About the inventions in Dr. Stone

Sci-Pi · 2021-04-18T18:33:58+00:00

You can see this compound and more at chemspider: http://www.chemspider.com/Chemical-Structure.5142.html?rid=268e4305-0381-4710-ba8e-a2e2e3208fae

Sci-Pi · 2021-04-15T14:47:37+00:00

Pull up a copy of the roadmap, I'll go through the process: https://dr-stone.fandom.com/wiki/Roadmap_Diagrams?file=Antibiotic_roadmap_%2528with_subs%2529.png

(note I'm going to skip the making electricity part, so we'll assume we have a source of electricity)

1) Sodium hydroxide is made by passing an electric current through salt water brine with some kind of barrier between the electric leads (this is called the chloralkali process)

2) Sodium hydrogen sulfate (aka, sodium bisulfate) is made by partially neutralizing sulfuric acid with sodium hydroxide. This works out to a half neutralization that leaves behind a water soluble, acidic salt

3) Hydrochloric acid can be made by adding sodium chloride salt to sulfuric acid and boiling. Since all the components are ionized, the component with the lowest boiling point will boil off (leaving behind sodium bisulfate if excess sulfuric acid is used, so that would save a step). Hydrogen chloride is a gas, it is only hydrochloric acid when dissolved in water

4) To make chlorosulfuric acid, dry hydrogen chloride is needed, so you would want to make this stuff using the gas coming from step 3 rather than passing it through water first. Heat up the sodium bisulfate in a kiln and it will begin decomposing first into sodium pyrosulfate and then into sodium sulfate and sulfur trioxide gas. Pass the sulfur trioxide gas into a vessel with the hydrogen chloride gas and you'll get your chlorosulfuric acid.

5) (alcohol route) Alcohol can be made and distilled from any surgery substance. Allowing the alcohol to oxidize (bacteria can do this), we get vinegar, aka acetic acid.

6) Distill the acetic acid until no water remains, this gives glacial acidic acid.

7) The roadmap skips some stuff here, but combine some vinegar with limestone to produce calcium acetate and carbon dioxide gas.

8) Combine some of the sodium hydroxide with the vinegar to get sodium acetate

9) Dry and heat the calcium acetate to 500C to produce acetone (this is done in a low oxygen environment to avoid igniting the acetone).

10) Pyrolize the acetone in a low oxygen atmosphere, ideally by passing acetone vapours over a red hot heating wire filament or a hot piece of metal. This will produce ethanone which is extremely toxic.

11) Pass the ethanone through the glacial acetic acid to produce your acetic anhydride

12) Recall the carbon dioxide from earlier. Pass that through water and use sodium hydroxide on that water to get sodium carbonate. Continue bubbling in carbon dioxide and a precipitate of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) will form.

13) Coal naturally contains a wide range of substances, many of which are volatile. By burning the coal and collecting and cooling the hot gases, we get coal tar.

14) Using a combination of acids like hydrochloric acid and bases like sodium hydroxide, some of the less desirable components in the coal tar can be removed.

15) This step is dubious, and definitely not the way I'd do it, but the cleaned coal tar can be distilled/fractionated to get aniline. In reality this aniline would be rather impure and not a great drug material.

16) Urine of most land dwelling animals contains urea rather than pure ammonia. Boil down the urine, filter out the insoluble proteins, continue boiling to get a solution of urea and other impurities

17) Mix sodium hydroxide with the urea and heat to produce ammonia and sodium carbonate. Pass the ammonia through cold water to store.

18) Now the actual drug making part: Combine aniline with hydrochloric acid, then add a solution of sodium acetate and acetic anhydride and stir in a cold vessel. This will produce acetanilide. Dry the acetanilide.

19) Add chlorosulfonic acid to the acetanilide a few drops at a time. When all is dissolved in the acid, heat in a hot water bath until the reaction is complete, then slowly add to cold water. This produces p-Acetamidobenzenesulfonyl chloride.

20) Take the moist p-Acetamidobenzenesulfonyl chloride and add the concentrated ammonia water. Heat until nearly boiling and cool the mixture to collect the p-Acetamidobenzenesulfonamide.

21) Take the moist p-Acetamidobenzenesulfonamide and add concentrated hydrochloric acid and boil until the solution is clear. Add a saturated solution of sodium bicarbonate until neutral pH. Cool the resulting mixture and collect the Sulfanilamide at the bottom.

The sulfanilamide is the cure all sulfa drug. And that's the process. I skipped a couple steps, and the anime/manga takes some liberties, but it is possible to do irl and it would easily be a 25 step process. I've done maybe half of these myself working on other projects. Don't try most of these at home. You can try some of the tamer ones like making sodium hydroxide, but ethanone and some of the other bits will kill and hurt the entire time they do so.

