Slashdot Mirror
Mixing the Unmixable
markthebrewer writes "From an article in the New Scientist: Conventional wisdom every 15 year-old knows says that you can't mix oil and water without some kind of surfactant. However a team lead by Richard Pashley from the Australian National University in Canberra have done it simply by first removing all dissolved gases from the water. Apart from the obvious potential improvements in salad dressings, it could have an impact on the manufacture of everything from drugs to paint - anywhere an emulsion is required. Apparently, it will also give some insight into the mysterious 'long-range hydrophobic effect' (or why oil droplets coalesce over surprisingly long distances)." Keep in mind the usual scientific caveat: this experiment doesn't seem to have been replicated by other experimenters yet.
Keep in mind the usual scientific caveat: this experiment doesn't seem to have been replicated by other experimenters yet.
AKA: "Uh, guys, some soap fell into the bottle but let's pretend there isn't any and call it science!"
But where are these 15-year olds who know what a surfactant is? :)
My dingo ate your honor student.
What the environmental impact of water based oils will be.
It's like mixing oil and water, assuming that all of the dissolved gases haven't been removed from the water.
Yeah, that rolls off the tongue.
..they'll have trouble pouring oil on troubled waters, it'll just mix in.
Can we say Pons and Fleischmann salad dressings?
Salad dressings.... I don't know about you, but I would never trust chemically engineered food. Don't eat anything that you can't make at home!!!!!!!! That includes chicken with no heads...:Pp
Am I the only one that finds it funny that the first, most obvious benefit mentioned in the caption was food related? Salad dressing indeed ;)
Talk about mixing the unmixable.
"Yeah, we were like oil and water without a sulfacant!"
Scientists mix oil and water.
In other news, record sub-zero temperatures in hell.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
"He takes the air out and he doesn't get the long-range hydrophobic force. It doesn't nail the hydrophobic force down, but now we have something to work on," says James Quirk, a chemist at the University of Western Australia in Perth..."
Hydrophobic, eh? So that's the reason they don't mix: the oil is afraid of the water. Neat.
PS I wonder if the chemist's middle initial is T.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
This is the biggest scientific discovery to come out of Australia since Yahoo Serious discovered how to give beer a nice head and invented rock n' roll!
Apparently they were able to pass both the oil and water through an new Irish web browser. The 4-fold increase in speed of all of the particles is what allowed the mixing.
There are 01 types of people in this world. Those that understand binary, and me.
"Apparently, it will also give some insight into the mysterious 'long-range hydrophobic effect'"
I am sorry to say that this is not mysterious at all and if you have ever taken an entry level organic chemistry class or cell biology class you would understand it.
>> "...simply by first removing all dissolved gases from the water."
Ahhh, Once you remove all of the Hydrogen and Oxygen I can see where there would no longer be a problem!!!
Great, hopefully Alton Brown can make a super mayonnaise emulsion based on this theory - super tasty and smooth on the tongue, now that's Good Eats!
----------------------------
Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
This has got to be a dupe. Think of all of the biological effects that would be couteracted by this. Hydrophobic/hydrophilic effects are the basic reason why proteins fold the way that they do, and biological system's don't have free gasses floating around. Not to mention what would happen to all of our membranes (note, membrane formation is also due to hydophobic/hydophilic effects). Gasses in a biological system are all bound to something - example - Oxygen is bound to hemoglobin or myoglobin, if it isn't it causes serious problems. If water and oil mix without gasses present then we're in a world of hurt and I'd just be mush right now instead of typing this.
yeah after reading just the headline i thought this was about music . . .
track7.org has all kinds of interesting stuff!
From the article...
An alternative might be to disperse the medicine in degassed water, which is already produced on a large scale by the oil industry.
You're telling me the oil industry itself makes degassed water on a large scale - for some unmentioned reason - and didn't discover this researcher's claims that oil and degassed water spontaneously emulsify? What's up with that?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
It's always been possible to mix oil and water with a little thing called SOAP. Or surfactant, to be more precise. Or detergent. You get my drift.
It was once my job to figure out how to get oil out of wastewater, and it could be a really difficult problem. Oil/water emulsions are nothing new.
