Gateways 2018-2019

The first instances of black powder throughout history date back to 1200 AD in ancient china. They used black powder for fireworks, and in the following centuries, gunpowder started to be utilized for much more than just pyrotechnics. Black powder started to be used by countries in their weaponry during war. Guns and cannons that used black powder became the weapons of choice for all fighting, and they were extremely effective, and deadly. Gunpowder is a mixture of 3 different substances, which in the right ratio can prove to be very explosive. The powder is comprised of Potassium Nitrate, Charcoal, and Sulfur. Potassium Nitrate (KNO 3 ), serves as a source of a vital part of combustion, oxygen. At high temperatures, Potassium Nitrate decomposes and releases oxygen, this is useful because it helps fuel the flame, and also makes it so the mixture can sustain itself. This means that even if it is smothered, it will still burn due to the continuous presence of oxygen. The charcoal ...

You may have heard that diamonds come from coal.  Is this true? And how does it happen? Coal and diamonds are related, but it's not true that diamonds come from coal.   Coal and diamonds both share the same base, carbon, but are still very different.  Diamonds are essentially pure carbon formed into a crystalline structure. The rarer, colored diamonds do contain minor impurities (boron, for example, makes diamonds blue, while nitrogen turns them yellow), but those impurities exist on a scale of just one atom in a million. Coal is also mostly carbon, but it isn’t pure. Coal also includes many other substances, including hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, sulfur, arsenic, selenium, and mercury. Depending on the type of coal and its source, it will also contain various levels of organic materials because coal originates from decaying plants, fungi and even bacteria. These impurities alone prevent coal from being turned into diamonds. I think that we could use different t...

SOAP BUBBLES Soap bubbles are not just for play, though. They are used in the arts to enhance various performances and also in studied in mathematics and physics, used to promote muscle development in speech therapy, and even in Chemistry. Soap bubbles role in chemistry are different and have different reaction. Soap molecule consists of chain of atoms of carbon and hydrogen. Bubbles are a sign that a chemical reaction is taking place.When soap molecules are added to water they form clusters Clusters of the soap molecules are called micelles.When clusters are formed the hydrophobic ends are in the middle of the cluster with the hydrophilic ends surrounding them and micelles move to where their polar ends are in the water and the nonpolar ends are located on the surface of the water. The arrangement results in lower surface tension on the surface of the water and this lower tension allows the surface to have more properties. Soap bubble are often made in factories, but also soap ...

Fritz Haber was a German physical chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for creating a method of forming ammonia. Ammonia is a substance made of Nitrogen and Hydrogen. Carl Bosch was a chemist who took the process made by Fritz Haber, and turned it into a large scale experiment by adding high-pressure to the process. This experiment got an award for being the first industrial chemical process to use high pressure. The process of making ammonia, created by Fritz Haber, if fairly simple, and doesn't require too many tools or elements. It starts by directly combining Nitrogen from the air with hydrogen under very high-pressures, and fairly high temperatures. The catalyst used is made of iron. The use of an iron catalyst ensures that the process can be carried out at low temperatures.  Low temperatures are advised, because the lower the temperature during the process, the higher amount of ammonia gained from the process. The recommended temperature for this commercial process...

Scientists turn carbon dioxide back into coal “ Scientists have harnessed liquid metals to turn carbon dioxide back into solid coal, in research that offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing the greenhouse gas from our atmosphere”. A brand new technique can that can convert CO2 back into carbon at room temperature, a process that is efficient and scalable. A second side benefit to this is that the carbon can hold electrical charge, becoming a supercapacitor, so this could potentially be used as a component in future vehicles. That is a brief background and summary but here are some more specifics. Also researchers have used liquid metals to turn carbon back into solid coal, they did this in a world-first-breakthrough that could transform our everyday approach to carbon capture and storage.  Published in the journal Nature Communications, the research offers an alternative pathway for safely and permanently removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosph...

Chemically termolecular reactions: The fourth class of chemical reactions Maisy Chase Up until now only three classes of chemical reactions were known. Unimolecular reactions occur when one reactant undergoes bond breaking or forming to create different products. Bimolecular reactions are where two reactants collide and then undergo bond breaking or forming. Termolecular association reactions, where two reactants collide to form a whole with a new chemical bond between the two reactants. A third molecule, known as the bath gas, then removes some of the internal kinetic energy of that molecule to stabilize it. Researchers from Columbia University , led by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Michael P. Burke, have discovered a fourth class of chemical reaction known as “chemically termolecular reactions.” This involves the breaking and bonding of three molecules. The team showed that these chemically termolecular reactions not only are major chemical pathways but also ...

