Diet Cherry Coke

[Karlos]

Having seen first hand the effects of a coca-cola concentrate spillage at the docks of my home town as a child, I have not felt inclined to drink coca cola in any way shape or form.

[Karlos]

Cymric wrote:

Karlos wrote:
Having seen first hand the effects of a coca-cola concentrate spillage at the docks of my home town as a child, I have not felt inclined to drink coca cola in any way shape or form.

What happened?

(And while I'm at it, is that rotated black \tau on the right of your hand a fracture? What did you do?)

Myself and several other kids from my junior school saw this unfold one saturday morning when basically playing not so far away.

A fairly large shipment of concentrate (later announced to be coca cola concentrate) was dropped in a crane accident, rupturing several large drums of the stuff.

The concentrate, which is basically neat phosphoric acid (which is very different to the same stuff dissolved in water) and all the other stuff except sugar and carbonated water eroded away 6 inches of reinforced concrete in an extremely exothermic reaction that, like neat sulphuric acid, is not best dealt with by applying water. Which is exactly what several dock workers attempted before the professionals got there. Several of them were hit by the backsplash getting burned, both thermally and chemically. I found out later that one was permanently blinded.

An entire hazmat team had to come in to clean the spill and the whole area was evacuated. The extent of the damage was evident the following week when the badly corroded steel rods that reinforced the concrete were visible for all to see in the 5 metre wide sunken depression the stuff had made.

Seeing that when your'e seven years old really made you wonder what the stuff does to your insides.

And yes, that was my broken wrist (specifically the scaphoid) before it was realigned and cast. Look in the scaphoid fractures thread to see how I skilfully managed that.

[Karlos]

I've had to handle stuff with a negative pH in the past. Ordinary bronstead style protonatinc acids pale into insignificance next to superacids ;-)

[Karlos]

Cymric wrote:
Okay, okay, superacids rock (has anyone beaten the power of a HSO3F / SbF5 mixture yet?) but that wasn't my point. My point was that a concentrate of purely natural ingredients can be made to have a pH resembling that of battery acid . Normally you tend to think of 'natural' acids in terms of weak buffers, diluted, not fully ionised, and the like.

HF + SbF5 is a considerably stronger protonating acid than SbF5 activated fluosulfonic acid (which will already dissovle wax!). This is down to the fact that SbF5 sequesters F- on dissociation of HF and point blank refuses to give it back. The resulting SbF6- ion is an extremely weak base and very poor nucleophile. You end up, quite literally with free protons kicking around - it's about 2×10^19 times stronger than 100% sulfuric acid ;-)

Depending on the ratio of HF to SbF5 it retains the ability to dissolve glass and other silicates as well as alkanes and other materials...

Almost as bad as coca cola concentrate ;-)

[Karlos]

Cymric wrote:

Karlos wrote:
You end up, quite literally with free protons kicking around - it's about 2×10^19 times stronger than 100% sulfuric acid ;-)

Sounds like the blood of a certain type of alien being killed and resurrected on the white screen for about 4 times...

Unless it's blood vessels were nickel lined (IIRC HF passifies nickel by making a tough surface fluoride) I don't think that particular stuff would be. It's a _lot_ stronger than SbF5 activated triflic acid (FSO3H). Like the latter, it will protonate raw alkanes.

Incidentally, according to something I read recently, modern varieties of carborane based superacids (not actually stronger than the stuff above in dissociation terms but a better source of 'clean' H+ only - ie no dodgy fluorides or other species) might be able to protonate xenon :lol:

[Karlos]

Mmmm cyclobutadiene, antiaromatic...

[Karlos]

bloodline wrote:
cyclobutadiene... tasty... hey, where'd it go?? :-o ;-)

Mmmm, too much ring stress and no delocalisation....

Read into that what you will *snigger*

[Karlos]

@AgaFaster

... except it is nothing like benzene chemically - no delocalisation of any kind, it is basically an extremely reactive diene (enchanced by the considerable bond angle strain) and tends to undergo an automatic diels adler reaction with itself.

Benzene, on the other hand does not have this alternating single/double bond structure, the electron density is spread evenly around the ring in a fully delocalised configuration. See Huckel rule for predicting ring "aromaticity".

[Karlos]

Hyperspeed wrote:

:inquisitive:

Anyone seen those MagiCool sprays in shops right now? They mysteriously cool you down somehow, the ingredients list is rather worrying though.