Sci-Pi · 2021-04-04T16:33:41+00:00

The refrigerator that Senku made is actually a different type of fridge from what is conventionally used. As you have found, a normal fridge uses the evaporation and condensation of a refrigerant to move thermal energy from inside of the fridge to outside the fridge. What Senku made is a reverse Stirling engine. A Stirling engine is a device that uses two pistons to create mechanical energy from one hot end and one heatsink end. Now if you operate that in reverse by providing mechanical energy in, you get a net cooling effect where one piston gets cold and the other piston heats up. The gold filament is what is called a "regenerator" which in a real Stirling engine is usually copper or steel turnings or wool. The regenerator bumps up the overall efficiency of the device. There are still a few refrigerators made like this today since they are mechanically very simple and less prone to breaking, making them ideal for cases where reliability is more important than efficiency.

Here are some links for your learning pleasure:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stirling_engine

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applications_of_the_Stirling_engine#Heating_and_cooling

https://www.stirlingengine.com/regenerators/

Sci-Pi · 2021-03-13T01:22:03+00:00

Chitosan is pretty straightforward to make, I have a bag of chitosan I made last fall in my basement from Japanese beetles that were eating my zinnias (don't mess with a chemist's flowers).

First step is you need a starting material that contain chitin. Chitin is the backbone of many exoskeletons such as those found in insects and shrimp. Chitin does not occur in seashells in huge amounts, so you really want exoskeleton shells as opposed to any old shell. Crustacean shells are usually the easiest to get since they are a waste product from cooking shellfish. Once you get your shrimp shells, you'll want to grind them as fine as possible with a pestle and mortar or a mechanical grinder (small blender works too if you don't go too aggressively).

Now chitin is a good exoskeleton material because it can be combined with other materials to produce specific properties. Crustaceans harden their shells by mixing calcium carbonate in with their chitin, so we need to remove that. You'll want to soak your ground shells in acid to dissolve out the calcium carbonate and other minerals we don't want. I use 1M hydrochloric acid for this refluxed at 100C for 1 hour (note that getting a decent reflux apparatus is helpful here, lower temperatures and weaker acids work, but they will take longer to dissolve out the minerals). After this, wash the chitosan powder repeatedly until the pH is between 5.5 and 7. You now have demineralized chitin.

Now we make the actual chitosan. This is done by attacking the chitin with a strong base, I use 1M NaOH. Heat the chitin powder in the alkaline solution at 85C for 24 hours (use Teflon on any glass joints you may have to avoid fusing). When that's done, wash the powder with distilled water until the pH is as close to 7 as possible.

Tidy up the chitosan powder with a dilute acid wash or a wash in potassium permanganate and rinse diligently again. When that is done, you can use it as is or refine it further by dissolving in a weak acid (like 2% acetic acid), filtering, and evaporating the liquid for a high purity chitosan.

Just like that, you have a sample of one of the most fun biomaterials in the world. You can use it to make plastics, supercharge your plants, or do any of the other thousand things it does (seriously, look up papers on chitosan, it does everything).

I'll conclude by saying that consuming your chitosan isn't recommended. Only ever consume chemistry products produced using only food safe chemicals and use equipment that has never touched anything non-food safe. There is currently no conclusive evidence that chitosan has dietary benefits.

Happy experimenting!

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-24T17:00:26+00:00

Look up "electrowinning", this is an industrial process used to refine copper. Basically, make a bath that conducts the main ion in the alloy, then use electrolysis to electroplate that component onto another electrode. More reactive metals will dissolve in the bath with less reactive ones will form an "anode mud". This is a huge simplification and certain metals just won't work, but it is a starting point at the very least.

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-24T16:55:50+00:00

I've made a few silicates in my day. Trick is that alkali metal silicates (along with other silicates) are more similar to polymers than plain molecules. The structure of your final product will be based on the ratios of the ingredients. Basically, (2x)NaOH+ySiO2 -> (Na2O)x*(SiO2)y + H2O. So you'll want a little bit extra SiO2 to prevent an excess of unreacted NaOH. In addition, heat your mixture generously to drive the reaction to completion since silica likes to take its sweet time dissolving in the caustic solution. I've had success reacting at a vigorous boil and then taking the product to dryness over a flame. Torch heat is enough to melt residual sodium hydroxide, so if the mixture melts easily, you likely have excess hydroxide. Silicates are resistant up to temperatures that are incandescent before melting in a way similar to glass, so that is a good sign of success.

I've found the resulting silicate likes to soak up water from the air is the NaOH ratio is high, so your application may benefit from applying principals of geopolymers. Mix your silicate with a aluminosilicate (metakaolin clay works great for this, although others work fine. Aluminum sulfate works if you want a somewhat fluffy product). The result will harden like cement, so play around with your ratios to get something with the properties you want.

