woelen

Please explain in more detail. You know, this is a science forum, and if you cannot/are not allowed to discuss the principles behind this, then please stop posting here. Forums are public and confidential things can better be covered by a consultancy agency or whatever.

No it isn't. Copper nitrate looses oxygen as well, you get a mix of NO2, O2 and water vapor. When you lead this through water, you'll get nitrous acid, nitric acid, and unreacted NO2. The latter is very nasty. At higher concentrations, your acid will become yellow, brown, or green, due to the NO2/HNO2/N2O3 impurities. Such nitric acid is crap and cannot be used for many more sensitive reactions, because the nitrous acid and nitrogen oxides give very strong side reactrions.

Bubbling SO2 is much easier. SO2 is very soluble in water and when you bubble this through water, it certainly will dissolve. From a practical point of view, you burning sulphur method is not easy. You will not have real pressure behind the SO2 formed, so, it is not easy to bubble it through water. You really cannot obtain H2SO4, or do you just want to do this experiment in order to educate and entertain yourself? Making H2SO4 from SO2 can be done in another way. Take some dilute HCl (not more than 15%), add sodium bisulfite (or potassium bisulfite), which can be purchased at wine/beer making stores as disinfectant and preservant. Then heat the solution to (almost) boiling. The SO2 now bubbles out of this solution, it does not dissolve well in hot water. And, if your HCl is not of too high concentration, you hardly will get any HCl with the SO2. By bubbling the SO2 (with small amounts of HCl in it) through H2O2 you make H2SO4. Heating this in turn drives off any small amounts of HCl, decomposes excess H2O2 and concentrates the solution. Be careful with leading SO2 through H2O2 in this case. Use only 10% H2O2 (you can boil off water lateron) and be careful for suckback. When production of SO2 is not fast enough or when heating is stopped, while the bubbling tube is still in the H2O2, then quickly liquid is sucked back and eventually may come in your HCl/bisulfite mix. This is a real risk, so be VERY careful. You can use plastic/rubber tubing. The transparent tubes, sold in aquarium stores for oxygen pumps or filters is perfectly suitable. SO2 is not corrosive to those tubes (but it is to your lungs!, be careful).

If the solutions are VERY dilute, then the reaction with zinc does not really matter. The forms of sulphur I know are very hard to make wet, that is why I did not suggest this. Just for fun, add some sulphur powder to water. It is amazing to see that it really does not mix. If you have a somewhat heavier clump of sulphur powder, then it completely sinks to the bottom, taking the air with it and no water penetrates into the clump of sulphur. Even poking around with a little stick does not really help mixing the sulphur and water. Yes, they have different colors: copper sulfate (hydrated) copper sulfate (anhydrous) copper (II) chloride (hydrated) copper (I) chloride (has slight impurity) I have no picture of anhydrous copper (II) chloride on my website, but that compound is brown. In its crystallized form, with larger crystals, it is dark brown. What do you mean with Baralyme??? Do you mean the oxide BaO? You might be able to make that from Ba(OH)2, but I expect you will need to heat the stuff a lot. Probably over 1000 C or so. I have no personal experience with that, but I guess it will be hard.

OK, I'll just add some NaHSO4 then to some 96% ethanol and see what happens. I expect to obtain a very acidic solution of H2SO4 in ethanol. In due time this will obtain an orange, later even a brown color (due to dehydration, followed by condensation reactions). This is a fairly nice test for H2SO4 in ethanol. if the liquid remains colorless for many days, then I severely doubt what happens. I'll give it a try and come back on this.

I doubt that simply adding copper to the zinc is good. Doping with a material means adding a VERY little amount. If I had to do this, I would make a very dilute solution of CuCl2 (or CuSO4, if no CuCl2 is available). Take e.g. 1 spatula full of solid in 1 liter of water. Take some of this water and make a paste with the zinc metal. Let this mix dry and then mix this with sulphur. In this way you add trace amounts of copper to the zinc.