Yes, I had some last summer and made full use of it :-) Unfortunately I couldn't find it in the shop recently. It's just water with a bit of dimethyl ether and presumbly some sort of emulsifier.

Would this stuff be classified as endothermic? Isn't liquid nitrogen in that category?

Substances are not classified as endo/exothermic, only reactions (more specifically processes).

Magicool works simply because when you spray it on yourself, the ether evaporates out of the spray very quickly, rapidly cooling the water droplets before they hit you, in the process. There's no mystery to it ;-)

[Karlos]

Hyperspeed wrote:

by Karlos:
Magicool works simply because when you spray it on yourself, the ether evaporates out of the spray very quickly, rapidly cooling the water droplets before they hit you, in the process. There's no mystery to it

I wonder how many innocent rabbits, guinea pigs and monkeys had to endure hours of spraying into the eyes, ears, wounds and mouth to test the safety of that!

The toxicity of the substances contained in the product are likely to have been long known before it was formulated. They're not exactly new. It's mostly water.

If people want to magically cool themselves they should wear a hat and buy an ice-cream.

If you think that virtually anything you eat, ice cream included, has not had every additive exhaustively tested on animals then you are frankly a bit gullable. Even when a product says it has not been tested on animals, it does not imply that the components that went into making it have never been tested.

On the subject of atoms and all that: why, with particle accelerators and all this, is it still beyond science to turn lead into gold?

It isn't. In theory, you could carefully build up gold atoms from lighter ones by heavy particle bombardment, or by carefully chipping down heavier ones.

In practise it's not possible simply because of the energy required, the fact that you are probably more likely to shatter your target nuclei than get it to fuse with the incoming one, that it would take interim stages of likely highly unstable nuclei that would just decay again faster than you can get from one metastable stage to another and that the end product would likely contain an infinesimal amount of gold relative to the now probably highly radioactive side products.

We've already grown diamonds, built steam engines a few molecules across and set off multi-megaton nuclear bombs...

Growing crystals isn't that difficult, although getting them pure is another matter. Conceptually, nuclear devices aren't that complex either. Nanotechnology on the other hand...

And back to soft drinks - what is an emulsifier, what is acesulfame, how does a 'widget' work in beer cans and just who sells/regulates the E numbers?

Answers on a postcard!

Well, an emulsifier is simply any substance that allows you to mix two normally immiscable liquids, eg hydrophillic and hydrophobic. You'll find them in all sorts of things from ice cream to moisturising cream...

[Karlos]

Hyperspeed wrote:

On that subject, scientists were reported to have been working on a breathable liquid similar to that portrayed in The Abyss... is this what the illusionist David Blaine was breathing in that 'bubble' or did he have a pipe in his gob all the time?

Nope. The Abyss borrowed an already developed idea. Heavy flurocarbons are used as breathing fluids already as they have excellent oxygen / carbon dioxide solvation/transport properties.

The liquids include derivatives of perflurocyclohexane (often anchored with a nice heavy bromine atom). These have densities greater than water and are quite difficult to breathe. A lot of research into these compounds was carried out at Durham Universitiy. Contrary to the movie's suggestion, most rodent subjects died afterwards due to the stress on their resparatory system when trying to evacuate the fluid.

Their main use, AFAIK is to assist people that have severe breathing difficulties from lung trauma where the substance is dripped into the lungs, inflating the aerioli with oxygen rich fluid.

[Karlos]

Hyperspeed wrote:
Slightly off-topic I know but haven't scientists worked out how a fish's gills extract oxygen from water and applied it to a device similar to that used by Qui Gon and Obi Wan in the Phantom Menace?

Is the level of oxygen in water sufficient to sustain a human without other heavy equipment?

No, not if you want to breathe air. Lungs and gills perform similar functions but you cant use some artificial gill to extract gaseous oxygen from water suitable for a human to breathe directly. Oxygen solubility in water is actually pretty low.

Another thought would be that if humans exhale carbon-dioxide then isn't there a way to constantly recycle the oxygen atoms by filtering out the carbon? I saw some program where it said the Apollo 13 crew had to build a makeshift carbon dioxide filter using lime or calcium or something... a small, portable air recycler would prove very handy for a Mars mission or the construction of a lunar base.

That was a CO2 scrubber - the whole purpose was to filter carbon dioxide out of the air, rather than liberate oxygen from it. In an enclosed space, CO2 build up from breathing becomes toxic long before you run out of sufficient oxygen to breathe.

As for "filtering" out the carbon and liberating oxygen from CO2, see: plants/photosynthesis ;-)