Controlling the chemical properties to achieve absolute zero Scientist in labs have been testing experiments on different chemical compounds to achieve around the coldest temperature, absolute zero. I will talk about what is happening now and the new discovery. I will explain what is absolute zero and who named it. Lastly I will talk about were the scientist studying this should go from there. The Institutes to credit this to are the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering. Controlling all aspects of reactions is very hard until this invention. All aspects that are taking place in a chemical reaction and they are crucial for understanding what happens in that reaction and if any of the factors has an effect on it. A team lead by Andreas Osterwalder from the EPFL Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering that also has been working with a theorist from the University of Toronto, created an apparatus that creates an environment that is suitable to create a chemical reactio...

In the year 1953, scientists successfully succeeded in identifying DNA’s structure. There are four nucleotides, and they each contain a letter-labeled base. They are arranged in a double helix pattern. A for adenine is matched with thymine T, as cytosine, C, bond with guanine, G. These are described as the building blocks of all life on Earth. Their pairs create genetic intructions for proteins, which aid in about all critical processes keeping us alive. With that, scientists have found a way to double the double helix letters so instead of DNA with four letters, there are now eight. This new DNA is named “ hachimoji  DNA” meaning “eight and letters” in Japanese. This new DNA is already far more durable in storing digital data,  that could used for centuries.  A team of researches manufactured this new structure lead by Steven Benner, who is a synthetic biologist from the Foindation for Applied Molecular Evolution. “We can do everything here that is necessary for...

By Sophia Kaisermann For the past decades, wildfires have been haunting the world by destroying homes and cities. Wildfires are destructive open fires that spreads quickly because of their combustibility.  They have been happening all across the world,in places such as Russia, Canada, Portugal, and Australia, but the majority of people are most familiar with the California wildfires. Since they spread very quickly and last long periods of time, wildfires affect a lot of land. One example is the 2003 Siberian Taiga Fires in Russia, it burned 47 million acres of land and holds the record of largest wildfire ever. In November 2018, California was hit by its biggest wildfire in a century, the Camp Fire. It burned 6,453 homes and killed at least 29 people. These horrible fires are a result of combustion. Combustion is a reaction between fuel and oxygen. For it to happen, the fire triangle must be present: fuel, oxygen, and a heat source. As explained by National Geographic,...

Chemistry is such an interesting topic when you get to experiment. An experiment is a scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis, or demonstrate a known fact. The best part of an experiment is mixing elements and making them EXPLODE. But can some of these experiments harm you? Are we harming kids? The experiment that I chose to focus on was “Elephant Toothpaste”. The basic definition of elephant toothpaste is a colorful, foamy substance. The materials needed to make this is a water bottle, dish soap, food coloring and hydrogen peroxide. You can have fun with the food coloring and choose almost any color you want. The only thing you need to do is have supervision if you are younger than 5. The main ingredient that teachers are started to get suspicious is Hydrogen Peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is something that you would use to clean out a cut or bruise. People have been putting too much in their solution that leads to harmful burning. There was an incident whe...

By: Aidan Ryder Why have fireworks been so valued for so long? They are a perfect way to start a new year, celebrate a special event, and more. In America, they are mainly used as a light show towards Independence Day on July 4th, the day that the Founding Fathers accepted the Declaration of Independence. With fireworks, the main reason, as stated before, is light. The massive light show with fireworks are stunning to the naked eye. In this blog, I will explain how fireworks truly work. The main product of fireworks are heat and light. How are they formed? Well, they are formed through combustion. Combustion is  rapid chemical combination of a substance with oxygen, involving the production of heat and light. When fireworks explode, heated chemicals react with oxygen and then produce heat and light. The electrons gain lots of energy from the heat, causing them to light up. What is in the fireworks that cause them to be so bright and colorful? ...

Crazy Combustion   By: Maximilian Muller   Once the secrets of gunpowder became known to man it was quickly being built into larger and larger guns .  In history some nations developed weapons to an amount in which the power becomes almost comical matter .  These are some of the largest artillery guns to ever exist in the history of mankind .  These guns required a lot of maintenance and care seen as they were the size of a city block and fired shells double the size of a full-grown man .  These monsters are called the Paris gun, Heavy Gustav, and the P 1000 Ratte .     The Paris gun was a heavy artillery piece built by the Germans in World War I to shell the city of Paris from behind the German trench lines 75 miles away from the city .  The main driving force behind all guns is a mini explosion in a chamber that has nowhere else for the force to go so the round exits the front of the gun as a result of the sudden burst in powe...