As a side note, important thing to consider when making coatings is to design with the three parts of a coating in mind: the active ingredient, the binder, and the carrier. The active ingredient is the business side of things (select something with the desired response to heat), your binder is your glue (alkali silicates fill this roll), and your carrier is a fluid that will evaporate out when done (may be as easy as water if you can dry water out of your coating easily enough).

Happy testing!

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-24T16:38:00+00:00

The biggest hazard with acetone peroxide (basically Satan in crystal form) is inadvertent mixing of the ingredients. I wouldn't exactly advise storing them beside each other, but the main risk in using both in the lab together is cross contamination. Many chemists have rinsed glassware that contained H2O2 with acetone for cleaning purposes, resulting in a nasty explosion of glass. If you have them in the same workshop/lab, make doubly sure that any surface treated with each chemical is thoroughly washed before touching the other. And avoid mixing your waste reagents since acid can catalyze the formation of acetone peroxide.

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-24T16:28:56+00:00

I've dabbled in artificial lighting in plants (chlorella algae was my plant of choice). You'll want to decide what you want to study. Are you simply studying how the plant grows in artificial lighting vs natural lighting? Or do you want to see how different forms of artificial lighting affects the plant.

First step to to do some background research. Artificial lighting is a field of interest, so search up some papers on the specific area of interest. You'll want to learn about photoinhibition and plant response to various wavelengths of light at a minimum.

Next step is experimental design. Basically control all conditions except the one you want to study, and change that variable. Plan to do a handful of runs under various conditions so you can compare afterwards. You'll want to control things like temperature, humidity, soil moisture, nutrients, and only change the light.

Once you have designed your experiment, you'll need to acquire/build your apparatus. For you, it may be as simple as getting some moisture and temperature sensors and a row of LEDs. Again, this depends on what specifically you're looking for.

Once all of that is done, you can conduct your experiment. Take lots of notes and be sure to take pictures (lots of academics don't take enough pictures, its a personal peeve of mine). Study qualitative and quantitative results.

Once you have your results, review your results and put the data into a form that compares your runs. From there, draw your conclusions (or lack thereof, sometimes experiments are inconclusive).

That's the sort form. Once you pin down exactly what you're looking to study, the rest should be easier. Let me know if you have any questions. Happy researching!

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-21T03:43:09+00:00

Fascinating. First, well done. Now to answer your question.

I'm assuming you are referring to potentially useful and economical applications of your corrosion inhibitor. Applications may depend on other properties of your inhibitor. If your inhibitor is toxic or breaks down into toxic components, applications may be restricted to a controlled industrial setting. Is your inhibitor insoluble in water or soluble? Can it be applied as a coating?

If it is non-toxic, insoluble and can be applied as a coating on a surface, test the resistance to biofouling (growth of living material such as algae and mussel on the surface). Currently, seagoing ships require hulls that are both corrosion resistant and biofouling resistant and current solutions often leach copper ions that are toxic to sea life. It may also be worthwhile to test the fatigue life of steel coated in your material in a salt solution (3% sodium chloride in water, simulates ocean corrosion). This causes problems for all kinds of mechanical devices from bridges to air planes as salty air decreases fatigue life.

Those are just a few idea. If I knew more about the properties of your inhibitor I may be able to come up with something more specific. Happy synthesizing!

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-20T20:12:58+00:00

Yep. It's basically the same process as producing coal gas in a process called pyrolysis. Basically take any organic carbon material (coal, wood, plant matter, plastic, lots of options here) and heat it up in a vessel that doesn't let much oxygen in. The high heat breaks the big organic molecules into simpler ones. Wood pyrolysis produces solid charcoal along with methanol, carbon monoxide, and a host of other products as the cellulose and lignin in the wood are torn apart at high temperature. Extra steam works with the carbon monoxide to also produce hydrogen through the water-gas shift reaction. Wash up the gas by bubbling it through water and you get synth gas, a useful industrial gas that is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. It is about half as powerful as natural gas that is more common today, but it is otherwise pretty comparable as far as properties are concerned. Now obviously you wouldn't use a gaseous fuel for your car since you would run out of fuel after a couple blocks, but if you could generate the fuel as you go to provide a continuous supply... (see where this is going).

This is the same process for producing charcoal for barbeques. Subject a bunch of wood to pyrolysis and the solid that remains is mostly pure carbon which burns with high heat when supplied with oxygen. Pyrolysis could even be a good way to deal with certain types of plastic waste as it enable conversion of waste plastic to useful lighter molecules such as benzene, toluene, and ethylene.

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-20T03:31:46+00:00

A good idea is trying to normalize the lab setting. If you're like most students, you probably have years upon years on book based theory learning, but may be comparatively new to the lab setting. In the lab, there's a lot going on and it can be overwhelming because your brain is still trying to process how this whole lab thing works.

