Science

The ninety-three-million-mile separation between the sun and the Earth pays little attention to our lunchtime or recreational schedule. The sun is essentially the same distance from your rapidly reddening nose at all times of day. But the strength of the sunshine varies, for two reasons: one atmospheric and one geometric. Picture the Earth as a … Read more

Waves can tell when they’re approaching a shore and actually turn to line up with it. What makes waves, of course, is wind blowing across the water’s surface. But it can’t be that the wind is always blowing the waves straight in to shore. Out in the ocean, the wind may be blowing every which … Read more

“Sea Breeze” isn’t just the name of a thousand beach motels. The breeze coming in from the sea is a real phenomenon that makes the shore cooler than it is inland at least in the afternoon, which is when people most want to cool off anyway. In the daytime, cool breezes almost invariably blow in … Read more

The term proof was coined in the seventeenth century when people proved, or tested, the alcohol content of whiskey by moistening gunpowder with it and setting it afire. (Honest.) A slow, even burn indicated the desired 50-percent-or-so of alcohol. If the booze was watered down, the flame would sputter. Today in the United States, 50 … Read more

Silly-sounding question, maybe, but with several interesting answers. People tend to put up with fishy smelling fish in markets and restaurants because they’re thinking, Well, what else should it smell like? But fish needn’t smell like fish at all. Not if it’s perfectly fresh. When they’re only a couple of hours removed from the water, … Read more

Jell-O and similar desserts are about 87 percent sugar and 9 or 10 percent gelatin, plus flavoring and coloring. Kids love three things about the stuff: It is brightly colored, it is very sweet, and it jiggles. Mothers don’t mind, because gelatin is pure protein. The gelatin, which of course is the jiggler, really does … Read more

When the liquid carbon dioxide in the tank turns into gaseous carbon dioxide, it gets cold enough to freeze some of the carbon dioxide into “snow.” But why, indeed? All that’s happening is that the compressed carbon dioxide gas is expanding as we let it loose into the room. Do expanding gases automatically get cold? … Read more

The smoke from dry ice isn’t smoke; it’s fog. Although dry ice is pure carbon dioxide, the fog itself is not carbon dioxide, as some people think. Carbon dioxide gas is invisible. The cloud of fog surrounding the dry ice is pure water. It has been condensed out of the air’s natural humidity by the … Read more

Hydrogenation is, quite sensibly, the name of the process by which hydrogen is added to something. Hydrogen is the lightest of all known substances, but paradoxically, hydro-genating an oil makes it thicker and more solid. If we went all out with complete hydrogenation, the oil would become as solid as candle wax, which would make … Read more

The very best way to get ketchup out of the bottle, as was once memorably demonstrated by David Letterman, is to grasp the bottle firmly around the bottom and swing it round and round over your head, like a lariat. Of course, the ketchup will splatter all over the walls, but you asked only how … Read more

Just smile. Anyone who thinks steaks contain blood, well, they’re wrong. They’re not necessarily wrong in their preference for eating well-done steaks, although many would argue that such behavior should be declared a felony. Where they’re wrong is in calling your steak bloody. There’s practically no blood in it at all. Blood, you might politely … Read more

It does sound odd, but something is really going on here. What makes the MSG story hard to swallow is that the terminology is misleading: “Flavor enhancers” do not enhance the flavors of food in the sense of improving them; that is, they don’t make anything taste better. What they do is intensify, or magnify, … Read more

If Gertrude Stein had been a chemist, she might have said, “Calcium carbonate is calcium carbonate is calcium carbonate.” Sure, clams and oysters make their shells out of calcium carbonate. But chemically speaking, it doesn’t matter whether the calcium carbonate in the supplement bottle came from an oyster bed or a bed of limestone, which … Read more

Sure, freezer burn is an oxymoron, but not a bad one at that. Take a good look at that ancient pork chop you’ve been keeping in the freezer for an emergency. Doesn’t its parched and shriveled surface look as if it had been seared? Believe it or not, “seared” doesn’t only refer to heat; it … Read more

