I’m doing the damn thing and finally embarking on a PhD journey! Ever since I transitioned from working in industry to working in academia a little over 3 years ago now, I’ve been slowly cracking away at a master’s degree in chemistry and I finished this December. So now I’m working on a PhD for the foreseeable future.  

Won’t it be a lot of extra work? Yes, it will.

Don’t I already have a full-time job?  Yes, I do.

Why am I doing this?!

Because:

a.)  I want the freedom to do whatever I want for my entire career, and I believe having a PhD will help to enable that kind of freedom.

b.)  Learning is a spiritual journey for me. This is how I make the world a better place. I believe learning raises the vibration of the oneness, ie: it makes God happy. It feels like this is my mission on this planet: to collect as much knowledge and experience as possible and dissolve it back into the source. I think the universe loves to be examined and explored. She’s beautiful and sexy and she loves to be checked out. She wants us to find out every little thing about her. The universe loves to be loved and appreciated. Haven’t you ever noticed that when you intentionally shift your mindset to one of gratitude, your life starts going better? When you love and appreciate the universe, she will love and appreciate you right back. Every human, animal, mineral, plant, piece of technology…we’re all just little fractions of the God holograph lovingly gazing at each other, trying to take it all in. Learning is a spiritual act of love for me and it’s what I’m here on this planet to do.

c.)   The research area of the lab I joined is renewable energy, which feels like a noble cause. What could be a more important pursuit in the face of impending planetary doom?

d.)  The principal investigator in this group is ambitious as hell. He’s a big ideas kind of guy and he gets shit done. I think watching how he works will be inspirational.  

So here I am to write about what it is that this lab does because explaining things to “other people” in writing is the best way that I learn (and when I refer to “other people”, I mean mostly myself but also the bots that leave comments on my blog posts with sketchy links that probably gave me a million viruses when I clicked on them.) And, to be honest…so far, I don’t actually know much about what they do in that lab other than they all seem really smart, and it has something to do with renewable energy. But there are all kinds of topics that fall under the category of renewable energy. What does this group do in particular? I don’t really know, let’s take a look at the content they have online and do a little copy/paste, shall we?

“The Boettcher electrochemistry and solar materials laboratory is focused on designing, synthesizing, and understanding materials for applications in solar energy conversion and electrochemical energy storage/conversion. Specific interests include the synthesis and study of heterogeneous electrocatalysts for water oxidation with defined molecular and nanoscale structures, the use of computer simulation and direct electrical measurements to understand semiconductor-electrocatalyst interfaces, and the development of high-performance III-V semiconductor solar conversion architectures using scalable and inexpensive deposition processes. Recent new projects include the development of alkaline membrane electrolyzers for low-cost scalable hydrogen production as well as fundamental aspects of bipolar membranes and electrolyzers.”

Lots of big scary words in there. I need to break this paragraph down word-by-word to absorb it. Let’s start with heterogeneous electrocatalyst.

A catalyst is a chemical that increases the rate of reaction without itself undergoing any significant physical change.

An electrocatalyst is a specific type of catalyst that functions at an electrode surface. So, on the surface of some conductor that can be hooked up to a power supply and charged up.

A heterogeneous catalyst means the phase of the reacting chemical at the beginning of the process is different from the phase at the end.

Changing phase…does that mean we are going from a solid to a liquid? Or a liquid to a gas? Yes, that’s exactly what it means! In fact, here, we are talking about water oxidation, which is the process of splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen. This is a liquid turning into a gas.

Note, hydrogen is a proton. I’m going to use those two words interchangeably throughout this piece. Don’t get confused!

So, to sum up the first half of that big, wordy paragraph: this lab is trying to create and test materials that use electrical and chemical reactions to turn water into hydrogen gas and oxygen gas. This process is called water electrolysis.

Why would we want to turn water into hydrogen gas?

Because, when used in a fuel cell, hydrogen gas generates electrical power and emits only drinkable water and warm air. It’s just about as efficient as gasoline and has near zero greenhouse emissions.

How does a fuel cell work?

There are a bunch of different technologies for fuel cells, I'm going to explain how PEM fuel cells work.

This video gives a pretty good introduction. I grabbed some screenshots from that YouTube to explain what’s going on.

A fuel cell is essentially a sandwich with two metal plates (an anode and cathode) as the bread, and this thing called a Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM) in between.

The PEM is a material made from a special type of polymer designed to let through protons and block electrons. I am not clear on how it does that, exactly! It looks like I’ll need to teach myself some serious chemistry to begin understanding what’s going on here.

Let’s start with understanding what a polymer is. Well, it’s just a material that’s made from large molecules consisting of a bunch of repeating subunits. I remember my biology 101 professor holding up a stack of Legos as an analogy to polymers; Little repetitive building blocks that link together to make a larger structure.

 DNA is a polymer! It’s just a long, twisted ladder with the same 4 components repeating themselves in different combinations over and over. There are also ton of synthetic polymers: polyesther, polystyrene, nylon, Teflon…the list goes on and on.

Proton Exchange Membranes are made of a special type of polymer called an ionomer, which means that some of the subunits sprinkled throughout the matrix have an electric charge to them. Often, a product called Nafion is used.

The chemical structure of Nafion looks like this:

So…what’s going on here with this big jumble of sticks and letters? I’ve never taken organic chemistry, so this is a lot for me… but what I’m gathering is that when you take this big ugly ionomer structure and soak it in water, the part that I circled in pink (the sulfonic acid group) loses protons and those protons start hopping around from one acid site to another. If you apply an electrical bias, you can get all the protons to move in one direction. This is an electrical current!

Pressurized hydrogen from the fuel is forced through the anode while pressurized oxygen from the atmosphere is forced through the cathode.

An acid is used as a catalyst to split the H2 molecules into protons and electrons.

I had to go into a Wikipedia worm hole to remind/teach myself what it means to be acidic. Remember how the pH scale works? I didn’t. Here’s what I found out: pH is an acronym! It stands for potential of hydrogen. Acids have high concentrations of free hydrogen ions floating around, which means they are hungry for electrons. An acid will slurp up the electrons from the hydrogen, leaving only positively charged protons, which can move across the Nafion membrane.