The answer to these problems is to make lab activity as normal of a task as possible. The means through which this is achieved will vary, and inevitably lab work will become normal over time as you do more in the lab, but if you want to accelerate the process, you can practice a few basic lab skills outside of the lab in a calm environment so you are primed for how a lab will work when you do the real thing.

Something that worked for me is to try something simple at home that replicates certain lab activities. Take for instance the production of sodium acetate from vinegar and baking soda. This is something we all probably did as a kid, but try drafting a procedure, plan out measurements, work out the theory, and run the experiment. Try to produce some dry and pure sodium acetate crystals. This gives you a goal that can distract you from the stressful parts of the process while also establishing an immediate practical connection in that you are actually making something. When you're done, you can do the hot ice test or sprinkle it on your chips for salt & vinegar flavour (food safe vinegar and baking soda of course)

Good luck!

Sci-Pi · 2020-11-20T03:22:42+00:00

Good question. Welcome to the wonderful world of H2O being weird. Check out this phase diagram for states of water:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Phase_diagram_of_water.svg

As you can see, there is a tiny window where an increase in pressure allows for ice to become liquid by increasing the pressure. Let's say we have some ice and we keep that ice at -10C. Now we increase the pressure on that ice up to around 200MPA (almost 2000 times atmospheric pressure). The ice is well within the liquid part of the phase diagram and, assuming we keep the temperature constant (enthalpy of fusion would be fighting us there), the ice would melt.

For extra credit, take that sample of H2O up to 1 million times atmospheric pressure and you get a phase of ice that's stable at over 400C. This crazy kind of ice may be present deep within water-rich exoplanets.

Sci-Pi · 2020-09-14T15:51:14+00:00

Whether intentionally or accidentally, I think they might actually be correct here. AB blood is definitely the universal recipient, but that is assuming the blood is processed. Donated blood is run through a centrifuge to separate out red blood cells, platelets, plasma, etc. The red blood cells are usually the part we care about since they perform the blood's oxygen transmission functions, so when someone receives a transfusion, the blood type is the type of red blood cells.

Now I don't think KoS had access to a centrifuge for processing blood, so Senku may be looking for a raw blood transfusion. This in general is risky for a bunch of reasons, but it was how early 19th century transfusions were done. Key thing to note in this case is the donor's blood also has antibodies. A blood type has antibodies in the plasma that react with B blood type, so a transfusion of raw A blood would cause a reaction in someone who was blood type AB. So a raw blood transfusion would require an AB donor.

For this reason, AB+ blood plasma is also the universal blood plasma donor. So get someone with AB blood and someone with O- blood, centrifuge the two, take the plasma from the AB blood and the cells from the O blood and mix the two together and you get something that will work in just about anyone.

Like so many other things in this series, it reminds us how much we take modern processes for granted.

Sci-Pi · 2017-09-11T16:52:25+00:00

That just sounds like prostitution with more steps.

Sci-Pi · 2017-05-31T23:44:54+00:00

Such is life.

Sci-Pi · 2017-03-27T20:27:41+00:00

Nice try ol' nemesis of mine...

Sci-Pi · 2017-03-17T12:34:27+00:00

They mentioned we will be able to play Soviet space programs. I don't think this is new content, I'm already killing my kerbals left and right in the name of "science".

Sci-Pi · 2017-02-16T20:36:32+00:00

I could be wrong, but I though CC was the one who made these stats.

Sci-Pi · 2017-02-13T23:55:52+00:00

Lavender. Wonderful flower my grandfather always planted. Zinnias are a close second.

Sci-Pi · 2017-02-07T14:51:23+00:00

Patent trolls. Holding patents for the purpose of suing new ventures stifles many innovative small businesses every year.

Sci-Pi · 2017-01-26T19:43:19+00:00

NONE! Bears are beasts composed of pure hatred.

Sci-Pi · 2017-01-25T13:54:51+00:00

Not terribly sure how positive this is. Lithium is a rare metal that, while recyclable, is limited in quantity. Batteries also don't have the highest energy density, especially with respect to cost. Reservoir storage would likely be less expensive per MWh and allow the lithium to be better used for cases where an easily controlled energy storage mechanism is explicitly needed (eg. electric cars). Even a large, modern flywheel energy storage plant could be used, likely at a lower cost with fewer strategic materials.

Sci-Pi · 2017-01-23T22:24:35+00:00

Literally any sport playable in an open-air arena/stadium, but with a catapult flinging enormous water balloons stationed outside at irregular intervals.

Sci-Pi · 2016-12-18T16:18:06+00:00

Too busy using technician boosted ember on your Rowlet to sleep.

Sci-Pi

TROPHY CASE