"You're in the limelight"

This phrase is normally said to people who are actors and people who have light shown upon them so they can be seen better by the audience. These lights are the footlights the lights that appear on the bottom of the stage. Before electricity was created in the olden days they used to make footlights by using calcium oxide better known as lime. This was burned with oil and it created a greenish light despite its white color, upon the actors thus causing them to say "hey you were in the lime light." this relates to chemistry because the limelight was made of calcium oxide which is a combination of elements.










http://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/whatischemistry/scienceforkids/articles/chemistry-puts-us-in-the-limelight.pdf

sports and chemistry

The advancements of chemistry have really helped the sports world thrive with new ideas and ways to make the performance of athletes better. Chemists designed fabrics that are synthetic and can help an athlete to either stay drier or swim faster. Also by creating bicycles using lighter metals they are able to make the bicycle faster and more efficient. They would either be made of aluminum, titanium, and other light weight metals rather than steel which they were originally made of. These major advancements and the gaining of knowledge of chemistry make it possible for athletes to make their performance better. This relates to chemistry because it talks about the light weight metals and fabrics made by using certain types of elements to enhance the way that athletes preform





http://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/education/whatischemistry/scienceforkids/articles/racing-ahead-with-chemistry.pdf

water water water water

Water is great. Not only does it quench your thirst it also is an amazing thing. We've learned that gases are less dense than liquids are less dense solids but water when it solid it floats. It allows fish to live under water and let's ice cubes float in out drinks. Also oil and water do not mix because the water molecules go to combine with the water and the oil molecules go off by themselves so that they can never combine.snowflakes are also very complex. Snowflakes form hexagons because the hydrogen and oxygen molecules form hydrogen bonds and it is easier for them to form hexagons. This relates to chemistry becuase it talks about hydrogen bonds.






http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/martinwestwellcolumn5.htm/

My violin sounds good? oh thanks its also over 300 years old!!

Stradivarius violins are violins that have a pristine sound quality and are over 300 years old. Stradivari was a man who made violins in the 1700's. They are the best sounding violins i believe and they cost only over million dollars, nothing much or anything. But yes they have a really really good sound quality (which is probably why they cost so much)  and scientist Nagyvary decide that he wanted to know how Stradivari was able to create such amazing violins with amazing sound quality. People who owned Stradivarius violins were able to give them up in the name of science! Spectroscopy was used by this scientist to seek out the chemical structure of this wood and then he compared it to other violins made in the same time period and the results were shocking. The wood of the Stradivarius violin showed that it had been brutalized chemically, the amount of lignin was really low and hemi-cellulose was greatly damaged. Because of this it changed the acoustics making it sound beautiful. The scientist tried many things evening baking wood to try to get the same results as the Stradivarius wood but it did not work and it seemed like the wood was chemically made different by iron salt or copper salts which increases oxidation. He cannot tell for sure unless he gets more samples of the violin which shouldn't be that difficult since they only cost 5 million dollars. But Nagyvary thinks that Stradivari did not use this to make the violin better but simply preserve it for a long time. But today they have a very nice sound. Since i play violin i know how some can sound good and some can sound not so good. I have not heard a Stradivarius violin for myself because i don't know anyone who has 5 million dollars to spare but i have heard they create a beautiful sound and the chemical structure of it is what causes it.



http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/features/chemistry1/q_subject/21/?tx_naksciarticle_pi1%5Bpage%5D=2&cHash=e30895d197325e7f647192d368d1b8d3

Big foot

Some people believe in Bigfoot. Some people don't. Well some people believe that Bigfoot is not  really a creature but a collective group of people who are creating a large nitrogen footprint. Nitrogen is begin used being used more and more everyday and we are destroying the planet as we continue to use it up. There are two ways in which a person can reduce the amount of Nitrogen they use. First we can reduce the amount of meat we eat. Rather than eating meat on a daily basis we could eat it once a week or twice a week. Meat has protein and the protein we eat provides nitrogen that essentially we put back into the environment. Thus creating more nitrogen in the environment so if we change the amount of times that we eat meat we could lessen the amount of nitrogen that goes into the environment. The second thing we can do is we can save energy. All the energy we use has some kind if nitrogen in it and that is essentially put back into the environment. So we could turn off the lights when we are not using them, and we could unplug things that we are not using and we can simply buy things that are more energy efficient to help with create less of a nitrogen footprint. If a lot of people do these things then we could decrease the amount of nitrogen we release into the environment and i will try to do my best to be more energy efficient and eat less meat.

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/articles/article/bigfoot-the-nitrogen-problem/

Graphene

Graphene is the strongest thinnest material ever. it is light and flexible and has the ability to conduct electricity. Graphene can be used to make space suits and conduct cheaper solar energy. a thin film of copper with big crystallized grains is what researchers found when searching for a growth platform for this subject. the largeness of the crystals help with stand heat which is needed for the graphene to grow. this discovery could help speed up the advancement of electronics creating faster better and smarter computers potential i think. This would also help improve phones and other things as well.



http://www.chemeurope.com/en/news/146127/huge-grains-of-copper-promote-better-graphene-growth.html

Light bounces

Professors at  Tyndall National Institute have been studying how the atom acts when it is hit by short bursts of light. Atom's have a natural vibration and they are excited when they are hit by  beams of light. the x-ray 

laser creates pulses that can capture the atom moving at a billionth of a billionth of a second. this lets the 

scientists to look at an individual atom and how it is affected when light is absorbed. This kind of study has 

never really been done before and this can help with the understanding of photosynthesis and how it can 

possibly increase energy storage if replicated. this is very interesting it did not know that the atoms bounce

when light is added to it



http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209143311.htm

Burning Plastic

Scientist found that there is a better way to get rid of plastic rather than just filling up land fills with it. Scientist Yiannis Levendis created a way to change combustion so that plastic would just turn in to soot. Even though the plastic cup gave of a lot of smoke the cup was turned into ashes. It could also burn as fuel as cleanly as natural gas. I think it is great that there is a new possible fuel source since we have so much plastic already and we use it every day it could be very useful to us in the future. 

Why is red dark?

The color read used in many painting a long time ago have darkened a lot since the time that they have been painted. Researchers thought otherwise until 2 scientists disapproved the other theory and made their own. The color red contains vermillion which is a made from a mineral called cinnabar. This mineral is made up of mercury sulfade. Researchers showed that when that was exposed to chloride ions such as salt it absorbs causing the mercury to become metallic which is black in color. This was probably what cause the dark color of red paint because it was found in the red paint. I think this was an interesting observation, although i do not go to many art museums i never noticed the color differences from out time to when they painted it.




 http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=vermillion-red-paint-darkening-physics