"fire" news and stories

Like the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919, the story of a Swiss freighter that almost exploded with cooked tapioca is safely behind us but still bears mentioning. In August 1972, the cargo of the Cassarate included timber and tapioca. The former caught fire and the hot water and steam created while dousing the blaze caused the 1,500 tons of Thai tapioca below deck to swell in the oven-like conditions. The Cassarate made an emergency stop in Wales, where the fires were finally extinguished. The hundreds of thousands of portions of tapioca, bound for Holland, never did wind up bursting the ship's hull. A recently updated Snopes page has excerpts from local newspapers that covered the incident.

Those of you that are familiar with the Jell-O experiments of MyScienceProject.org will be glad to know that a new batch of tests was added this month. Apparently the folks at MyScienceProject got lots of responses from their previous attempts to pack as much booze into a Jell-O shot as possible. On the new page, they're testing the benefits of using unflavored gelatin (yum), blooming it first, and then cutting it with grain alcohol or Bacardi 151 instead of vodka. After producing plenty of barely palatable Jell-O shots, the only logical thing to do was set them on fire. It's a shame there wasn't a buffet nearby.

As a side note, NPR recently featured a story about wine-infused gelatin.

[Photo: MyScienceProject.org]

I know some of you may already be familiar with this "trick," but I think it bears repeating. Even if it's just a good way to justify bringing some extra chocolate with you when you go camping. TrackerTrail.com has step by step instructions for how to create fire with nothing more than some chocolate and an aluminum can. The concave shape of the bottom of the can can be used to focus light from the sun, much like a magnifying glass does. However, since the surface of the can is rather dull, it can't focus light very precisely. That's where the chocolate comes in. Buffing the bottom of the can with the abrasive chocolate will make it much shinier. Once you have your highly reflective can, it's just a matter of concentrating the refracted light onto something that will catch fire.

[Photo Trackertrail.com]