More Elements fun

The Knights of the Periodic Table.

(other element fun: Element Letters, Better Gaming Through Chemistry, Elemental, My Dear)

(Cartoon from The Argyle Sweater by Scott Hilburn)

Elementary (Letters), My Dear

As a chemist I appreciate the ability to put The Honest Hypocrite in an elements based Periodic Table font. Each letter is a picture of an element from the periodic table.


I think tritium is a cop-out for T in the pictures above, but even worse would have been The spelled with "Th" for thorium and "e" for electron. I guess it is an inexact science.

Other brushes with the periodic table that regular readers will remember are about the Dungeons and Dragons inspired Order of the Stick comics, a Chlorine Elemental and a Titanium Elemental.

(you can see the banner for the Honest Hypocrite here, or make your own here)

Drug tests for whole cities

A recent article in Science News describes a new method to analyze waste water for drugs and drug breakdown products. As analytical chemistry has gotten more advanced, chemists can detect smaller and smaller concentrations of compounds. The new technique can detect quantities of drugs and drug metabolites down to nanogram quantities per liter. Jennifer Field (at OSU) and her graduate student Aurea Chiaia developed this technique and presented the results at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston on August 21st. I have been searching for a paper which describes the work in detail, but it doesn't seem to be available, only abstracts and press releases. I would have loved to see some charts and the actual measured values from the paper.

That Friday, Field spoke on NPR's talk of the nation Science Friday to describe some of the work. They investigated several different compounds, illegal drugs, such as pseudoephedrine, cocaine, rave drugs (like Ecstasy), LSD and heroin. They also looked at some drugs that are not illegal like pseudoephedrine, amphetamine , one of which break down products of methamphetamine use and the other can be used to manufacture methamphetamine illegally.

She was cagey about reporting which community has a bigger drug problem, appropriately suggesting that these are early results and probably because they are working out the accuracy of the findings. Most of the coverage of the paper centers around the use of the technique for drug enforcement officials. Some of the articles about the study reflect this concern.

"Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying it could harm her relationship with sewage plant operators."

She also seemed hesitant to list the cities in particular they studied. I was impressed with her stand on privacy concerns when it was suggested that the technique could be used further upstream by law enforcement officials to catch people using illegal drugs. From the OSU press release:

“Waste water analysis is a more powerful indicator at the community level,” Field said. “We are interested in the 'community load' of drugs, so we want to take samples as close to the urinal as possible without violating the privacy of individuals.”

The team also looked at caffeine, which she described as a human urinary biomarker, perhaps it could serve as a control compound to normalize the other concentrations.

One interesting part of the study involved looking at the levels change in drug use for one coop municipality over 28 days to look for time effects. They measured benzoylecgonine, which is a breakdown product of cocaine. They found that cocaine use increased on weekends, indicating that it is used recreationally, while methadone, a prescription opiate, used to treat cocaine abuse remained constant. Methamphetamine, not know for its recreational use, but for its addiction, showed steady use over the time period. One of the papers co-authors, Caleb Banta-Green, is a research scientist at the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, and is especially concerned about meth abuse, which has been increasing in the Pacific Northwest.

It looks like the group will also present similar findings at the 6th International Conference on Pharmaceuticals and Enocrine Disrupting Chemicals in Water in October.

Molecule Furniture for the Discerning Chemist

The DuPont science and inventions exhibit at the Hagley Museum in Delaware has the coolest chairs made of molecules. I do understand that most chairs are made of molecules but these are made to look like molecules. Where can I buy this chair?


Also included, a giant Nylon molecule column as an artistic room centerpiece.

Better Gaming Through Chemistry

One slogan the DuPont company used in the 60's was Better things for better living through chemistry, often shortened to "Better Living Through Chemistry". I think we can say the same thing for the Dungeons and Dragons gaming online comic "The Order of the Stick". Or perhaps we should say "Better Gaming Comics Through Chemistry"(tm).

Instead of the stodgy old Earth, Fire, Water, and Air elementals that are used in current fantasy gaming, Rich Burlew has a character that paid attention in chemistry class and suggests the use of element based elementals. In my comments on the titanium elemental he used in an earlier strip, I presciently wondered how scary a chlorine or plutonium elemental might be. In Friday's comic he has the goblin cleric use a chlorine elemental to clear the way during the epic battle that's in progress. Though I had seen the comic that day, Zak3056 kindly pointed out that I guessed right.

I like how the comic artist had a nice periodic table of the elements label on the elemental so we know which one it is. Chlorine's effects are well know, but there are some other nasty elements in pure form, like fluorine, that would kill even faster. Oxygen elementals would cause things to burn fast. Call up a sodium elemental and a water elemental and let them mix for a big boom. Mercury elementals would be cool to look at, all reflecting and liquid, like the Terminator in the second movie.

Some of the effects of elements depend on their valence state, a pure chromium elemental would be shiny or could be used to make your other metal elementals shiny, but chromium at +6 is a strong oxidant and is known to cause cancer, I guess in the gaming world it would have a Touch of Death or some such thing. Can the spellcaster also suggest the isotope of the element that is summoned? Depleted Uranium (low in U235 almost all U238) is good for bullets, but too big a U235 isotropically pure element would go critical and cause a nuclear explosion as soon as it was summoned (no uranium 235 elementals over 52kg). We all know what a polonium 210 elemental would do.

Can we do chemistry with the elementals? If I summon three chlorine, one hydrogen and a carbon elemental, does that make one chloroform elemental that can put everyone to sleep? Enough fluorine and carbon elementals (four F's to every C and some F's for the ends) strung together should give me an untouchable Teflon elemental.

Speaking of carbon elementals, which physical or crystal state do the elementals arrive in (allotropes)? Can I could have a slippery graphite carbon elemental, or a hard diamond carbon elemental? What special properties would a nanotube or fullerene carbon elemental have (everything you could think of according to the scientists that try to get funding for that type of research).

The possibilities for chemistry element based elementals seem to be endless. I guess it is whatever the Dungeon master can think of and the players will let them get away with. In the comic its all up to Rich Burlew.

Elemental my dear.

One of my favorite webcomics is Order of the Stick. Rich Burlew combines D&D style role-playing and fun with some observations of the world into quite a few clever comics. Sometimes the strips have many fun points, not just one. As a chemical engineer I really appreciated a recent strip in which he has the bad guys create Elementals to storm the good guy's castle walls in a siege.


These are not your scientifically inaccurate fire, air, water and earth elementals, his characters have taken and passed chemistry, so these are periodic table of the elements elementals. These titanium elementals even have the properties of titanium that makes it so good for golf clubs and rocket ships, light but strong.

Dungeons and Dragons updated to at least the 19th century. Mendeleev would be proud (I recommend Mendeleyev's Dream by Paul Strathen to hear the interesting story of the periodic table). Does this mean there are now 118 or so elemental planes instead of the four from the original Dungeons and Dragons game? Can you imagine a chlorine elemental or plutonium elemental being sent after your player character during a rousing session of Dungeons and Dragons? Neutralize the first with water and the second with graphite rods I guess.