Science Classroom; Tuesday [ 08/02 ].

[bootlessjane.livejournal.com]

So there it was. A large chunk of rock sitting in the middle of a laboratory classroom, waiting to be researched. Jane wasn’t entirely sure it wanted to be researched, though, with all the elusiveness and mystery it was giving off, but, then again, geology was hardly her area of scientific expertise, and she had a feeling it wasn’t quite Miss Granger’s forte either.

Thankfully, that was why they had their brilliant and inquisitive students to help, yes?

Goodness, she hoped so! Either way, a handwavey message had been sent out to the student body, encouraging anyone who was interested to come on in and help them out today.

“Hello, students,” she gave them a bit of an uncertain smile. “Thank you all for coming and giving us a hand with this most mysterious piece of rock. It’s so good to see so many of you eager to help, but Miss Granger and myself must ask you to take the utmost care. Clearly, we are uncertain what we are dealing with, so we must be careful.”

"Yes, please. I wish we had more information to give you," said Hermione, and don't think that wasn't bothering her. Of course, she'd also decided that if there was some strange mysterious rock that no one knew anything about, she was not going to be touching it unless it was absolutely necessary. At least without gloves. She knew that was probably just paranoia. "If there is anything you can tell us about it, don't hesitate to speak up."

“We’ve got gloves, microscopes, goggles, you name it,” Jane offered, “and also plenty of books for reference. Let’s use our resources and try to figure out what we can. Consider everything; even if you find something that’s just minutely interesting or different or strange, it could be useful.”

"Now, if anyone has any questions, we'll answer them as best we can," Hermione went on. "But let's get started and see what we can find, shall we?"

[[ written, obviously, with the fantastic smartestone and for all you sciencey types; please wait for the OCD is ready for examination! ]]

Comments

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

Claudia had already observed the squishiness the day before when she poked it with a rock, so she didn't remark on that when she poked it with a scalpel this time.

"Dude," she said instead. "It's, like, warm."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

"Really?" Marshall asked, looking a little closer at it. "How warm?"

He got back to setting up an array of reagents in test tubes. "Could you cut me a slice?" he added. He'd noticed the squishiness, too, and hoped that it would make it easier to get samples for him to work with.

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"Gimme a sec," Claudia said, stalling while waiting for an answer on the rock's sliceability in the OOC thread. "And very. This sucker has to be doing some seriously exothermic reacting, here."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

Marshall nodded, pulling a series of thermometers out and placing them in the test tubes. "I think I saw an infrared thermometer here, somewhere," he suggested. "We can compare the exothermic reaction to temperature changes with the reagents, see if anything jumps it up or down."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"That could help us figure out what it's made of," Claudia agreed. "It seems pretty metallic, though I've never seen metal that color before. I've never seen anything that color before."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

"I'm not even sure it's a colour." Picking up a glass rod, he gave the rock a poke. "It is seriously way too soft. I mean, there are definitely malleable metals, but this is ridiculous.

"Do you know, has anyone measured its magnetism yet?"

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"I don't think so." Claudia managed to slice off a small piece with her scalpel and offered it to Marshall. "I've never seen a metal this close to a plasma type state. It might make a good conductor, too."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

Marshall nodded as he took the piece, placing it in a petri dish as he took another scalpel and cut it into three. "We should check that, too," he agreed, before placing a piece in each of his three test tubes -- water, aqua regia, and sodium hydroxide -- and waiting to see if anything happened.

"... Is the aqua regia cooling it?" he asked. "Look, the temperature in that test tube isn't going up as fast as the other two." Marshall grabbed his notebook, jotting down that the rock reacted differently to an acid reagent than it did to water or basic reagents.

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

Claudia leaned in to get a closer look. "Huh. That's kind of . . . different, right?" She was a physicist more than a chemist, but she was pretty sure that was different. She turned back to the rock as a whole and started setting up coils to test for an eddy current. She tilted her head as she looked closer at the spot where she made the cut. "Hey, check this out: the bit that's newly exposed to the air looks like it's . . . tarnishing or something."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

"Well, it means that the acid inhibits whatever exothermic reaction it's undergoing." After jotting down a few notes -- including 'corrodes on contact with air' -- Marshall grabbed tweezers and pulled each of the three slivers out of the test tubes, place each one in a separate petri dish. "Or possibly it just doesn't contain whatever the stone is reacting with. If it's something in the air, then maybe that same substance is present in both the water and the sodium hydroxide." Which potentially meant impure reagents; Marshall was going to have to look at that more closely.

