Kibbles & Bytes Blog

Now that winter is most assuredly here, I thought of an interesting topic to discuss for readers here. It has to do with things I’ve discussed before regarding electromagnetism, but in includes something else I haven’t really discussed before.

Pretty much every morning these days I have to run the rear window defroster in my car. If it’s not too cold, the snow and ice will be able to melt and run off the window as liquid water. I noticed though that it doesn’t just run off smoothly. It seems to stick to the defroster element lines or be deflected by them. The wires themselves are not on the outside of the glass, so the water isn’t physically interacting with them. What’s going on here?

First, I have to make the disclaimer that my chemistry knowledge is several orders of magnitude weaker than my physics and electromagnetism knowledge, so hopefully I don’t mess up too much. Nevertheless, I’ll do my best to explain this phenomenon. To understand what’s happening with the water on my window, we have to go down to the water molecule itself. The chemical makeup of water is H2O. That’s two hydrogen atoms and a single oxygen atom. These atoms are just like any atoms. They have cores composed of positively charged protons that are orbited by negatively charged electrons. When atoms bond to each other to form molecules, they do so in a number of different configurations. Atoms group themselves into molecules either with electrostatic force (attraction of atoms with opposite overall charges) or via the sharing of electrons (covalent bonds) and these bonds can occur at different angles. In the case of water, the bonds involved are covalent. Water molecules are not linear, and the imbalance of relative electrical charges (oxygen atoms have a slight negative charge, hydrogen atoms have a slight positive charge) causes the resulting water molecule to have a positively charged end and a negatively charged end (called a dipole). Molecules like this are called ??polar molecules??.

Which molecules come out as polar and which do not are based on pretty complicated chemistry. In each case it depends on the relative electronegativities of the atoms involved as well as the way they configure themselves in the molecule. A carbon dioxide molecule has polar covalent bonds holding it together, but because it configures itself in a linear fashion (a carbon atom flanked by two oxygen atoms in a straight line) there is no overall dipole. Though the ends of the molecule (the oxygen atoms) do have dipoles, they just happen to cancel out as far as the overall molecule is concerned. This is what allows CO2 (a non-polar molecule) to dissolve into water (a polar molecule).

Ok, if you managed to survive all that (I’m not even entirely sure I did), hopefully I can tie all this back to what I observed happening on the rear window in my car. Water is a polar molecule, meaning that it has a positively charged end and a negatively charged end. This allows it to be influenced by electromagnetic forces in the environment. When I engage the defroster element in my car, current flows through the narrow wires, encountering resistance which causes them to heat up. The flowing current also creates a magnetic field around each of the wires. The water molecules, being polar, are influenced by this magnetic field and therefore do not simply flow off the glass unimpeded. The water molecules tend to “stick” to the element wires even thought they don’t touch physically. Electromagnetism!

This property of water is more commonly demonstrated via a static electrical charge since the water will respond better to that than to a magnetic field. The demonstration usually consists of taking a plastic comb and combing your hair with it. This strips electrons from your hair and deposits them on the comb creating a static electrical field. If you create a thin stream of water from a faucet and hold the comb next to it, the water will be deflected instead of falling straight down. Again, this is because the water is a polar molecule and can be influenced by electromagnetic fields.

Hopefully this was an interesting topic. It’s always interesting to find complex science in the simplest things.

One of the best parts of my job is how excited I still get when I learn about something new I can do with my devices. I am constantly learning and finding out about new things that I can do. Many users are going to find that they have some new toys to play with this coming weekend, so here are two of my favorite tips to pass along.

**Read Song Lyrics in iTunes**

How many times have you found yourself singing along to a song and just start to hum through the part you don’t know? Better yet, how many times have you had a friendly argument over what the lyrics really are in a song? Most of us know that you can simply google the lyrics, but did you know you can get these answers right from iTunes? If you’re running iTunes 12.5 and using Apple Music you can instantly get song lyrics. You can check to see if what you just heard was what you sang by clicking the lyrics button in either the up next popover or the mini player window. I will say it doesn’t work for every artist. In my playing around with this feature it worked for most artists. This article took me down memory road for some forgotten artists. Little Feat’s ??Waiting for Columbus?? album was a favorite of mine in high school. The album is in Apple Music but not the lyrics.

**Copy Phone Numbers From Incoming Calls**

I’ve been adding contacts to my address book from incoming text messages or even via digital address cards, but did you know you can also copy numbers via your incoming call log? This is handy if you need to redial a phone number, or share it, yet you don’t want to keep it on file on your phone. In the phone app’s recent screen, there is a hidden workaround that lets you copy the number. Tap the ‘i’ button (it’s typically blue with a circle around it) next to the call, then press and hold the number for a second or two until the copy button appears. Tap copy and you can then paste that number into mail, messages, notes etc. To paste, tap where you want the number to go and then the paste option will appear.

Two tiny, yet hidden tricks you can use on your devices or just show off to your friends!

Emily here! Don and Grace are away on a much needed vacation and I’m left here in the cold of Vermont. I promised Don I wouldn’t bother him unless a building was on fire, but neither one of us seem to vacation completely disconnected. He’s checked in with me a few times on the activities around the offices this past week, but we’ve kept the chats short, after all we’re both having busy weeks in our own ways.

The new year is just around the corner, and while I’m not one to dwell too much on the past I find it hard not to sit at my desk these days and think over the past year. I prefer to be the kind of person who learns from the past and focuses on the future. I’ve found that to be a very hard task in the last month as 2017 approaches. I won’t bore anyone with details of my vows (though I’m sure mine are very similar to most of yours) but rather take the time to think about what this time of year is all about. I mean really think about what this time of year is meant to be about. Reflecting on 2016 has made me realize that as hard as this year has been to watch and see things unfold, it’s really about the little moments and the memories. As crazy as things have been for us, we are still very fortunate.

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