exchemist

Yeah and now, with $$$ signs in his eyes, Trump is actually accusing Zelensky, a man who has out-Churchilled Churchill for his country, of being a dictator! WTF?

A useful word, which was adopted some years ago in our household to refer to decaffeinated coffee, to distinguish it from the unadulterated version.

Thanks for these further references. I too had stumbled across Haüyne . This mineralogists' discussion about nomenclature was interesting. Whatever the ins and out of the naming of these minerals, it seems clear than when they are bright blue it is due to polysulphide anions in the cages, replacing a proportion of what would otherwise have been sulphate. Chivers comments in his paper that in earlier work people thought the anion was S₂⁻ (your scanned pages reflect this earlier view) but it is now recognised to be this S₃•⁻, with the odd electron in the π* antibonding orbital, that is responsible for the absorbance that creates the colour. Pyrite is indeed found in association with lapis lazuli but my suspicion, from the Chivers paper about the reversible formation of S₃•⁻ in the lab at elevated temperature and pressure, is that the same hydrothermal fluids that create pyrite can also alter suitable rocks to create lapis lazuli, by partial replacement of sulphate with this trisulphide radical anion. Anyway, all good and interesting stuff. I must pop back to the Natural History museum for another interesting mineral. There were some very dramatic, long, blackish crystals of stibnite, for example.......

Hmm, but all you are saying is that we don’t as yet have a model for the process. That’s what makes it an object of study, of course. Wondering about reproducibility in the lab is the sort of thing only someone with little understanding of the science would do. As a “question to ask”, it is very naïve - or disingenuous, but in your case I’ll assume naïvety, pro tem. The biochemistry of a living organism is very complex indeed. There is no reason to expect that assembly of all the components required, in a functional form, could be accomplished in a lab on a human timescale. Other contributors to the thread have already made this point.

But how is this any different from us not being to observe directly geological processes, say, or the formation of stars? There are many aspects of science that depend on inference of a process from observations, without being able to observe the process directly. Do you think the origin of life is unique in this respect, for some reason? If so, what?

Incidentally I notice from your link that there is some variation in how the formula for lazurite, responsible for the blue of lapis lazuli, is written. Reading a bit more about this it looks as if the zeolite cages can hold either sulphate or this trisulphide radical and it qualifies as lazurite if >25% of the cages contain trisulphide. Also, rather paradoxically, Wiki describes it as being formed from contact metamorphism (metasomatism?) of limestone. This seems very counterintutive as it does not explain where the aluminosilicate matrix comes from, let alone the sulphate/trisulphide content of the cages. Curiouser and curiouser.

Counterexample: Jonathan Woss? He has a London working class accent and went to local schools in East London. But you may be right that the non-rhotic pronunciation of Southern England is what can lead to these "wotten wabbits", as we used to call them. Probably due to the phoneme set picked up in early speech. It was interesting when my bilingual son was learning to talk that he developed two independent sets of phonemes: one for English which he used with me and one for French which he used with my French wife. (This became apparent when he used, with my wife, a family nonsense word he had learnt from me. Speaking to her, he pronounced this word like a stage Frenchman speaking English, with a strong accent.) I've yet to hear of a Scotsman who can't pronounce his Rs, no doubt because from the cradle Scottish children learn to pronounce it rhotically.

I’ll look forward to that. In the meantime I’ll see what I can discover about lazulite, which I see does contain a transition metal, though it is Fe which is not normally associated with blue colours, pace Prussian Blue.

Curious non-sequitur in your final sentence. What on earth do “materialist atheists” have to do with the topic?

So, Vance has laid it out clearly for us in Europe. We no longer have shared values with the USA and the USA is no longer an ally of Europe. NATO is now effectively dead. Which means Eastern Europe is at serious risk of invasion. Welcome to World War III. Thanks, Vance.

I see that Associated Press has now been refused access to White House press briefings and travel on Air Farce 1, because they have reiterated, in their style guide, that the Gulf of Mexico is to remain described as the Gulf of Mexico, because that is how it is known to its worldwide audience.

It's not quantum theory but radiometric dating that is used to estimate the age of the Earth. This gives a value of approx 4.5bn years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth

I've found that the odd electron does indeed go into a relatively high energy orbital: a π* antibonding orbital which is shared across all 3 atoms. The information was buried in this interesting but very long review of polysulphide anions by Tristram Chivers and someone else: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/cs/c8cs00826d. What I have yet to find out is what it gets promoted to in the transition responsible for the colour. There is a comment that neutral sulphur molecules have a +ve electron affinity, such that addition of one extra electron is both exothermic and exergonic (ΔG<0), so the radical anion is stable with respect to the neutral atom. Adding a second electron, to make a 2- anion, is energetically favourable in polarisable solvents but not in the gas phase, so is more marginal. Lapis Lazuli has a quite open zeolite-type aluminosilicate structure, with cages big enough to sequester this big anion and prevent it from reacting further, in spite of the reactivity implied by the odd electron. It would be interesting to know how this unusual mineral is formed in the Earth's crust. The Chivers paper says it has been found that S₃•⁻ has been found to form in sulphurous hydrothermal fluids, at temperatures >200C and pressures > 1kbar. So perhaps lapis lazuli is formed by some kind of metamorphic alteration of a pre-existing aluminosilicate mineral, involving sulphur-containing hydrothermal fluids.

Head of the Office of Goverment Ethics was fired this week: This guy Schiff is rather good value, I must say. (As he should be: Stanford and Harvard Law School). As he says in closing: "So much for draining the swamp".

Perhaps Google should be renamed Grovel, while they are about it.