Jacobs,+Erik

This article was very interesting in describing how Hydroflouric acid does what it needs to in your body to stay alive. The part of where the doctor describes what it does, including depriving your body of Calcium and Magnesium, and killing cell membranes that got in the way. The thing I learned here is that like any other environment, a normal chemical reaction could occur that could potentially kill you. Along with this, the fact of the acids breaking up, and doing double the trouble with hydrogen doing one thing and Fluorine ions doing another only made it worse. One last thing that I learned was to always wear gloves while using any kind of rust remover.

One thing I learned in this article was the amount of influence that the Greeks and their terminology had on the naming of so many elements. Even more interesting was the way the Greeks named the elements thy found. When it was said and one, most of the elements seemed to be named from simple observations. Another thing I learned was the amount of English vocabulary that originates from the Greek language and the way it ties into the way we pronounce different elements and compounds. Simple things like mono, duo, and tetra, which sounds like Tetris, the game, all tie back to Greece.

I read the article about a the "hydrogen house" and how the owner of the house uses hydrogen gas and solar power to power their house. In the article, I learned how you can take the hydrogen out of water, and emit oxygen into the atmosphere. During the article, the author explained how the owner of the house, Mike Strizki, a civil engineer, designed and installed the system to work 365 da ys a year. From this part of the article, I learned how he stores the excess energy in batteries he has a wall in his garage, and the extra hydrogen gas in three large storage tanks he has behind his house.

Polymers in the Field During the article, I found many things interesting, First, is the way that they put together the track. Specifically the way that they Proxy-Connection: keep-alive Cache-Control: max-age=0 ke the track, using a liquid, and vulcanizing it into a rubbery solid that can withstand any weathering of usage. Another thing I thought that was interesting was the way they can determine the hardness/softness of the track it self. The way I think they could do this is by changing the time that it is in the vulcanizing process. Overall, I think that the article was very interesting in a science sense, because of the way you can take one substance and convert it to a different substance for a totally different use.

Erik,

Your comments strike at the very essence of chemistry. Small molecular changes have a great impact on properties. MW

Water and Oil:

I find this very interesting because most of the topics in this article are the things we have learned or discussed in class. For example, the part where they discuss the misconception of why water floats on water. I have to admit, I thought it was because of the mass or weight of the oil, but since we did the labs in here, I found that it has to do with polarity and non-polarity. Also, the article discusses the topics of induced dipole induced dipole forces, or London forces. In the end, it feels good to read an article that you understand terminology that not everybody knows about.

Erik. Be more specific about what you knew and what you learned! Late. 3 stars.

Salt on Roads:

I found this article very interesting as well, since there is so much research that goes into clearing the roads of snow. I thought the part of where they described how the salts work in melting the surrounding snow to prevent ice. Just like the last articles, I liked how I could understand what they were talking about, and how some people wouldn't understand it. Besides this, it was cool to see how technology is going into bridges to automatically "spray" the roads without needing people to do it, other than filling the storage tanks, or installing lines to go to the sprinklers.

Erik, OK. MW

Hand Warmers:

I thought this article was very interesting in the time that is put into finding new ways to conduct a very simple reaction. All the factors, which include the type of cloth used to hold the reactants, and the shape are engineered to find the best way to keep people's hands warm in the wild. Along with this, is how extreme the reaction can get, since the lady in the article said it started to smoke when she let the reaction occur in open air. I thought this was very interesting, and could possibly open a new field in fire starting if they can get the reaction hot enough.

Eric, Sort of minimalistic. Did you know/learn 3 things? Any connections to reaction kinetics or thermo concepts? 4 stars. MW

Syrup Making Three things I learned in the article are that syrup is slightly acidic, that it contains amino acids, and that Syrup is made by boiling the tree sap that comes out of the tree, which would make sense, because when it comes out of the tree, it is almost like water, so by heating it, it would make the molecules of sugar basically melt and stick together when they collide. Other than knowing that syrup making originated in North America, I didn't know much chemical knowledge about syrup.

Erik, A bit sparse. Any connections to our class? Solubility, osmosis, etc.? 4 stars. MW

Flaking Away Three things I learned from this article are how rust really goes about his business. I was surprised when the man from the University of Virginia said it was a redox reaction because of the anode being the steel and the cathode being the oxygen. I was also surprised to find out the amount of money that rust and its effects costs the United States each year. Everything from trying to stop the spread of rust among the many and infinite metal products we as a nation create each year and helping to keep the mechanical dexterity and strength to hold up our nations skyscrapers. Thirdly, I was not aware that you can plate the metal back to its original state and restore the metal. I always thought they applied some kind of solvent to the metal that would put a protective coating of some sort on the metal.

Erik, Looks good! 5 stars. MW