Wats up Guys and Girls.
Have you heard of Superheating? It is another physical phenomenon similar to super-cooling which I mentioned last time.
This phenomenon can also be referred to as "boiling retardation". Superheating is easy enough to explain, it involves a water based liquid being boiled to a temperature higher than 100 degrees centigrade (waters metastable boiling point). However the liquid does not boil. This is due to a lack of nucleation sites (refer to my last entry if you do not know what this is) of which boiling can begin around. It is important to not disturb the liquid at any point in the experiment, especially when the water has been superheated.
Superheating can also occur when a person heats an undisturbed cup of water in a microwave oven. When the container is removed, the water still appears to be below the boiling point. However, once the water is disturbed, some of it violently flashes to steam, spraying boiling water out of the container. A word of caution, superheated water has the potential to be a hazard due its spontaneous boiling, at least were goggles when attempting this experiment.
There is one major difference between supercooling and superheating, where as supercooling only works in pure substances, superheating on the other hand has the potential to occur in liquids such as black coffee. Good luck trying this out, its a bit more trickier (and potentially more harmful) than supercooling!
Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_OXM4mr_i0
I want to move on to a chemical compound known as Sulfur Hexafluoride. It consists of octahedral geometry, consisting of six fluorine atoms attached to a central sulfur atom. It is also a colorless, odorless, non-toxic and non-flammable gas (under standard conditions). These properties lead to some very intersting properties. None less than the ability to act like water, on youtube this chemical is nicknamed invisible water! This is due to the fact that Sulfur Hexafluoride is denser than air.
Watch the link: ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAsOfqCy4A0
It's amazing, no? I certainly thought it was, as did many of my friends at my school. But my real purpose for talking about this chemical is to ask wether anyone knows where this compound can be brought from, does it exist as a natural compound in the Earth's atmosphere or is it man made? Please E-mail me if you have any answers.
My third topic that amazed me when i read about it was Plasma, suppsoedly a fourth state of matter. Everyone knows about the three states of matter, no? Gas, liquid and solid. Well, plasma is a partially ionized gas in which a certain proportion of electrons are free rather than being bound to an atom or molecule. Plasma therefore has properties quite unlike those of solids, liquids or gases and is considered to be a distinct state of matter. Like gas, plasma does not have a definite shape or a definite volume unless enclosed in a container, but unlike gas, in the influence of a magnetic field, it may form structures such as filaments.
And that brings to an end my blog for today, this blog seemed more like a science lecture but this is due to my weird disorder of constantly surfing the internet for new scientific phenomenons. I promise to keep science to one paragraph in my next blog and talk more about my life and Dragonball: Evolution, due out in less than a months time!! Till then, goodbye and remember, work hard and play hard.
Sami.