The cold pack contains ammonium nitrate crystals and a thin, breakable pouch of water. When the pack is squeezed, the water pouch breaks and, with a little shaking, the ammonium nitrate dissolves in the water. When any chemical dissolves in water, it may either absorb heat, get cold, or release heat, get hot. Ammonium nitrate … Read more

Tradition, namely the dietary laws for the Jewish holiday Passover, demands the absence of any leavening agents such as yeast, baking soda, or baking powder. So matzos are made of flour and water only. Between Passovers, the manufacturers can cheat a little and add other ingredients to vary the flavor. If you make dough by … Read more

You’ll be the first to admit, won’t you, that corn contains a lot of starch? Well, starch is the key to corn syrup. They convert cornstarch into sugar by the magic of chemistry. Take away the water from a kernel of corn and the remainder is about 82 percent carbohydrates, a classification of natural organic … Read more

Let’s not think of food energy as energy to be used only for exercising and running around. Our bodies utilize the energy we get from food not only to move, but to digest and metabolize the food itself, to repair the continuous day-today wear and tear on our cells, to build new growth, and to … Read more

The fog is exactly the same as any fog: a collection of tiny particles of liquid water that have been condensed out of the air by a cold temperature, but are too tiny to fall down like rain. They are kept suspended by being constantly bombarded by air molecules. They look white because they reflect … Read more

Those quick thaw defrosting trays are also good at taking money directly out of your wallet. What they are is a remarkable new high-tech, space-age miracle called a slab of metal. Of all types of materials, metals are the best conductors of heat. So if you put your frozen hamburger on a slab of metal, … Read more

At a truck stop, I watched a trailer-truck driver banging fiercely on the sides of his trailer with a baseball bat. When I asked him what he was doing, he explained, “My rig is a thousand pounds overweight. I’m hauling two thousand pounds of pigeons, and so I’ve got to keep half of them in … Read more

Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide are both dangerous gases, but in very different ways. Small amounts of carbon dioxide are normally present in the atmosphere. It gets there from volcanoes, from the decomposition of plant and animal matter, from the burning of coal and petroleum, and from the opening of cans of beer, which, however, … Read more

And that is indeed what is happening back in the gas station’s compressed-air tank as you allow some of its stored-up compressed air to expand into the outer world. Why does expansion cool a gas? Well, if a collection of flying gas molecules is suddenly allowed to expand into a bigger space, the molecules have … Read more

It can’t be friction, because putting air into a car tire doesn’t heat it up. The answer is that when air (or any gas) is compressed,  when it is forced into a smaller space, it gets hot. When you use your hand pump, you’re compressing the air in the pump, but when you use the … Read more

It’s not just the pressure you’re fighting against; you also have to consider the volume. It takes many more strokes of the pump to add a “pound of air” to the car tire than to the bike tire. What people loosely call a “pound of air” is not an amount of air, like a pound … Read more

Oil is a good lubricant, obviously, because it’s so slippery. But what makes a substance slippery? All liquids are slippery to some degree. A wet floor or highway, wet with water, is a well-recognized hazard that keeps many lawyers in expensive clothing. But water isn’t much use as a lubricant in our engines and other … Read more

Ordinarily, water is the best mixer in the world, and I don’t mean just with Scotch. It mixes with, it associates intimately with, it even welcomes into its very bosom, that is, it dissolves, more substances than any other liquid. That’s why it is sometimes called the universal solvent. But there is one family of … Read more

Contrary to what everybody says, the ice on your driveway doesn’t melt, any more than sugar melts in coffee or tea. People often confuse melting with dissolving. (“I don’t need an umbrella; I won’t melt in the rain.”) But melting, as you have already noted, requires heat. You can certainly melt ice or sugar by … Read more

It was an extremely cold day, wasn’t it? Below zero Fahrenheit, perhaps? That was the problem. Sand won’t work when it is too cold. In order to improve traction, the sand grains must become partially embedded into the ice, making tiny bumps in what had been a smooth surface, in effect, making “sandpaper” out of … Read more

