the tree

The most common domestic use is to test the ph of pond water so an aquatics store would have it.

Get some universal indicator, and a few weak acids and weak alkalines, that's simple and pretty low risk. Putting an asprin into one of those camera film containers with a bit of water then putting the lid on makes a reasonable bang. As a demonstration rather than a hands-on thing, burning metals to get pretty colours is always fun.

Ammunition that never ever runs out. Such as the phasers in Star-Trek or the guns that Will Smith uses in IRobot. Talking of IRobot, that silver goo that came out of the injured robot, what was it?

Would an alkaline detergent, when mixed with something acidic such as Cola form a salt of some sort?

There is a few gazzilion cookies there, possibly your affliates or such-like.

Wow, thanks everyone. I can't belive I just learned all that from asking such a simple question!

o.k. I've searched the forums to no avail and I can't find anything about the words under our names. 1. What are the boundries? What names can I expect to get later? 2. What is a lepton?!?!

Hot stuff goes up and cold stuff goes down right? Hence pretty convection currents and plate techtonics and all that jazz. But if this is so then why does ice float in water considering that the ice is probably less than 5 centigrade and the water (from the same tap) is room temperature?

I put yes, as considering the size of the universe it would be pretty incredible if there wasn't. If the question were " Does intelligent life/ life anything like us exist elsewhere in the universe?" then my awsner would be not sure because I don't know nearly enough about biology to know.

Life generaly covers anything that will do all of the following: grow move reproduce consume die

Oh so many forums say that, and unfourtunately it tends not to get followed.Infinity is a damn cool number, but I can see why the conversation goes nowhere and is pretty pointless. Although you can divide by infinity: [math]{\infty}/{x}={\infty}[/math] but that's about as far as it goes so I agree that said thread should have been closed.

LOL sure you would. I'm sure not everything has already been done, in fact there's probably an infinite amount of things to do, just increasingly more obscure.

It's quite easy, in this case it'd be y = \\frac{x+1}{(x+2)(x-1)} in [math] tags.

BigMoosie that's pretty impressive, I'm only doing GCSE maths at the moment, but next year I'll be doing mechanical maths at AS level so I imagine I'll be doing stuff like that. What makes a "polynomial"? From your example it looks like an expresion that involves x to powers of 1, 2 and 3; is that right or is it something more specific? We've used quadratics (where the highest power is of 2) and I understand how factorising sometimes helps with that.

Yeh, I'm pretty sure it'd be more tedious than difficult but I see your point. Thanks

Bigmoosie, I see what you mean but why would that have to be done with prime factors? [math]\frac{50}{100} \rightarrow \frac{2\times25}{4\times25} \rightarrow \frac{2}{4} \rightarrow (\frac{2}{4})/2 \rightarrow \frac{1}{2}[/math]

I don't suppose you could explain that? It sounds interesting but I can't see how that'd work. The thing that bugged me about it was that it was too easy. Not exactly satisfying just to do a couple of divisions.

If x rocks were stolen from a pile of 30 then the cavemen would need to replace x rocks. If they know that 23 rocks are remaining then they'd need to take 23 from 30 to realise that they are missing 7 rocks. Apart from some painfully tedious trail and error, they wont get anywhere by addition and understanding subtraction is pretty much the same as understanding negative numbers.

In my upcoming maths GCSE, I know that I'm likely to get a question asking me to give a number as a product of it's prime factors. For instance, writing 50 as:[math]2\times 5\times 5[/math] wich is pretty easy, but what's the point? How could this be useful? Does it lead on to something that I might look at at a later stage or something?