Ok, so now the protons have made their way across the membrane to hang out with the oxygen molecules on the right side of the fuel cell and they leave their electrons behind on the left side.

That means the right side has a positive charge and the left side has a negative charge. This is a battery! This is exactly what a battery does, it’s just a separation of charge that creates a potential difference. If we connect a circuit between the two charged plates, we can force electrons through the circuit. This will power whatever we’ve got going on in the circuit.

To sum it all up, a hydrogen fuel cell is just a battery that’s charged up by hydrogen and oxygen gas. Acid is used as a catalyst to steal electrons from the hydrogen molecules, making them positively-charged protons which are then encouraged to move across an ionomer membrane. This creates a separation of charge that behaves like a battery.

As an aside, I’d like it to be known that this technology is yet another one of the many gifts given to us by the space industry! Tons of resources were devoted to the study of these Proton Exchange Membranes (PEMs) during NASA’s Gemini project in the 1960’s.

I get on my soap box about this all the time. Space exploration truly is the gift that keeps on giving. Space travel presents us with novel problems that require creative solutions. This forces the development of innovative new technology that we end up using for all kinds of other applications. The list of technology that came from the space industry goes on and on. I don’t know why so many people get all up in arms about how we shouldn’t be devoting resources to space exploration, but those people annoy me.

Anyway…space rant over. Back to fuel cells!

Why are fuel cell vehicles way better than battery powered vehicles?

It takes hours to fully charge a battery powered vehicle and even with a full charge you can’t go that far. Most electric cars can barely get half as far as a car with a full tank of gas. And then when the battery runs out, you have to wait around for a long time to recharge it. Hydrogen cars can go just as far as gasoline-powered cars, and you can refill the tank with hydrogen in the same amount of time that it takes to refill a car with gasoline. There are already hydrogen powered cars cruising the streets in California.

But we aren’t just talking about cars for fuel cell applications; Trains, planes, spacecraft, power for big industrial settings…all of this could be powered by hydrogen fuel cells to create a completely green economy.

Sounds great, right? A battery that works better and takes less time than the current Lithium-ion batteries and is also completely carbon neutral?

Wrong! Hydrogen fuel only counts as renewable energy if the process of making the hydrogen is renewable.

Currently, hydrogen is primarily made through steam-methane reforming. This is a process where high-temperature and high-pressure steam is combined with natural gas to create hydrogen gas. Natural gas is not all that green…

So, this lab’s goal is to develop green technology for creating hydrogen fuel using a process called water electrolysis. We want to mimic the process of photosynthesis, using solar energy to split water into oxygen and hydrogen and store the hydrogen molecules as fuel to power fuel cells.

As far as I can tell, the biggest rock star in the group is this woman named Grace. She takes responsibility for getting stuff done and moving the group forward. She’s graduating in spring which is going to be a big loss to the group, but an enormous gain to the organization she goes on to work for. She spent a couple hours with me explaining how water electrolysis works. Here's what I learned:   

Currently there are three different technologies out there for water electrolysis and they each have some big problems.

We’ve got:

1.) Liquid alkaline

2.)  Proton Exchange Membrane (PEM’s…yay we already learned about those above!)

3.) Anion Exchange Membranes (AEM)

So, how do each of these technologies work? Or I suppose I should say…how don’t they work?

Let’s start with liquid alkaline. I learned a lot from this cute Spanish lady. I included a screen shot of her talk below with a cartoon of the liquid alkaline electrolyzer. It's helpful to refer to the cartoon while I explain how it works. 

In this type of device, you have two metal plates separated by a porous foil that won’t let electrons through; only OH^- ions (these are called hydroxyls). I’m not going to do a deep dive on how that foil transports ions, but I suspect it’s some kind of polymer that forces the OH^- to hop from molecule to molecule, kind of like I described above with the acid group in the PEM. It also isn’t supposed to let gas through; only liquid. I guess this is achieved mechanically with design of the porous foil. The whole thing is submerged in a highly concentrated solution of potassium hydroxide, which is strongly alkaline.

Alkaline is on the opposite end of the pH scale from acids, instead of a bunch of free hydrogen floating around, it has free hydroxyl ions. Instead of wanting to steal electrons, it wants to steal protons.

So anyway, this device is submerged in a liquid that has a strong concentration of hydroxyl ions floating around, and its functionality leans heavily on those hydroxyls flowing through the membrane to react with stuff on the other side. In this case, we have water flowing in on the right side of the cell. Two water molecules react with two electrons to form hydrogen gas and two hydroxyls.

Why does the water react with two electrons and break down into its components? Does water just do this on its own? No, thankfully! Water doesn’t just spontaneously fall apart else we’d be in trouble considering how much water our bodies use to keep us alive. We need to force this reaction to take place by introducing electricity into our system. When you apply a huge voltage to water and add a little bit of electrolyte (the potassium hydroxide), you can force a current through the water which pulls electrons away from the solution at the cathode while forcing electrons into the solution at the anode.

Great, so now on the right side we have water flowing in and reacting with electrons from the electrode to create hydrogen gas and hydroxyls. Hydrogen gas is our product! It bubbles out and gets stored.  The hydroxyls are a liquid and flow over to the left side through the membrane where they become water, oxygen, and electrons. The oxygen gas bubbles out, this is a secondary product! The electrons make their way over to the positive side via a circuit and this supplies the electrons to continue the process on the right side.

Liquid alkaline electrolyzers are great because they are low cost and reliable. They are already used all over the place in big industrial settings for hydrogen production and ammonia synthesis for fertilizer. Unlike the other two technologies we will highlight below, they can be made of materials that are abundant on earth and cheap, like nickel! 

They suck because they suffer from this problem called “shunt current”. This is when current starts going through the tubing instead of the electrode. This becomes more of a problem as you increase the current: more of it goes through the wrong pathway. This is a problem is exacerbated because liquid alkaline electrolyzers have to be constructed as a huge stack containing multiple electrodes in series.

Another huge problem that can occur when you vary the current is that instead of bubbling out, the gas tends to cross over the microporous diaphragm and hydrogen and oxygen gas will mix. You know what happens when you mix hydrogen and oxygen?

