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03/27/2002

Survival Under Pressure

Did you watch The Players Championship at Sawgrass here in
Florida last Sunday? If not, you missed one of the most amazing
finishes of a professional golf tournament in history. Craig
Perks, co-leader going into the final round on Sunday, was
spraying bogeys all over the place squandering his lead. He even
missed two one-foot putts! Obviously, the pressure was just too
great for this player, ranked 203 in the world and whose only
tournament win was on the Hooters Tour! I never heard of the
Hooters Tour, have you? But Perks perked up on the 16th hole,
where he holed his chip shot from off the green for an eagle. On
the famed 17th, the green a tiny target in an alligator-infested
lake, he canned a 25-foot birdie putt. Now in the lead again, he
began the 18th hole with an errant drive. After clearing the
crowd for a stupid attempt to shoot through the trees, he finally
paid attention to his caddy''s advice to lay up. The crowning
touch was another holed chip from off the green for a par.

I was reminded of my round at Spooky Brook in New Jersey
some years ago when I chipped in on three out of the first six
holes, the last shot being from 125 yards out. I enjoyed those 6
holes more than my hole-in-one. (Longtime readers will have
anticipated that I wouldn''t miss the chance to work in my hole-
in-one here.) Only in my case, there wasn''t a $1,080,000 first
place finish on the line!

Intense pressure can certainly affect people and other things
differently. In Perks'' case, it could be said that he was choking
under the pressure until those last glorious holes. In science, the
study of materials under intense pressures has led to some very
interesting results. My own appreciation of the possibilities of
high-pressure research came when workers at General Electric
first used high pressure to make diamonds in the laboratory.
Today, their process is used to make industrial diamonds.

Actually, diamonds are the key materials use in an apparatus to
attain some truly phenomenal pressures. What kind of
pressures? We''re talking pressures as high as in the center of the
earth, something on the order of 4 to 5 million times atmospheric
pressure (we call this 4 to 5 million atmospheres). At such
pressures, strange things can happen. For example, hydrogen
becomes a metal! For those who are uncomfortable with
pressures expressed as atmospheres, it might help to note that an
atmosphere is equivalent to 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi).

Let''s now make a diamond anvil high-pressure apparatus. It''s
really pretty simple. First, we take two diamonds and polish
down a flat face on each one. These faces are typically about a
millimeter in diameter. Now let''s glue them to a couple of big
metal cylinders in a piston arrangement that lets us screw down
on the cylinders to bring the diamond faces together. Now all we
have to do to get our extremely high pressures is just screw those
diamond faces together real tight. Why don''t we use something
else instead of diamond, say stainless steel? It turns out that
most materials either fracture or deform or break down in some
manner under extreme pressure. Diamond''s legendary hardness,
however, lets it hold up fantastically well.

You may be wondering how do we get such high pressures in
such a simple apparatus? To illustrate the principle, let''s say you
weigh 150 pounds. Now, stand on a platform, analogous to the
piston, with a diamond glued to the bottom having a one-inch
square face. Ok, that''s a huge diamond but, assuming you could
balance on it, the pressure would be 150 pounds per square inch
(psi). Since one atmosphere is about 15 psi, you have generated
a pressure of roughly 10 atmospheres between the diamond and
the floor. Now suppose the diamond face is just a tenth of an
inch square. That''s only 0.01 square inches in area. Now, our
150 pounds has generated 150 divided by 0.01 or 15,000 psi.
That''s about a thousand atmospheres pressure. In other words, if
you squeeze on something small, you can magnify the pressures
to quite high values. This is what''s done in the diamond anvil -
screw down hard on those small diamond faces.

Of course, the apparatus to do this is more complicated than I''ve
described and to measure what goes on in the material getting
squeezed is tricky. The diamond anvil has an advantage that can
be quite useful. Being transparent, you can look through the
diamonds with a microscope and watch what''s going on. You
can also make spectroscopic measurements.

Aside from Craig Perks, what prompted my concern with
pressure was an article in the February 22 issue of Science. The
article is by Anurag Sharma and coworkers at the Geophysical
Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington and is titled
"Microbial Activity at Gigapascal Pressures". (The Pascal is just
another unit of pressure.) What these researchers did was to look
at what happens to bacteria when they squeezed the bejeebers out
of them. To do this, they formed a film of water and bacteria
between the two diamonds in the diamond anvil apparatus and
squeezed down on those little microbes. The pressures they
obtained were equivalent to those that would be found if you had
an ocean around 90-100 miles deep. I calculate the pressures to
be roughly about 10 thousand atmospheres.

Bacteria are pretty sturdy critters and have evolved to survive
under some really harsh conditions - deep underground in rocks,
in hot boiling springs, in highly acid or salty conditions in
Antarctic ice, etc. Could bacteria survive in the polar ice caps on
Mars or what is believed to be a frozen ocean many miles thick
on Europa? Those are the types of questions these anvil
experimenters hope to answer. So far, the bacteria turn out to be
surprisingly hardy creatures.

