THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS ARE SOME DEPRESSING SHIT

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

(Sorry to my huge base of loyal blog fans, yesterday I was unable to write my blog due to personal circumstance beyond my control.  I hope you can forgive me for not providing you with your daily fix of science. Enjoy today!)

07/03/2013

CHEMISTRY

THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS ARE SOME DEPRESSING SHIT

1^st law:

Energy is neither created nor destroyed.

This seems simple enough and not very depressing.

Energy is a thing that exists and makes up the universe that we know of and everything we see around us is nothing more than energy. Everything you are and everything you see is simply energy in different forms. So I guess it makes sense (in a mind blowing kind of way) that you would not be able to create or destroy this fundamental ‘stuff’ of everything around you.

Eg – electricity companies don’t make electricity. They convert energy into electric energy from other forms, usually fossil fuels made of large hydrocarbon atoms being  broken down into Carbon Dioxide.

Ok we move on

And This is where it gets painful.

2^nd law of thermodynamics

All Anthropic systems will spontaneously decay into a lower order. 

This lower order is known as Entropy.

Eg. Water flows downhill.

Water in a high potential energy state on top of a hill likes to flow down to low potential energy state at the bottom of the hill.

Entropy is a state of low order.

If you build something it will rust, crumble and disintegrate

If you have a closed system, it will stop running.

If it moves it will stop, if it breathes it will die, if it is warm it will become cold…

A hospital corridor near the site of the Chernobyl disaster: in a growing state of Entropy

EVERYTHING in the universe including life on planet earth, slowly yet inevitably, is moving the universes energy from a high order state to a low energy state.

What’s truly depressing is that this process is unavoidable and ever processing.

Eventually there will be no order in the whole universe and everything will be left in the lowest state of order possible.

Nothing but cold, dark nothing.

Unless the universe is going to collapse under its own gravity, (which seems ever more unlikely as we uncover more and more of its mysteries), then this cold darkness is our future.

And there is nothing we can do about it.

DECAFE COFFEE: HOW DO YOU TAKE THE CAFFEINE OUT OF THE COFFEE?

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?

 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

04/03/2013

CHEMISTRY

DECAFE COFFEE: HOW DO YOU TAKE THE CAFFEINE OUT OF THE COFFEE?

I don’t know about you guys, but in the morning when I wake up I really enjoy a coffee.

I do like the flavour of a nice coffee and I can appreciate the difference between a well extracted espresso and a gritty bitter one. However, I am fairly confident in saying that I am searching for the caffeine hit.

Coffee was probably first drunk in Africa and the first truly credible evidence for its cultivation comes from Yemen, and seems to have spread around the world from there.

People quickly came to appreciate the effect that caffeine intake has on a human metabolism and today, coffee is one of the most commonly drunk beverages in the world.

It is the primary agricultural industry in twelve countries and the trade of unroasted coffee is the 7^th largest agricultural export on the planet.

Heaven knows why, but for some reason there is a market for coffee drinkers who are not looking for the caffeine ‘high’, but still enjoy the taste and/or perhaps the experience of sitting in a coffee house with friends.

So... How do we get that caffeine out of those beans?

Coffee has over 400 chemicals within it that directly affect the taste, so science had to find a way to get the coffee beans to stay exactly the same yet have the caffeine removed.

This is where the chemistry comes into play.

 

It has to do with solutes and solvents.

A solute is a type of chemical that will dissolve in a solvent.

A solvent is a type of chemical that will allow a solute to be dissolved within it.

A good example is salt dissolving into water. The salt is a solute and the water is a solvent.

What happens technically is that the salt molecules are more attracted to the water molecules than they are to each other, so the crystalline solid structure of the salt crystls breaks up and floats away into the water mix.

 

To get the caffeine out of the coffee beans, scientists ‘wash’ the unroasted beans in special types of solvents that bind to the caffeine and not to anything else.

To find this perfection in such a complex entity as a plant seed, is a testament to how badly people wanted decaffeinated coffee.