The speed at the center of the earth, when you start off with zero velocity cannot be computed easily, because we do not know the mass distribution of earth precisely. But for simplicity, assume that the mass is evenly distributed and that density is all over the same inside the earth. Then the depth x as function of time t can be written in differential form as d²x/dt² = g * (1 - x/r), here r is the earth radius, and g is the acceleration at the surface. Solving this differential equation for x(0) = 0 and xdot(0) = 0 yields: x(t) = r - r * cos(wt), with w = √(g/r). The velocity, xdot(t) can be written as xdot(t) = w*r*sin(wt). At the center, the velocity is maximum, so sin(wt) equals 1 over there. The velocity in the center of the earth will be w*r = √(g*r). With g equal to 10 m/s², and r approximately 6,300,000 meters, this is approximately 8000 m/s. All calculations are very rough, so this number only is an indication of the velocity at the center. In all these computations, the air friction is not taken into account.

Sounds interesting. Could you please elaborate more on the conditions under which this decomposition occurs. I have 99.9% methanol, free of water, and I have NaHSO4, which I can easily make free of water by heating it. I could give this a try, but if you could give more details on the reaction, then my try will not be a random shot.

Using such a simple procedure definitely gives you very impure DNA. It will be hard to separate the DNA from the other organic stuff.

Ah.. you added water. In that case, I can agree, the solution can be regarded as containing dilute HNO3 and distilling this can give some (dilute, at best azeotropic) HNO3. This is what I mentioned in the previous post. Making concentrated (90+ %) HNO3 from NaHSO4 (or KHSO4) and NaNO3/KNO3 will be MUCH harder. Yes, H3PO4 and AN will make nitric acid, but the lower phosphoric acids (NaH2Po4 and Na2HPO4) will make nitric acid with greater difficultly. I even expect that if you mix AN and Na2HPO4, that the Na2HPO4 even acts as a base and NH3 is released, while NaNO3 and NaH2PO4 are formed. EDIT: Fixed quote/quote error

How are you sure you isolated DNA? Don't you have any other organic crap from the cells, other organic matter, etc. ? It seems quite difficult to me to isolate DNA.

YT, I have to disagree with you (and hence agree with budullewraagh) on the KHSO4 and even more on the H3PO4 that you can use all equivalents for making HNO3. KHSO4 and KH2PO4 (and certainly K2HPO4) are not that strong acids and these are solids. With these, it will be hard (not impossible) to make HNO3, because you need strong heating and that will result in decomposition of any HNO3 formed into NO2, NO and O2. If you add some water, then you might be able to distill off an azeotropic mix, with KHSO4, but not with K2HPO4. The latter already is basic and will consume acid, instead of release acid. H3PO4 already is a weak acid, KH2PO4 is a VERY weak acid, K2HPO4 is a weak base, and K3PO4 is quite a strong base. LOL You indeed are a good dad! Other's first learn 1, 2, 3 or something like dad, mum, <names of other family members>, or whatever, you learn the periodic table. I like this . I hope she will really be interested in science when she grows up, but when you show your enthusiasm then that certainly works in the right direction. My youngest daugther (now 8 years old) is quite interested in all things I do, she especially asks not only about the "what", but also about the "why", she wants to understand things. If she may experiment herself, then she most likes it, but coming back to the topic, making HNO3 is not the thing she is allowed to do (at least not yet ).

No, when you put a burning match in the liquid, the match will stop burning and nothing further happens. There simply is too much water, even in 30% H2O2.

The size of the black hole determines how strong the tidal forces are at the event horizon. For a large black hole, it would hardly be possible to feel these tidal forces and for all black holes of practical size, the tidal forces on atoms are neglectable.

I would most like a definition system, where there are 8 planets (Mercury ... Neptune), asteroids, mainly between Mars and Jupiter, and Oort-cloud objects. Pluto belongs to the latter class, and possibly hundreds of Pluto-sized other objects and maybe thousands or even millions of smaller objects. The Oort-cloud extends far far beyond Neptunes orbit and who knows what is all inside that area of the solar system. Maybe even earth-sized objects, but still I would not call them planets.

