Thursday, April 25, 2013

Eating liquid nitrogen biscuit

Have you tried eating a biscuit that has been dipped into the liquid nitrogen? What will happen? Don't worry it will not be very cold to cause frost bite in your mouth. As you are eating the biscuit not drinking liquid nitrogen. (Please do not drink liquid nitrogen as it will kill yourself!). The taste of it? No taste of the biscuit only feel cold and dry.

The moment you eat it, the heat from your body will cause the liquid nitrogen to become gas. Hence what will happen? You will look like an angry bull with smoke coming out from your mouth & nose. Here is the video, happy viewing!

YBCO floating on neodynium magnet

Hi all, here is an interesting experiment. When you cool a YBCO (a kind of superconductor) using liquid nitrogen and placed it on top of the neodynium magnet, it will create a meissner effect which will allows the YBCO to float on top of the neodynium magnet as shown in the video.

Do note, it need strong magnetic field, in order to let it float. So neodynium magnet is needed and not other normal magnet. The theory behind it that cause the floating is quite complicated so I will not touch on that. I only want to show the video, how amazing it is to see something floating.

Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Blood grouping with artificial blood

I tried to search online for the recipe. Actually I did saw different recipe and tried it out, but because online did not mentioned on the concentration used and the brand of the dye. My experiment fails with their recipe.

I did get agglutination when I react HCl with silver nitrate (recipe from online). However the agglutination is white colour in a pool of red water.

If you all seen a real blood grouping before using blood and the serum with different antibodies, the agglutination is actually red in a pool of pale yellow solution (which is serum). Below are my recipe:

Blood Gp A - Star brand Red Dye + Tap water

Blood Gp B - 10% FeCl3 (Iron III Chloride) + Char Siew powder (to give red colour)

Blood Gp O - Char Siew powder + Tap Water

* Star brand Green dye is used to adjust the red colour to look more like blood.

Anti A - 0.1M HCl (Hydrochloric Acid)

Anti B - 0.1M NaOH (Aq Sodium Hydroxide) 

So after a few trial with different chemical, I finally come out with my own recipe. All thanks to Star brand red dye which agglutinate in the presence of acid.

However I do have a problem is that I cannot make Blood AB as the Red dye (from Blood A) will agglutinate in the presence of FeCl3 which is acidic even no acid is added (I only mixed 5g of FeCl3 powder with 50ml of tap water and it gives a pH of about 1.5)

So I intend to leave out Blood AB, as after a lot of trial, I still cannot get the result I want. I even let the agglutination in my Blood AB to settle down and get the supernatant. However it only react with Anti B (NaOH) but not in Anti A (HCl) which I think all have been reacted to form agglutination so the supernatant does not gives a reaction when react with Anti A (HCl).

If anyone who read my article can create Blood AB, or you have any recipe where the result is as good as mine shown in the picture (really look like real life blood agglutination). Please leave comment in my blog. Thank you.

Attached below is the picture of the item I used for my blood grouping kit.