This is a picture of an industrial hydrogen plant in China that went boom.

So, because of shunt currents and gas cross-over, you must have a steady current and therefore a non-variable power supply.

Well, you can’t really ask the sun to shine or the wind to blow in a non-variable way, therefore this technology can’t be paired with renewable energy. So, if we stick with liquid alkaline electrolyzers, water electrolysis is never going to be renewable.

X Liquid alkaline electrolyzers are out! They can't be paired with renewables! 

What’s next?

Next up, we have Proton Exchange Membranes (PEM’s), which I described in depth above when I was talking about fuel cells. When we were talking about it above, it was hydrogen in, electron current and water out. But now it’s electron current and water in, hydrogen out.

Look at this cute cartoon I found on Wikipedia! Staring at this for a while helps a lot!

So, as a reminder, the membrane in the middle moves protons across. Water is fed in and electrons are pulled out at the anode side, causing the water to break up into oxygen and protons. The protons move across the Nafion membrane because they are attracted to the abundance of negatively charged electrons that are being forced in at the cathode side. The protons gather up those free electrons and bubble out as hydrogen gas that gets stored. This is our product!

The fact that the thing in the middle is a membrane rather than a porous thing means we don’t have the gas cross-over problem that acid alkaline electrolyzers have. AND, we don’t have to have a bunch of electrodes in a stack so we don’t have the shunt current problem either. Great, so this technology is both safer and able to be paired with renewable energy!

So, what’s the downside with PEM’s? Well, instead of using an alkaline as a catalyst, we are using an acid. This is a problem because acid will chew away most metals. The only metals that are stable in an acidic environment are precious metals like iridium. Since iridium is one of the scarcest metals on earth, this is the bottle neck in PEM electrolyzer production.

X PEM’s won’t work either. They require metals that are too scarce and expensive!

Finally, onto Anion Exchange Membranes. Instead of exchanging protons through the membrane, we exchange hydroxyls...just like with the liquid alkaline electrolyzers! Hydroxyls are ions with a negative charge, the word for that is anions, this is where we get the name Anion Exchange Membrane. These devices get rid of the problems created by PEM’s because they can be used in an alkaline environment rather than an acidic environment. That means we can construct these with earth-abundant metals. 

The biggest problem for AEM’s is poor durability.

Many different polymers have been tried out as the anion-conducting membrane and they are all trash! AEM’s just fall apart faster than PEM’s and no one is totally clear on why that is. It sounds like my first project in this lab is supposed to be trying to understand how/why these things break. 

In the AEM community, it had been thought that the problem with these devices is that the membrane is limiting. However, it’s interesting that the rate of degradation is the same no matter what material the membrane is made from. To get a grip on what’s going on, researchers started incorporating a reference electrode in the middle of the stack. From this electrical information, they learned that it’s not the membrane that’s degrading, it’s the anode!

So, what I'll do is use my Focused Ion Beam to cut a bunch of cross-sections of used devices and unused devices. We’ll compare the two and see if there is any obvious physical degradation on the microscale. Hopefully, understanding how these devices are breaking will help us to make them stronger.

And that’s it! That’s what I’ll be working on for the foreseeable future (on the side of my regular full time job, that is)

So far, I've sliced up a healthy AEM and put all the slice images together into a movie. Here's what it looked like. Next up, I'll work on a used AEM to look for differences and make improvements on my observation methods. 

If you read this far, I am impressed and grateful for your mental fortitude! That's enough nerding out for now. See ya next time!

Voodoo

I'm am about to describe the things I found out via the internet about a religion that is affiliated with a culture that I am not part of and know very little about. I understand this is the quickest way to accidently say something totally stupid/ignorant/offensive. As such, I feel the need to explain why I am interested in learning about voodoo before I do anything else.

Voodoo is something I've wanted to know more about for a very long time but only recently looked into.

It started in college when I took an education class (one of many) in order to get an endorsement to teach science. The class was called Science and Society and in this class we were tasked with picking apart various non-western traditions (astrology, acupuncture...ect) and exposing all the reasons why these things were "pseudo-science". It seemed to me that a large part of the class was applying our western values to various belief systems that none of us could really claim to know anything about. It also seemed to me that the whole attitude behind this class was congratulating ourselves on our superior, well-informed, western beliefs and scoffing at cultures that don't base their beliefs on the all-mighty, infallible, scientific method. It felt like supremacy to me. I didn't like it.

One of the texts from this class was called "Voodoo Science: The Road From Foolishness to Fraud". I remember being annoyed at the title.

"That's someone's religion!" I said to my professor.

"Well, what would you call the book?" He asked.

"I don't know...Debunking Pseudoscience?"

"And then you'll never sell a book"

...And we moved on to talking about how people who believe in intelligent design aren't interested in facts or some other judgmental bullshit about other peoples' deep seated beliefs, as though ours are intrinsically better. It's the same kind of self righteousness that makes people think science and spirituality need to be pitted against each other instead of seen as allies on the mutual mission to explore our place in this universe.

I didn't do very well in this class because instead of turning in a paper ripping apart palm reading and going through the various ways the lines of your hand couldn't possibly mean anything to your personality or life, I turned in a research paper on palm reading. I had 6 people photo copy their hands for me and gave them personality tests and questionnaires about their life style. I examined the ways their palm features correlated or did not correlate with their personalities and lives. Even though my sample size was small, I did what I could to look for statistical significance. I made pie charts and histograms. I used peer reviewed resources from the British Journal of Medical Psychology and The Journal of Medical Science showing that schizophrenia has been shown to manifest itself in the hand. I tried to convey my feelings that perhaps the reason no one had ever done extensive research on this topic is because delving into non-western traditions is a career-ruiner in the science world. It makes you sound like a spooky, psuedo-scientific kook that no one wants to give grant money.

I put lots of work into it and wrote an awesome paper. But I got an F because according to my prof, I missed the point. I guess that's true, I didn't write about the ways palm reading is psuedo science. Maybe because I felt like the difference between science and pseudo science was extremely obvious to me and the whole assignment was insulting to my intelligence and I wanted to make a statement about my feelings on this class rather than do some busy work. I was a pain in the ass, what can I say? I'm pretty sure he didn't get it, though. He just thought I was kooky. I should be used to that by now, I suppose.