By interfering with water’s molecules, dissolved substances not only lower its freezing point, they also raise its boiling point by making it harder for the water molecules to fly off into the air. With ethylene glycol dissolved in it, your coolant water has to get to a higher temperature than usual before it will boil. … Read more

Strange as it may sound, it’s true. A fifty-fifty mixture of ethylene glycol and water won’t freeze until the temperature gets down to about 34 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-37 degrees Celsius), while pure antifreeze will freeze at about 11 degrees above zero (-12 degrees Celsius). Let’s see what’s going on here. It happens that … Read more

Rusting takes place through a juxtaposition of iron and oxygen that actually constitutes a miniature electric battery, on the atomic scale. That is, the oxygen molecules are taking electrons away from the iron atoms, and that is exactly what goes on inside a battery: electrons being snatched from one substance by another. Anything that helps … Read more

Iron plus oxygen plus water equals rust. That’s it. When all three are present, rust will inevitably occur. But if any member of this unholy triumvirate is missing, there can be no rust. Fortunately for us living creatures, but unfortunately for our garden tools and automobiles, oxygen and water vapor are present everywhere in the … Read more

They play hard rock music while it’s being poured. Sorry. The strength of pre-stressed concrete doesn’t come from heat tempering, as in the case of windshield glass. Pre-stressed concrete is concrete containing steel cables that have been subjected to tension, that is, that have been stressed by pulling on them lengthwise, before the concrete hardens. … Read more

Preventing the scatter of fragments is relatively easy. The windshield is actually a sandwich, with glass “bread” and an elastic plastic “ham” that can be indented without cracking. When the bowling ball hits the windshield, most of the pieces of glass remain bonded to the plastic instead of flying around loose. But why it breaks … Read more

Don’t use flashlight batteries when they’re cold. They would be just as sluggish as a car battery in winter. Cold inhibits both kinds. They must be somewhere around room temperature if you are to get the intended amount of “juice” out of them. Batteries produce their electricity, streams of electrons, by a chemical reaction, and … Read more

Not unless the spinach was in a steel can, which is perversely known as a tin can, even when it’s an aluminum can. The much-touted iron in spinach just isn’t in a form that’s attractive to a magnet. Iron is magnetic, attracted to magnets, when it is in the metallic form, but not when it … Read more

There’s nothing unique about the use of sugar to preserve foods. In principle, you could make your strawberry jam with salt instead of sugar and it would keep just as long. Much longer, in fact, because nobody would go near it after the first taste. Salt has been used for thousands of years, however, to … Read more

Nonstick cooking sprays like Pam are nothing but cooking oil dissolved in alcohol, in a handy aerosol can. The idea is that instead of pouring a random amount of oil into your skillet, you give it a quick spritz from the can. The alcohol evaporates and the oil coats the pan. You’ll still be cooking … Read more

Quite obviously, sticking can’t occur unless there are two distinct materials; there must be both a sticker and a stickee. The properties of both must be considered. But can there be such a thing as an intrinsic non-sticker, regardless of what the stickee may be? This non-sticky question was settled in 1938, when a Du … Read more

It’s very good for those who manufacture the salt mills and peddle them to yuppies who must own the ultimate pseudo-gourmet accessory. For the rest of us? It’s a scam. Pepper should be ground fresh, but grinding salt accomplishes nothing, but exercise. Freshly ground black or white pepper (which are identical plant berries that have … Read more

Is sea salt healthier than ordinary salt? Baloney. The sea salt that’s sold in supermarkets and health food stores is no richer in minerals, no less refined, and no different in flavor from ordinary table salt. But you’ll pay anywhere from four to twenty times as much for it. And it may not even come … Read more

It is, of course, entirely unnecessary to point out that salt is inherently nondenominational. While kosher salt comes from the sea and is certified at the factory as meeting the strict criteria of Jewish dietary laws, the rabbi’s blessing has no more effect on flavor than does the priest’s consecration of a communion wafer. Kosher … Read more

What is friction? When you rub the surfaces of two objects together, they’ll resist slipping and sliding to some extent, and some of the muscle energy that you’re applying to overcome that resistance shows up as heat. And what is heat? It’s just molecular motion. What microwaves do is make certain molecules move, and once … Read more