Be aware that the New Scientist is not a peer reviewed journal.
/., is that usual?).
The two guys who claimed that they produced cold fusion in a laboratory also didn't publish in a peer reviewed journal. It turns out they were full of crap. Just 'cause it's written doesn't make it so. Once it's in a peer reviewed journal, I'll seriously be interested (chemistry news on
Anyway, the New Scientist is well known for its overhyping of science.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
also refers to rabies. The victim is scared of water. BTW what will you call someone who is scared of a mixture of water and oil?
Oil is Hydrophobic (it doesnt stick to water). So someone who is phobic to oil will be hrdro-lover. But if u mix oil+water, then he becomes hrdrophobic + hrdro-lover. So what the hell is he?
http://www.robotwisdom.com/
Reminds me of that cold fusion dealy during the 70s. The radio electronics article states a 1/100 chance of getting it to work, but to my knowledge the original experimenters were the only ones to get it working.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Cats and dogs living togther?!
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
The effect prevents oil's dispersion in water, and means that you can only make oil and water emulsions, such as French dressing for salads, by shaking them and adding stabilising agents. ?
Second of all, the oil/water thing is more of an Italian dressing, I believe; and First of all, we don't call it french dressing any more, we call it Freedom Dressing.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
n/t
My Ass hurts.
Whew!
I thought it was about Bill Gates and RMS having a love child together.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
What evidence do you have that gases are not dissolved in our body fluids?
Correct to the contrary it is well known that dissovled gases are in our blood stream. This is partly how CO2 travels, indeed a small percentage but still occurs.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Every oil change I have ever gotten from Meineke for a car I think has been "mixed with water".
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
Isn't that, like, a dude who just pretends to know how to surf, but really can't, so he just acts like it?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
how exactly is "mixing" defined? If I put olive oil and tap water in my blender, and crank it on high, it is pretty well mixed, at least temporarily. Is it critical that the "mixture" stay "mixed" over time?
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
How could I reply like that and neglect the Emperor Joshua Norton I -- rice connection?!!!
(Legend has it that Joshua Norton had corned the market on rice in San Francisco and stood to make a tidy fortune. Then a ship full of rice sailed into port and he lost his shirt. And some say his mind.)
DAMN!
and do you know why. because water doesn't cling to the salad.
why all of a sudden will they start using water in their salad dressings. It would just run off the lettuce and pool at the bottom of the bowl.
I don't know, where I'm from they call those people "AOL users".
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
If we can now mix oil and water, can geeks and hot women be far behind?
(ducking)
I like my beverages with warning labels!
Combining something oil-based w/ something water based. Oil and vinegar for example.
Here's the link to the actual journal his article was published in, for the curious.
From the article, it would be a stretch to say that Pashley has found a way to overcome "long-range" hydrophobic effects. Those effects are still present. However, he has found a way to get the hydrophobic liquid to break away in small droplets. Once broken away from the bulk, standard DLVO theory takes over to keep the particles apart. DLVO is not a cancelation of hydrophobic effects, it is just an overpowering of hydrophobic effects by electrostatic effects.
Unfortunately, it seems as though Pashley has no good explanation for why the degassing method works, it just does. This could be interesting, as more researchers study the role of gasses in keeping hydrophobic and hydrophilic liquids apart.
Overall, quite interesting, though New Scientist does tend to exagerate scientific findings.
Tony
It lessens the size/amount of the gasses in a liquid (don't know how), so it is the same thing in concept just not in process, no?
"The only thing I enjoy more than doing the crossword puzzle, is actually finishing it"
Vinegar is mostly water. The reason your vinaigrette dresssing separates is the same reason oil doesn't mix with water.
In my opinion vinaigrette shouldn't be emulsified, so I don't see how this 'discovery' adds anything to salad dressings.
If the oil industry uses this on a large scale it would seem that accidents would have happened where the oil came into contact with this degassed water. Those damn energy companies have known all along.....OIL AND WATER DO MIX!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If my high school chem classes + memory serve, the more general statement would be that polar substances cannot be mixed with non-polar substances.