Anyway, this whole palm reading rant was just a chance for me to get on my soap box and a digression from the point: Voodoo. The use of the expression, "voodoo science" in lieu of "psuedo" or "fake" science got me thinking about the way we members of western culture, we offspring of the semitic religions, tend to view other belief systems. In my research on Voodoo, I found this syllabus from a college course on voodoo. I think it's pretty telling that right away the instructor felt the need to remind his students,

"First and foremost Voodoo is a religion. It is the dominant religion of Haiti. Many of the practices and descriptions of Voodoo belief may sound to us like rank superstition, but then, imagine the beliefs of Christianity to people who know nothing about it. Tell them about the trinity or the resurrection, or the presence of Jesus in the eucharist. Any of these practices which very intelligent Christians believe in the fullest would seem no less superstitious to someone unfamiliar with Christianity.
Thus I urge you to recognize that Voodoo is Haiti's religion, it is taken very seriously not merely by unlettered peasants, but many intelligent and learned members of the Haitian society believe as sincerely in Voodoo as do German theology professors in their Christianity. In no way do I expect you to believe in Voodoo; no more than I would expect you to convert to Islam if I taught a course on that religion. But, please do recognize that it is every bit as real a religion as the major religions of the world."

 Voodoo is particularly interesting because not only are westerners usually ignorant about it and consider it frivolous superstition...lots of them are actually afraid of it! Something people know nothing about and also fear? What better thing to nerd out on?

Mainly, I would like it to make it clear that in learning about Voodoo, I am coming from a place of respect and fascination.

So here we go! Voodoo!

It's a syncretic religion, which is a word I just learned. That means it's a combination of various belief systems and schools of thought. Voodoo is a combination of the African religion, Vodun, and Catholicism.

A relatively young religion, Voodoo started up in Haiti in the late 1600's/early 1700's when the French established an agricultural colony on the island. The success of this colony was completely driven by slave labor. In order to preserve their culture, the African slaves practiced their religion under the guise of practicing Catholicism. To this day, Voodoo is pretty much only practiced in Haiti and places where there are a large density of Haitian immigrants (like Louisiana).

Voodoo's main god is named Bondyé. Bondyé is far beyond human understanding and doesn't interact with humans or get involved in human affairs. In order to interact with the spiritual realm, Voodooist invite spirits, which they call lwa or loa, to possess them. These loa are the conduits between the physical and spiritual world.

The way Voodooists view spiritual possession seems to be very different than the way people from my cultural background view it. It's not like Regan from "The Exorcist" at all. In fact, Voodooists don't even use a word that translates to possession or ownership over someone's body. They use a word that translates to "ride" or "mount". A loa will "ride" a human body after being invited to do so in community ceremony where everyone participates. It is in this way that the spiritual world can transmit messages to the community.

 This guy has some cool stuff to say about spiritual possession in Voodoo. He talks about spiritual possession as letting your unconscious mind take over, not so much letting something else enter you. We should be wary of listening to any one person's relationship with Voodoo and using that to generalize, however. Voodoo is a tradition passed down orally, which allows for lots of individualism and the potential for the practice to vary widely from one person to the next. No matter how you slice it though, spiritual possession in Voodoo is seen as positive and necessary as opposed to evil and scary. Furthermore, it's something that well practiced Voodooists have complete control over.

The loa that ride community members during the ceremony are associated with Catholic saints. This was a necessary guise during the slave days. To evoke a certain loa, a symbol is drawn on the ground with sand, cornmeal, or other powdery substance. Each loa has their own symbol, called veves. They are usually really cool looking like a tattoo Bjork would get. Here are two of my favorites:

This is the veve for a loa known as Gran Bwa or Gran Bois, which means great woods or big tree. He's the kind hearted master of the wilderness and he's associated with the Catholic Saint Sebastian who was tied to a tree and shot with arrows. 

This is the veve for the loa known as Oguon, the loa credited for getting the Haitian slaves all riled up for the revolution. Oguon is associated with St. James. Maybe because James was killed with a sword and Oguon is usually pictured holding a machete. (That's just me hypothesizing) 

Gran Bwa is the master of the forests of vilokan, the Voodoo spirit realm. Vilokan is described as a forested and submerged island.

This is kind of how I imagine it. What a beautiful heaven!

Voodoo has a strong connection with nature and a special relationship with the mapou tree, which is used as a central part of their holiest ceremonies.

I'm pretty sure the movie Avatar drew lots of inspiration from Voodooism and Haitian history.

The mapou tree is seen as a connection between the physical and spiritual world and is used as a temple of sorts.

With such a close relationship to the spiritual realm and the dead, Voodooists know they have the power to use spirits for both positive and negative magic. They are dissuaded from negative magic by a deep concern for the well being of their ancestors. The Haitian Vodou Handbook by Kenaz Filan states, "Taking spirits who were violent in life and using them as attack dogs will only hinder their enlightenment. Instead of helping those spirits grow and to conquer their problems, you will be encouraging them to wallow in their weakness and become more, not less, flawed."

For some reason, Voodoo has become associated with devil worship for some. This certainly is the attitude of the Christian missionaries that were interviewed in Real Voodoo, a short film. This is obviously flawed logic because Voodooists don't even believe in the devil...why would they worship him?

Maybe it makes certain Christians more comfortable to describe any sort of spirituality they don't understand as devil worship. We've seen Christians associate pagan beliefs with the devil again and again throughout Christianity's historical conquest to convert everyone in the world. The very image of the devil with his goat lower half was based off pagan god Pan in attempts to scare people away from nature worship.

For a good description of Pan, read Tom Robbins' book Jitter Bug Perfume 

 Even though Christians have a long history of pointing fingers and yelling "Devil!", I think some of the main reasons Voodoo became associated with the devil are political.

To understand the evolution of Voodoo and the stereotypes that come with it, it's becomes very important to understand the history of Haiti.

