Ruby's Procrastination Notes 

16/10/18

 Colours Feather or butterfly wing remaking

Feathers are very similar to carbon fiber some feathers are a bit like carbon fiber but other are coiled.

30/10/18

Petals have pigment. Warm colours have the pigment Carotene (makes red, orange & yellow) and anthocyanin (makes red, magenta, purple & blue)   

5/03/19

This is under Biochemistry.

Bioluminescence is the light you find in some creatures like fireflies and glowworms. I am working on the Luma light show for 2019 by lab in a box. The light that is produced is going to be different from others because of the habitat and organism. Most marine animals have a green-blue light. They have this because they are psychically unable to create red, orange, yellow and violet colours. Most organisms flash their lights for about 10 seconds at a time but others, like the foxfire fungus, glow continuously. With this light, some organisms use the light for defensive purposes to confuse the predators and startle them. The other way is to attract mates for instance, the firefly or lightning bug. Both males and female can use luminescence.  

2/04/19

Glow sticks

Sodium hypochlorite+Hydrogen Peroxide are the chemicals for a glow stick's light. One is in the glass tube which is inside the plastic tube. Inside the plastic tube itself, the other is. Also in the glass tube is the dye which changes the colour of the light.

Phenyl Oxalate ester and a fluorescent dye are in the plastic tube and in the glass tube inside of the glow stick is the hydrogen peroxide or the activator. When you snap the glow stick you are breaking the glass inside the glow stick and mixing the two together. When the two mix, they create two new compounds, phenol and peroxy acid ester. Peroxy acid ester is unstable and because of that it decomposes and produces more phenol. It also produces a cyclic peroxy compound, which decomposes to carbon dioxide. 

This decomposition releases energy to the dye. The electrons in the dye’s atoms jump to a higher level, then fall back down, releasing energy in the form of light. The other chemicals in the fluorescent dye determine the color of this light. Warmer temperatures will speed up the reaction but it won't last as long. That's why putting glow sticks in the fridge slows the process and stays lit longer.

Iodine clock

Eventually changes colour from clear to a dark brown/blue. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLCDJ0m_qrk 

Used this video as a guideline to recreate it. Since it was so slow, I thought it didn't work but once I started to move the solution between two beakers for a couple of minutes, it eventually changed colour. It was very slow and once you could see the colour start to change, it too was slow.

Electroplating

Have you ever looked at jewelry and wondered why it's really cheap when it is clearly golden. Well, here we are doing that process of electroplating by plating scissors with copper.  (Start the plating) So, what is electroplating? Electroplating is when a metal forms on top of another metal via electricity. The two objects that are placed in the solution is cathodes and anodes. The cathode is the object that is going to be plated and the anode can be either the metal you are plating with (what metal is in the solution) or another material that resists plating such as lead or carbon. Both of these are hooked up to a battery/power pack with the anode on the positive . In this instance, we are using carbon as the anode and some scissors as the cathode. These are placed in a metal solution of what metal you want to plate so copper. So, how does it work?

Using a carbon electrode and the item you want to plate in a solution of what metal you want to place on the item, we can plate a thin or thick layer of the metal. By leaving it in the solution for longer, the plating will be thicker. The most effective metal (visually) is copper. It can take a while to get a nice coat of copper but on a silvery metal, it is very easy to see.

Copper sulfate - very effective

Silver nitrate - lumps of what maybe silver. Not visually pleasing. - found out that voltage may change how the plating happens. Having too high voltage may make the metal crystallize weirdly thus making gloopy lumps of silver.

 Chromium sulfate - Nothing much happens. Only gets slightly darker on the scissors. It seems to stain the scissors and can't be scrubbed off easily if not at all.

Using a plate of copper and plating with nickel sulfate - Can see the difference clearly due to the different colours.

23/02/2021

First official session of science buskers in 2021. Each Year 12 was assigned to a experiment to do with the younger students. I tried to do it but it was only ok, it did crystalise but it wasn't very engaging, a fair amount of waiting. We are going to try the Hot stuff roadshow again and I am going to be doing acetylene gas section of it. Tried it in a flask and found out that it will continually burn.

1.06.2022

Iodine clocks

I wanted to try to make an iodine clock because well, they looked cool. At first, I wanted to do the Briggs Rauscher reaction which is an iodine clock but it oscillates from colourless to dark blue and then back to colourless constantly for a while. When trying to recreate it in our lab, I found out that we didn't have all the right chemicals but had some possible substitutions for the chemical we didn't have. After trying it out, it didn't work at all. It turned from colourless to something similar to the colour of beer so I decided to do the more basic version where it doesn't oscillate. 

I found a recipe online for the iodine clock which had really simple ingredients and didn't seem too difficult (https://www.imaginationstationtoledo.org/education-resources/diy-activities/iodine-clock-reaction/). There was one change made to the recipe, I had changed the liquid laundry starch to corn starch because we didn't have any.

The reaction did work but after ages of waiting and me leaving for a bit, it did turn black. This was really exciting because I had attempted this before but the reaction was really slow and for some reason, I didn't pursue it or change anything. 

The next attempt at the reaction had me change the amount of hydrogen peroxide used. I doubled the amount to hopefully speed the reaction up a bit and I also placed it in a hot water bath to heat up the solutions because the hydrogen peroxide was also refrigerated beforehand. This did seem to help as soon as when I placed the solution in the hot water, it started to turn pink and slowly to black. This was progress but the reaction was still too slow and the change in colour was a gradual change instead of an instant.

The most recent attempt had me changing the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide from 3% to 35%, yes it's quite a jump, heating both solutions before combining them and using soluble starch instead of corn starch as corn starch wasn't dissolving properly and that could've been the reason for the slow colour change. This attempt was amazingly successful! There was time for me to talk about how the reaction itself was working and then for the colour to change. Perfect amount of time for a performance.

Here is a method for recreating it yourself:

Ingredients:

- 3x 60ml distilled water

- some hot water

- 1g of absorbic acid or vitamin c

- 1tsp Iodine water solution

- 3tsp hydrogen peroxide (35%)

- 1/4tsp soluble starch

- 3 250ml beakers

- 2 500ml beakers

Step 1:

Dissolve 1g of ascorbic acid with 60mls of water. This will be your ascorbic acid stock solution

Step 2:

Combine 5mls of the ascorbic acid solution with 5mls of iodine water solution and 60mls of water. This is solution A

Step 3:

Combine 15mls of hydrogen peroxide, 1g of soluble starch and 60mls of water. This is solution B

Step 4:

Place both solutions in a hot water bath using the two 500ml beakers and the hot water for around 1 min. This helps the reaction speed up

Step 5:

Pour solution A into solution B and keep pouring the solution between the two beakers. After a while, it will suddenly turn black

What happens? 

Two reactions are happening when the two solutions are mixed. The first reaction happens with the iodine and the hydrogen peroxide. These two are mixed together to produce pure iodine which is blue with the presence of the starch but it doesn't turn dark blue instantly. This is because the ascorbic acid is quickly consuming the iodine but this also uses up the ascorbic acid. After a while, all the ascorbic acid is used up and the iodine quickly changes the starches colour to a dark blue.

8/06/22

Did some testing with the clock and found out that a fair amount of starch is necessary for the colour to turn into a nice dark blue/purple. If there is not enough starch then the colour is a bit of nasty dark brown. I am going to attempt to increase the amount of hydrogen peroxide to hopefully increase the speed of the reaction. By doubling the amount of hydrogen peroxide, the reaction time was much quicker and also adding more starch made the reaction much better. The first time today took ~50s and after the modifications the time was 30s which is a nicer timing.