The most interesting implication of this discovery (if it proves to be factual) involves doing the reverse--dissolving polar solids into oils. We could finally make liquid solutions of things which chemically react with water, without contaminants or expensive solvents.
-Amalcon
I guess they mean vinegar. Italian dressings are basically olive oil and vinegar, plus extra spices and stuff. The problem is that you have to shake violently before use, or else you get the oil on top of the vinegar (which is a solution of acid in water...)
"Even more surprisingly, the mixture did not break up even when gas was put back into the water after the emulsion had formed."
This would be good for soda, such as Code Red, which contains Brominated Vegetable Oil, a chemical on the FDA's watch list as a potentially poisonous compound.
But it is false to assume that there is no gas circulating unbound in blood. In fact, 3% of blood oxygen do so without any carrier proteins.
Also consider how oxygen enters your circulation in a step-by-step process: oxygen comes from the air in your lungs, goes in and out your alveolar cells, then into the lumen of your pulmonar capillaries. From there, it diffuses into red cells, and then, finally, is accepted by hemoglobin molecules. Oxygen is considered as a small molecule that doesn't need any transporter to cross the bilipidic membrane of our cells. So your blood is never entirely gas-free, even in its unbound form.
Even more: in hyperbaric conditions, where your limited reserves of hemoglobin are already saturated, it is speculated that oxygen nourishes your tissues without being carried by red cells, only dissolved in your blood. Hemoglobin proteins would then only act as a mere oxygen buffer.
I think the /. article is a little misleading. After scanning the JPhysChem B article here (You may need to have a license). The articles suggest that removing dissolved gasses allows you to mix oil and water indefinately. I'm pretty sure that this is not true.
/. article.
They are adding 2 ml of oil and 33 mils of water and after mixing they still have some oil phase (from the picture in the paper). They are reporting an increase in the solubility, not that oil and water in these conditions are completely miscible as implied by the
As for my questions, I'm not sure I understand their results with respect to the observation that re-exposure to air doesn't immediately reverse the effect. This sort of raises a red flag to me, because (assuming there isn't any covalent chemistry going on) it means that achieving equilibrium is rather slow, and it may be that they are not at equilibrium when the measurements are made. Either way it is an interesting paper. (This would be better phrased as a question than a statement, I might have just missed the answer in the paper....)
-Sean
Apart from the obvious potential improvements in salad dressings,
Only industrials put water in dressing, in order to have consumer pay full price for half fat.
Good dressing is oil (sunflower or olive), acid (vinegar or lemon juice), perhaps mustard, perhaps onion, salt, pepper, herbs I don't know the name in english, but certainly not water. And when you thinkabout the physic of the dressing, the oil is here to recover the salad with the acid and herbs.
In fact, my best dressing is an emultion of vinegar and mustard in oil, and it's quite unstable. I'm certainly not going to put water, at least without electric mixer. But if I use and electric mixer, I will destroy the herbs I can incorporate asily with a fork and a little work. So, no, thanks. No water in my salad dressing.
Once in a lecture I saw a live demostration
of a supersonic surgical drill mixing water and oil.
I can't be sure how long it stayed mixed.
check out http://www.activusa.com/
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
Not only have you shown your complete lack of knowledge of the "culinary arts" as you put it, but also complete lack of common sense.
Dogbert: I'm going to start a school for people with no common sense.
Dilbert: Who would pay to learn what can't be taught?... except maybe people with no common sense.
Dogbert: Bingo.
Possibly you should invest in a school like this? Just a thought.
HTH. HAND.
Scientist: I've done it. I've DONE IT! Two parts gin ... one part vermouth ... and an olive. They MIX! Mwuahahaha!
Grad student: Uh, that's just a martini, and not a very dry one.
Scientist: Blast! Well, bottom's up. We'll just change gin to "oil" and vermouth to "water" and publish anyway.
Some details are missing. Was it regular crude oil (a complex mixture that includes some surfactants), if not were there any hydrophillic groups in the molecule (most surfactants include one hydrophobic group and one hydrophillic group), was the water distilled, deionized, salt, or tap?
How much water was used and how much oil?
