Who Needs Yeast When You Have Lab Equipment?

March 26, 2022 by Donald Papp 32 Comments

This particular story on researchers successfully making yeast-free pizza dough has been making the rounds. As usual with stories written from a scientific angle, it’s worth digging into the details for some interesting bits. We took a look at the actual research paper and there are a few curious details worth sharing. Turns out that this isn’t the first method for yeast-free baking that has been developed, but it is the first method to combine leavening and baking together for a result on par with traditional bread-making processes.

Some different results from varying the amount of pressure released during the baking process.

Basically, a dough consisting of water, flour, and salt go into a hot autoclave (the header image shows a piece of dough as seen through the viewing window.) The autoclave pressurizes, forcing gasses into the dough in a process similar to carbonating beverages. Pressure is then released in a controlled fashion while the dough bakes and solidifies, and careful tuning of this process is what controls how the bread turns out.

With the right heat and pressure curve, researchers created a pizza whose crust was not only pleasing and tasty, but with a quality comparable to traditional methods.

How this idea came about is interesting in itself. One of the researchers developed a new method for thermosetting polyurethane, and realized that bread and polyurethane have something in common: they both require a foaming (proofing in the case of bread) and curing (baking in the case of bread) process. Performing the two processes concurrently with the correct balance yields the best product: optimized thermal insulation in the case of polyurethane, and a tasty and texturally-pleasing result in the case of pizza dough. After that, it was just a matter of experimentation to find the right balance.

The pressures (up to 6 bar) and temperatures (145° Celsius) involved are even pretty mild, relatively speaking, which could bode well for home-based pizza experimenters.

How To Solder To Aluminum, Easily

March 6, 2022 by Donald Papp 53 Comments

[Ted Yapo] shared a method of easily and conveniently soldering to aluminum, which depends on a little prep work to end up only slightly more complex than soldering to copper. A typical way to make a reliable electrical connection to aluminum is to use a screw and a wire, but [Ted] shows that it can also be done with the help of an abrasive and mineral oil.

Aluminum doesn’t solder well, and that’s because of the oxide layer that rapidly forms on the surface. [Ted]’s solution is to scour the aluminum with some mineral oil. The goal is to scrape away the oxide layer on the aluminum’s surface, while the mineral oil’s coating action prevents a new oxide layer from immediately re-forming.

After this prep, [Ted] uses a hot soldering iron and a blob of solder, heating it until it sticks. A fair bit of heat is usually needed, because aluminum is a great heat conductor and tends to be lot thicker than a typical copper ground plane. But once the aluminum is successfully tinned, just about anything can be soldered to it in a familiar way.

[Ted] does caution that mineral oil can ignite around 260 °C (500 °F), so a plan should be in place when using this method, just in case the small amount of oil catches fire.

This looks like a simple technique worth remembering, and it seems easier than soldering by chemically depositing copper onto aluminum.

An Infinity Gem That Didn’t Make The Cut, The Flavor Stone

March 5, 2022 by Matthew Carlson 26 Comments

MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) is a flavor enhancer used to add a meaty/savory (often called umami) flavor to a dish. You might even have some in your pantry (though more likely it is in something that is in your pantry). What you might not know is that you can grow it into a large crystal.

[Chase] does an excellent job walking through the details of the process. MSG is one of the many common household substances that can grow into a crystal such as table salt, alum, fertilizer, sugar, or Epsom salt to name a few. The idea is quite simple — just create a supersaturated solution with your desired crystal material and then suspend a string in it; but the execution has some nuance. To create a medium that’s super saturated, heat some water and mix in equal parts of MSG. Then let it cool once it has all dissolved and split it into two parts, one big and one small. You need to create a seed crystal, so place the small solution in a shallow dish and let a crystal percolate out over the new few days. You attach one of the seed crystals that grow to a string and suspend it in your solution. There are several gotchas around how to properly harvest the crystals but [Chase] enumerates them for you.

We’ve covered [Chase’s] efforts before when he grew crystals out of Rust. He is on a quest to grow all five flavor stones: salty, sweet, sour, umami, and bitter and we wish him all the best. What we would also love to see is the whole process of MSG from start to finish, making your own MSG.

Neon, Ukraine, And The Global Semiconductor Industry

February 27, 2022 by Jenny List 34 Comments

On our news feeds and TV channels at the moment are many stories concerning the war in Ukraine, and among them is one which may have an effect on the high-tech industries. It seems that a significant percentage of the world’s neon gas is produced in Ukrainian factories, and there is concern among pundits and electronics manufacturers that a disruption of this supply could be a further problem for an industry already reeling from the COVID-related chip shortage. It’s thus worth taking a quick look at the neon business from an engineering perspective to perhaps make sense of some of those concerns.