These workers studied a couple types of microbes, one being the
familiar E. coli that we all harbor in our guts. At the highest
pressures, of the initial million or so bacteria, about 10,000 lived
to tell the tale. How do you tell that these 10,000 are still alive?
You don''t just look at them through a microscope; you also
monitor with dyes and spectroscopy the products of the
microbes'' metabolism. At a certain pressure the liquid water
turned to a high-pressure form of ice. The microbes, or at some
of them, still seemed to adapt to this change of habitat. There
was, however, a limit to how much pressure these little critters
could take. At that critical pressure, the spectral data showed no
more evidence of metabolism. However, the researchers
conclude that, at least as far as the pressure is concerned, any E.
coli on Europa or Mars could hack it. Of course, there are other
factors and we still have a bit of work to do, like actually finding
microbes on these distant bodies.

There are as usual the skeptics who question most new work. In
this case, they question whether the bacteria were indeed "alive"
after being subjected to the anvil treatment. As reported in
another article in Science commenting on this work, Jennifer
Couzin reports that these skeptics want to see the bacteria grow
and multiply. They feel that just showing the critters to be
mobile and metabolic isn''t enough. This research is apparently
in the works.

Some informed readers might say, "Why all the fuss? The effect
of pressure on bacteria has been known for over a century." And
they would be right. Just search "high pressure food processing"
on your search engine and a plethora of sites show up. The use
of high pressures to kill undesirable microbes in milk, for
example, was reported in the early 1900s. However, the actual
utilization of high pressures commercially seems rather limited at
this point. I have not made a thorough search of the Web on this
subject so must say that I could be unaware of some widespread
application.

I think the real point is that, while the food industry is concerned
with reducing the level of unwanted microbes in our food, the
diamond anvil workers are more in tune with today''s trend in the
media. These researchers are more interested in the few that
survive under pressure. By chance, I too have developed a keen
interest in high pressures, in this case my own recent elevated
blood pressure readings in this laid back Marco Island
atmosphere. Hopefully, returning to New Jersey next week and
working on my tax returns will straighten out my problem.
Yeah, right!

Allen F. Bortrum



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-03/27/2002-      
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Dr. Bortrum

03/27/2002

Survival Under Pressure

Did you watch The Players Championship at Sawgrass here in
Florida last Sunday? If not, you missed one of the most amazing
finishes of a professional golf tournament in history. Craig
Perks, co-leader going into the final round on Sunday, was
spraying bogeys all over the place squandering his lead. He even
missed two one-foot putts! Obviously, the pressure was just too
great for this player, ranked 203 in the world and whose only
tournament win was on the Hooters Tour! I never heard of the
Hooters Tour, have you? But Perks perked up on the 16th hole,
where he holed his chip shot from off the green for an eagle. On
the famed 17th, the green a tiny target in an alligator-infested
lake, he canned a 25-foot birdie putt. Now in the lead again, he
began the 18th hole with an errant drive. After clearing the
crowd for a stupid attempt to shoot through the trees, he finally
paid attention to his caddy''s advice to lay up. The crowning
touch was another holed chip from off the green for a par.

I was reminded of my round at Spooky Brook in New Jersey
some years ago when I chipped in on three out of the first six
holes, the last shot being from 125 yards out. I enjoyed those 6
holes more than my hole-in-one. (Longtime readers will have
anticipated that I wouldn''t miss the chance to work in my hole-
in-one here.) Only in my case, there wasn''t a $1,080,000 first
place finish on the line!

Intense pressure can certainly affect people and other things
differently. In Perks'' case, it could be said that he was choking
under the pressure until those last glorious holes. In science, the
study of materials under intense pressures has led to some very
interesting results. My own appreciation of the possibilities of
high-pressure research came when workers at General Electric
first used high pressure to make diamonds in the laboratory.
Today, their process is used to make industrial diamonds.

Actually, diamonds are the key materials use in an apparatus to
attain some truly phenomenal pressures. What kind of
pressures? We''re talking pressures as high as in the center of the
earth, something on the order of 4 to 5 million times atmospheric
pressure (we call this 4 to 5 million atmospheres). At such
pressures, strange things can happen. For example, hydrogen
becomes a metal! For those who are uncomfortable with
pressures expressed as atmospheres, it might help to note that an
atmosphere is equivalent to 14.7 pounds per square inch (psi).

