How to mix oil and water
Whoever said water and oil don't mix? If you take a drop of water coated in oil and bounce it long enough, then they'll mix together. (That's basically the entire article.) Apparently, scientists in Belgium got the idea (from where is what I'd like to ask) to see what would happen if you bounced an oil coated water droplet for longer than it usually does. They took a drop of soapy water and covered it in oil, and the droplet hung on a wire. Then, they took a (shallow) container of oil, if my interpretation of the video is correct, and bounced the droplet up and down. As it bounced, the outer layer broke up into little globs and went into the water droplet, creating an oil-and-water droplet. They call it the "mayonnaise droplet," a very (cough) official sounding name. Anyway, silliness aside, the significance of this is to try to understand the concepts behind the mayonnaise droplet so they can apply it to other areas like pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
My first questions were how and why. Bouncing little droplets of makeup probably won't be cheap, so the practical applications of this isn't very high. However, research is research, and perhaps they will find something revolutionary based on this concept. Who knows? Also, while I understand the basic way that they did it, I still don't quite understand how the drop "bounced" instead of splattered. Would it simply be because of surface tension or other factors as well? The video was amusing to watch, and explained the experiment much more clearly than the article. Overall, this was definitely an interesting little article.
Case of the toxic gingerbread man
This was a pretty long article compared to the oil and water one. To cut to the chase, there are people out there that try to keep levels of toxic chemicals in the air and water, well, nontoxic. However, there was one stubborn chemical that wouldn't go down: the DCA compound. Basically, what they did was they went into a house (in Utah) and tested every room for the concentrations of this chemical. The hotspot was the basement. Of course, that could be anything: the carpet, walls, paint, the stuff in the basement, and things that go in a basement. Therefore, they took all of the stuff from the basement and put it into the garage. The basement's levels of DCA went down dramactically, and the garage's concentration spiked. A lot. The culprit: a plastic gingerbread man ornament along with some other ornaments. They tested the gingerman's paint, but found little. So, they cut off its legs, and bingo! The chemical is in the plastic. Sadly, ornaments aren't the only culprits. The team who were looking into this also found quite a few other decorative objects that had the exact same problem. On the bright side, the Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission is looking into this, so hopefully it won't get too out of hand.
Personally, I don't really find any reason to panic or throw out all of our Christmas ornaments from reading this. We can't really tell what it is made of, so there's not much really we can do that is practical. Plus, I don't think polyresin is the only material that is emitting toxic fumes into our environment, and trying to rid ourselves of all of those toxins would be nearly impossible. Rather, probably a more rational approach would be to buy new ornaments with care, and perhaps avoid the ones made in China stuffed away in the corner of a dollar store. This material is a cheap plastic, so I'm guessing that cheaper ornaments and decorative stuff would be more likely to be dangerous than the more expensive ones. Overall though, it was an interesting article and nicely written.
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