During the European colonization of the Americas, the French got a hold of the western part of Hispañola, the island that the Haiti and the Dominican Republic share.

The French were successful at growing tobacco, sugar, indigo, and coffee but not so successful at enslaving the natives to do their work for them. To sustain their labor-driven society, the French started importing slaves from West Africa, the area that is now Benin. By the late 1700s, Haiti (then known as Saint Domingue) was the most profitable of all French colonies and known for being one of the most "brutally efficient" slave holding societies. They followed the code noir (the black code) which was a document written by the French government that basically instructed the colonists to treat the Africans worse than the most soulless person would ever treat a dog. Seriously, read that shit. It's disgusting.

So brutal were conditions for slaves, that many died within a few years of being imported. Many African mothers were suspected of abortions and infanticide to prevent their babies from growing up in slavery.

In Benin the Africans had practiced Vodun. This evolved into Voodoo in Haiti due to the code noir's strict policies on Catholicism being the only religion practiced by anyone. Code noir also had strict rules about slaves gathering. However, since black slaves out numbered their white masters 10 to 1...this may have been hard to keep track of and enforce. This gave the slaves opportunity to gather and practice Voodoo.

Probably the most famous Voodoo gathering was named Bois Caiman and happened on August 22nd, 1791. During this ceremony, the slaves discussed their resentment of the conditions forced upon them and evoked Oguon (pictured above) who is credited with planting the seeds of revolution in their souls. That night, the slaves revolted. They killed all the whites they met and set fire to the plantations. This was at the same time as the French Revolution so the French government really didn't have their shit together enough to defend the colony. On top of that, Haiti's slave revolt and successive cry for independence made the new leadership of France ask themselves, "how strong ARE our convictions?  I mean, if poor people in France get rights...why don't black people in Haiti?"

All of these factors combined made Haiti the first and only state to ever be formed from a slave rebellion. In addition, Haiti and The United States were the only two countries in America to become sovereign nations before the 1900's. Not bad, Haiti.

With the onset of the revolution and Haiti's successive independence, the remaining white plantation owners and the slaves they were able to retain fled to Louisiana. As a result of this exodus, the population of New Orleans doubled.

The French, undoubtably bitter at getting their asses handed to them for being total dicks, starting spreading propaganda about the evil Haitians and their worship of the devil. Regardless, Haiti was left alone for a couple hundred years. That is, until 1915 when US president Woodrow Wilson got all bent out of shape because Germans were moving to Haiti and were pretty good at mingling with the Haitians. The Germans had been more successful than any other Europeans at marrying into Haitian families and becoming land owners. At the time, Haiti had a law that said foreigners could not own land. US troops were sent to Haiti to "protect US interests". The entire point was to change the law so that foreigners could own land and Americans could profit from Haiti's rich farmland instead of the Haitians.

US troops occupied Haiti for 19 years. During this time, Haitians were pretty much enslaved again. The National Guard ruled Haiti with a violent regime and the Haitians were left with no choice but to support themselves doing back breaking labor building roads for the US military.

Why did the US get away with this? I'll bet that it was because of erroneous propaganda that made Haiti out to be a nation of devil worshippers. A Christian nation like the US is probably not going to feel all that bad about taking away the rights and sovereignty of a nation they deem evil.

For such a community-based religion, Voodoo sure has had to overcome a lot of hatred and ignorance. It wasn't until 2003 that Voodoo was even declared an official religion within Haiti.

Along with healing the wounds of oppression and slavery, the catastrophic earthquake that occurred in Haiti in 2010 has made lots of work for Haitians in rebuilding their nation. I hope that Haitians can turn to their culture and spirituality as a means of empowering themselves and defining their own destiny.

As a closer, watch this interview with La Belle Deesse, Voodoo priestess.

"Voodoo teaches us how to love one another, be there for one another and never let each other down. Don't betray your sisters and brothers. If they have a problem you stand by their side and fight till the end."

The Beetle I Found

I’ve been given a tool to feed my obsessive nerdyness. This tool happens to be a company that makes microscopes and I totally tricked someone into hiring me there. 

SO ANYWAY. I found this Beetle. I found it on the black top of some airport. It was all dead and dehydrated. I picked it up because I thought I could glue it to a canvas and make a cool painting around it. It looked like this:

Photo Credit to JJ Blackwood

But I happened to be hanging out with a coworker who suggested we take it to work and look at it. 

So then, I cut off it's leg and I cut off it's head and my friend Marc stuck it into his Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). It looked FREAKY. I'll show you in a sec but first you need to know that it was a pristonychus terricola (I think) based on a picture I found in a library book called The Anatomy of Insects & Spiders by Claire Beverly and David Ponsonby. 

This is a really cool book because not only is it full of historical drawings that are from as far back as 1255 but it also talks a lot about uses for these bugs in ancient cultures. Turns out, Egyptians were really into Beetles and their traditions around it are fascinating and worth their own blog which I might get to someday. 

Ok, so first of all...let's look at it's leg. 

We are about to look at this part.

This is the hook at the end of it's foot. I was playing with the cutest june bug that I found when I was in Tennessee last weekend. It was crawling all over me and I kept thinking about how it's digging it's little micro-hooks into my skin but they can't cause me pain because they are too small.
That scale bar in the bottom right hand corner says 500 microns. To give you a frame of reference, a strand of human hair can be 17-50 microns for people of European descent and 56-181 microns for people of African descent. If you want to measure the diameter of your own hair, it's really easy! All you need is a laser. Follow these steps. If you are using one of those red laser pointers then it's a helium neon laser and the wavelength, λ, is around 633 nanometers. 

This is what I like to call the leg vertebrae! See in the drawing above how beetles have a whole bunch of joints on the leg? You know what I just found out about these joints? They work like screws! Instead of a ball-and-socket joint like humans have, beetles joints have threads that screw into place. They can do a full 360 rotation and are much harder to dislocate than human joints. 

Here is a close-up of one of the leg vertebrae. It's a beetle-knee!  I think the spikes are for defense based on the fact that they kind of look like medieval armor. I don't know what enemies beetles have besides birds and things that could just swallow their little 10-micron-wide knee weapons whole...but it probably makes them look tough to other bugs.
The schmutz all over it is probably dirt or dust specks. 

