John Cuthber

No plants, fungi or algae produces sucralose and the only animal that makes it is us. There's no way it can be described as "natural" without debasing the word.

I'm not quite sure what the relation is but I always feel that children have fewer rights because they have fewer responsibilities. You can't hold a 10 year old driver responsible in law if he kills someone- so you don't give him the chance. Incidentally, for most countries the age of majority is 18; it's not the age at which you can make some decisions, it's that age at which you can make any/ all decisions. Most people would be unhappy seeing 12 year olds deciding to get married. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority

Can I just check on the definition of "fair" please? For example someone born to poor parents who attends a poor school is unlikely to do as well as someone whose parents can afford a better school. Is it fair that, no matter how hard he works, he is likely to be disadvantaged? If so, is a progressive tax more likely, or less likely, than a flat tax to address this particular variety of unfairness?

Astronomers have been measuring distance in "light years" for ages. So what?

Wouldn't you need an infinitely long video to prove perpetual motion? If you had an infinitely long video then...

I can buy sand at about $40 a ton, it's connecting the wires to each grain that costs the money. What on earth would you want with a piezoelectric floor?

Mercury is in HFCS High fructose corn syrup? http://xkcd.com/285/

Viruses can only attack things that are actively living. I suspect that anthrax spores would be pretty safe from any virus. The virus will attack any actively growing anthrax, then the virus will die because it has no host. Any spores that happen to "live" longer than the virus will be just fine. Virus particles are not generally very stable in the environment whereas spores are.

"If i dissolve Na2CO3 in water and distill the solution will the water that comes over have a higher concentration of hydroxyl ions. " Higher than what? Anyway apart from some solution carried over as spray, the only stuff that will distil is water. In principle it will be neutral. In practice it will pick up a little CO2 from the air and become slightly acidic. Hypothetically, the process of boiling will decompose some of the carbonate to CO2 and NaOH but the effect will be tiny. You can boil a solution of sodium carbonate and let it cool. What will crystallise out is the carbonate, not the hydroxide. "is there a catalyst of some sort to produce more NaOH and release more CO2? " No, sadly that's not what catalysts do. They can only affect the rate of a reaction, not the position of the equilibrium, and in this case, the equilibrium is very much in favour of carbonate. (I say it's sad because it would solve the energy crisis if you found a catalyst that did that. It would breach the principle of the conservation of energy.)

"If i dissolve Na2CO3 in water and distill the solution will the water that comes over have a higher concentration of hydroxyl ions. " Higher than what? Anyway apart from some solution carried over as spray, the only stuff that will distil is water. In principle it will be neutral. In practice it will pick up a little CO2 from the air and become slightly acidic. Hypothetically, the process of boiling will decompose some of the carbonate to CO2 and NaOH but the effect will be tiny. You can boil a solution of sodium carbonate and let it cool. What will crystallise out is the carbonate, not the hydroxide. "is there a catalyst of some sort to produce more NaOH and release more CO2? " No, sadly that's not what catalysts do. They can only affect the rate of a reaction, not the position of the equilibrium, and in this case, the equilibrium is very much in favour of carbonate. (I say it's sad because it would solve the energy crisis if you found a catalyst that did that. It would breach the principle of the conservation of energy.)

"If i dissolve Na2CO3 in water and distill the solution will the water that comes over have a higher concentration of hydroxyl ions. " Higher than what? Anyway apart from some solution carried over as spray, the only stuff that will distil is water. In principle it will be neutral. In practice it will pick up a little CO2 from the air and become slightly acidic. Hypothetically, the process of boiling will decompose some of the carbonate to CO2 and NaOH but the effect will be tiny. You can boil a solution of sodium carbonate and let it cool. What will crystallise out is the carbonate, not the hydroxide. "is there a catalyst of some sort to produce more NaOH and release more CO2? " No, sadly that's not what catalysts do. They can only affect the rate of a reaction, not the position of the equilibrium, and in this case, the equilibrium is very much in favour of carbonate. (I say it's sad because it would solve the energy crisis if you found a catalyst that did that. It would breach the principle of the conservation of energy.)