The melting point and the freezing point of a substance are the same thing. The solidification process is what we also call freezing. When we say that water freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius), we could just as well say that that’s the melting point of ice. The reason they are the same … Read more

Who says you can’t melt salt? Any solid will melt if the temperature is high enough. Lava is molten rock, isn’t it? If you want to melt salt, all you have to do is turn your oven up to 1474 degrees Fahrenheit (801 degrees Celsius), which will make your kitchen glow a pretty red color. … Read more

The short answer is that baking soda is a single, pure chemical compound, while baking powder is a mixture of that same chemical with one or two others. (If you must know, baking soda is sodium bicarbonate or bicarbonate of soda, while baking powder is sodium bicarbonate plus an acid or two: tartaric acid or … Read more

Butter is clarified to get rid of everything but the pure saturated fat. Some people think of butter as a block of fat surrounded by guilt. But guilt or no guilt, it isn’t all fat. It’s a three-part, solidified emulsion, a stable mixture of oily and watery components, with some solids mixed in. When you … Read more

Fish flesh is inherently different from the flesh of most walking, slithering, and flying creatures for several reasons. First of all, cruising through the water doesn’t exactly qualify as body-building exercise, at least when compared with galloping across the plain or flitting through the air. So fish muscles are not as developed as those of … Read more

The short answer is that cooking makes proteins harder and carbohydrates softer. We’ll leave meats out of this, because the toughness or tenderness of a cut of meat depends in a very complex way on the muscle structure of the animal, the portion of the animal it came from, and on precisely how it’s being … Read more

Candy recipes tell you to boil sugar syrup until it reaches various temperatures on a candy thermometer: the soft ball stage at about 237 degrees Fahrenheit (114 degrees Celsius), the hard crack stage at 305 degrees Fahrenheit (152 degrees Celsius), and so on. Different cookbooks will give you slightly different temperatures for the various stages.) … Read more

The difference between simmering and boiling is more basic than just the vigor of the bubbling. A simmer aims to produce a slightly lower temperature than true boiling, because even a few degrees difference in cooking temperature can make a big difference in how things cook. In moist cooking, cooking with lots of water present, … Read more

It’s strange, but true. The boiling water will indeed begin to boil at a higher temperature as soon as the salt dissolves. For every ounce of salt that you add to a quart of water (or for every 29 grams of salt per liter of water), the boiling temperature will increase by about 0.9 degree … Read more

Not a lot of steam is lost until the water starts to boil, but water vapor, yes. Long before you ever see any steam, which is made up of tiny droplets of liquid water, there is a lot of invisible, hot vapor being produced, unattached water molecules, flying around as a gas. A vapor and … Read more

Dive into the science of boiling water and the intriguing question: Can water get hotter than its boiling point? Uncover the mysteries behind this common yet complex phenomenon. Key Takeaways: Explore the science of water boiling and the factors influencing its temperature. Understand the concept of superheating and the conditions under which water can exceed … Read more

Bleach doesn’t know which clothes are white. What it does know about is color, because color is a lot more fundamental, chemically and physically speaking, than our mere human wash day preferences. Bleach attacks colored chemical compounds, most of which do indeed have something in common, and leaves behind a lack of color that we … Read more

Inside the battery, electrons are indeed passed from one atom to another like jumping fleas. But that’s not how electricity flows through a wire or through a complicated electric circuit. The electrons don’t just enter one end of a wire, hop from one atom to the next, and come out the other end. Let’s say … Read more

Batteries do not contain electricity as such; they contain the potential for electricity in the form of chemicals. These chemicals are isolated from one another inside the battery and are thus prevented from reacting until we hook up the battery to a device and turn on the switch. Then they react and produce electricity. Getting … Read more

If you look carefully, you’ll see a narrow constriction in the capillary tube through which the mercury travels up and down. On its way up, the mercury has plenty of force to overcome the resistance and push through the constriction; the pressure of an expanding liquid can be quite high. (When water freezes and expands, … Read more

