John Cuthber

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonium_persulfate Also, HCl/H2O2, but be careful with that as it can give off chlorine.

You didn't help. You said "It seems partially related to sexual abandonment." which is counter-productive.

No, tuna isn't just protein. Tuna is mainly water so, you don't get 39 grams of tuna, you get 154 grams of tuna which includes about 39 grams of protein and probably something like 100 grams of water. Fish are mainly water (gosh!) rather than mainly protein. Proteins are solids so if the tuna was 100% protein it would be like a plastic cast of a fish. The protein would be like resin- about as stiff as the stuff your fingernails are made of. It wouldn't be able to swim, it's heart wouldn't beat and it wouldn't have any brain or nervous system function.

http://bit.ly/10kx1bj

OK, common sense and the data say that remaining life span fall as a you get older or, equivalently, the older you are the more likely you are to die in the next year. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Excerpt_from_CDC_2003_Table_1.pdf/page1-593px-Excerpt_from_CDC_2003_Table_1.pdf.jpg So the idea that, at 100 you have a longer life ahead of you than you had at 90 is experimentally wrong. Since the effect described does not actually happen (older people don't expect to live longer than younger ones) there is no need to call on some weird hypothesis to explain it. Indeed, if, as stated elsewhere, this increase in lifespan among the elderly is a natural consequence of the "Global brain" and this increase does not happen, it is evidence that this "Global brain" (whatever that might mean) does not exist.

"On the biochemistry, my reading is that the reaction is normally reversible" Well read it again, and keep reading it until you realise that the reaction goes practically to completion. Fe(OH)2 will remove oxygen very effectively. Oxygen simply is not produced by Fe(OH)3 in water. If you have a tank full of water there are only two thing present in macroscopic quantities, the metal of the tank, and the water. In some circumstances those can react and produce hydrogen. There's also a reasonable chance of production of methane from organic stuff in the water. So, there are two mechanisms that might produce a build up of flammable gases. Air can generally get into tanks too. Either as bubbles or by dissolving where the pressure is high and then coming out of solution where the pressure is low. So, you can fairly easily get an explosive mixture it a tank my mechanisms that are sensible and plausible. Now, why in the name of all that's holy do you insist on coming up with absurd schemes to produce impossibly hygroscopic explosives like ammonium nitrite? Incidentally, adding copper ions to the water is a bit of a red herring. If the pipes are made from any metal more reactive than copper then the copper ions will be reduced to the metallic copper. If the pipe is copper then the metal of the pipe is likely to dissolve and give traces of copper ions, whether any is added or not. If the pipe is concrete then the copper is likely to be precipitated as silicate. In hard water areas the copper is likely to get trapped in the limescale. Basically, unless the pipes are plastic the addition of copper won't make much difference.

"Isn't 100 g of tuna fish in a can 100g of pure protein?" No. There's a lot of water there (my guess is about 70%) as well as other things like salt, fat, whatever it is that makes it pink, etc. So, 100 grams of tuna is probably about 30 grams of protein.

Ajkoer, The bottom line is that, since the water is usually quite pure, there isn't much in it. So it can't make much gas. This reaction " H2O + Fe2O3 → 2 Fe(OH)2 + O2 " (or, rather the properly balanced version) goes the other way 4 Fe(OH) 2 + O2 + 2 H2O--> 4 Fe(OH)3) or if you prefer 4 Fe(OH)2 +O2 --> 2 Fe2O3 +4 H2O If you try to prepare Fe(OH)2 it goes brown as soon as the air gets to it. (The reaction in wiki is a bookkeeping simplification it doesn't produce free O2, the reaction is coupled to the oxidation of some organic material. It would have been better if you had understood what you were citing) And in the case of "4 Fe(HCO3)2 + O2 + 2 H2O --> 4 Fe(OH)3↓ + 8 CO2↑" you have forgotten that CO2 is rather soluble in water (like a few other spurious suggestions you have invoked) In essence, the only valid comment you have made is that tanks rust.

My point is that real science is repeatable. Is "mindfulness" based on a clear set of principles which permit the creation of a testable hypothesis? Or is it a quasi religion?

If you open a discussion with "I want the benefits of being known without the risk of having a bullet put in my head." then you are pretty much inviting a diagnosis, so it's hardly off-topic.

"There are many more studies on meditation with control groups, they show a variety of results." So does roulette.

