Journal Entries
Ice-Cream making
Posted Dec 7, 2002
Made icecream in ancient times.
How?
Simple. salt iced/water. reduced freezing temperature, thus made water colder than 0 degrees C. Ice cream can be made. C'est voila.
World record holder: find out. about 22 seconds using liquid nitrogen. I've had it, quite scrumchous!
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Latest reply: Dec 7, 2002
Cotton
Posted Dec 7, 2002
Cotton is a widely used and very important plant material to our every day lives. Why, you say? Well, apart from being used to make cool cotton clothes, it is the material conscripted into forming the legendary towel. The one item hitch hiker’s can’t possibly do without. Now I know what you’re thinking, “why only cotton, can’t something else be used to make towels?” My answer to that my fat headed friend, is yes. Yes you can make towels out of say, nylon, but if you placed a cotton towel against a nylon towel in 1v1 battle royale, the cotton towel would not only win but you wouldn’t find a speck of nylon afterwards.
Cotton has two amazing strengths, one of which is, well, its strength. It is an amazing property of cotton that being made of the same substance as plants it is incredibly stronger than them. Although not as amazing as, say, a spider’s thread in strength to size ratio, it does come fairly high in the list.
Comign Soon:
Drying power vs nylon.
Strength vs other plants.
Cellulose chain
Notes:
Cotton and nylon are both made up of giant polymer molecules. Polymer molecules are often long chains of atoms linked in repeating patterns. There are a lot of atoms bonded to one another in these molecules, giving a lot of places where sticky water molecules can find a place to bond.
Cotton is pure cellulose, a naturally occurring polymer. Cellulose is a carbohydrate, and the molecule is a long chain of glucose (sugar) molecules. If you look at the structure of a cellulose molecule you can see the OH groups that are on the outer edge. These negatively charged groups attract water molecules and make cellulose and cotton absorb water well. Cotton can absorb about 25 times its weight in water. Chemists refer to substances like cotton as hydrophilic, which means that they attract water molecules.
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Latest reply: Dec 7, 2002
Snowman
Researcher U210951
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