Hubble-bubble Bath!

Guys, let me introduce to you the meaning behind hubble-bubble bath! It is actually talking about how useful soap is to sweep away the dirt from our body. In the mean of organic chemistry, soaps are sodium or potassium salts of long-chain fatty acids with 12 to 18 carbon atoms per molecule. The general formula of soap is RCOO^-Na⁺ or RCOO^-K⁺. Diagram below shows the two equivalent formulae of sodium stearate which is a type of soap.



 

Soap acts as a cleansing agent to remove grease and dirt. In the past, soap was made by mixing animal fats with alkaline wood ashes. However, nowadays, to reduce the cost, soaps can be made by hydrolysing animal fats and vegetable oils under alkaline condition whereby this reaction is known as saponification. The animal fats that most commonly used are fats from cows and goats whereas the vegetable oils often used are palm oil, olive oil and coconut oil.

Click HERE for briefly 10 uses of soap.

Bath soap

You may be wondering how to make your own organic soap instead of buying it from the market. Making soap on your own is cheaper. Besides, you can modify the ingredients in your soap according to your wish. For instance, you can make a deodorizing organic soap, skin-softening organic soap, or scented organic soaps. Most importantly, it is just some easy steps for you to follow. Thwvideo below shows you on how to make a homemade soap:

Now comes the interesting part. Do you know that why the bath soap that you use every day is just so effective to clean our body from dirt and grease making us always stay healthy and fresh all the time? How does it work actually to sweep away dirt from our body? What actually gives a youthful look to your skin and keeps your complexion. We are going to discover the mysterious part of it.

Our body oils will form a thin film on the surface of the skin to give smoothness, glow and pulchritude to our skin. However, when you remove the body oils in order to stay clean, you are indirectly reducing the smoothness and glow of your skin. This is because the hydrophobic part which of the soap which is soluble in oil attaches itself to your body oils whereas the hydrophilic part which is soluble in water attaches itself to the water when you lather your body with soap. 

This is a soap molecule.

During scrubbing, the water is agitated. This helps to pull the oils and dirt free from the surface of your skin and also breaks the oils into tiny droplets. When you wash off the soap bubble with water, your body oils are wrenched off from your skin due to the repulsion between the negative charges on the droplets which then suspends in water. Your skin soon loses its natural moisture but it gives you a feeling that you are cleaned. You feel fresh as you are free from all the dirt and grease compared to the oily condition of your skin before that made you felt uncomfortable.

While using the soap, what you should pay attention is be careful while applying soap to an open wound by making sure the ingredients used in the soap is harmless to the wound instead of letting the wound to get worse. The soaps which do not contain harmful chemicals also might react with the skin. Most of toilet soaps are made of natural as well as synthetic essential oils. These toilet soaps are soft as well as fresh in fragrance.

You should also be noticed that frequently use of soap will deplete the capacity of your body to produce the body oils that give smoothness and glow to your skin. Therefore, here are the advices, take a bath with vigorous rubbing with soap to clearly clean off the oils and dirt from your skin; use soap occasionally but not often. That is the best and only way to keep you young and healthy.

The misunderstanding on the Garbage Enzyme

Around 4 years ago, the garbage enzyme starts trending among most, if not all of the community whose have the awareness toward the environmental problem.

Garbage enzyme, also known as Eco enzyme, is developed by Dr Rosukun Poompanvong from Thailand.

Dr Rosukun

Dr Rosukun is a Thai doctor in alternative medicine and is a pioneer in Thailand’s organic farming. She has been actively involved in enzyme research for more than 30 years. Since 1991, she taught farmers around the country the organic and environmental friendly way to produce foods with her enzyme. She is the one of the winners of the 2007 Fervent Love of Lives Medals, an award created by Taiwan’s Chou Ta-Kuan Cultural and Educational Foundation.

The production of this “enzyme” is summarized as the image below:

Click HERE for briefly production of Garbage Enzyme.


It is claimed that the various advantages of garbage enzyme is as follow:

Click HERE for brieflly uses of garbage enzyme.

However, although Garbage Enzyme named with a term “enzyme”, it is not an enzyme.

Enzyme is a type of protein which acts as the catalyst for a biological reaction to occurs.

However, the so called Garbage Enzyme is just an organic product which is nothing more than vinegar. It is a type of homebrew vinegar, reduced from alcohol produced from the fermentation of the kitchen waste with the brown sugar. Brown sugar is used as impurities in the mixture to ensure a supply of bacteria. The breaking down of sugar into alcohol releases carbon dioxide gas. Therefore, the container has to open at least a week to release the gas produced by fermentation process. This procedure is also done to introduce the oxygen gas into the container to avoid anaerobic fermentation, because this process will produce methane gas, which is a greenhouse gas that remains in the atmosphere for approximately 9 to 15 years. This green house gas is 21 times more effective in trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide gas over a 100-year period.

The cleansing properties of the Garbage Enzyme thus obviously can refer to the properties of vinegar (the carboxylic acid groups), for example, to dissolve the oil while using it to wash the dishes. However, it is not advised to apply on metals, because acid will cause erosion on metals, otherwise the Garbage Enzyme has to be diluted.

It can also be the insect repellent because insects do not fond of the pungent smell of Garbage enzyme.

It is claimed that ozone gas produced during the fermentation process can lower the carbon dioxide level in the air, so can reduce the greenhouse effect. The contrary is true. The fermentation process will produce carbon dioxide and ozone. If produced, this will actually react with carbon to produce carbon dioxide due to the strong oxidizing properties of ozone. Hence, there is a net increase of carbon dioxide instead, but the fact that this carbon dioxide comes from plants results in a near neutral carbon cycle.