This is one of the coolest pictures in here, in my opinion. It's looking into the inside of the leg from where we cut it off. That's right...EXOSKELETON. Besides the support structures, it's totally hollow on the inside! If this beetle hadn't been dehydrating in the sun when it found me, it would have been full of goo.
Exoskeletons are made out of chitin, which is a long-chain polysaccharide. According to Wikipedia, "chitin has some unusual properties that accelerate the healing of wounds in humans". The Egyptians totally knew about that, fyi. As I learn more, I'm starting to suspect that beetles are actually magical. 

Ok, next we are going to look at this long antennae here.

Look at all the little hair follicles! Antennas are for sensing, and are insects' primary olfactory senses. In other words, these are the smellers. I tried to figure out how they work but then got really confused by all the jargon. Maybe one of you bio people can explain it to me? Thaddaeus, I'm looking at you. 

OK, compare the texture of the big antennae to the smaller one.

This one.

Super smooth! They must have two entirely different functions. Like, one for sensing and one for collecting particles...or, something like that. I'm not really sure. 

This is the end of one of the long antennas. The antennas are jointed just like the knees and this one was broken off at one of the joints when I found it. This is really cool because you can see those screw threads I was talking about where their joints come together! See them?
I think the stuff on the end of it is a little speck of pollen.

This is that pollen up close. It's also got this thread stuff all over it. Seems too small to be spider web....maybe a bacteria?

This is that same thread stuff that was all over it. I have no idea what this is.  I looked up SEM images of bacteria and spider webs and they don't really look like this. What do you all think? 

Here it is close-up. See how it's kind of braided like rope but then it's got this gooey part like snot? 

Here is part of it's head. It's got a chunk of dirt and also a little crawly thing. 

Here's the crawly thing up close. Maybe a little bacteria? It's got those little leg-looking things. I actually have no idea what this is. It's hard to put "5um long wormy thing with legs" into google and get meaningful results. I wish I knew more about this stuff so I knew what I was looking at!

Ok, I guess that's enough nerding out for now. See ya next time!




UPDATE: My friend Jessyka told me that the crawly thing might be a nematode. Here is a picture I found online of a nematode:

Yep....looks like it. Nematodes are a parasite to beetles and are used as organic pest control. Maybe that's what killed my beetle. Check out nematode pest control

21 cm cosmology

I haven't blogged in a very long time! I've been spending most of my intellectual energy and free time trying to learn spanish and graduate college instead of nerding out. However, for the next two months I plan on: 1.) Being really broke and 2.) Having lots of free time. This means many more blogs are on the way! Suggestions are welcome. In the meantime, I'd like to share a paper I wrote for my cosmology class this quarter.  It used to be full of lots of equations to describe the quantum behavior of hydrogen but I can't figure out how to insert equations in this thing. Does anyone know how to do that?

 It's a little different than the way I usually write in this blog but maybe you'll dig it anyway!

21 Centimeter Astronomy

The Dark Age

Applications of quantum mechanics have proven to be of great utility in the expanding field of radio cosmology. As astronomers begin to piece together answers to the question, “what did the early universe look like?”, the quantum model of hydrogen plays a large role. Understanding the nature of hydrogen’s hyperfine structure and it’s interaction with radiation becomes crucial to this investigation.

Hydrogen has a forking energy structure: each branch separates into a different set of branches. This branching begins with electrons, which exist in quantized energy levels, known as orbitals, around hydrogen nuclei. Within these orbitals the electrons are subject to two types of angular momentum: orbital (associated with motion of the center of mass) and spin (associated with motion about the center of mass).  While it should be noted that electrons are fundamental particles without interior structure, (and therefore cannot literally spin) this analogy is useful in analyzing the splitting behavior of orbiting electrons. Suffice it to say that electrons carry an intrinsic angular momentum which can alter the total energy.  It is spin that creates the hyperfine structure of hydrogen.

According to classical electrodynamics, a rotating electric charge creates a magnetic dipole. This sets up the electron as a magnetic dipole. The proton, like the electron, has an intrinsic spin, which sets up its own dipole moment in the same direction as the proton’s spin. The dipole of the proton is more complex because it is a composite structure, made up of three quarks, which gives a different gyromagnetic ratio. The proton’s dipole moment creates a magnetic field.

            The difference between levels in hydrogen’s hyperfine structure is an artifact of the interaction between the electron’s dipole moment and the proton’s magnetic field. If the dipole moments of the electron and proton point in the same direction (parallel) the energy of this configuration is slightly higher than if the dipoles point in the opposite direction (antiparallel). It is found that the frequency of a photon emitted during the transition from parallel to antiparallel is 1420MHz, which corresponds to a wavelength of c/v=21 cm. This falls within the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum.

The probability of this transition taking place is so small that it is classified as forbidden. To be precise, the probability of such an event taking place is 2.9*10^-15 1/s, or once every 10 million years. As a result, it can never be manufactured in a laboratory. However, evidence of this transmission is detected pervasively in all directions as astronomers look into space. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake considered the 21cm line to be so ubiquitous and universal that they utilized it on the Pioneer Plaque of the Voyager Mission as a single unit measurement in defining length and time. The omnipresence of this extremely improbable detection indicates that the universe contains a tremendous amount of neutral hydrogen.

The dumbbell looking thing the the upper left hand corner represents hydrogen undergoing a spin-flip transition. For those of you that don't know about this plaque, it's floating out in space with the hopes that someday aliens will find it. This plaque and the rest of the bizarro messages on board the Voyager definitely deserves it's own blog. Hopefully I'll get to that soon!