Heat makes things expand. In a compression faucet (the most common kind), the water flows through a narrow gap between a neoprene rubber washer and a metal “seat.” In the hot-water faucet, the initial flow of hot water makes the washer expand, which closes down the gap between washer and seat, restricting the flow of … Read more

The normal temperature of an ice and water slush is 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius). But that’s not cold enough to freeze ice cream. It has to be at 27 degrees Fahrenheit (-3 degrees Celsius) or below. Salt is what does the job. Lots of other chemicals would do the trick, but salt is … Read more

Congratulations. Your friends think highly enough of you to put out their company tableware, which is made of sterling silver. Your home “silverware” is either stainless steel or (sorry about that) only silver-plated base metal. Sterling silver is almost pure silver: 92.5 percent, to be exact. And silver is the best conductor of heat among … Read more

There are several reasons why a glass of champagne has less bubbles than a glass of beer, none of them sociological. • The champagne is likely to have been poured into a flute, a tall, narrow glass that doesn’t have a lot of bottom surface for bubble formation. Moreover, such narrow glasses are not as … Read more

The trick, as you already suspected, is to chill the bottles well and avoid any agitation for at least several hours before opening. But knowing why always helps. Beer, soda, and champagne all get their fizziness from carbon dioxide gas, which has been dissolved in the liquid during, or in the case of true champagne, … Read more

When the sun is low in the sky at sunrise or sunset, you’re seeing it straight-on through a great distance of atmosphere. While traversing all that atmosphere, a lot of the blue light that started out in your direction gets scattered into many other directions, so the light that reaches you straight-on is depleted in … Read more

The sky is blue for the same reason that cigarette smoke is blue: the preferential scattering of blue light by tiny particles. Pure air is colorless, of course, meaning that all visible wavelengths (colors) of light pass through it without being absorbed. But it contains molecules and, often, suspended dust motes that are smaller than … Read more

Tar and nicotine are not blue, so forget that idea. What happened was that the size of the smoke particles had changed. The particles in cigarette smoke as it rises from a quietly burning cigarette are extremely tiny, smaller than the wavelengths of visible light. When a passing light wave encounters one of these tiny … Read more

The water in a water bed will indeed settle down to the same temperature as everything else in the room, including a conventional bed. But you would still feel colder on the water bed. It has to do with the fact that water conducts heat away from your body a lot more efficiently than other … Read more

The soda wasn’t frozen as long as it was still in the refrigerator because the refrigerator’s temperature was warmer than its freezing point. But when you pulled the tab you did two things: You released the pressure inside the can and you lost some of the gas. For different reasons, each of these effects helped … Read more

Unlike thermos, which has become a generic word, Styrofoam is still struggling to retain its identity as a trademark, but nobody seems to be paying attention; people call all polystyrene foam products “styrofoam” anyway. The material is a good insulator because the plastic foam contains billions of trapped gas bubbles. Gases hinder heat conduction because … Read more

To solve the problem, all you have to do is think of heat as a kind of liquid that flows only “downhill” from high temperatures to low temperatures. The thermos bottle acts like a dam that blocks the flow of heat. It won’t let heat flow “down” from your hot coffee inside to the lower-temperature … Read more

The common substance that contracts when heated is rubber. Stretched rubber. Most things expand when heated for a simple reason: The higher temperature makes the atoms or molecules move faster. They then need more elbow room, spreading farther apart on the average, and that makes the whole substance take up more space. But rubber can … Read more

A larger amount of gas can dissolve in a liquid when it is cold than when it is hot. Or as a chemist would say, the solubility of a gas in a liquid increases with decreasing temperature. But that’s how chemists talk. In practical terms, why does the carbon dioxide choose to leave the beer … Read more

Your objective is to keep as much carbon dioxide gas in the bottle as possible, because that’s what the fizzy bubbles are made of. Keeping the bottle tightly stoppered certainly has to be your first line of defense. But frankly, it won’t help very much. There are many kinds of stoppers on the market, including … Read more

