This man may change the world Andrea Rossi & eCat

I enjoyed being teacher's assistant to my highschool chemistry teacher. Aside from the fun of learning stuff, from time to time she also had various expired chemicals that had to be "disposed of", such as a jar of manganese powder and some magnesium "tape". (pretty sure I still have some of both around here someplace). some of these things we used in "demonstrations" of how NOT to handle chemicals or perform experiments.

Nowadays I'm sure the schools and parents would be horrified at such things, deeming them all incredibly unsafe. I doubt they get to do more dramatic experiments than turning litmus paper different colors anymore.

fechter said:

My old high school physics teacher made a big batch of nitrogen triiodide and let it dry out on a piece of paper towel. Unknowing lab assistant accidently placed a large beaker on top of the paper and KA-BOOM! + miniature purple mushroom cloud. Little pieces of it flew all over the room and would snap loudly when you stepped on them. Luckily nobody got hurt, but it was quite impressive - and messy.

This is the same guy that would charge up a capacitor about the size of a small refrigerator and half way through the lecture (when all the jocks were falling asleep), he would demonstrate how a small piece of copper wire on the end of a long stick would turn to plasma when enough current was passed through it. Dang, I miss the good ol days.

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At the first lab I worked in we used to make batches of NI3. The prep is dead easy, just mix concentrated ammonia with iodine and filter out the precipitate, which is NI3. When dry it's as sensitive as hell, the slightest friction or even touch will cause it to disassociate into nitrogen and iodine, with a loud bang.

We used the stuff as fly traps, mixing a bit of glucose with the precipitate whilst it was still wet, then leaving small amounts to dry on filter papers on the lab windowsills. When dry, even the touch of a fly landing on the stuff would be enough to cause it to detonate.

Other uses were pulling the keys off the Teletype (used to run the lab minicomputer - this was the early 70's) and putting small amounts of wet NI3 under the key caps, then replacing them. When the lab tech came in early the next morning to boot up the computer there would be a serious of satisfying pops as the keys flew off the Teletype under his fingers...........

I witnessed a sodium in water explosion in grade 11 and the girl sitting directly in front of me was burned by it. The teacher had done this in many classes per year for over 20 years with nothing more than the fizzle you have seen happened. Maybe impurity in the water or contaminate in the dish, but something caused it to ignite.
Her dress, blouse and face had small burns.

Another Chem teacher in a different year, damaged the building with a chromium experiment. I don't know what went wrong as it was covered up and kept quiet.

liveforphysics said:

Drunkskunk said:

Making buckyball sounds more reasonable than making iron. And more fun. I think C60 would make a decent dry lube.

I spent a few hours looking up info on this during a rather dull confrence call today. I couldn't get hard numbers on the radiation released but you would likely glow in the dark for the few minutes left of your life if you could produce a gram of iron from carbon. Too many protons would escape. You would also likely have to form Magnesium(12) and a few other elements along with the iron (Argon(18), chromium(24) ). It would be easy to test for the Magnesium. Just drop the residue in water and see if it explodes.

What I read on carbon Makes LFP's theory sound more reasonable. Various Carbon Fullerenes and nanotubes can be produced in electical arcing. Some of them are magnetic.

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Magnesium doesn't explode in water my friend. The wheels on my racecar and my old chainsaw case are made of forged magnesium alloy.

For that matter, pure Lithium metal doesn't explode in water at all, it just kinda disappointingly fizzles Hydrogen slowly.
Pure Sodium metal does substantially more in water, but it still is a disappointment and rarely does more than fizzle hydrogen unless you've got a good ignition source provided for the hydrogen.
Pure Potassium metal does make a decent showing in water, tends to make little pops and flashes, never could get a decent bang from it though, but the flashes are fun.


The famous UK TV science show that showed someone dropping various heavier Alkali metals into water with large explosions as results FAKED the videos and used dynamite and various special effect BS. All just another of the millions of reason I don't watch TV or trust anything from TV.

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I remember those metals in water experiments including oxidation of aluminum in a vacuum and the sudden addition of air, pretty flame, interesting to see how reactive it was, powdered stuff explodes well too .

Jeremy Harris said:

We used the stuff as fly traps, mixing a bit of glucose with the precipitate whilst it was still wet, then leaving small amounts to dry on filter papers on the lab windowsills. When dry, even the touch of a fly landing on the stuff would be enough to cause it to detonate.

Other uses were pulling the keys off the Teletype (used to run the lab minicomputer - this was the early 70's) and putting small amounts of wet NI3 under the key caps, then replacing them. When the lab tech came in early the next morning to boot up the computer there would be a serious of satisfying pops as the keys flew off the Teletype under his fingers...........

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Good ones!
We used to put it between the toilet seat and the bowl and wait for somebody to sit on it.