Of special importance to big bang cosmologists are the 21cm transmissions detected at redshifts between z=25 and z=10^3. Radiation detected in this range comes from a period between two important epochs of gas phase change in the early universe: recombination and reionization. To give a brief history of the state of hydrogen throughout time, shortly after the big bang, the universe was radiation dominated. During this period, protons and electrons could not combine to form neutral atoms without being quickly ionized by energetic photons. However, the universe cooled as it expanded, eventually allowing for this reaction to take place. This is known as the epoch of recombination and took place around redshift z=1100.  For several hundred million years following recombination there were no radiating sources, only cold, dark hydrogen. For this reason, the period is referred to as the Dark Age. In this epoch the universe was transparent, meaning photons could travel unimpeded through space. This is important to cosmologists as it means there is much information retained in the photons. The second epoch of the universe, known as reionization, occurred after the gravitational interaction between neutral hydrogen atoms allowed for the formation of the first structures large enough to radiate and ionize surrounding atoms. Astronomers interested in probing the structure of the universe between these two phase changes, when the universe was dominated by cold, dark hydrogen, must examine the fingerprints of such an era:  21cm photons.

Photon emission due to the spin-flip transition of hydrogen is temperature dependent. This means as 21 cm photons are released they will catalyze other reactions from neutral hydrogen nearby. By mapping the intensity of this radiation, cosmologists can develop a precise picture of the topography of the universe during the Dark Age. This is predicted to provide crucial constraints on current models for dark matter and dark energy. Furthermore, neutral hydrogen that has been ionized by those first radiating structures will appear as dark spots in the 21cm background. By examining these anisotropies, cosmologists can gain a firmer understanding of how the process of universal reionization occurred.

Research involving the 21cm line places cosmology on the verge of a new era. However, this field has a long way to go as observation of this transmission is extremely difficult. After redshift, this line is observed on Earth deep into the radio spectrum. This presents many challenges in collecting data as photons in the 21cm spectrum are drowned out by background noise from television transmission and the ionosphere. In the last few years, progression has been made both theoretically and observationally: theoretically, computer simulations of reionization have achieved larger dynamic range and can make more reliable predictions; observationally, plans have been made for four machines to start sensitive 21cm detection in the near future. Precise observations of the 21cm line from distant redshifts promise to revolutionize our understanding of the early universe.   

Sources

Griffiths, David. Quantum Mechanics. 2nd. Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, 2005. Print.

Pritchard, Jonathan, and Loeb Abraham. "Evolution of the 21 cm Signal Throughout Cosmic History."

Miguel, Morales, and Wyithe Stuart. "Reionization and Cosmology with 21-cm Fluctuations." Annual Rev. Astron. Astrophys.. (2010)

Perception, LSD, and Synesthesia

PERCEPTION. It's crazy, right? The way you view the world around you depends so much on your current state of mind. Whether your perception is altered by your mood, illness, or drugs, it’s plasticity is almost frightening.

Of course, one of the easiest and most marked alterations you can make to your perception is via hallucinogenic drugs. I’ve never tried them myself just because the thought of letting my imagination become my reality kind of terrifies me, to be honest. I don’t think I am emotionally mature enough to deal with the monsters that my personal psyche would create for me. Not yet, anyway. At some point in my future, however, I would love to hallucinate. I think it would be a fascinating experience. I’ve heard that some people are forever changed after taking LSD. You can talk to God. You can come to life-shattering realizations about the universe. Your spirituality and worldview might be forever altered. Like this guy. On the darker side, however, some people come out of LSD trips with permanent psychosis.

It’s hard to find accurate accounts of what people actually experience while on LSD. Google will bring up government websites with obvious bias toward scaring people away from drugs or hippy forums that seem pretty sketchy and not very reputable. Since the experiences of those who take acid are so personal and individualized, I think the best resources available to me are personal anecdotes.

I spent a little time watching people take LSD and talk about their trips on YouTube. Apparently to some people it sounds like a good idea to take video of them selves doing illegal things and post it on the internet. It’s amazing how many people will willfully and enthusiastically incriminate them selves. I did find some interesting stories though. This one is good.

He brings up the monumental question, “what is reality?”. Questioning what is real seems to be common among LSD users. Some people, like the hippy I linked above, might challenge the idea of reality for the rest of their lives. You can see, hear, smell, taste and feel “unreal” things while you are on acid. To the tripper, these things are completely tangible. How could that not eff with your perception of reality?

It’s difficult for our minds to grasp the fact that all sensory perceptions are just electrical and chemical signals in our brains. The reason my computer screen looks the way it does is because photons of a certain frequency stimulate my retina and cause it to send signals to my brain. The same goes for all the information that my brain is taking in from my surrounding: sounds, smells, temperature, air pressure, everything. My brain uses electrical and chemical processes to somehow construct my understanding of what is around me. This understanding of my surroundings is projected into my consciousness and it is the only way I can relate to reality. If the mechanism that allows us to interact with reality is altered, then our personal reality is altered. This can be a significant, permanent change.

If people are forever changed by taking LSD, then it must be permanently altering the structure or function of the brain somehow. But how?

Well… I guess first of all I need to figure out what LSD is, exactly.

LSD stands for lysergic acid diethylamide. So it’s made from reacting two chemicals: lysergic acid and diethylamide.

What are those two things?

Looks like lysergic acid is the good part…

Lysergic acid is found in a fungus known as ergot, it commonly infects rye. More specifically, ergot has high concentrations of a chemical called ergoline. It is from ergoline that lysergic acid is extracted.

When ergoline is ingested it does some knarly things to the body including constricting blood vessels, causing convulsions, headaches, nausea, vomiting, and most famously: hallucinations.

People have known about ergot for a long time. Since the middle ages, controlled doses were used by midwives to induce abortions. There is also evidence of its (intentional?) use thousands of years before this as ergot was found in the stomachs of prehistoric human remains preserved in bogs. Perhaps it was used in prehistoric rituals of spirituality.

It has also been ingested accidently on several famous occasions. Turns out ergot is a trifling little fungus that may have had a hand in several historical events. Many historians have suggested that the behavior of the young women who were “bewitched” during the Salem witch trials was due to ergot poisoning. It has even been linked to The Great Fear, wide spread panic among peasants that helped spur on the French Revolution.

As for the D part of LSD, diethylamide, it’s a bunch of carbons, hydrogens, and a nitrogen strung together. You can get it from mixing ethanol and ammonia. I’m not quite sure of its purpose in LSD. It might be a potentiator, a chemical that enhances the hallucinogenic effects of the lysergic acid. With a potentiator like this, you can just take a drop and go on a mental vacation without the unpleasant effects from the ergoline like vomiting, diarreah, gangrene, ect…Diethylamine sounds like a plus.

