Science tricks for the Christmas table

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Do your festive dinners need spicing up?

Fancy some science tricks to wow the guests around the Christmas dinner table with? Chemistry World has put together a small collection of videos that should help keep the kiddywinks quiet, wake up the snoozers and amuse even the more cynical table guests. If you like them let us know and if you have other tricks and experiments to share then tweet us or leave us a comment.

First up, the ever reliable Richard Wiseman of Quirkology fame. He’s put together 10 interesting table top challenges and tricks, including a tea bag rocket – don’t set fire to the curtains!

The next set of videos include a number of tricks and interesting scientific phenomena tailored for children, with simple explanations of exactly what’s going on.

And here’s another video from Richard with another 10 tricks including creating a fire extinguisher from baking soda and vinegar.

And if you’ve got any sticky tape or sugar left over, why not check out the phenomenon of triboluminescence, whereby light is emmitted when a material is pulled apart, ripped, scratched, crushed or rubbed? The phenomenon is still not completely understood but is thought to be due to electrical charges being separated and then recombining, with an electrical discharge.

Finally, one more from the prolific Dr Wiseman where he uses just milk, food colours and soap to produce dynamic colourful patterns reminiscent of the beautiful Belousov-Zhabotinsky reactions (video at bottom of the page).

Why not also check out our blog on that perennial Christmas table favourite the crystal tree and the chemistry behind it. There’s further Christmas themed blogs to be found here, where you can learn why snowflakes have six points, what linked Faraday with candles and what exactly are frankincense and myrrh. Happy Christmas and new year from all at Chemistry World!

Patrick Walter

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Reggae reggae source

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Here’s a quirky fact straight from the Journal of Environmental Monitoring. It turns out that a major river polluter in Sweden is the Uppsala Reggae Festival!

Over three days each August, 10,000 reggae-lovers converge on the shores of the River Fyris in Uppsala. Sounds like fun for the festival-goers, but not so much for the fish. You see, at the first sign of rain the contents of the

urine soaked festival field get washed into the river (toilet facilities can’t be all that good). If that wasn’t bad enough, any drugs taken by festival-goers (lots of painkillers) are excreted in their urine and end up in the river too. And these biologically active compounds have been known to have an adverse effect on aquatic organisms.

The festival can lead to ammonium levels in the nearby river increasing 210-fold









Tests showed that the festival can temporarily result in a higher pharmaceutical input (about 3.4 times greater) into the river than the wastewater treatment plant downstream! But only if it rains.

The recommendation for next year’s festival? Better toilet facilities! I would definitely recommend packing wellies if you’re thinking of going though.

Elinor Richards


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How do your reindeer fly?

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— What powers Santa’s sleigh?

So, on Saturday evening, Santa will fire up the reindeer and set off around the globe once again. In fact, you can track his flight. But how do those reindeer fly, it could all be to do with Christmas Spirit, but it’s long been suggested there’s a slightly more pharmacological explanation

On a mushroom hunt a few years ago I learnt how to identify some common, edible mushrooms, and to spot some poisonous ones as well. One of the most well known is fly agaric, or Amanita muscaria. The name comes from its use as a fly poison, but for bigger animals like reindeer its not so much poisonous as fun. In fact, I was told that upon smelling a crushed mushroom, reindeer will come from miles around to eat some. Why? Because of the psychoactive compounds the mushrooms contain.

The psychoactive compounds in fly agaric include, muscarine, which mimics the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, and the two related compounds ibotenic acid (below) and muscimol (bottom), that mimic glutamic acid and GABA respectively.



Now, the story goes that it’s not just reindeer that like to get high from the mushrooms, but also the locals. Sometimes they eat it, and sometimes they use the reindeer as a filter, drinking the urine, which obviously contains a lower does of the psychoactive compounds, as well as their metabolites. So could this be where the story of flying reindeer comes from – tripping ruminants?

Whatever your opinion, it’s at least a salutary lesson in making sure you identify your mushrooms properly, so you avoid any unwelcome side effects. Or at least, talk to Frank.

Laura Howes

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I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…

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Somehow Christmas time always feels more magical when there’s snow about. As snowflakes drift down and stack against frozen panes, you sink deeper into the sofa to sleep off the lunchtime overindulgence. And as you sit there the world goes silent as a white blanket settles leaving the landscape an undulating mass of indistinct shapes. But while we’re all familiar with these beautiful six-pointed stars of ice, have you ever stopped to think about how they form? What are the chemical and physical processes that make a snowflake grow into the shape it is?