At what temprature was this experiment done?
You know, all the stuff needed to repeat the experiment.
many years ago, I mixed "Planet Rock" (Afrikaa Bambaata & the Soul Sonic Force) with the first movement of Beethoven's 3rd Symphony.
It actually worked pretty good, go figure.
C|N>K
Ice-9?
You folks are missing the key point in the article:
"The mix spontaneously formed a cloudy emulsion".
This is very different from the usual case where you take an oil and water mix and maybe some surfactant and agitate it.
The reason is that the formation of surface area during the dispersion of oil into water normally requires an energy input. Surfactant reduces the energy required and also often stabilizes an emulsion by adding some repulsive forces (either steric or electrostatic) between the droplets. However, with the exception of systems called microemulsions that increased surface area always represents a energy increase. With time (the amount of time depending on the use of suractant etc.) that free energy will cause the emulsion to break and form two homogeneous layers.
Microemulsions are the exeception; they are unusually favorable systems that reduce the energy of formation of surface area to near zero, probably less than the thermal energy kT available. Thus they can spontaneously form emulsions that are stable indefinitely. Microemulsions generally require very specific compositions to form so they are not often seen except in some specialized applications.
The problem with Pashley's work is that he is claiming the spontaneous formation of an emulsion.. This would normally be expected only if the surface energy of his mixture was near zero - and there is nothing in the description of this system to indicate that this is happening, regardless of the side show with air bubbles.
What is more likely is that his oil-water system actually contains some small amount of surfactant as an impurity (quite typical in many oils). If so, the process of lowering temperature will take this mixture through what is known as the phase inversion temperature, where the mixture will achieve a minimum surface tension. This lowered usrface tension will make formation of an emulsion with minimal energy input quite likely.
"Yo! Surfacant. Wurd bitch!"
KFG
My experience is that any discussion of 'hydrophobic forces' is usually a more complicated and somewhat misleading way of describing what can be better explained by electrostatic and van der Waals interactions between molecules.
The argument that the emulsion stabilization is due to the electrostatic repulsion does not hold up - there should be no special tendency for hydroxyl ions to adsorb on the oil surface.
As others have said, the proof will be the repeatability of these experiments by others.
Paul (www.surfactants.net)
(Sorry, couldn't resist. I actually like cats and dogs.)
It's by no means a bad journal, have a couple of papers there myself, but if this had been the great discovery slashdot tries to make it it would have been accepted in Science (www.sciencemag.org), nature (www.nature.com), or at least a tier-B journal like JACS.
methodology: I boiled a cup of water in the microwave. I waited for it to cool, and boiled it again. I let it cool and boiled it again. I carefully removed the cup and let a few drops of (extra virgin olive) oil drip onto the surface from about 1cm height to minimize air bubbles.
observations: the oil stayed in a tight slick on the surface for about 10 seconds. Then it spread out, I'm assuming because of the heat of the water.
After a about 45s, a piece of wood was introduced to the water, which caused mild boiling suggesting that the water had indeed been devoid of air.
After more than 30 mnutes, the slick was still on the surface without mixing.
Conclusions: those guys are need to accumulate more data.
> they do not understand the concept of water in a salad dressing.
I used to work for a company that made salad dressings that were resold under house names (like a grocery store's name). We used a heck of a lot of water in our dressings. Think about it, if the liquid isn't oil, it's usually water. We didn't necessarily just add water to the dressing. We usually mixed water with a component, like a powdered flavor, then mixed that liquid into the final product.
BTW, I got laid off six years ago, and I can still smell the plant on some of my clothes. It was horrible.
Boiled water. Ever put olive oil on top of water you're going to put spaghetti in? It degasses pretty thoroughly before it hits a rolling boil, but the oil remains on top and doesn't emulsify even when it hits a boil.
Don't you remember the Loverboy song, Pig and Elephant DNA Don't Mix?
I want giant pork! Send them in herds to Iraq. Oh the screams... of joy of the Americans.
WD39... it mixed with the water instead of repelling it.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Do you think that NIH knows that it funds this kind of late night experiments?