From the 3rd one "All participants were college students at a small, midwest-ern university. Participants in the meditation group were students in a psychology course, led by the first author (CJM), in which this research was conducted. They were research assistants for this project. Enrollment in this course determined the sample sizes." "meditators were aware that if they did adhere to the training program, and a significant effect were found,they may be co-authors on a manuscript." Well, that looks like a biassed sample group to me, so the experiment is, at best, questionable. It leads me to wonder why they chose to do that. To be fair, they give an answer "This design was motivated by the intensive time commitment required of meditators and served to incentiv-ize adherence to the training regimen." So, it's a self- selected group rather than a randomly chose one. Does it look legit to you? The 4th is interesting, Looking at table 1 they compare the effects of "sham" meditation with "real" meditation. Apparently, real meditation raises systolic blood pressure while sham meditation reduces it. Both reduce diastolic blood pressure, but the sham version works better. Both raise heart rate: the sham version has a stronger effect. There's no statistically significant difference between the two interventions for the other two parameters which are measured. In most cases the sham treatment had more effect. And the paper's conclusion? "A brief meditation intervention was effective in reducing overall negative mood including depression, tension, fatigue, confusion, anxiety, and lowering HR when compared to the sham meditation and control groups. Sham meditation was effective in significantly reducing state anxiety and tension. Comparisons with a sham meditation group are an effective way of controlling for the demand characteristics associated with meditation practice in experimental trials. This study demonstrated the efficacy of brief mindful training above and beyond the demand characteristics of a sham meditation condition" They claim it reduces 6 parameters ("depression, tension, fatigue, confusion, anxiety, and lowering HR") when they only measured 5, and two of those are not what they are citing. They say "A brief meditation intervention was effective in ... lowering HR when compared to the sham meditation and control groups" If you look at the data for the first session (fig 3) you see that the reductions in mean blood pressure from the control group, real and sham groups are 93.1, 93.6 and 92.9% respectively. i.e. the "real" meditation gives rise to the smallest drop in blood pressure (though there's no statistically significant difference- all three interventions are really indistinguishable. At least they admit that "Sham meditation was effective in significantly reducing state anxiety and tension." and they say "This study demonstrated the efficacy of brief mindful training above and beyond the demand characteristics of a sham meditation condition"" Let's say that they have not demonstrated it very convincingly.

"Is the speed of light always 299 792 458 m / s?" Yes.* http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/current.html * strictly, it's the speed of light in vacuo.

There was a talk on "mindfulness" at work a while back. They cited the benefits that had been shown in various studies. At they end they invited questions. I asked what the reference intervention had been in those studies. The speaker looked a bit put-out and eventually admitted that there wasn't one. A few people in the audience started laughing. So, they were happy to stand up and speak about a subject and say how good it is, even though they knew that there was no valid evidence. In effect they had repeatedly done an experiment with no "control" population. These people are psychologists and understand experimental technique. You have to ask yourself why they deliberately chose not to do the experiments properly, knowing that this was almost certainly going to bias the outcome in favour of a positive (though meaningless) result. If it works, why not do a proper test on it, rather than publishing badly done ones? .

The problem is that too many people worry too much about physical appearance.

I suspect that a lot of new kit these days is designed more by electronic engineers and programmers than by chemists.

How much hydrogen would you expect 1 gram of pure magnesium to produce?

If you are concerned about it you should see a doctor.

Given the conventional use of the symbols, mgh is the gravitational potential energy and not a force. The units are wrong so the equation is wrong.

Did you read the article you cited? Did you understand it? That article says that the Henry's law constant for the solubility of HNO2 is 49M/atm So, at one atmosphere pressure the theoretical solubility of HNO2 is 49 molar. That's notionally 2.3 kilos of acid in each litre of water (obviously the linearity of Henry's law will have broken down at this point, but the fact remains that HNO2 is very very soluble in water.) Sure it's limited but when the realistic concentrations are in parts per million, a theoretical solubility of 2,300,00 parts per million isn't much of a limit. Why don't you just drop this silly idea?

Well, a battery combines an oxidant and a reductant, so do rockets. Since, in the case of a battery you might have a solid phase reaction you would need to use the electrical power to heat a working fluid to a high temperature and push that out of the back of the rocket, and that may well spoil the overall efficiency.. The point I was making was that rocket design is largely about getting a whole lot of stored energy in as small a mass as possible. So is battery design- but batteries also need to be stable and to have the energy harvested electrically. Rockets just need lots of hot gas so the constraints are different and generally less severe - if the energy density is high enough the reaction temperature will generally vapourise the products. There is one system which is effectively used for both rockets and batteries- the hydrogen and oxygen in a fuel cell.

Once the battery is full, it is full. So there's a limit to how much energy you can put into it. No battery can store the energy needed to get it into orbit (if it could, we would use them instead of rockets). So you would use more energy moving the batteries than you would get from the solar power.

Do you mean things like this? http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredient/724188/STEARYL_ACETATE/ (other suppliers are also available- I just picked the first one where Google gave a picture.

Without commenting on the morals or wisdom of any other aspects of this process: by the time you have dried the material down to a solid there will be so little butane there that it won't be an issue, or rather it will be less of an issue that the other materials naturally present.

If it is the same price to make a gram of it, but you need a thousand ties less, then it will be cheaper. Also, if you need to find a painkiller for an elephant (ten times or a hundred times heavier than a human), this stuff might be easier to carry.