Ask a Scientist

1) Yes, in the process of typing and re-typing the response, I forgot to menion that cheap anti-retrovirals aren't an explicit problem with research; but as a caveat, ask James Orbinski about the splinter group from MSF that has managed to put out a cheap fixed-dose ARV that is heat stable.

2) The lack of vaccine is because the virus mutates so fast that there isn't a consistent surface protein that can be used as an antigen for your body to develop antibodies and mount an immune response fast enough. I've been trying lately to be calmer when people say things that display their lack of medical education, and it's unreasonable of me to expect everyone to know the finer points of HIV virology, but it's very critical to understand the basis of how vaccines work before one starts questioning the rather fundamental understanding that HIV not merely causes AIDS, but in fact is AIDS. If you look at diagnostic criteria, there is no specific point where an HIV infection becomes AIDS; symptomatology resulting from high viral load and low T-cell count is what defines someone with AIDS vice simply HIV+.

3) This is another aspect of quackery that I see repeated in various permutations; the "scientists" who disagree with the establishment (rather than established) view that [such and such]. I don't buy it. The claim is made about evolution, about the MMR-autism scare, and so forth. There are countless success stories of scientists who challenge the established status quo and do the research and garner the data to back up their claims, prove everyone wrong, and win sexual favours from countless fawning young women for their noble scientific endeavours. If a legitimate scientist wants to question the HIV/AIDS paradigm, they are welcome to do so and shouldn't become pariahs for their asking questions; but remember that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and to question whether HIV alone is sufficient to cause AIDS requires very extraordinary evidence indeed. If that fails, then what can be submitted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.

 

Suffering a nasty cold and being told to take Advil every few hours to drop my temp, I had a quick question-

If your body raises the temperature to kill the virus, why would you want to regulate your temp if it's not at a dangerous level? 102+

 

Hopefully there are some chemistry experts on the board that can help solve a mystery that's been plaguing our distilling process for the past couple batches.

We have been distilling cask wine into cognac then filtering through activated charcoal. The last batch we did came out the filter with no alcohol content at all. Basically it was water that smelled like cognac. We figured it was time to replace the charcoal because ~20 litres had passed through it at that point. We changed it and tried again today - same thing. The volume coming out of the filter appears to be only slightly less than what went in (some gets stuck to the carbon and takes ages to drip out or evaporate) but the alcohol content drops from 70% to 0%.

The only thing we can think of that may have changed is before we were using a mix of a red and a white wine, but both times this has happened we were using only the red one.

So far our best theory is that the carbon is acting as a catalyst for some kind of reaction so my first question is: is this the case?

Secondly, the liquid going in is 70% alcohol, Im guessing 28+% water, and the rest various impurities. How can such a tiny amount of chemical react such a large volume of alcohol, and what could it be turning into?

Thirdly: Why didn't this happen with the mix of wines and how can we stop it happening now?

 

Hey, BS in chemistry here. Activated carbon does all its work by adsorption - things get stuck to its surface, and either stay there (like for filtration) or that bonding helps them react (if it's used as a catalyst). However, it has trouble adsorbing alcohols - it'll generally grab the larger ones, and let the ethanol flow by. That makes it pretty unlikely that your ethanol is adsorbing and/or reacting.
Your first question: Assuming something weird is going on, your ethanol could be reacting with oxygen to produce water and CO2 - end result would be about a 7% reduction in volume, and no alcohol in the mixture (if you'd like I can send you the numbers). However, that reaction gives off a lot of heat. Have you noticed any unusual temperature changes during filtration, either heat or cold?
Second: The way a catalyst works is by making it easier for a reaction to occur. It doesn't actually get used up in the reaction - in an extreme example, a teaspoon of catalyst should help a swimming pool of reactants.
Third: As far as I know, the chemical differences between red and white wine only occur in (relatively) trace amounts. It may be possible something in the red wine is acting as a catalyst, but then you would have noticed it happening with the mix as well.
Out of curiosity, what are you using to measure the alcohol content? Forgive me, but have you checked the equipment you use for after filtration? As I said above, it's possible that there's a reaction happening to explain what you've seen, but it seems more likely that the measurement is off.
Hope this helps.

 

Nope, the liquid was still a little warm from the distillation but we have to touch the filter to move it and would have almost certainly noticed any significant changes in temperature.

We use a hydrometer in a narrow flask, and confirm the results by taste and flame tests. We even tried removing the charcoal from the filter and igniting it to see if the alcohol was being trapped in the carbon. It had a weak alcohol smell but wouldn't ignite.

