Tag: Alchemy

making diamonds from peanut butter

That subject sounds like something I might just make up and write about to be silly and random. But it’s actual science! Someone has actually done this!

The article explaining this starts out in a really interesting way:

Every so often, Dan Frost hears a dull thud and his office floor vibrates. It can only mean one thing: one of his experiments has exploded again. Making his way downstairs to his lab, he finds the shock is written on the faces of his colleagues still in the lab. … The odd explosion is part of the job.

Sounds like fun! Well, until it isn’t. Explosions are interesting, until they destroy things, which they are apt to do. But sometimes that’s the cost of figuring things out.

The reason for the explosions is that his team is trying to mimic the forces of Earth’s lower mantle thousands of miles underground. That is where diamonds are formed naturally. Their machine uses a piston to squeeze crystals at up to 280,000 times atmospheric pressure. To put that in perspective, your body wouldn’t do well at anything above 30 atmospheric pressures (atm). You would need a special suit and a special source of air to survive above that, because the air density changes and weird things happen. But I digress…

The second part of the process is using an anvil made of diamonds to squeeze the crystals with 1.3 million times atmospheric pressure. It uses sound waves traveling through the crystal to determine whether it is similar to the composition of the mantle, by comparing it to known seismic waves travelling through the Earth.

His experiments have led to some unexpected data about the composition of the Earth’s mantle and that there may be “oceans” of water hidden deep in the mantle. He has also learned how to make diamonds. It won’t make him rich — it takes a lot of time and energy for this process, more cost than the diamonds are worth. But it does have real-world applications in other fields.

As for converting peanut butter to diamonds, he has tried various sources for ingredients. A German TV station asked him about using peanut butter, so he tried it and it actually worked, but then “a lot of hydrogen was released that destroyed the experiment”. The article doesn’t explain what that means. Were the diamond destroyed? If so, that’s some explosion!

You could say that he made peanut butter explode. 🙂 Isn’t science interesting?

Does poop contain gold?

The other day I was in a conversation that got random really fast. Someone started sharing some scientific trivia, and they said you could burn a bucket of cow manure and get some rare elements like gold. I was immediately skeptical and made that known. They went to get their book of random scientific stuff (not the actual title) and found the reference. It turns out that someone had taken cow urine and boiled it to produce something useful. At this point I’m still skeptical, but figure since it’s actually published in a book and not just some obscure blog, it’s worth a minute of research. The results were surprising (and not all related to the original article)…

Apparently some doctor in India believes that cow urine has healing powers and can supposedly cure 70 to 80 incurable diseases like diabetes. It’s also sold as “highly effective products for preventive medicine” in some countries. (So if you don’t get sick, it worked, and you should buy more!) However — and this is important — there is thus far no scientific proof about it healing anything. Some studies have shown that it can lead to significant side effects, including death. So I wouldn’t recommend it. But it is good to use as fertilizer to grow actually edible food…

During my research, I saw where one guy said, “I drink cow urine every day. That is why I do not have Covid right now.” That is faulty reasoning, and it could easily be countered by someone saying they do NOT drink cow urine at all, and thus they don’t have Covid. But then again, how many people who drink cow urine every day catch Covid? The number has to be really small, right? (Surely there are very few people who could even be in that group.)

Some doctor made a “wonder drug” of cow’s milk, cow’s urine, cow excrement (soaked in water), and butter, and they claimed it will cure “99 percent of diseases”. I’m no professional doctor, but I’m fairly certain that’s a load of crap (both literally and figuratively).

Back on point, there has been someone who claimed to have found gold in cow urine and dung. Perhaps if you want to investigate the microscopic level you could find some — I have heard that ocean water has gold in it, but it’s such tiny amounts that it’s not worth doing anything with.

Thanks to the internet’s amazing ability to lead you down rabbit trails you didn’t even know existed, I just learned that human poop does contain trace amounts of gold, silver, platinum, copper, and rare elements like palladium and vanadium that are used in cell phones and computers. So is your poop worth its weight in gold? Not quite. These particles are about 100 times smaller than the width of a human hair, and of course there are other non-valuable particles in there to sort through. (That job would stink!) It’s estimated that an American city with a population of 1 million sends down the drain about $13 million worth of precious metals each year. So maybe it’s worth finding some automated way to filter it. Actually, I bet this becomes a legitimate business someday, when someone figures out how to efficiently extract the valuable elements from all the worthless elements.

People have tried to figure out alchemy for years (converting a metal into gold), but perhaps this is the closest we’ll get.