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Saturday, October 17, 2009

Homework on a Saturday

Pretty flowers growing out of a tree stump

Mitosis pancakes!

Extracting pigments from spinach leaves/Thin-Layer Chromatography

It's Saturday afternoon! I am doing French homework and Organic Chemistry homework and playing Cafe World on Facebook (which is really fun and you should play too) and watching Scrubs. I slept for twelve hours last night because I've been sick and having trouble staying asleep for very long and finally borrowed some of Cal's Nyquil.

On to more important business, something we learned in ochem: How Cyanide Works.
Cyanide is the perfect killer if you play it right. Cyanide is attached to a cyclical chain of carbons (cyanide is CN-), and mammals have an enzyme that slice up that bond to the carbon chain and turn cyanide back into its ionic form that then flows through your blood. Another important fact to know is that cyanide is metabolized. So you put some of the cyanide molecule into a drink, some coffee or something, and then you leave and go shopping for a few hours. When you come back, your husband is dead! From cyanide poisoning. But because you happened to be gone for so long, your husband has been dead for a while and all of the cyanide that was in his body has metabolized out of it. There will be no trace of it on a tox screen and hey, you just got away with murder. Now you will have to make sure he drinks a lot of fluids so that the cyanide won't be in a puddle next to his body or something like that, but those are just minor details.

Enjoy!

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