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Chemistry mistakes on TV - Have you got any to share?


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Posted

Hi everyone!

 

Brainiac - a mistake in a chemical formula name!

 

Brainiac - I'm shure most of you have heared of it - Science abuse and its quite fun to watch too (Especially the Thermite, oooo Thermite) :)

 

Anyway, on the Exploding Caravan Golf the person speaking said it was Sodium Carbonate ([ce]Na_2CO_3[/ce]) but was labelled [ce]NaNo_3[/ce] which is clearly Sodium Nitrate!

 

Big mistake there.... ;)

 

Another thing that annoys me are these adverts that go on about all this miricle anti-rinkle formulas and the like. When you lookup the stuff they say most of it is a load of crap and infact most of it is not even found!

 

Amazing the things they put on TV... :rolleyes:

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Posted

To my opinion Brainiac is sheer crap. The only thing the program does is grow k3wls. It may be fun to watch, but the scientific contents is 0.0, or even less than 0.0 (i.e. sheer nonsense).

 

Btw, NaCO3 would be a rather interesting chemical which I certainly would like to do some research on :D . What you probably meant is Na2CO3 ;) .

Posted
To my opinion Brainiac is sheer crap. The only thing the program does is grow k3wls. It may be fun to watch' date=' but the scientific contents is 0.0, or even less than 0.0 (i.e. sheer nonsense).

 

Btw, NaCO3 would be a rather interesting chemical which I certainly would like to do some research on :D . What you probably meant is Na2CO3 ;) .[/quote']

 

Thats the one - my fault (Forgot that the [ce]CO_3^{-2}[/ce] had a -2 charge!) :(

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Posted
You mean the [math]CO_3^{2-}[/math] :D

Srry' date=' couldn't resist. DON'T KILL ME!!!!!!! :eek:[/quote']

 

 

Its really not my day today... :-( And would you believe it the LaTeX is not working now ... ;)

 

Ryan Jones

Posted
Fortunately we all are human ;) including RyanJ ;)

 

We are? Human is that a species of some sort? :D

 

Well... I was last time I checked... or was I? ... Yes I was and still am :D

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Posted

I've heard nasty things about Atropine. I just so happen to have a certain plant that produces the chemical. It has pretty flowers :) I've heard of cats dieing after eating the leaves. lol.

Posted
I've heard nasty things about Atropine. I just so happen to have a certain plant that produces the chemical. It has pretty flowers :) I've heard of cats dieing after eating the leaves. lol.

 

Sounds pretty un-nice, I'm not going to eat any I'll tell you that :P

 

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Posted

Yeah. Dumb...people.. eat it.... And die. If it didn;t happen so often you could give them all Darwin awards. They ARE doing the gene pool a favor..

Posted
Yeah. Dumb...people.. eat it.... And die. If it didn;t happen so often you could give them all Darwin awards. They ARE doing the gene pool a favor..

 

LOL, I'd say - the award could say "Nature does not support stupidity - you are the weakest genetic link, Goodbye!"

 

 

Cheers,

 

Ryan Jones

Posted

Atropine (from atropa belladonna or deadly nightshade) is a muscarinic antagonist. It can be used to counter the effects of certain nerve agents working as muscarinic agonists. It actually has several medical uses, for example it can be used to influence heart rate by acting upn the autonomic nervous system, or by direct application. Another is to cause pupillary dilation during eye examinations or cataract surgery.

  • 3 years later...
Posted

Forget what TV "Science" show it was on, possibly "How it's Made" or similar.

The narrator explained that it (whatever they were making) was rinsed with pure water which has no pH!

Posted

I yell at the screen sometimes when I see stupidity...like the mythbusters episode where they put an entire pair of blue jeans in a huge bomex (!!! can't they afford pyrex or kimax) beaker full of H2SO4 and HNO3 (They appeared to be reagent grade which further confuses me as to why they were using cheap bomex stuff, which is thin walled and often has bubbles in it). I haven't seen the episode in a while, but I don't think there was an ice bath, so the reaction ran away and started spewing NO2 fumes.

 

Also on the hindenberg-thermite episode, they failed to test all combinations of experimental conditions. It was really glaring to me, but probably not to most people.

 

At any rate, the show is a lot better than brainiac, despite a lot of little mistakes and a few big ones.

Posted

Climate talks on the news always does a great job at messing up chemistry. CO is called carbon dioxide.

 

The best one however is the articleI once read (so not on tv) about water treatment plants. They explained the units that were used to express the pollution in the water. It was "mmol/l", or "minimolecules per liter". Made me wonder how small molecules can get in their part of the universe. Pretty small, I'd say. :D

Posted

One of the most glaring to me was in the movie "The World Is Not Enough". Yes, it's a Bond movie so I'm expected to suspend some reality, but when he brought half of a nuclear warhead of Plutonium to Elektra and said "Don't worry, it's safe." I nearly threw up. That much plutonium would be RED hot from the natural radioactivity, and everyone in the area would be toast. Then, the final battle taking place inside of an ACTIVE nuclear reactor had me wretching. It's a case of "ignorance is bliss" because knowing ANYTHING about chemistry and radioactivity made the movie unwatchable. Aside from that, it was a good movie. (If you also ignore Denise Richards being a nuclear scientist).

Posted

Well... the newest Bond movie isn't much better. There's the hotel that is powered by fuel cells (so far nothing weird). But each room has its own individual fuel cell for power (isn't it easier to install some cables like most places have?) and their own hydrogen storage (obviously resulting in the whole place being blown up). Not really so much a chemistry mistake as a chemical engineering mistake.

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