I don't know much about bolybutylene terphthalate, but I do know about a bit about polyethylene terphthalate (PET) PET, in thin sheets, is better known as mylar. It's commonly used as a dielectric in capacitors so I guess that's the sort of thing we mean. As for the expansion coefficients I presume they mean parallel to the sheet and perpendicular to it. If you had a big stack of sheets of this stuff 1 metre square and 1 metre high and heated it up by 1 degree the stack would get 77µm taller, and 63µm wider and deeper (front to back). Does that help?

"I love when science proves a biblical story true," For example?

Don't you have a taxable allowance system? Anyway, it looks a bit communist to me- too much like a planned political economy.

Hang on, have I missed something? "bad thing happens to person, they get sad, we give them drugs." bad thing happens to person, they get flu, we give them antibiotics (which don't affect the flu virus). bad thing happens to person, they get arthritis, we give them anti inflamatories (etc which don't actually stop the disease). bad thing happens to person, they get asthma, we give them drugs that reat the symptoms, but not the underlying cause. What's the difference? To be fair to the psychologists they are trying to deal with something that's a bit complicated.

"I just think its interesting to see how much uncertainty there is in the most basic common concepts. " So did Descartes, but he wondered about it a long time ago (1637 assuming you believe in time). Have you anything to add?

Never mind the books, even if there is a God, He didn't write them. The question was "Is there really a conflict between religion and science? " and the answer is yes. If science finds a discrepancy between the current teachings and observations made in the real world then science changes what it preaches. If religion finds such a discrepancy, it locks up or kills the the people who pointed it out, suppresses the information, and carries on. That's a conflict.

Using a dielectric mirror gives you a monochrome image which isn't very impressive. With a 95% reflector you can get away with 15 bounces before you lose half the image intensity. If you put one mirror on the moon and the other on Earth that's less than a minute. A video recorder does a better job.

I don't know, but I don't propose to watch an hour of dull slow video to find out, particularly when it took 3 tries to actually link to the video. If Alexandre thinks this is important then the best bet might be to post a precis of the ideas and evidence.

A fiddle of gold against your soul says I think I'm better than you.

Everything that you see around you is emitting microwaves. Even hot things, as well as emitting light, give of microwaves; in fact they give off more than cool things do.

Synchrotron radiation can emit light as a direct effect of a magnetic field on a moving electron. This is plainly an EM effect. There may be others, but it only takes one to show that light is EM radiation.

It wasn't until Mr Science said "Well GOD created Science, not the church or the state". I still think that, at the time when science was invented, there was no real distinction between the church and the state.

You could extract the sulphur from eggs, but it would be a very expensive way to do it. There isn't much sulphur in an egg. The Claus process is complicated in practice, but in principle its simple enough. The idea is to recover sulphur from gas mixtures containing hydrogen sulphide. A lot of natural gas contains some hydrogen sulphide when it comes out of the gas well. This is a problem because hydrogen sulphide is corrosive, and when it burns it forms sulphur dioxide which contributes to acid rain. The hydrogen sulphide is composed of atoms of sulphur, each of which is attached to two atoms of hydrogen. The Claus process, effectively burns off the two hydrogen atoms and leaves the sulphur behind. Unfortunately, it's not possible to do that directly because the sulphur will also burn. So they burn part of the hydrogen sulphide to get sulphur dioxide and water. Then they react the sulphur dioxide with the remaining hydrogen sulphide. The oxygen in the sulphur dioxide combines with the hydrogen from the hydrogen sulphide to make water. The sulphur gets left behind and is extracted. The catalyst makes this reaction happen more readily.

" (The unknowns are becoming less.)" The only unknown is why do you still believe in this.