As it is, each and every tiny snowflake has a humble beginning – a microscopic seed. This can be a speck of dust or some other particle – organic or inorganic. So, as the air temperature falls, water vapour coalesces around this seed and the snowflake begins to grow. As the water molecules freeze around the seed they form a crystal with six-fold symmetry. This symmetry is an intrinsic property of ice crystals and is due to the way the water molecules stack when they freeze. As the ice crystal grows it retains this hexagonal structure and builds upon it. This gives it its flat, plate-like structure with the six pointed shape we know so well.

Oxygen atoms are in red while hydrogens are marked out by grey bars © Ken Libbrecht

The hexagonal crystal lattice gives the snowflake its underlying structure and from there it grows by a process known as faceting. As the ice crystal grows the ‘rough’ edges with the most ‘dangling’ bonds grow fastest until only the smoother facets – geometric faces of the crystals – remain. These then grow in a uniform manner and, on their own, would result in ice crystals that were hexagonal columns. The complex branching patterns that give snowflakes their unique and beautiful shapes is down to small imperfections appearing in the facets, which are then quickly amplified by the stacking of more and more molecules of water at these points.

One man who has certainly spent a lot of time considering the shape and structure of snowflakes is Ken Libbrecht, at Caltech in the US. Libbrecht, orginally an atomic- and astro-physicist, says he became fascinated by snowflakes when he first saw a morphology diagram of how different snowflake structures form at different temperatures. If, like me, you’ve been watching the BBC’s brilliant Frozen Planet series then you’ll already be familiar with some of his work: high defintion videos of snowflakes growing.

Libbrecht says he got a call from the Frozen Planet team who told him that they wanted to use his videos of growing snowflakes on the programme. However, to date, Libbrecht hadn’t created any high quality videos. ‘Right before the BBC called it popped into my head that this is how to do [high definition videos], and when they called I said, “Great, I need a little money to do it”.’ Libbrecht went on to make a number of changes to his apparatus and produced the amazing videos that the Frozen Planet team were then able to model and superimpose on to the footage above.

© Ken Libbrecht

As a result of this collaboration with the BBC, Libbrecht says this set him off on exploring another phenomenon. As snowflakes grow – unlike other crystals – their edges actually get sharper. He thinks that this may be linked to surface melting, which occurs when an ice crystal warms to nearer to 0°C and the molecules near the surface become less tightly bound and the structure becomes more amorphous. At the sharp edge of the ice crystal there are fewer neighbouring molecules to stabilise the lattice in this region and surface melting increases, this leads to further growth of the crystal making them even sharper and so on. It’s a process of positive feedback that gives ice crystals their razor sharp edge, although why they grow faster as they get sharper is still something of a puzzle.

A growing ice crystal © Ken Libbrecht

However, Libbrecht says that building up a picture of this process will be extremely difficult. Ice crystals have a high vapour pressure so water molecules are coming and going at a prodigious rate. As the structure is in a constant state of flux it makes it very difficult to get an idea of what’s going on. He compares it with trying to take a clear picture in the midst of a hurricane. If you want to find out more about the fascinating world ice crystals and some experiments you can do then check out the Snow Crystals website.

And if all this talk of snow and ice has left you feeling distinctly chilly, then sit back and warm up by a real (virtual) log fire. Is there anything people won’t film and put on YouTube?

Patrick Walter

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Chemistry in its element – tartrazine

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What comes to mind when you hear the term E numbers? Hyperactive children? Or a simple labelling system for food additives? In this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast, Brian Clegg admits that while the health worries over tartrazine –  perhaps the most famous E number of all – might be justified, it brightens up our lives in other ways.

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Amnesia The Dark Descent Walkthrough – Part 4 Chemistry Let’s Play – Video

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Amnesia the Dark Descent Walkthrough - Part 1 My Name is Daniel Let's Play http://www.youtube.com Amnesia the Dark Descent Walkthrough! Walkthrough and Let's Play Playthrough of Amnesia the Dark Descent Walkthrough with Live Gameplay and Commentary. Series Playlist: bit.ly

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Amnesia The Dark Descent Walkthrough - Part 4 Chemistry Let's Play - Video

Chemistry in its element – green fluorescent protein

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It used to be just for jellyfish, but now everything from mice to monkeys is sporting that fetching green fluorescence. However, it’s not all fun and games and glowing gerbils – there’s some serious science here. Josh Howgego tells the story Osamu Shimomura and the green fluorescent protein in this week’s Chemistry in its element podcast.

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H-index movers and shakers

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The latest update to Chemistry World’s h-index ranking of living chemists is out. Unsurprisingly, Harvard University’s George Whitesides is undisturbed at the top of the tree, but there are a few climbers in the chart this time around.