Thanks for the information so far. Is there any experiment you can suggest to narrow down what's going on? I am free this weekend and wine is cheap.

 

You need to dilute to 40% alc/vol prior to filtering. That be yer problem.

 

Hmm, I just did a quick experiment and put the original wine through (ie, 16% abv.) and that too came out with very little alcohol content (as well as less colour and flavours as expected). The plot thickens...

I also left out one detail: prior to putting the charcoal in in the filter, we washed it with water and dried it in the sun, but we also did that last time.

 

You're right, washing the carbon shouldn't have any effect. Here's a couple things you could try to nail down what's happening:

Take some fresh, unfiltered distillate and let it cool to room temperature. Measure, as accurately as you can, its volume and temperature. Try and get a thermometer where it can measure the temp of the filter, and run the distillate through (if you can't get the thermometer in the filter, just take the temp of the stuff when it comes out). Also get the volume of the stuff after it comes through the filter - try and wait so you get all the drips. If the ethanol is reacting to form water, each liter of fresh distillate will come through the filter reduced to about 940 mL. You should notice a rise in temperature as well.

Next, take that filtered product and run it all through your still again, including the water. Try and mark down the ranges of temperatures where you collect different liquids. That should give you an idea of what compounds you're actually dealing with, and in what proportions. If you get anything odd - not obviously ethanol or water - that'll be a big clue.

On the side, try running the first experiment with a bottle of cheap vodka. If it happens again you'll at least know whatever is going wrong is in the filter.

 

Wait, what water were you washing it with? Does your tap water have a lot of minerals in it? Grasping at straws here, but this is just weird.

 

I've received a lot of people asking if I got a response on this, and no, I didn't.

After doing some research, the best answer I could come up with is that you shouldn't try to reduce your fever if it's under 101 as it's not dangerous and counteris your body's defense trying to kill the virus.

Then again, this was off google, not necessarily a certified answer.

 

Well the filter is definitely causing a chemical reaction.

I just put 50g of charcoal in a funnel, and measured it's temperature to be 25C. I poured 25mL of 55% abv @29C into the charcoal and it was too slow draining to come out the bottom. I had planned to pour a whole 250mL through to measure the final alcohol content, but decided not to bother after I measured the temperature of the charcoal to be 41C after only a few seconds.

I don't know how we initially overlooked such a large amount of heat being given off, perhaps because it was outside the air was cooling it down.

So is it safe to assume this is the ethanol to H20 and CO2 reaction? Filtering spirits is a very common thing, and from my research this seems to be a very rare problem, what could be causing it?

 

It's mainly true that you don't really need to do anything if your temperature is under 102. It is more or less one of your body's innate mechanisms to fight off disease. It has a lot to do with increasing and enhancing your immune systems response.

I don't know enough to say it definitively, but a prolonged fever above 103 goes beyond your immune system being helped along. You could have a kidney infection, meningitis, heatstroke etc... All of which can be fatal.

Also, it seems like there is great debate over what to do with a fever sub 102, whether you should treat it, or take something. So a definitive answer isn't likely.

I do not have any sort of degree in medicine, and most of this is coming from my classes in A&P and the intertubes.....

 

The only reliable thing I've read or been taught about low-grade fevers is that they're thought to be beneficial, but I don't know that there's much evidence to back that up. Theoretically, your body's increased temperature is supposed to denature the viral / bacterial proteins and kill the pathogens. Not so theoretically, it's only a few degrees higher than your normal temperature, so how much damage can it do? Have you ever heard of or seen any level of evidence or anecdote that suggests suppressing a fever will prolong the course of an infection or lead to worse outcomes? I sure as hell haven't. If tylenol or advil make you feel better when you're sick, that's better than feeling like crap. Bear in mind that your immune system is hard at work specifically and effectively killing any and all foreign pathogens that it detects. A fever isn't. But, come to think of it, the question of whether using advil and tylenol for a low-grade fever and mild infection will prolong the symptoms might make a pretty interesting research question.

Fun fact of the day: the fever that comes from malaria is so high it will cure you of syphillis.

 

The ethanol -> CO2 + H2O is the frontrunner based on what you've seen, except that the reaction plain shouldn't happen in a water solution. Let me know if I've made any wrong assumptions:

For your hydrometer to read 0% alcohol, the product would have to have a density pretty close to water, right? The temperature increase means you've probably got an oxidation reaction going on (they usually give off heat), and two oxidation products of ethanol are acetic acid (which gives vinegar its taste, and is near the density of water) or CO2. Water gets produced in both. Unless your taste tests came back sour, it's probably the CO2.

