This article gives an explanation of the term, “spontaneous combustion” and explains the factors that contribute to this action. Combustion happens when materials heat up to the point of burning without the absorbing heat from its surroundings. This act most commonly happens amongst paints, oils, sawdust, hay, waste paper, coal and charcoal. One exception is when levels of oxidations or heat drawn in are minimal like in rusty iron. The levels of heat supply and oxidation are important because in order for the reaction to be successful, it is often very hard to study the causes and properties of this reaction because there are usually no remaining materials. There are two forms of detection in this case, one is to determine the increased burning in the center of the object versus the outside; and another form of detection is to justify that after attempts to put out a flame, the results were to only to light up in flames again.
This article is important to society because spontaneous combustion is a frequently talk about topic; however, there is frequently no definite answer. These studies to try an understand combustion is going to help give us a better understanding of what combustion is, and could later on eliminate arson suspected crimes if there were ways to rule out a person starting a fire instead of natural causes.
I think the article was well written and somewhat informative; however, more information on why it is a useful form of research would have been beneficial. Also, more knowledge on who is studying combustion and for what reasons seem to be an important factor for this topic since there is really no presentation of background information on who is doing these studies and the purposes.
"Forensic Biology » Articles » Anthropology » "Truth In Bones"" The Bronx High School of Science. Web. 01 Nov. 2010.
Posted for A. Sher
3 comments:
I think Alison Cher picked an exciting topic worthy of interest to me. The article was about “spontaneous combustion”, which means an object can randomly catch on fire and then explode. Currently, scientists are studying spontaneous combustion in order to find out what causes it. I particularly liked three things about the article. First, I liked her description of flammable items, such as wood, paper, and certain types of paint. Second, I liked the part about the chemical reaction when metal turns to rust, because I could easily picture it in my mind and “see” the chemical reaction. Third, I found her critique of the article very interesting.
Though Alison is a good writer, there are some flaws with her work as well as her perfections. I noticed that she forgot to provide a link to the original article. Second, I thought Alison could have been a little more thorough with her writing. Her writing style is a little too terse, in my opinion.
In closing, I learned a lot about spontaneous combustion, which, prior to this article, I knew nothing about! Therefore, it was new and exciting to me. Keep up the good work, Alison!
From Kathleen Moriarty
This review is organized, very straight-forward,with plenty of in-depth detail and insight for the reader to understand the point.
two things that would make this review better would be to explain more factors of what happens under spontaneous combustion and maybe explain the causes and properties of the reaction (because of the fact there's usually no remaining materials)
Something i learned from this is that further understanding of combustion can help in arson cases
I think in this article Allison did a really good job of making the details of combustion easy to understand. I personally think the fact that things can randomly ignite into flames is somewhat amusing, but I digress. The fact that Allison gave us examples of things that can combust I thought was helpful to me understanding how much diversity there is between combustable materials.
A few things I think Allison could have improved on would include adding a bit more detail to certain aspects of spontaneous combustion, and maybe explain why there are no left over materials or substances a bit better.
All in all I think this was a stellar article that was translated and deduced with a high level of expertise.
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