Discover the Many Uses of Dry Ice...

You all know what dry ice is, right?  Solid carbon dioxide which sublimates at around -78.5 degrees celsius?  Makes a mist when put in water?

Today at work, one of my tasks was to replenish our dwindling stock of pure 100% ethanol.  We were completely out of it actually.  Anyway, as I was walking to the stock room on this beautifully warm day in Pasadena, I passed by a delivery truck that had "Discover the Many Uses of Dry Ice" written on it in huge blue letters next to a giant picture of a boy and girl eating ice cream cones.  On the other side of the kids it said "...for freezing and special effects". 

"That is only two uses", I thought to myself.  

Since I had forgotten the permission slip to buy the ethanol (since ethanol is the alcohol you drink without going blind, unlike its evil twin, methanol) so I had to return to the lab, pass the truck, then return to the stock room and pass the truck again and then once more returning to the lab with the 200 proof booze.  Each time I passed the truck I thought more about the advertisement on the side of it.  You know, there really are only two uses for dry ice.  Keeping things cold/freezing and special effects.  Sure, those are general categories but keeping biological reagents cold (as we do in our lab) and keeping your fridge cold during power outages (as they say in their online advert video) are pretty much the same use.  As are making halloween punch bubble and fogging up a dance floor in that they both exploit the increased speed of sublimation that occurs when dry ice is dropped in water.

So like, what the fuck man?  I know that advertising needs to exaggerate a product's uses, awesomeness and sex appeal, but does dry ice really have that much marketability?  I mean, you don't see advertisements for regular ice, do you?  Just Smirnoff Ice!  Ok, bad joke.

So as I thought about it more (yeah, today was a slow day), I decided I would cut them some slack.  There IS another use for dry ice, but it is rather macabre.  I recall a friend of mine telling me that in the lab they worked in, they studied mice.  When the mice were of no more use to lab, it was necessary to dispose of them in a somewhat humane manner.  One way of doing this is to replace their oxygen supply with carbon dioxide, suffocating them.  In labs that lack the financial superfluity to purchase carbon dioxide tanks for dispatching the "test subjects", they have to put a "bag of mice" in a box with dry ice.  As the the dry ice sublimates, it pushes the oxygen out of the box, cutting off the air supply.

There you go Penguin Dry Ice!  Discover the many uses of dry ice  :)