No, there really IS no force, there is nothing trying to pull you apart. The forces nicely neutralize each other. Compare this with an electrical circuit. If I take two equal resistors R in series and I apply a voltage V to one resistor and a voltage -V to the other resitor, then at the node, between both resistors the voltage is equal to 0. The voltages precisely cancel. One cannot tell the difference between this situation and a situation, where a resistor R/2 is connected to the GND wire. Exactly the same is true in the center of the earth. A blinded observer, who only can feel gravity could not observe any difference between the centre of the earth and deep space (disregarding the enormous temperature and pressure of course ).

No, this blue stuff or green stuff is not suitable as a dye. It is quite unstable on heating and also will dissolve on washing the fabric. In order for a compound to be suitable as a dye for fabric, it needs to have adidtional properties besides having a nice color. It also needs to form some stable connection with the fabric and it needs to be fast (capable of withstanding light, washing conditions and wear).

You're right, it is correct what you pointed out. H2SO4 is needed as a catalyst. In fact, you CAN get SO3 from Na2S2O7, but you need also some H2SO4 as a start. The net reaction of course still is Na2S2O7 ---> Na2SO4 + SO3.

Oxygen supports combustion, but also is required for combustion. Oxygen in fact is quite an energetic molecule, and so are the molecules in combustible materials. The rearrangement of the oxygen and the combustible molecules to water and carbon dioxide releases the chemical (potential) energy in those molecules as heat.

What do you mean with this? The elements themselves are not especially colorful. Most of them are just silvery metals, only copper and gold are nicely colored. Salts of these elements are colored though. The explanation for this is not easy in terms of high school physics. It has to do with the energy gap between lower and higher orbitals, used for bonding and used in ion formation. While for e.g. the alkali metals most light absorbtion is at very low wavelengths, this is for longer (and visible) wavelengts in the compounds of the transiton metals. There is a reasonably sucesful theory, which helps explain (and sometimes even predict) colors of transition metal complexes. Try to understand that piece of information, but it is not really simple. The key to this is "crystal field theory". See e.g. the following Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_field_theory

No, this does NOT work! Hydrogen simply bubbles through the acid. It does not form NaOH. Just an exercise for you. Try to balance the equation you proposed and even on the basis of that, you can see that this cannot work. The hydrogen would go to the +1 oxidation state while nothing is reduced on the other hand. So, even without any knowledge of the reactants and their peculiarities one can conclude on the basis of some simple math already that this is not a possible reaction.

Phosphoric acid does have a very high boiling point, and it also decomposes on heating, giving metaphosphoric acid and water. By heating, you will not get rid of the green impurity. The water will boil away, the acid will remain, together with all its impurities. Unfortunately I see no real good way to get rid of the green stuff. The only thing which comes to mind is to add some active carbon and see whether this absorbs the green color. Pure phosphoric acid (containing water only) is an oily colorless liquid, or when it is really pure (free of water), it is a white/transparent solid with very low melting point.

Raivo is right, inorganic salts are not the best choice for coloring/dyeing. The prussian blue is very good and stable in paints, i.e. it very well withstands (sun)light. But it is not stable towards even mildly alkaline conditions, so washing is out of the question with this color.

Dyeing fabrics is one thing, but making the dye fast is another thing. E.g. the blue of potassium ferricyanide and FeSO4 is not fast at all. It will quickly degrade in the mildly alkaline conditions of washing. Try adding a mildly alkaline solution to the Prussian blue. It will become light brown fairly quickly. IIRC azo dyes are among the better, suited for adding colors to fabric. These can be made from aniline and its derivatives, together with nitrite salts (e.g. NaNO2). Wouldn't it be nice to use natural colors? One natural color, which comes to my mind, which is fairly fast as well is the yellow color of turmeric (a.k.a. curcuma). This color is really bright and adheres to the fibres very well. Just try this with some white cotton or better, wool.

Adding calcium oxide or hydroxide does not seem very beneficial to me, adding calcium carbonate or calcium sulfate can be beneficial, because of the reaction, I described in my previous post. Calcium sulfate can do a similar thing, now SO3 being the oxidizer, itself beingng reduced to SO2 and the aluminium being oxidized to Al2O3.