The price oil over the past two days: Was at $91/barrel over the past weekend. Shot up to just under $116/barrel when the market opened yesterday. Then fell to $85/barrel at 5PM yesterday. Over the past 24 hours, there was  low of $78.5/barrel. At 3PM EDT today, the price was $84/barrel. During the past month: Oil sat at around $65/barrel. Was as low as $61/barrel a little more than a month ago, February 12 Was up to $67/barrel at the end of February. War started on February 28. On March 2 oil rose to $71/barrel and went up to $95/barrel on March 9. So you might say with that one skyrocket price yesterday, the price of oil went up $19/barrel since the war started. From  Wikipedia: The   price of oil , or the   oil price , generally refers to the   spot price   of a   barrel (159 litres) of   benchmark crude oil —a reference price for buyers and sellers of crude oil such as   West Texas Intermediate   (WTI),   Brent Crude ,   Du...

 Food dyes are everywhere: A surprising amount of the food we consume contains various compounds to add color. Marshmallows look white, but they contain blue coloring (to keep them from growing less bright as they sit on shelves). Starbucks uses food coloring in its strawberry drinks. And frozen meat, like fish and crab meat, contains red food coloring to make it more appealing . Red dyes, in particular, have had a colorful history. The Aztecs crushed an insect, the cochineal, which produces a nasty-tasting compound called carminic acid, which can make up as much as 24% the body weight, dunked the product into an acific solution, mixed it with salts, and produced  carmine dye , which is a vibrant red color. Then there is Red Dye #3 In 1856, William Henry Perkin, at the age of 18 in Germany, was the first to synthesize a a dye.  Experimenting with derivatives of coal tar, he produced mauveine, a purple dye. In 1876, Swiss chemist Karl Kussmaul of Switzerland created erythr...