OK, so what is it doing to your brain?

Well, LSD is structurally very similar to a chemical called serotonin. 

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a chemical that transmits signals from neurons.

This is how neurotransmitters work:

Neurons have lots of little packets of chemicals inside them (like serotonin). When a neuron receives an electrical impulse from the nervous system it converts this electrical signal into a chemical signal by releasing the little packets of neurotransmitters.

Here is a really cool animation.

This one is not as cool but it explains what is happening.

The neurotransmitters swim around in your brain and bond with receiver cells and this causes many varied responses in your body. In the case of serotonin, it might affect your mood, anxiety levels, appetite…the list goes on and on.

I didn’t know much about serotonin so I did a few google searches and I found this great blog by neuroscientist Sheril Kesenbaum that gives a fantastic run down on serotonin. 

Man, I tried really hard to understand what serotonin was all about. One thing Dr. Kesenbaum said that made me feel much better is that no one really understands serotonin because the serotonin system is insanely complicated. Serotonin has LOTS of different functions in our bodies and it fulfils these functions in many different ways.  

When the LSD molecule enters our brain, since it looks a lot like serotonin, it binds to serotonin receptors. This is where LSD gets unpredictable: sometimes it will excite the receptor and sometimes it will inhibit it. The effect is a flood of serotonin or no serotonin at all. This is happening at several serotonin receptors throughout the brain.  When a person takes LSD they are messing with their natural ecosystem of serotonin on a grand scale. For reasons no one understands entirely, this causes a marked change in your sensory perceptions.

LSD distorts sensory perceptions in several ways. My favorite is called synesthesia. This is where sensory perceptions tend to blend together. IE: A person may see music or hear/feel color. This word comes from a real medical condition. Ok, after reading up on it a little, synesthesia is actually my new favorite thing. Synesthesia is a real, documented psychological condition in which the stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to the immediate stimulation of another, unrelated pathway. So, for some people the sound of middle C on a piano might smell like roses or maybe every time they see a humming bird they will taste chocolate or if they have a toothache it will have a color, smell, and taste.

The most common manifestation of synesthesia is that letters and numbers will have a certain intrinsic color. IE: G is orange. 8 is purple. They just are. And yes, they are actually SEEING these colors along with the numbers or letters, not just imagining them. The most compelling evidence is that brain scans reveal the visual color processing sections of a synesthete’s brain lighting up when they are shown a certain number or letter. Furthermore, the colors they report seeing are consistent. If they see J as pink at age 9 it will still be pink when they are 32, and the same goes for all other letters and numbers that have a color. If this were just an artifact of imagination it’s hard to imagine that such remarkable consistency would be maintained throughout a person’s lifetime.

Since you don’t question what you are experiencing until you realize that everyone else is not experiencing the same thing, many people don’t even realize that they have this condition. I found this book on synesthesia called The Frog Croaked Blue and there is this cool quote from a woman who describes the moment when she realized that she perceives the world differently than everyone else,

 “I did not 'discover' my synesthesia until I made a comment to my parents in my mid-twenties about a number. They were disputing some number that I had given them as a statistic and I said, by way of proof, that it could not have been seventy and had to be forty because it was a red number with a warm feel, and it was only halfway up the line to 100. It is extremely strange when the two people who know you better than anyone else regard you as though you were a complete alien. I then went on to describe how my numbers are not only colored, but also have very distinct patterns, as does time - the time of day, days of the week, months within the year, and the years themselves.”

Most synethetes view this as a gift that helps them excel at certain tasks such as spelling, arithmetic, memorization, composing... the list goes on. Two famous composers, Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov once had a public disagreement about what color certain keys were! I have no idea of the circumstances of the argument but I really like to imagine these two heartily debating the color of a sound in a room full of uncomfortable people who have no idea what they are talking about because to everyone else, sounds are not colors.

Many brilliant people have been known to be synethetes. As a child, Vladimir Nabokov insisted that the colors of the letters on his blocks were all wrong.  Physicist Richard Feynman describes his colored equations,

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

One of the things I find the most interesting about synesthesia is that certain perceptions seem to be consistent among different synesthetes. For example, for those who have color/letter synesthesia: S will tend to be yellow, A tends to be red, O tends to be white or black. Different people tend to agree on the intrinsic color of certain letters!

Ok, come with me into the weeds for a sec…

If one person can observe something that is completely tangible to them, it doesn’t necessarily constitute reality. BUT if several people see the same thing isn’t THAT reality? I mean…if you see something unbelievable the first thing you will probably do is ask someone else, “Do you see that too?” and if they do then you know it’s real and not just in your head. If more than one person can agree on seeing the same thing then …What IS this? Is this a different reality?

Synesthetes’ brains must be different from the brains of regular/boring people like me some how. But how? It seems that no one is really sure.

If LSD is temporarily inducing these effects in people who don’t have synesthesia and LSD is known to affect the serotonin system…perhaps it has something to do with serotonin?

Do you have synesthesia? I would love to talk to you about the awesome way you see the world around you!


Obviously, much more research should be done on perception, LSD, and synesthesia, but alas, this subject seems to have widely been abandoned by psychologists and neuroscientists. Perhaps it's a reputation ruiner these days. I did find this 2010 project from the Multidisciplinary Association For Psychadelic Study, though. They used a mysticism scale to quantify spiritual experiences! Imagine that. The mysticism scale was developed by this guy named Ralph W. Hood in 1975. It's 32 questions that are thought to measure mystic experience scientifically. Check it out.  


LSD seems to be a powerful gateway toward an understanding of oneself and our role in the surrounding universe and should perhaps be used in that context. However, while breaking down psychological barriers of the mind can be an enlightening learning experience, it should be noted that these barriers exist for a reason. Sounds like with enough LSD use, it's possible to lose your ability to relate to others, to reality, and effectively, to yourself.  

I think a good way to end this post is with this interview from Saul Williams on LSD and how to use it. Smart dude. He's got some good things to say. Have a watch.