Something on the pieces of the rock in the petri dishes caught his eye -- specifically, on the piece that had been in the acid. "Are you-- Are those what I think they are?" he asked, using the tweezers to point at the designs now faintly etched into the piece of rock.


[Ohgod I hope I didn't screw up the science here. I haven't studied any chemistry in... seven years? Pay no attention to the man behind the technobabble!]

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

Claudia leaned in over his shoulder to look. "Okay, that I know is different." She was leaning more and more towards putting this rock into the "artifact" category.

[yeah, it's been even longer than that for me, hence Claudia being less than sure of the implications. I've been madly trying to look up how to test for conductivity online, here, myself.]

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[wheeler-360.livejournal.com]

"It looks like Widmanstätten patterning," Marshall explained. "Which is, according to Wiki as far as I know, only found in meteoric iron, and some of the pallasites." Yeah, someone had been a little space-obsessed growing up. "I've got some books, I think, or the library probably does -- I know there's some other things that look similar that are Earth-based. But this might not be from Earth."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"I knew it. It's totally an alien egg. That . . . forced its way up out of the ground."

Right, the only way to respond to the trepidation that Claudia was feeling at that thought was to electrocute the rock with her eddy current testing coil.

Take that, possible alien life form!

". . . Woah, this sucker really digs electrical current."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

Scully grinned again and said, "Bets on whether its alive? Or maybe a rock with a symbiote, like moss?" New species! New species! Let it be a new species. She was cutting off a tiny sliver for herself to run tests on.

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"Could be. It's definitely doing something, though it's possible it's just reacting to the air itself. Look, you can watch the changes happen where you cut the bit off."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

Scully peered, fascinated, and watched it change color. "Reacts to oxygen. Or maybe exposure to inert nitrogen?" she theorized aloud for her record, and then said to Claudia, "That's so weird. Silver oxidizes quickly, but I've never seen anything that reacts in seconds. Even apples or other organic matter take an hour or so, not seconds."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"Yeah, I'm starting to think we're not going to find anything about this sucker that isn't weird."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

"But it still has to follow physical and chemical laws." Scully paused, getting a mildly paranoid look on her face, her voice lowering. "...unless someone starts to claim it's magic, in which case they'll take it away from us and not let us study it."

No! Their shiny! Theirs!

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"Everything follows natural and physical laws," Claudia insisted. "It just . . . might have found loopholes we don't know about, yet."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

If Scully were a real sixteen-year-old, she would say Awesome! Instead, she said, "We could get a scientific paper out of this. Just an initial survey, but if we document everything closely enough, we could get it out there for others to speculate on." She shook these thoughts away and put her sample in a test tube. "Boiling and steaming first. Then the spectrograph. Which should give us the chemical make-up."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"And here I was just thinking I wanted to zap the sucker." Claudia was really more a physicist than a chemist or biologist. "I'm pretty sure the scientific community at large in my world would laugh any of the stuff we see in Fandom right off the planet."

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

"Possibly," Scully had to acknowledge, especially with how she couldn't put her real name on it. "But there are enough obscure journals to make it worth a try..." She carefully prepared a sample in water, and started to heat it. "...total failure to react to heated water," she said in an interested tone. "I wonder what its melting point is?"

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

"It can't be that high. It's not even completely solid, right?"

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[showmetheproof.livejournal.com]

"It's more of a plasmoid, mostly," Scully admitted, watching the sample in perplexity. Maybe it was like mercury? Maybe the density was making it impossible for it to react at water's boiling point? "Maybe it needs a re-agent to get a reaction going, though." Not that she wanted to leave nothing for anyone else to do. Time to keep working on the temperature thing. "Maybe if it's in the oven, we'll start to see something." Get a nice ceramic bowl, cut off another teeny-tiny sliver.

Scully's fingertips were tingling again, but there was SCIENCE here. Her blood flow problems could wait.

Re: Poke at the Rock - 08/02.

[notmyownage]

Claudia was so used to getting tiny reactions from objects in the Warehouse when she did weekend inventory that she hadn't actually noticed any weird feelings from the rock, and she had picked the whole thing up to measure the volume of it, earlier.

"We could try applying fire directly, too. I think I saw some decent torches, earlier."