My gut call is that somehow the charcoal in your filter has gotten charged with one of a couple different compounds. Try rinsing the charcoal with a bunch of distilled or de-ionized water. Then toss your charcoal in a pan, and roast it in a 300 deg.F oven for an hour. That might rinse away or vaporize whatever is in there.

In the meantime, if you have any of your de-boozed product saved, try running it through your still and marking temperatures where you collect stuff. The different boiling points might tell us what compounds are coming out of the filter, and give a better idea of the chemical conditions inside it.

 

No wrong assumptions there. The filtrate isn't sour though, so I don't think it's producing any significant proportion of acetic acid.

We had tried washing the charcoal and cooking it in a frying pan, but for only a few minutes instead of an hour. I'll ferment some sugar and try again in order to distill the filtered product and see what kind of compounds boil off. The strange part is the charcoal has been kept in a sealed bag since we bought it, and it initially worked fine. The only thing we did in between removing it from the bag and pouring alcohol through it is washing with water and drying in the sun.

It'll take a few days for the sugar to ferment so I'll PM you when I have some more results. Out of curiosity, what compounds could the charcoal have picked up that would cause this?

 

I'll admit my gut call is a very long shot. There are a few things that could oxidize ethanol - the go-to in the lab is a salt with the dichromate ion (which is rather toxic) - but most of them aren't going to be found outside a lab. Nitric acid, hydrogen peroxide, and iodine are probably the most likely to have at home, but getting them to the filter would take some work. My apologies.

I made that call partially based on the apparently small volume change when you put the stuff through the filter. Perhaps when you run the next batch, get a fix on how much volume you actually lose? You might just be seeing an acid-base reaction, which would still produce water, but not as much.

That the charcoal shouldn't have been exposed to anything is the oddest part. One other question - what are your fermentation vessel, still, and filter built from? Certain metals can leach into solution, and might be reacting. Also, I'll try and come up with some other experiments you could try and PM you.

 

The singularity concept is an extension of Moore's Law - which can be summarized as Computational capacity of a certain type of hardware doubles every two years. This is a truism rather than a law, in that it's stood as true since we started placing transistors on integrated circuits - but it's not a law - there's no rule of physics that says this to be true.

Assuming that Moore's Law holds true for another 10-15 years, then we'll be able to build a computer that's as capable as a human brain.

If Moore's Law is a reflection of the time it takes human researchers to improve, then the computers that are as smart as people, should be able to double their effectiveness after two years. If computers are then twice as capable as humans - then they can double their effectiveness again in a year. If the principle holds - then the time to double the effectiveness of the computers capability halves and halves again until inside of 4 years from the first computer that's as capable as a human being - computers are able to improve themselves at a rate beyond our ability to observe. Hence the singularity.

Again - this all assumes that a truism regarding placing transistors on integrated circuits holds true. And there's no assurances that that will happen.

In terms of the immortality theories - there are a number of projects underway - and sorting out the difference between crackpots and geniuses is quite difficult. Fundamentally - the human brain is an organic computer that processes a large number of transactions using electronic impulses and chemical reactions. It also stores an enormous amount of data and indexes and accesses that data fairly efficiently. There are a number of projects under way to capture that data - lots of geeks wear a camera on a necklace all day, every day and use computational algorithms to analyze that data and distinguish and sort events so that they can at a later date translate all the experiences that they have been visually exposed to into a data matrix that a computer can re-use.

There are also projects in place to interpret the data coming from the human brain - think of a Nintendo Wii but you think to move left and think to move right. There are models that work for things like a basic game of pong. Now we're effectively talking about translating a language that has never been spoken, is different in almost every speaker, and can only be heard using an imperfect interface. But those projects - once they're in place - will be able to record what you're thinking. As the projects evolve - it's logical that they'll be able to interpret more complex thoughts and represent them more accurately. Once that process gives us a complete ability to understand the human brain - then recording it is easy and recording every thought, every experience, every sense that human will have in their life time is just a matter of storage and power. Organic liquid data storage and kinetic motion/body heat based power systems are an established concept - although aren't being practically applied in scale. But theoretically at some young age, we could implant a sensor and a wifi broadcast point under the skin at the back of your head and broadcast the data to a storage device somewhere else around the body and have a complete, digitally accessible record of your personality, memories and experiences.