How are kids supposed to get interested in chemistry if we take all the fun out of it?

One more: one of my chemistry teachers did a demonstration of thermite, a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum dust, ignited by some potassium permanganate and glycerin. He had a small pile sitting on an asbestos sheet (yikes! asbestos!) that was supported on a ring stand. Once it got going, it melted through the asbestos, through the cast iron base of the ring stand, and about half way through the black lab countertop, leaving a smoking hole filled with molten iron. Cool! Sort of like 'alien blood'. It was as bright as the sun and made a good cloud of smoke. No smoke detectors in those days.

fechter said:

One more: one of my chemistry teachers did a demonstration of thermite, a mixture of iron oxide and aluminum dust, ignited by some potassium permanganate and glycerin. He had a small pile sitting on an asbestos sheet (yikes! asbestos!) that was supported on a ring stand. Once it got going, it melted through the asbestos, through the cast iron base of the ring stand, and about half way through the black lab countertop, leaving a smoking hole filled with molten iron. Cool! Sort of like 'alien blood'. It was as bright as the sun and made a good cloud of smoke. No smoke detectors in those days.

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I witnessed a similar demonstration except that Mg ribbon was used to start the reaction. Do you think chem teachers do this on purpose to emphasize the results?

liveforphysics said:

Magnesium doesn't explode in water my friend. The wheels on my racecar and my old chainsaw case are made of forged magnesium alloy.

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Doh! You're right, and I'm a Bonehead. I Shouldn't type while listening to hold music. That stuff will lower IQ points and I don't have any to spare


So in keeping with the idea of garage verifications for garage experiments, I suppose you could drop the magnetic powder through a propane torch flame. Iron will burn. C60 and C70 won't. Are there any carbon nanotube structures that will burn when dropped through a flame? If not, that should make it easy to verify That it is or isn't realy iron.
Or turn off the lights and see if you glow.

Assuming it's tube is still any good, I have an old yellow Civil Defense geiger counter here, that if I rigged up some batteries for it could be used to detect any radiation from the arc event. I have some large-diameter pencil leads I could use for arc rods, and then jjust need to setup a physical clamp to hold them and let me move them together very slowly so they don't touch but are close enough to arc. Not sure which power supply would be best used for this, but I have that old wire-feed welder that doesn't feed right that should work.

Whether I will have any time to do the experiment is another story. :lol:

There would be chemical tests could use to for iron.

You have your own geiger counter? Nice!

Pencil Lead is graphite powder in a clay binder. Clay is made up of Phyllosilicates and may contain a fair amount of iron and other metal oxides.

You might indeed end up with iron residue and no radiation spike this way, but it would just be from the contamination of the clay.

Ah, true, I hadn't thougth about that. However, I was just thinking of monitoring for the radiation, regardless of whether iron showed up or not.

Teh GC is very old, though, paranoia-CD-era, so it's not all that likely the tube is still good (or good enough). Have never tested it since it was given to me by a friend when clearing out his parents' house after their passing.

fechter said:

My old high school physics teacher made a big batch of nitrogen triiodide and let it dry out on a piece of paper towel. Unknowing lab assistant accidently placed a large beaker on top of the paper and KA-BOOM! + miniature purple mushroom cloud. Little pieces of it flew all over the room and would snap loudly when you stepped on them. Luckily nobody got hurt, but it was quite impressive - and messy. ..........

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Ha ! memories are jogged...chem' teachers seemingly couldn't resist demonstrating those tricks !
Similarly my chem teacher showed us the NI3 process, and being full of youthfull stupidity we took some of the "samples" on wet filter paper to a local cafe and let them dry out carefully on a sunny table with a few other napkins..then waited nearby for the owner to come round and clean up the table ! .. ..scared the crap out of him and us !
Getting the correct amount of NI3 was not easy !
Repeated attempts had to be abandoned when the filters dried out prematurely and detonated in the "couriers" pocket !
Im sure we would be hounded by the cops and treated as terrorists if we tried that today.

If its real, this will disappear or the inventor will go mysteriously missing.

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as long as amberwolf dosent go missing....... careful man u might be too successful at fusion!!


LoL I remember the nitrogen triiodide, saw that at a science camp , we stole bottle of mercury from our science lab in highschool.....

amberwolf said:

Ah, true, I hadn't thougth about that. However, I was just thinking of monitoring for the radiation, regardless of whether iron showed up or not.

Teh GC is very old, though, paranoia-CD-era, so it's not all that likely the tube is still good (or good enough). Have never tested it since it was given to me by a friend when clearing out his parents' house after their passing.

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Sounds like a plan then. I work with a guy who's last career was with a company that tested and calibrated those Geiger counters. I'll ask him if there is "field" test you can do to see if it's working and/or roughly calibrated. I won't see him untill next week, though.