It has to do with the fact that atoms and molecules that are heated in flames can absorb some of the heat energy and then promptly spit it back out as light energy. Every substance has its own typical wavelengths or colors of light that it emits after being stimulated by the heat. (Techspeak: every … Read more

It’s a matter of how much oxygen is available to the burning fuel. Lots of oxygen makes blue flames, while a limited amount of oxygen makes yellow ones. Let’s look at the yellow flame first. A candle is really a very complex flame-producing machine. First, some of the wax must melt, then the liquid wax … Read more

By capillary attraction, the wick leads melted wax up to where it can be vaporized and mix with oxygen in the air. A block of solid wax, or even a puddle of melted wax, won’t burn because the wax molecules can’t come in contact with enough oxygen molecules; only as vapors can they mix intimately, … Read more

Except for what drips all over your tablecloth, burning candle wax goes to the same place that gasoline and oil go when they burn: into the air. But in a chemically altered form. Candles are usually made of paraffin, which is a mixture of hydrocarbons, substances that we find in petroleum. As the name implies, … Read more

Rather than insulting everyone by pointing out why sheets will not be any softer if washed with soft water, I might gently state that hard and soft water are not called that because of their relative rigidities. Nor is it because you make hard boiled eggs with one and soft-boiled eggs with the other. The … Read more

There is an important thing that soap does: It makes water wetter. That is, it helps the water to penetrate into all the nooks and crannies of whatever it is we’re washing. Water molecules stick to each other quite strongly. As a result, a water molecule situated at the surface of a “piece” of water … Read more

It would appear that soap is a magic substance that recognizes and respects our skins and precious possessions while devouring everything else under the sun like a vulture leaving only bones behind. But no such magic substance exists. Instead, the answer has to do with the natures of oil and water. Simplistic as it may … Read more

The unholy mess involved in making soap belies its use as an incomparable cleaner of just about everything for at least the past two thousand years. It has always been easy to make out of cheap, readily available materials: fat and wood ashes. Lime was sometimes used also. You can make it the way the … Read more

It goes back to the fact that most humans are right-handed. Long before we had modern weapons such as guns and automobiles, people had to do battle using swords and horses. Now if you are right-handed, you wear your sword on the left, so that you can draw it out rapidly with your right hand. … Read more

The steam hammer was essentially a power hammer, as used today to shape forgings, but it was driven by a steam engine. It comprised a hammer-like piston within a cylinder positioned vertically in an iron frame. The central hammer piston was driven upwards by injecting high-pressure steam into the cylinder’s base, which was supplied by … Read more

The beam engine was used to draw out water from mines, as well as to pump water into canals. The engine consisted of a large wooden frame into which a pivoted overhead beam was used to apply force generated by a vertical piston and transfer that movement to a pump rod. The piston’s movement was … Read more

The invention of the steam engine and its practical implementation in the beam engines of the early-18th century was the catalyst. By mechanizing and automating the excavation of mines, not only could raw materials, such as coal and ores, be harvested in immense quantities, but the process could be executed at a speed simply infeasible … Read more

It’s a common misconception that steam is visible. The characteristic white mist that we see rising from a boiling kettle or the cooling tower of a power station is, in fact, haphazard clouds of water droplets forming through the condensation of steam in the cooler air. Indeed, if steam was simply a mist of water … Read more

The origins of Hurricane Sandy, one of the most costly superstorms ever, have been revealed by meteorologists. The storm caused over $20 billion (£12.5 billion) worth of damage and claimed more than 50 lives. Classified as a post-tropical cyclone, Sandy caused wide-scale destruction to buildings, left over 7.4 million properties without power and led to … Read more

A grandfather clock uses a pendulum to keep time, a swinging weight that oscillates back and forth at fixed intervals. However, if the pendulum swings once every second, a tiny error quickly spirals into a major timekeeping problem. The solution is to break the second down even further and to use a ‘pendulum’ that swings … Read more

Two decades ago, astronomers weren’t sure if any planets existed outside of our own solar system. Now they’ve identified more than 1,000 all over the galaxy. But in order to support liquid water and therefore life as we know it, a planet must be small enough, rocky, have an atmosphere that’s dense but not crushing, … Read more