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2. About that baked cake.

You remember that Charlie Strong, both before and after his departure from Texas, was pretty clear about the prospects for 2017. The cake was baked, Strong said, and just needed to be iced, a reference to the young talent on hand. Yeah, it was pretty much Strong's backdoor way of praising his program building. New coach Tom Herman isn't quite as certain about this dessert being ready to serve. Look at it as playing the expectations game from a different side. Appearing on Houston's 790 AM on Thursday, Herman mentioned his biggest surprise since arriving in Austin. "I'd heard about these back-to-back top 10 recruiting classes," Herman said, "and I was surprised that there was not as much depth here as there would seem to be with two ballyhooed recruiting classes in back-to-back years." Sounds like something is headed back to the oven.

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HTownAg98 said:

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Needs more glow sticks and urine.

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This led us to the alchemist Hennig Brand, who tried to create gold by storing buckets of urine underneath his house and doing science to them. He ended up blowing up his house, apparently, but in the process noticed the material he was producing glowed in the dark. What Brand had created was not gold, but phosphorus!
Here's how you do it:

• Boil urine to reduce it to a thick syrup.
• Heat until a red oil distills up from it, and draw that off.
• Allow the remainder to cool, where it consists of a black spongy upper part and a salty lower part.
• Discard the salt, mix the red oil back into the black material.
• Heat that mixture strongly for 16 hours.
• First white fumes come off, then an oil, then phosphorus.
• The phosphorus may be passed into cold water to solidify.

The science of it all:

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Urine contains phosphates PO43-, as sodium phosphate (i.e. with Na+), and various carbon-based organics. Under strong heat the oxygens from the phosphate react with carbon to produce carbon monoxide CO, leaving elemental phosphorus P, which comes off as a gas.

Phosphorus condenses to a liquid below about 280C and then solidifies (to the white phosphorus allotrope) below about 44C (depending on purity).
This same essential reaction is still used today (but with mined phosphate ores, coke for carbon, and electric furnaces)

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