Probably if it's sensitive enough I could detect some radiation from the Americium often found in smoke detectors, simply by putting it close enough to the sealed unit inside the SD. But I don't know if it was ever taht sensitive in the first place, much less if it still is after all this time. I can't think of any other radiation source I have access to, besides the common ones you find in steel re-bar and the like, which hopefully would be too low to register on it, too.

Drunkskunk said:

Sounds like a plan then. I work with a guy who's last career was with a company that tested and calibrated those Geiger counters. I'll ask him if there is "field" test you can do to see if it's working and/or roughly calibrated. I won't see him untill next week, though.

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I have several Geiger counters around here. If the tube is working well, you should be able to pick up some background radiation, a few clicks per minute. I use an old radium dial watch from the '50s to test. Still hot after all these years. If you peel the top of the can off the element in a smoke detector, you can get get a reading.

I haven't gotten to the smoke detector testing yet, but I did get it powered up and zeroed. A small challenge was finding batteries for it: I did have a few old but still good-enough D-cells--however it also requires a "miniature hearing aid battery" (about 3/4 the size of an AA :lol: which is about 4x bigger than the whole hearing aid I have in a drawer somewhere). Fortunately that battery is suppsoed to be 22.5V, which of course none of us have anything like that laying around, do we?


While it doesnt' fit in the case, a couple of alligator clips with banana/bullet ends that came with the turnigy chargers bikefanatic sent me made an easy hookup to the tabs inside the meter.



It powers on, and "checks" ok with the meter setting for that, and I can zero it. No idea if it actually still detects radiation though.

I get no reading when placing the smoke detector under the ionizing chamber area, at any distance. Oh, and this very cheaply-made civil-defense type unit doesn't have a clicker just an analog meter gauge.


I doubt I'll get much farther than this soon, as I have a bunch of stuff to do in the next few days and I'll probably forget like usual, since I put the bits back up where they belong so i don't lose them (or kill the batteries leaving them hooked up).


BTW, the smoke detector has molded into it's plastic case someting that says to replace by 2008, with a really big WARNING on it. I suspect that would be for the halflife of the Americium in it reducing it's effectiveness at ionizing particles to then be able to detect them,, but I haven't actually checked why they say that. I don't know how old it is, as this was in the house when I moved in at the turn of the century. I'm sure it still emits enough to be detected if I open the ionizer/detector casing...but first I'd like to be sure it is safe to do so, both from a toxicological and radiological standpoint (I know very little about such things, although i probably know significantly mroe than most poeple do).

They detect a break in the ion beam, i believe.
As smoke particles through in front.

I think the one i took apart years ago, the source was in a little sealed unit inside.

Do they use a type of diode to do the detecting in modern type of radiation detection?
I was thinking would be good to make a small module fits a phone port and then run a real radiation detection app, not a fake, good for Japan, or anyone concerned generally.

Great pics.

I remembered something, so I went Wiki-ing on Americium. It emits lots of Alpha particles, but not much beta or Gama. Alpha radiation can be totally blocked by a sheet of paper. That's why it was deemed safe for use in unregulated consumer grade equipment.

Unfortunately, CD Geiger counters only read Gama. There are a few that can detect Beta, but it takes a special tube. Alpha can't be read with a Geiger counter tube because the glass will block it.

Then I guess I don't have to worry about that part of testing. I doubt I have any radium stuff around, though I do have old phosphorescent stuff it definitely only glows after exposure to light.

megacycle said:

Do they use a type of diode to do the detecting in modern type of radiation detection?
I was thinking would be good to make a small module fits a phone port and then run a real radiation detection app, not a fake, good for Japan, or anyone concerned generally.

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I think somebody beat you to the idea:
http://www.scosche.com/consumer-tech/product/2254

Basically any super sensitive photo detector coupled with something fluorescent will make a scintillometer. I think they usually use sodium iodide crystals as the fluorescent element. It emits a tiny flash of light when hit by radiation.

I know they use solid state detectors in modern digital x-ray equipment. These are very sensitive and can respond to other types of radiation. These detect directly and I think are based on PIN diodes.

Good to see its been made.
Though look at the beast, is it based around an old tube lol.

Yeh was thinking pin diode, just as an indication, not full on accurate.

Also a link to an detector inbuilt into a phone, developed by Sharp, especially for the disaster in Japan.
I reckon would have to be a must for me if i was there.
http://www.androidauthority.com/softbank-unveils-sharp-pantone-5-107sh-smartphone-radiation-detector-90502/

I still have my first scientific calculator circa about 1980, a sharp edit EL5103.
Its nearly as good as a scientific i could by today.
Top company .

Bump,
Looks LENR is definetley a go.