Great Balls of Carbon!
...ok, they're actually teeny-tiny charcoal spheres.
These are little black balls I found inside of an old hard drive I just took apart. They are charcoal. Activated charcoal pellets to be exact. Like tiny versions of the charcoal briquettes you might use in your barbeque grill, which were invented by Henry Ford.
You burn something with carbon in it (most things in the universe) while providing lots of oxygen. The result is very porous charcoal. The pores are shallow like the dimples on a golf ball. They increase the surface area and help soak up poisons and other contaminants like gases in the air.
In hard drives they're in a little cup with a vent on one side and gauze on the other. This acts as an air filter for the hard drive. I had the same setup for my aquarium when I raised pufferfish! A gauze pouch with charcoal pellets for cleaning the water.
SiliCON vs SiliCONE vs Carbon
The carbon pellets are also super bouncy. Like, oddly bouncy. Way more than the polymer ball we made a few posts back. That surprised my, but a quick glance at the Periodic Table shows that carbon lives right above silicon, which you'll remember from the non-Newtonian fluid and polymer post and the fast that it's what makes Silly Putty so bouncy...well, that's silicone with an "e" at the end polymer made from silicon. Carbon forms much more stable bonds than silicon, but it likes other carbons to bind to. Silicon likes oxygen, and although it's less stable than carbon bonds silicon plenty of molecules-great molecular subunits linked together (very bouncy). Silicone rubber (which is a silicon polymer) has a Young's Modulus of 0.001 and carbon is less elastic at 4.1.
Balls bounce one way, balls bounce the other way. Meow.
Here is one on the xyz stage of my microscope. The white disk is actually the other side of the black cup/filter assembly it was in with a zillion of its pals. A little ways below I have a better photo of this cup.
Here's some various videos made with 3 different cameras, a very nice microscope and some really terrible out-of-sync lighting. This gives a good sense of their miniscule size.
The very same from my previous video: little black balls I found inside of a hard drive I just took apart.
They are charcoal. Activated charcoal pellets to be exact. Like tiny versions of the charcoal briquettes you might use in your barbecue grill, which were invented by Henry Ford.
They're in a little cup with a vent on one side and gauze on the other. This acts as an air filter for the hard drive. I had the same setup for my aquarium when I used to raise Figure-Eight pufferfish!
In this video I put them under a very nice microscope...but with a very cheap ($1.99 used) webcam and terrible side lighting. My microscope has very, very, very good lighting for looking at slides and other things properly prepared for microscopy with the light coming from *underneath* the slide-not from the side.
Also a point of annoyance: I was testing a crappy webcam (an ancient GE model) that I bought used for $1.99. The flicker is from the LED flashlight not syncing with the webcam.
So, a lot of ugliness on this one. Check my other videos for better cameras (a big Canon in HD, but also my cheap Samsung cellphone and Nexus tablet have way, way, way better video than this GE webcam).
This video was: cheap camera, cheap flashlight just as a quick peak. On the blog post I'll put some better looking still photos.
For a $1.99 I finally have a webcam. At some point I might bash the lens off of it and point its CCD array straight into a dark container with a photo-amplifier tube / scintillator in it to create an alpha particle radiation detector. Sort of like the alpha spark detector I made a video of, only digital.
The microscope is actually very nice (stereo eyepiece, xyz stage, abby condensor, LED with electronic dimming switch and various mechanical shutters for dimming and changing the incidence angle of the light, 2000x oil immersion lens: basically all the bells and whistles and the highest reflected normal light magnification physics allows! All coupled (today only) on a webcam that costs less than a can of Red Bull, lol.
I was also holding the webcam with one hand while moving the xyz stage and focusing with the other--I'm being terribly unprofessional today. I actually have a side illuminator for microscopes that I could have used also. It has a nice (non-harsh, non-flickering light) but this was only a test and with the lousy webcam it would't have made much of a difference.
I kept changing video cameras, but kept the lousy lighting.
Speaking of old technology, I also found this cool brochure for coin operated computers for our library. Pineapple Computers!
Neat, but my computer glows in the dark!
I don't care about the black balls, but I need you to make sure none of these old hard drives have any snakes in them! Mee-yow!
