Carbon

You are totally allowed to think that my life is boring. With no friends home for the summer and me leaving in a little over a week, my life has been packing (kind of) and spending quality time with the dog. So again, it'll be a fun blog post day rather than an all about my life day.

For starters, I hope ALL of you read the Science Times in the NY Times (actually I don't expect many or any of you, but it's available every Tuesday). I accidentally forgot about it this week until Wednesday but to my luck, the website had posted a new article yesterday so all is not lost. And that new article is super chemistry related because elements 114 and 116 were added to the periodic table!!! (Though they already had placeholders on the periodic table, they had not been synthesized until now.)

The weather today is terrible here, so if that's the case for you, take some time to do this following activity. We know about carbon from pencils and diamonds, but do you know that carbon is everywhere around you? Try to list more than 10 things in your home that contain carbon (hint: there are infinitely many so if you are super bored, you can spend the whole day doing this). I'll start you out:

1) vinegar
2) cast iron skillet
3) antacid tablets
4) carbonated beverages
5) plastic bags
6) baseball bats (carbon nanotubes)
7) asparagus
8) gasoline
9) jeans
10) you!


Fun Fact: Graphene, a honeycomb lattice of carbon, has been heralded as the strongest material ever measured as it is 200 times stronger than steel. A layer of graphene the thickness of Saran Wrap would be punctured if an elephant was balancing on a pencil. If this was extrapolated to a tyrannosaurus rex, the thickness of graphene would be 1.5 times the thickness of Saran Wrap.