I've talked about the dangers of chip pan fires, but you may not have realized you can get the same disastrous fire from frying a holiday turkey. If you fry a turkey, be extremely careful.

• Don't drink alcoholic beverages when frying a turkey.
• Set up the turkey fryer on a level surface, at least 10 feet away from anything flammable.
• Be sure the turkey is thawed and drained, since juices can splash up from the hot oil and cause a grease fire. Ice crystals react vigorously with hot oil and can vaporize it, making it easier to ignite.
• Don't over-fill your fryer since it could overflow when the turkey is added and start a fire.
• Don't heat the cooking oil over 350°F. Oil can ignite at 375° F.
• Be sure you are strong enough to handle the turkey.
• Deep-fry your turkey outdoors, not in the garage. If a fire does occur, it will be much easier to contain it.

Do you want to take a nap after Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner. Do you think it's the food that's to blame? Let's talk turkey and learn about L-tryptophan and carbohydrate metabolism. Tell me more...

Re-Use the Turkey Thermometer | Thanksgiving Chemistry

November 26^th is John Alexander Newlands' birthday. Newlands was a British chemist who noticed that if he arranged the known elements in order of increasing atomic weight, the chemical properties of the eighth element were similar to the first. The pattern repeated every eight elements much like the octaves on a piano, so he called his periodic law the "Law of Octaves".

When he presented his idea in 1863, he was met with criticism. Other chemists thought his ideas were arbitrary, even useless. Fellow English chemist, Carey Foster even asked Newlands if he had considered arranging the elements by the first letter of their name. The general reception of his theory led him to abandon any work on categorizing the elements into a useful manner.

By the end of the decade, Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev and German chemist Julius Meyer independently compiled periodic laws based on atomic weights. Mendeleev created his periodic table to account for the common chemical properties much like Newlands. The modern periodic table is arranged by the atomic number discovered by Henry Moseley in 1914. Find out what else occurred on this day in science history.

Toss one or more of these treated pinecones onto your holiday fire for colored flames.