Some of the methods companies have used are incredibly complex. Such as saturating the solvents used with any compounds that are removed other than the caffeine, or using carbon dioxide compressed upwards of 300 atmospheres.

These are just generalisations of the processes used.

Thinking of doing some decaf yourself?

Try calling the companies that do this and see if they will tell you exactly how they extract caffeine.

This information is a multi-billion dollar trade secret…

CURSED TO A LIFE WITH NO CHEESE: HOW COME WE CAN DRINK MILK?

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?
 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

04/03/2013

EVOLUTION

CURSED TO A LIFE WITH NO CHEESE: HOW COME WE CAN DRINK MILK?

All baby mammals, (including humans) drink milk.

When we are born our mothers produce it and we drink it as a high energy disaccharide sugar filled growing juice.

 

After a while however, we move onto solids and the ability to drink milk fades. The enzyme in the intestine that digests the active disaccharide known as lactose, switches off production and after that, for almost every mammal, they can’t drink milk anymore.

The Lactose Molecule
A 'disaccharide sugar' full of energy

We know this to be what is called lactose intolerance and many adult humans are indeed cursed to a life with no cheese.

Imagine a world without cheese!

(If someone who is lactose intolerant does drink milk, the lactose left in their stomach is digested by bacteria and this leads to the feeling of being bloated and creating the potential of developing diarrhoea.)

However, strangely, some human adults retain the ability to produce the lactose digesting enzyme into their adulthood. Thus, keeping the flow of big glasses of milk and super-sized cheese pizzas unabated.

This is very strange as no other mammal has developed the ability to do this.

Furthermore, this ability is also not evenly distributed across the human population.

In Europe, West Asia, India and East Africa, there are high percentages of population that can drink milk. In other areas this percentage can be extremely low.

What’s going on here? Why do I love a big glass of milk so much?

 

This ability to drink milk evolved from the areas of the planet where access to milk products constitutes large portions of the diet. Evolutionary pressure has forced this ability upon our gut.

Interestingly, it seems that the ability to digest lactose has evolved independently across several ethnic groups, as these people share the trait, yet have had no common ancestor since the train arose. This insinuates that the genetic change required to switch on the enzymes production was not an extremely large change and the mutation was fairly common. Indeed, this is reinforced by the fact that in populations where milk consumption is extremely rare, you can still find around 10% of the population that can produce the enzyme.

Many people forget that humans are influences by evolution even today. Indeed, our bodies and evolutionary lineage will continue to be affected by its incredible power.

MICRO PROTEIN MACHINES

Ever wondered what cool sciencey stuff they are teaching undergraduates at the University of Queensland?
 Every school day I will post my newly learned cool fact... Enjoy

01/03/2013

NANOTECHNOLOGY

MICRO PROTEIN MACHINES

In the last decade, scientists have explored the inner working of a cell like never before.

The power of electron microscopes and the development of sophisticated separation systems, have allowed us to see into the molecular network of not only cells, but the instruments of how they work.

One of the most significant discoveries was how proteins are utilised to carry information around the cell.

 

Proteins are extremely large molecules, sometimes many hundreds of atoms long

Interestingly, a series of proteins that have been discovered have been described as being "micro protein machines".

The amazing thing about these macro molecules are that when they are activated by ATP (the energy carrying molecule of the cell), they act just like mini machines.

There are some that act like pumps

There are some that act like scaffold

There are some that act like crawlers

There are some that act like electronic conduits

These amazing molecules are integral to the signalling and moving structures within cells.

They fascinate biologists and will be under study as you read this page.

Check it out here:

http://www.ted.com/talks/drew_berry_animations_of_unseeable_biology.html

But these mini machines have not escaped the attention of nanotechnology research scientists either.

As the electronic and information processing world gets smaller and more sophisticated, scientists are constantly looking for inspiration as to how to create systems that act in a micro world how systems act in the macro environment.

It is perhaps the greatest thing about science that our engineers use the beauty of our own natural world as inspiration for human technological feats.