The Miracle Of Hydrogen Peroxide Used In Everyday Life

By: Alexandria Addesso

That ominous brown bottle that sits in most medicine cabinets or first aid kits, your mother may have put it on your scraps as a kid and even though it didn’t burn like rubbing alcohol, it did fizzle and foam and turn white. By now it may be obvious that I am talking about hydrogen peroxide. While its antiseptic properties are well known, the many other uses for hydrogen peroxide are still widely unknown by most of the populace.

Aside from being the world’s safest all natural sanitizer, it is also the only germicidal agent composed only of water and oxygen. Hydrogen peroxide can be used to combat all types of bacterial or fungal infections in just about any bodily orifice. While some people have claimed that drinking small amounts of hydrogen peroxide can cure systemic candida overgrowth, this is not recommended and could be dangerous.



It is also very effective as a mouthwash and gargle rinse if a sore or strep throat is beginning to form. Because of its whitening properties it is a much safer alternative to bleaching products to brighten teeth. These same properties also help get rid of stains in clothing or carpets. Even blood and wine stains start to fade when hydrogen peroxide is applied and rubbed in.

It can also be used as a much safer bleach alternative if used for cleaning around the house when put in a spray bottle for convenience and does a great job of killing mold. It is also safe for washing vegetables, cleaning cooking utensils, cutting boards, and getting caked on grease off of pots and pans.



If hydrogen peroxide is applied to budding pimples, blisters, or canker sores they usually heal very rapidly if not totally disappear by the next day. Some even say that the common cold can be combated by placing a few drops of hydrogen peroxide into each ear. Of course all these uses call for 3 percent diluted solution which is a chemical compound with the formula H2O2.

Hydrogen peroxide is a safe solution to so many ailments and everyday cleaning needs. Instead of the harsh antibiotics and toxic cleaning chemicals that are often pushed on us by corporations and advertisements. Even disinfecting children’s toys, which often end up in their mouths, is much safer when using hydrogen peroxide. Hydrogen peroxide is also an extremely cost effective solution with a whole bottle only usually costing one to two dollars. Hydrogen peroxide is a cure all.

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Amazing discovery in Physics: Some surfaces are wetted by water others are water-repellent a new material can be both

Scientists have discovered a robust surface whose adhesive and wetting properties can be switched using electricity.

When rain falls on a lotus leaf, the leaf doesn't get wet. Thanks to its special structure, the water drops roll off without wetting the surface. Artificial materials can be made water-repellent, too. It is, however, extremely challenging to produce a surface with switchable wetting. Now, a research team from TU Wien, KU Leuven and University of Zürich has managed to manipulate a surface of a single layer of boron nitride in such a way that it can be switched back and forth between states with high and low wetting and adhesion.

Hexagons making waves
"One of the most interesting physical properties of a surface is its ‘stiction’ or static friction" says Stijn Mertens (Institute of Applied Physics at the Vienna University of Technology, and associated with KU Leuven in Belgium). "This force has to be overcome for an object on the surface to start sliding." The nanostructure of the surface determines its stiction to a large extent: the details of the contact between the surface and another object (for example, a drop of liquid) depend on the geometry of its atoms and other properties. This in turn is crucial for adhesion, stiction and wetting. The relationship between stiction and wetting, however, is so far only poorly understood.



"Just as the material graphene consists of only one layer of carbon atoms, our boron nitride -- which contains as many boron as nitrogen atoms -- has a thickness of only one atomic layer," explains Thomas Greber from the Physics Institute at the University of Zürich. This ultrathin layer can be grown on a rhodium single crystal. The atoms on the rhodium surface and in the boron nitride form a hexagonal pattern, but the distances between the atoms in the two materials are different. Thirteen atoms in boron nitride take the same space as twelve rhodium atoms, so that the two crystals do not fit together perfectly. Because of this mismatch, the boron nitride hexagons must bend, they appear as a frozen wave with a wavelength of 3.2 nanometers and a height of about 0.1 nanometers.

"Precisely this two-dimensional nanowaves influences the wetting of the surface by water," says Stijn Mertens. In any case, the boron nitride superstructure can be made flat with a simple trick: by putting the material in acid and applying an electrical voltage, hydrogen atoms creep under the boron nitride layer and change the bond between nitrogen and rhodium. This makes the boron nitride flat. Suddenly the adhesion of a water drop on the surface changes dramatically -- even though the drop is 100'000 times bigger than the tiny waves in the boron nitride. If the voltage is decreased, this effect is reversed: "We can switch the surface again and again between these two states," explains Stijn Martens.



The drop-measuring machine
To investigate the wetting of the surface and apply the voltage at the same time, an instrument was built specially for this purpose, in which a liquid drop is brought on the surface through a very thin glass tube. The drop is made bigger and smaller while at the same time its shape is recorded. Whether the drop shape is flat or more rounded depends on the properties of the surface.

Concepts to switch the wetting of a surface forth and back have been around for a while. For example, organic molecules that change their shape with light of a certain color can be attached to the surface. However, such molecules are much more complex and fragile than the materials studied here. "Our surface consists of only a single layer of atoms, is completely inorganic and does not change even if we heat it in vacuum to 1000 °C," agree Stijn Mertens and Thomas Greber. "This means that this material could also be used for applications where organic molecules would long be destroyed, ranging from daily life to space travel."



Source: Vienna University of Technology

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