Let''s now make a diamond anvil high-pressure apparatus. It''s
really pretty simple. First, we take two diamonds and polish
down a flat face on each one. These faces are typically about a
millimeter in diameter. Now let''s glue them to a couple of big
metal cylinders in a piston arrangement that lets us screw down
on the cylinders to bring the diamond faces together. Now all we
have to do to get our extremely high pressures is just screw those
diamond faces together real tight. Why don''t we use something
else instead of diamond, say stainless steel? It turns out that
most materials either fracture or deform or break down in some
manner under extreme pressure. Diamond''s legendary hardness,
however, lets it hold up fantastically well.

You may be wondering how do we get such high pressures in
such a simple apparatus? To illustrate the principle, let''s say you
weigh 150 pounds. Now, stand on a platform, analogous to the
piston, with a diamond glued to the bottom having a one-inch
square face. Ok, that''s a huge diamond but, assuming you could
balance on it, the pressure would be 150 pounds per square inch
(psi). Since one atmosphere is about 15 psi, you have generated
a pressure of roughly 10 atmospheres between the diamond and
the floor. Now suppose the diamond face is just a tenth of an
inch square. That''s only 0.01 square inches in area. Now, our
150 pounds has generated 150 divided by 0.01 or 15,000 psi.
That''s about a thousand atmospheres pressure. In other words, if
you squeeze on something small, you can magnify the pressures
to quite high values. This is what''s done in the diamond anvil -
screw down hard on those small diamond faces.

Of course, the apparatus to do this is more complicated than I''ve
described and to measure what goes on in the material getting
squeezed is tricky. The diamond anvil has an advantage that can
be quite useful. Being transparent, you can look through the
diamonds with a microscope and watch what''s going on. You
can also make spectroscopic measurements.

Aside from Craig Perks, what prompted my concern with
pressure was an article in the February 22 issue of Science. The
article is by Anurag Sharma and coworkers at the Geophysical
Laboratory, Carnegie Institution of Washington and is titled
"Microbial Activity at Gigapascal Pressures". (The Pascal is just
another unit of pressure.) What these researchers did was to look
at what happens to bacteria when they squeezed the bejeebers out
of them. To do this, they formed a film of water and bacteria
between the two diamonds in the diamond anvil apparatus and
squeezed down on those little microbes. The pressures they
obtained were equivalent to those that would be found if you had
an ocean around 90-100 miles deep. I calculate the pressures to
be roughly about 10 thousand atmospheres.

Bacteria are pretty sturdy critters and have evolved to survive
under some really harsh conditions - deep underground in rocks,
in hot boiling springs, in highly acid or salty conditions in
Antarctic ice, etc. Could bacteria survive in the polar ice caps on
Mars or what is believed to be a frozen ocean many miles thick
on Europa? Those are the types of questions these anvil
experimenters hope to answer. So far, the bacteria turn out to be
surprisingly hardy creatures.

These workers studied a couple types of microbes, one being the
familiar E. coli that we all harbor in our guts. At the highest
pressures, of the initial million or so bacteria, about 10,000 lived
to tell the tale. How do you tell that these 10,000 are still alive?
You don''t just look at them through a microscope; you also
monitor with dyes and spectroscopy the products of the
microbes'' metabolism. At a certain pressure the liquid water
turned to a high-pressure form of ice. The microbes, or at some
of them, still seemed to adapt to this change of habitat. There
was, however, a limit to how much pressure these little critters
could take. At that critical pressure, the spectral data showed no
more evidence of metabolism. However, the researchers
conclude that, at least as far as the pressure is concerned, any E.
coli on Europa or Mars could hack it. Of course, there are other
factors and we still have a bit of work to do, like actually finding
microbes on these distant bodies.

There are as usual the skeptics who question most new work. In
this case, they question whether the bacteria were indeed "alive"
after being subjected to the anvil treatment. As reported in
another article in Science commenting on this work, Jennifer
Couzin reports that these skeptics want to see the bacteria grow
and multiply. They feel that just showing the critters to be
mobile and metabolic isn''t enough. This research is apparently
in the works.

Some informed readers might say, "Why all the fuss? The effect
of pressure on bacteria has been known for over a century." And
they would be right. Just search "high pressure food processing"
on your search engine and a plethora of sites show up. The use
of high pressures to kill undesirable microbes in milk, for
example, was reported in the early 1900s. However, the actual
utilization of high pressures commercially seems rather limited at
this point. I have not made a thorough search of the Web on this
subject so must say that I could be unaware of some widespread
application.

I think the real point is that, while the food industry is concerned
with reducing the level of unwanted microbes in our food, the
diamond anvil workers are more in tune with today''s trend in the
media. These researchers are more interested in the few that
survive under pressure. By chance, I too have developed a keen
interest in high pressures, in this case my own recent elevated
blood pressure readings in this laid back Marco Island
atmosphere. Hopefully, returning to New Jersey next week and
working on my tax returns will straighten out my problem.
Yeah, right!

Allen F. Bortrum