(I might have to make a few latex glove helium balloons too)
Not to say they're being deciptful, but what you're suggesting would be true -- and I wouldn't put it past 'em.
is peanut butter, you know when you have to stir it up because all the oil is sitting on top or else it will be thick and unspreadable. Of course it's funny when you give the dog (or I suppose cat but I can't imagine that being as good) a spoonful of PB and stick it to the roof of their mouth. Totally hilarious while s/he works on it for a good 20mins to 2hours.
ZERO ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ZERO ONE ONE! Just brushing up for my next big invention: Ethernet over Voice (EoV)
To remove all dissolved gasses from water, simply heat the water at a "Low" setting and bring it slowly to a boil. It's that simple. There's a kids' science experiment to demonstrate this effect at http://www.bigelow.org/virtual/handson/diss_air.ht ml.
Watch for those air bubbles during heating to verify
that the water has dissolved gasses already.
Put the de-gassed water in a sealed container (a soda bottle) and put some of the original water in an identical (but labeled) container. Collect water from other sources (tap, lake, well), splitting those into original and de-gassed containers in the same way. A sample from a fish tank is guaranteed to have plenty of dissolved gasses, otherwise the fish would be dead. Getting different water sources gives reasonable independence from the effects of non-gaseous impurities (minerals, for example) on your results. Let all water bottles come to the same temperature.
Choose an oil to try. Then for each bottle of water, prepare another container with a small amount of oil. Add a small amount of each type of water to those oil samples and shake vigorously.
Quantify what you see by measuring the time that it takes for all (or most) of the re-separation to happen. Remember, what you're looking for is any consistent difference between the original and de-gassed samples.
You should have plenty of water left, so rinse out those mixing containers and try different oils: canola oil, corn oil, baby oil, motor oil, etc. If you really want to be thorough, put all the water bottles in the refrigerator to try the experiment at another temperature.
If you try all this and you can't see any difference in the mixing between the original and de-gassed water, then you have disproved the theory. If you do see differences, then you have successfully duplicated the experiment.
There you go. You're a scientist!
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Um...you are overstating it a little bit but your point is taken...seems to be a lot of it going on lately. Still it's kinda nice to see some news that isnt about Hemos's wife. Or is it Taco's wife? Whatever.
If you take all of the dissolved gas out of water (which would be the oxygen of the h2o), wouldn't you just end up with hydrogen?
Then you just announce you have found a way to mix 'water' with oil. But really you're mixing hydrogen with oil.
Or maybe there is more to this?
The amazing claim is the use of no soap (i.e. no surfactant). I've no idea how you got modded up like that.
As a chemist I can say that we call samples of long chain unsaturated, or slightly saturated hydrocarbons*, oils. We generally mean a pure sample rather than a mixture of oils. We would never refer to crude oil as an oil, I imagine most chemists would refer to it as "crude oil".
* saturated long chain = lots of carbons singly bonded with hydrogens in the valence spots
* unsaturated long chains = as above but with some doubly bonded carbons
Does that mean you also remove the hydrogen and oxygen??
"Love is a familiar; Love is a devil: there is no evil angel but Love." --William Shakespeare ('Love's Labors Lost')
*forklift collision*
:)
Forklift Operator #1: Uh-oh! You got oil in my de-gassed water!
Forklift Operator #2: No... You got your de-gassed water in my oil!
-Zane
This sig is worse than my last.
Boohakka
Eat at Joe's.
the article is from 72. I wonder if someone "solves" cold fusion once every decade or two?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
the one dissolved in the water? i guess so. the O and H atomes that water molecules are made up of? no, their not dissolved gasses, so why should they?
Hydrophiliac is the term you were trying to assume.
Just because Oil is termed Hydrophobic, if someone is scared of an Oil-Water emulsion, they should obviously be termed Mayophobic, as any self respecting scientist could tell you.
Chips with that please.
Filos - friend
Fobia(sic) - fear.
Assuming greek phonetics and romanised transliteralisation. ey.
Plus Oil isn't Hydro, its Lipids, so Lipophobia might be the fear of oil.
Depends what oil we are talking about tho'.
So they may be hydrolipophobia.
erm.
For those who don't