Michael Grätzel of dye-sensitised solar cell fame,  has charged into the top five from 11th position in March, and Krzysztof Matyjaszewski from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, US, climbs nearly 20 places from 40th in March to 23rd.

What does this mean? Are DSSCs finally going to make good on their promise of recent years? Is atom-transfer radical polymerisation about to take over the world? Well, who knows – but its fun to watch the rollercoaster go up and down and round and around…

Phillip Broadwith

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Frankincense and myrrh

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Christmas is gently creeping up on us and the tills are merrily ringing as we pound the high street in search of suitable offerings to please our kith and kin. But however far you travel and however much you spend in your seasonally-sanctioned extravagance, you’d have to go some way to beat the efforts of the inaugural yuletide gift-givers: Melchior, Casper and Balthazar. These three – the magi of the nativity story – tramped across the Middle East to present Christmas’ namesake with their precious gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

The significance of these gifts gives biblical scholars much meat to chew upon; thought to be an acknowledgement of Jesus’ kingship or representative of his godhood and death. But these days, while manys an item of gold will be carefully interred in a paper prison to await liberation on Christmas morn, it’s unlikely you’ll find either of the others in your stocking. And would you even know it if you did?

Well, prepare to find out: frankincense and myrrh are tree resins (frankincense from Boswellia trees and myrrh from Commiphora, both natives to the Arabian peninsula) and 2000 years ago, they were certainly fit gifts for a king. At the height of their popularity they were worth their weight in gold, and were heavily traded.



Which is which?


They have been used since antiquity by a host of cultures, principally as incense in religious ceremony – both are listed in the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, as ingredients of the sacred blend of fragrant spices and incense called ketaret, which was used to perfume the air in temple rituals and worship. Their fragrant properties also found them applications in cosmetic perfume and they had various medicinal uses.


Though the trade has slowed today, many of these uses persist – frankincense is still to be found in perfumes and cosmetics and myrrh’s antiseptic properties have secured it a place in mouthwash and toothpaste, among other things. More recently, these riches of the plant kingdom’s treasure trove have been plundered for their potential to fight disease. Frankincense’s boswellic acid, for example, has proven to be effective at controlling cancer cells and a sesquiterpenoid isolated from myrrh extract was also shown to have promising anticancer activity. If only someone would mount them on gold nanoparticles…

Perhaps more interesting, incensole acetate, another of frankincense’s chemical constituents, was recently assigned psychoactive properties – acting as a sedative and reducing anxiety in mice. Its role in spiritual ceremonies is somewhat more practical in this light.

So there you have it. A whistle-stop tour of frankincense and myrrh; perhaps now you know a little more than you did. And, if you’re giving gold and perfume this year, why not follow a wise man’s example and throw in some mouthwash too?

Philip Robinson

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Organic Chemistry (TGIB) – Video

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Thank God it's Bio! For Mrs. Gaffney's Biology class. A delightful song about organic chemistry to the tune of Katy Perry's Last Friday Night (TGIF) The karaoke track is from TheHMKARAOKEMC's YouTube Channel! -Thanks! Organic Chemistry (TGIB) When I wake up in my bed science swimming in my head DNA and ATP It's organic chemistry! There's organic molecules Carbohydrates, Lipids too You've got Proteins and DNA With ATP I'll find a way Organic chemistry used to be hard for me but now I know With the science of life I will be all right and now I think it rules Organic Chemistry Carbohydrates are just swell make up structures of the cell are a source of energy Organic chemistry oh it isn't very hard simple sugars make up carbs synthesis can make it starch Organic Chemistry Oh Organic molecules Follow very simple rules Have carbon and have hydrogen Organic chemistry yeah I think I got this right It's the chemistry of life Whoa-oh-oah Organic Chemistry Learn it all again Organic Chemistry Learn it all again and Up next is ATP All living things need energy adenosine triphosphate it powers life so don't you hate Next up, Lipids are a ball Fatty acids, glycerol Store energy as well Make up the membrane of the cell Organic chemistry used to be hard for me but now I know With the science of life I will be all right and now I think it rules Organic Chemistry DNA has nucleotides and their bonded down one side Sugar phosphate and a base Organic Chemistry Adenine and thymine Cytosine and ...

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Chemistry does not exist in America – Video

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American women are so materialistic, according to most of them, chemistry means a man who fits all their insane checklist. In terms of dating, a man must have the following basics: money, type of car, tall and in shape, funny, romantic, etc but she doesnt have to fit any of your qualities. Nothing about these american women are real, they have no substance

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Chemistry does not exist in America - Video