If you’re making your own ammunition you’d like to be consistent in your process. First of all, there are the safety issues associated with overloading the charge in a cartridge. But even if you’re “close enough” to ensure safety, consistency of the load is important if you’re going to achieve consistency in the shot. So Read More

So you have to admire the goal set out by the producer of this video. He’s trying to bring some scientific integrity to his YouTube channel. Specifically, he’s trying to determine the effectiveness of four different gun-cleaning compounds. He begins by saying that he’s going to break up the discussion and demonstration into three parts. Read More

The internet offers rapid access to more information than you could ever process. It’s my personal opinion that this has helped companies realize that the best way to get people to use their products is to provide their customers (and potential customers) with the information they need to understand HOW to use their products, even Read More

Even where we have quibbles with a YouTube video, we can usually find good elements in most we bring to your attention. This one, though, just rubbed me the wrong way. It illustrates the use of the precision scale to measure the mass of the reactants, then the products of a chemical reaction. But, although Read More

Turns out, the more practice you have at a task, the better you are at it. All right, so that isn’t such a shocking result. But it does extend to fields where you might not anticipate it being all that important. For example, if you need to get a tooth restoration removed, the tooth inevitably Read More

YouTube is kind of like the internet in microcosm. It puts video publishing at anyone’s fingertips, leading to amazingly extensive access to information. On the other hand, there is no filter applied to the information, which means neither the quality nor the content is checked by anyone. We certainly would not recommend any video that Read More

How would you go about measuring the particle size of a grain ration? Perhaps even more important, WHY would you want to measure particle size of a grain ration? As to the first question, the answer is pretty straightforward. Sample your grain and swirl it around on a grid mesh. Take whatever gets caught in Read More

With today’s array of sophisticated analytical equipment, there’s really no excuse for failing to characterize the health and safety of our environment.  The pathway has been blazed, thanks to work such as that of two University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists, reported in this 1995 paper.  They describe the laboratory protocol for using inductively-coupled plasma mass spectrometry to Read More