exchemist

Agree about melting points but, on boiling points, that's not how I recall Raoult's Law.

No it's something in the potatoes. You can see it in their appearance after being steamed and before they are cut into chunks for frying. If they look floury at that stage, they will come out well. If they look moist, they will go dark, sweet and flabby.

All good background, but this does not address my issue, which is the lack of reproducibility of results, from batch to batch, as I described in the OP.

It's just grandstanding, in one of these farcical kangaroo court televised committees that US politics loves so much. As you say, kicking Fauci gets points on the US Right, as he is one of their hate objects, being a purveyor of objectivity and truthfulness.

Yes, the article I read was vague as to what process would be started by washing. Maybe washing or not is a red herring, after all. Anyway, I'll have another data point after this weekend, on these "baking potatoes" (variety unspecified).

Yes, I gather potatoes are from the nightshade, solanum, family (as are tomatoes), and that the green parts are poisonous (solanine). But I think that's another story. I have found some information that storage at excessively low temperature can make potatoes sweet. (This reminds me of the old theory that parsnips are best eaten after the first frosts). However I keep mine in the cellar of my London Victorian house, which rarely goes below 10C, so I rather doubt that explains it. I have also read that washing potatoes can start processes of some sort going. The ones I buy in polythene bags at the supermarket have definitely been washed. The ones I buy in France are unwashed, too. I'm going to experiment this weekend with so-called "baking potatoes", which are sold loose and unwashed. It will be interesting to see if I can steam them and then cut them up, without them disintegrating......

So far as I can see, Fauci is likely to be right. I try to avoid relying on sources with a political bias, and it is well-known that the US Right has been out to get Fauci for ages because he has credibility and stood up to Trump, making Trump look like the idiot he was. This story for some reason seems to be carried only by right wing outlets. However I did find this "fact check", made last month on the topic, which concludes that the accusations against Fauci are false: https://www.ibtimes.sg/fact-check-did-anthony-fauci-fund-bat-research-wuhan-lab-by-bypassing-rules-56635 ...unless he has better things to do than dance to the tune of a grandstanding politician, of course.

As a cook, I have noticed with frustration that, when I roast or shallow-fry cooked potato (in chunks or slices), sometimes they come out golden and crisp with floury interior, and sometimes they quickly turn dark brown and come out flabby and a bit sweet. I think it may correlate with whether or not the potatoes have started to sprout in storage. I can imagine that the starch may possibly start to break down to simpler sugars when germination is triggered. I wonder if this accounts for what I have experienced, the sugars caramelising with the frying etc. Does anyone know? And, more to the point, what can I do to ensure this does not happen to my potatoes. My experience has mostly been with supermarket Maris Piper. When we go to France in the summer, the varieties I have tried mostly seem to be fine. I wonder if the supermarkets in the UK store them too long or something.

Experiment. The model has been subjected to all manner of tests over the last century and has passed them all. It is even used to make GPS work in our phones. Being a chemist, I have not learnt tensors so I don't pretend to understand the maths of GR, but I have learnt enough science - mainly QM - to appreciate that the way the universe works is not always intuitive and can be at variance with what everyday "common sense" may suggest. And non -Euclidean geometry is not that hard to grasp, in principle, at least.

Yes. Very elegant. Another +1 from me.

Thanks for posting this. I was scratching my head thinking I had read something about chimneys. But they seem to need to be very tall, and are even more of a blot on the landscape than wind turbines. I wonder what sort of payback time they achieve and how they compare in Watts/m² with solar panels these days.

On the contrary, SCIRP has a very poor reputation. It seems to masquerade as being located in California, while really being a Chinese operation and is considered by Jeffrey Beall to be a predatory journal organisation. I quote a passage from the Wikipedua article about SCIRP: The company has been accused of being a predatory open access publisher[6] by Jeffrey Beall and of using email spam to solicit papers for submission.[4] In 2014 there was a mass resignation of the editorial board of one of the company's journals, Advances in Anthropology, with the outgoing Editor-in-Chief saying of the publisher "For them it was only about making money. We were simply their 'front'."[7] From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing

Anyone who think from the perspective of Space-time, are wasting their time. Oh no, not another Tesla crank. That's two in the space of a week! Tesla was a turn of the c.20th inventor, electrical engineer and Groucho Marx lookalike, who went mad* and died 80 years ago. Quoting what Tesla had to say about a branch of physics he knew nothing about, not being a physicist, does not enhance anyone's credibility. *In 1932 he announced he had invented a motor that would run on cosmic rays:

Work is Fd, force times distance. To calculate the work done, you need to know not just the force but the distance through which it is applied. Do not run away with the notion that you can get limitless power from the expansion of ice. The bigger the load, the smaller the distance through which it will be lifted. Ice is not incompressible. The work it does will be finite - and small compared to the latent heat released. But to be honest I think I am wasting my time now. At every turn, it seems, you generate another bogus complication, to evade acceptance of what I and others here have been telling you. I think you are determined to hold onto this daft notion of Tesla's, as you have these past 9 years, (I now discover you were posting on the same topic, in another forum I belong to, back in 2012) and that you are impervious to reason. Thanks for the "ice engine", though. I shall add it to my list of the more memorable crank attempts to get round the laws of thermodynamics, along with the Japanese infra-red photovoltaic in the box and the German surface tension one, which took weeks to unscramble. The common feature of all of them is to devise a scenario that is just complicated enough to exceed its proponent's powers of analysis - and hey presto, the laws of thermodynamics have been broken and free energy is available for all. Not.

I suggest you re-read what I have written about chemical potential energy. Nowhere have I suggested it is heat, because it obviously is not. Energy is converted from one form to another in the processes we have been discussing. I even drew a diagram with arrows. What are you hung up on? I am totally mystified.

Heat is DEFINED as a flow: the energy that flows between bodies that are at different temperatures.

I was reflecting on the ice engine today. It's quite an ingenious and entertaining idea, albeit an impractical one. The feature of it that differs from most heat engines is that it exploits the change in volume due a phase change in the working fluid, rather than the expansion on heating a gas. It occurred to me that this is also true of the earliest steam engines. These were "atmospheric engines", in which the power stroke exploited the reduction in pressure when the steam in the cylinder was condensed, by the injection of a cold water spray. So here, as in the ice engine, a power stroke is produced by a phase change, and is accompanied by a release of Latent Heat, whereas the heat input to the engine takes place on the return stroke, i.e. as the cylinder is refilled with steam. It seems that this feature - of the heat input taking place on the return stroke - is what is bothering @Tom Booth Perhaps he should think about Newcomen's atmospheric engine for a bit......

Before, you stated the ice engine does not convert ambient heat into work. And I said, on the contrary, it does. I went on to explain how this conversion takes place:- ambient heat -> chemical potential energy in liquid water ->work done in expanding the ice + heat output as Latent Heat of Fusion. I fail to see why this is an issue. But it appears, from your bowling ball analogy (or non-analogy), that you don't understand what I mean by chemical potential energy. Look, if two substances react chemically together with evolution of heat (what we call an "exothermic" reaction), they go from a higher energy state to a lower energy state. So we can say that the reactants have chemical potential energy, which is released and flows out as heat when they react together. That's all it means. What happens is weaker bonds in the reactants are replaced by stronger ones in the products. Crystallisation is a similar process, in that the unbonded molecules in the liquid state become bonded in the solid, with release of heat, which we call the Latent Heat of Fusion. So the molecules in the liquid state have chemical potential energy, relative to the solid.

Maa fiy sweat.

"Prove me wrong!" has been the cry of the crank down the ages. It does not work like that. It is for the person making the claim or hypothesis to provide evidence in support of it.

I do not understand what point you are trying to make here.

Fat finger trouble? I presume you meant to reply to the OP rather than to me.

My understanding is yes this is what happens. However the rate of decay is not such as to cause an appreciable bulk charge to accumulate, as a rule - there may be weird exceptions with some exceptionally highly radioactive species, I suppose. There are flows of ions and electrons at very low levels in the atmosphere and in the ground all the time, which we don't notice.

Yes it does. Ambient heat supplies energy to break the hydrogen bonds in the ice crystal, increasing the chemical potential energy of the working medium. This potential energy then flows out when the temperature is reduced and the ice diverts some of that energy into work, as the ice forms and lifts the weight. And then the cycle repeats itself. I've deleted the rest as it just adds confusion.

Yes. But in the end, what's new here is just a magnet. This has been "jam tomorrow" ever since I was a kid. I remember the ZETA torus (for some reason not called a tokamak, though it looked to me like one), with its promise of limitless power, just around the corner. And now I'm over 65 - and people are still designing magnets for toruses, with the promise of limitless power just around the corner...... Like everyone, I hope we are getting closer, but history makes me sceptical.