As most readers will know from their high school chemistry lessons, neon is one of the so-called inert gasses, sitting in the column at the extreme right of the Periodic table. It occurs in nature as a small percentage of the air we breathe and is extracted from the air by fractional distillation of the liquid phase. The important point from the above sentences is that the same neon is all around us in the air as there is in Ukraine, in other words, there is no strategic neon mine in the Ukrainian countryside about to be overrun by the Russian invaders.

So why do we source so much neon from Ukraine, if we’re constantly breathing the stuff in and out everywhere else in the world? Since the air separation industry is alive and well worldwide for the production of liquid nitrogen and oxygen as well as the slightly more numerous inert gasses, we’re guessing that the answer lies in economics. It’s a bit harder to extract neon from air than it is argon because there is less of it in the air. Since it can be brought for a reasonable cost from the Ukrainians who have made it their business to extract it, there is little benefit in American or Western European companies trying to compete. Our take is that if the supply of Ukrainian neon is interrupted there may be a short period of neon scarcity. After that, air extraction companies will quite speedily install whatever extra plant they need in order to service the demand. If that’s your area of expertise, we’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Here at Hackaday we are saddened beyond words at what has happened in Ukraine, and we hope our Ukrainian readers and those Ukrainian hackers whose work we’ve featured make it through safely. We sincerely hope that this madness can be ended and that we can mention the country in the context of cool hacks again rather than war.

If you are interested in the strategic value of inert gasses, have a read about the global helium supply.

Header image: Lestat (Jan Mehlich), CC BY-SA 3.0.

Grocery Store Rocket Fuel: Don’t Try This At Home!

February 25, 2022 by Ryan Flowers 29 Comments

It seems like whenever the topic of rocket science comes up, the conversation quickly shifts to that of rocket fuels. As discussed in the excellent [Scott Manley] video below the break, there are many rocket fuels that can be found in some way, state, or form at your local grocery or liquor store. The video itself is a reaction to some college students in Utah who caused an evacuation when the rocket fuel they were cooking up exploded.

[Scott] himself theorizes that the fuel they were cooking was Rocket Candy, a volatile mix of sugar and potassium nitrate that is known to go Kaboom on occasion. And as it turns out, the combination might not even be legal in your area because as much as it can be used as rocket fuel, it can also be used for other things that go boom.

So, what else at your local megamart can be used to get to orbit? [Scott] talks about different kinds of alcohols, gasses, cleaners- all things that can be used as rocket fuel. He also talks about all of the solid reasons you don’t want to do this at home.

If this type of things gets your molecules excited, you might enjoy a bit we posted recently about using another grocery store staple to save Martian colonists from being held back by gravity.

Big Chemistry: From Gasoline To Wintergreen

February 22, 2022 by Dan Maloney 18 Comments

Most of us probably have some vivid memories of high school or college chemistry lab, where the principles of the science were demonstrated, and where we all got at least a little practice in experimental methods. Measuring, diluting, precipitating, titrating, all generally conducted under safe conditions using stuff that wasn’t likely to blow up or burn.

But dropwise additions and reaction volumes measured in milliliters are not the stuff upon which to build a global economy that feeds, clothes, and provides for eight billion people. For chemistry to go beyond the lab, it needs to be scaled up, often to a point that’s hard to conceptualize. Big chemistry and big engineering go hand in hand, delivering processes that transform the simplest, most abundant substances into the things that, for better or worse, make life possible.

To get a better idea of how big chemistry does that, we’re going to take a look at one simple molecule that we’ve probably all used at one time or another: the common artificial flavoring wintergreen. It’s an innocuous ingredient in a wide range of foods and medicines, but the infrastructure required to make it and all its precursors is a snapshot of just how important big chemistry really is.

Continue reading “Big Chemistry: From Gasoline To Wintergreen” →

Mining And Refining: Lithium, Powering The Future With Brine

February 9, 2022 by Dan Maloney 28 Comments

Many years ago, I read an article about the new hotness: lithium batteries. The author opened with what he no doubt thought was a clever pop culture reference by saying that the mere mention of lithium would “strike fear in the hearts of Klingons.” It was a weak reference to the fictional “dilithium crystals” of Star Trek fame, and even then I found it a bit cheesy, but I guess he had to lead with something.

Decades later, a deeper understanding of the lore makes it clear that a Klingon’s only fear is death with dishonor, but there is a species here on earth that lives in dread of lithium: CEOs of electric vehicle manufacturing concerns. For them, it’s not the presence of lithium that strikes fear, but the relative absence of it; while it’s the 25th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and gigatons are dissolved into the oceans of the world, lithium is very reactive and thus tends to be diffuse, making it difficult to obtain concentrated in the quantities their businesses depend on.

As the electric vehicle and renewable energy markets continue to grow, the need for lithium to manufacture batteries will grow with it, potentially to the point where demand outstrips the mining industry’s production capability. To understand how that imbalance may be possible, we’ll take a look at how lithium is currently mined, as well as examine some new mining techniques that may help fill the coming lithium gap.

Continue reading “Mining And Refining: Lithium, Powering The Future With Brine” →