Ozone is an unstable molecule and will react quickly with other substances. If ozone produced by garbage enzymes escapes from the container, ozone react with heavy metals in the atmosphere will only transform the substances into acids that result in smog and acid rain.

Furthermore, it is claimed that Garbage Enzyme can convert ammonia to nitrate, which is the essential nutrient for plant. If this conversion is not control well, the high concentration of nitrate will wash off into ocean, which may result in algae boom..


Anyway, it is cannot be denied that Garbage Enzyme brings benefit to all of us, in the mean to preserve and conserve our scarred mother earth, as well as to reduce our household expenses.

Tobacco Addiction: Just Smoke and Die

Hey, do you think smoking is cool? If you do think so, then you will regret when it comes to the effect of smoking.

Tobacco smoking is the burning of tobacco by inhaling the resulting smoke. There are several way of consumption of tobacco such as cigars, cigarette and pipe smoking. The most common consumption of tobacco is cigarette smoke. According to World Health Organization (WHO) has compiled worldwide smoking statistics for the year 2002. There are about one third of males smoke in the world; and every one out of five young teens (aged 13 – 15) smokes worldwide. Smoking is the second major cause of death in the world. The related-diseases kill one in 10 adults globally. If current trends continue, by the year 2030, smoking will kill one in six people.

Click HERE for further information about Global Smoking Statistics.

We can see teenagers smoke everywhere, especially among students.

Now let’s discuss about the most common tobacco smoke that is cigarette smoke. As we all know, cigarette smoke contain nicotine. An average cigarette contains about 1mg of absorbed nicotine. But do you actually know what nicotine is? Nicotine is a liquid alkaloid (a substance with a basic charge) contained in the leaves of several species of plants. An alkaloid is an organic compound made out of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and sometimes oxygen.Nicotine is the common name for this chemical while 3-(1-methyl-2-pyrrolidinyl)pyridine is the IUPAC name for this chemical. It has a chemical formula of C10H12N2 and molecular mass of 162.12 g/mol. The structural formula is as shown as below: 

Low doses of nicotine acts as a stimulant in mammals while high doses of nicotine can be fatal. This stimulant effect is the main factor responsible for the dependence-forming properties of tobacco smoking. According to the American Heart Association, nicotine addiction has historically been one of the hardest addictions to break. Although 35% of the smokers attempt to quite smoking each year but fewer than 7% succeed to quite. Tobacco addiction is similar to those determining addiction to heroin and cocaine.

Nicotine is a hygroscopic, oily liquid that is miscible with water in its base form. As a nitrogenous base, nicotine forms salts with acids that are usually solid and water soluble. Nicotine can easily penetrates the skin. As shown by the physical data, free base nicotine will burn at a temperature below its boiling point, and its vapours will combust at 35 °C in air despite a low vapour. Because of this, most of the nicotine is burned when a cigarette is smoked. 

Smoking brings lots of harms (Click HERE). When you smoke, nicotine is absorbed through the mucosal lining of mouth and nose or by inhalation in the lungs. Once it enters our body, it activates the same reward system as do other drugs such as cocaine or amphetamine, although to a lesser degree. This will result in fatal lung cancers. 

From this photo, we can see the differences between smoker's lungs and 

non-smoker's lungs.

In the brain, nicotine increases the level of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is a chemical in the brain responsible for feelings of pleasure. The acute effects of nicotine subside within minutes, so people continue dosing themselves frequently throughout the day to maintain the pleasurable effects of nicotine and to prevent withdrawal symptoms. 

Nicotine is actually a common substance and can be found in several other food items. Tomatoes and eggplants are just two examples of foods that naturally contain nicotine in acceptable levels. 

Tomatoes and eggplants are naturally contain nicotine.

Nicotine in small amounts will not cause any harm to a person’s body. However, the high availability of the substance in tobacco makes it the best way to receive the effects that it produces in larger amounts. A normal cigarette made from tobacco will give a person approximately 1 mg of nicotine that will be absorbed into the bloodstream. This small amount will have stimulating effects, raising a person’s heartbeat and making the person breathe faster. But if a person becomes dependent on the cigarettes, he will receive more relaxation rather than stimulation when he smokes. Then it is consider as an addiction. 

People who smoke cigarettes are not addicted to the tobacco, but rather are addicted to the nicotine and the tobacco provides the easiest way to feel the effects of the nicotine. A person will start experience the signs of nicotine withdrawal when a person stops smoking. A single tobacco cigarette can ease the pain of the symptoms by bringing immediate relief. However, the effects only last a short while before the next nicotine withdrawal starts again and the person will feel the need to have another tobacco cigarette. This cycle will repeat again, again and again.

Although nicotine gives harms, but there are some benefits of nicotine. Nicotine improves our memory and concentration. It improves focus and recall by influencing parts of the brain associated with excitement and visual concentration. It also increase the functioning of the portions required for task performance by borrowing the less-used area of the brain. Besides, nicotine has a calming effects to female who exposed to stressful stimuli. It also increase the subjective feelings of happiness and friendliness of users in both sexes.
Click HERE for further information about the benefits.

There is no sharp boarder to differentiate whether nicotine is good or bad. Nicotine brings pros and cons, is we handle it in a correct way, then it will give us a good effects. But if we misuse it, then it will bring harms.