After that - the problem is writing data. How do you write data to the human brain? How do you secure the ability to write data to a human brain? Virus infection, hackers, etc all become a huge risk. And if you talk about immortality - assuming that you die and the data store of everything that was your brain is still around, where do we put that data to bring you back to life? Is it still 'you'? If you could be immortal through human cloning would you go in that direction - or would you experience the infinite potential of a singularity expansion phase computer that lets you be more than your human brain could ever imagine?

What if you could synchronize your thoughts between multiple brains? Once we can read and write human thoughts and experiences - why only have one body? What if you could have a dozen? Would it be masturbation if you had sex with another body that housed your mind and thought with perfect synchronization as an extension of your mind, joined through wireless networks? Would it be homosexual if your bodies were different genders but your minds had a singular gender identity? Would you be a sadist if you gave your other selves a beating? A slut if you fucked more than one of your other selves at a time? How would you feel when one of your bodies got herpes and the others still felt fine? Would you just recycle that body for a new one, would that be like discarding an appendage because you had athlete's foot? Would rich people be able to afford more bodies and therefore work harder creating an inescapable wealth discrepancy? How would you decide which of your bodies got to fuck your neighbours bodies and which of your bodies had to go to work? Could you monogamous with a dozen people at once? We'd need an entirely new dictionary just to describe the changes to the human condition that a single technological change could bring us.

Alternately - what will the school system look like when you can have a top flight education in anything written directly to your brain? When you can share dreams with your lovers or your psychiatrist? What will the entertainment industry look like when you can have a total sensory immersion? Will you watch the show from the side or will you 'be' the primary character in a carefully edited and directed story that's indistinguishable from any other event in your life, except for the fact that you emerge from the memory and find you've shared it with 100 million other people and you no longer have super powers?

And from that point - how will we as a species cope with a form of entertainment completely indistinguishable from reality, where the only limits to possibility are what we can program? Especially if that's happening at a time when the abilities of computers are expanding faster than our ability to comprehend? Asimov's laws of robotics and various other peoples thinking about safe programming of artificial intelligence revolve around a bunch of ideas that ignore the fact that someone is bound to ignore them. Patch around them. Release Viruses to erode them in entertaining or nefarious ways.

When the human mind can just directly download into a computer that's capable of vastly superior thought processing, and then expand with the full capacity of human imagination - at speeds that are to the speed of thought, what the speed of light is to a glacier - how do we even conceptually imagine the universe that we'll ultimately imagine?

Expanding beyond the human brain as a digital entity, nano technology is incredibly interesting. There are proof of concept models working now in large tubes of fluid where robots serve the purpose of blood and deliver chemical molecules to artificial cells. Those blood 'cell' robots can also be programmed like an anti-virus program to recognize certain things and take actions - liker recognize an ethanol cell and grab it before it reaches the brain and carry it to the bladder or the lower intestine and pass it as waste. If we could miniaturize these technologies and transfer the batteries to work from body heat instead of an internal cell - we could program the ultimate drug or the ultimate detox. Or we could program them to look for aids, cancer, tuberculosis and anything else undesirable that blood comes in contact with, and take a tablet a day for an immune system that could be update via wifi broadcasts and could respond through internal communication and email you when a top up tablet to replenish your immune-oids was required. Again, securing that process has some interesting questions attached - but this process entirely involves technology that we have, that just isn't quite small enough yet. And would allow us to synthesize things like the feeling of fullness after a meal, testosterone to build muscle, HGH to repair the bodies - in minute, controlled dosages delivered directly to the required muscles?

You thought MDMA was a trip? What happens when you can release serotonin in a regulated and controlled fashion during sex at a level that makes an MDMA overdose feel like a cup of coffee on a warm day, and replenish the bodies supplies immediately afterwards, all while supplying enough blood to the body that sex remains practical even though you're riding an impossible high that would normally make erection or orgasm impossible.

As a species - how we survive those sorts of biological changes through technology is a hell of a question. The time scale and ultimate feasibility is so up in the air that it's pure sci-fi at this point. But there's still an excellent chance that the majority of people alive today, who haven't been given a diagnosis with a time line attached already, will be around find out the answer and see the species after the technology becomes viable.

 

Can someone explain to me in more depth than Fox News ("ZOMG It's NRG! YAyZ!") what the Bloom Box is and how it works?