CaptainPanic

Yes. Redundant obsolete technologies and all industries that are connected to it must disappear at some point. You can cry about it, but in the end it has to go. The question is not if, but when. This is the whole point. Once an entire economy starts to depend so heavily on some old fashioned technology, you prevent innovation. Sadly, the longer you wait, the more jobs it will cost in the end. And short term managers/poloticians don't care about that.

It might be the "Karl Fischer" reagent. As far as I know it is prepared by ordering it from a chemicals supplier, online or by phone I've never heard of people making it themselves, but I'm sure it's possible. Look up Karl Fischer reagent. It's used for measuring the water content of solutions by titration (especially of solutions that are supposed to contain little to no water).

You were almost correct. The N has a + next to it because it has 4 bonds, and not 3. The reason is that at first it was neutral. It had 8 electrons in the outer shell with a bond to the carbon, and to 2 hydrogen. Then a 3rd hydrogen came along, and squeezed itself in... This particular hydrogen that came along was a proton (a hydrogen atom that had completely lost its electron). The nitrogen was already sharing 3 of its 5 electrons with the 3 neighbours. It then shared both of the free electrons with the proton. As it happens to be, I am sure that the hydrogen originated at the oxygen which is now negatively charged. The hydrogen broke off, and left its electron on the oxygen atom. i always feel foolish to talk about happy atoms and unhappy atoms, but at the start of chemistry lessons it seems easiest to explain it like that. 8 electrons-in-the-outer-shell-atoms are happy. Later you realize it has to do with energies... but thermodynamics of acid/base reactions don't belong in this thread... yet. For now: 8 electrons in the outer shell makes an atom happy. Hydrogen just needs 2 to be happy. And to count charge, you need to know: How many protons does an atom have. How many electrons does an atom have. How many is it sharing with its neighbours (all shared electrons, whether they come from the atom itself, or from the neighbours, count as 0.5). So, the positively charged nitrogen has: 7 protons. 2 non-shared electrons. 5 shared electrons originating from itself. 3 shared electrons from other atoms (1 from the carbon, 2 from the hydrogen) and 0 shared electrons from the positively charged hydrogen. So the total is: 7 protons, and 2 + 0.5*8 = 6 electrons. Result: a positive charge.

I think that in this case "vaguely remember" is acceptable (pioneer's own words). Quoting the 2 blocks of text below, with no reference is not acceptable. Just adding some info, and saying you're not sure is ok, especially if you include a new key-word (like "Vietnam") in this case. This can greatly improve the search results in a literature search. But if you use pioneer's post as your only reference, then you're just plain stupid. The great thing about plagiarism and Google is that there's no need for discussion: just copy paste an entire sentence into google. With plagiarism you're guaranteed to get exactly 1 hit. One thing pioneer did right: he made it clear to everyone that the quoted text is not his. So it took me less than 10 seconds to get the link: http://www.inventor-strategies.com/crazy-invention.html

Internal combustion engines are obsolete (although still very popular). Steam engine locomotive manufacturers also did not receive a bail-out when they were becoming less popular. The US industry needs to reform. Perhaps that means people lose their jobs. If anything needs government money, then it's future technologies and emerging industries... not some old fossil from the previous century.

Perhaps you undertstood it, but your last reply suggests that you possibly misunderstood. So... I'll take a step back. First thing you must know is the difference between atoms (examples are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) and molecules (examples are ammonia, L-histidine, and all the hydrocarbons (like methane, ethane, propane)). (If you don't know this yet, you will know it once you start physics/chemistry classes). To be able to draw up any molecule, you need the octet-rule. Then you need to figure out how many electrons an atom has. For that, you should take a look at the periodic table. It's a very important piece of information... but if you're interested in amino acids, you only need 5 atoms: Carbon: has 4 electrons in the outer shell, but wants 8 Nitrogen: has 5 electrons in the outer shell, but wants 8 Oxygen: has 6 electrons in the outer shell, but wants 8 Hydrogen: has 1 electrons in the outer shell, but wants 2 Sulphur: doesn't always care so much about the octet rule. For simplicity, you can leave this one out of today's lesson - it's also not present in histidine. So, in the case of ammonia (NH3, 1 nitrogen atom, 3 hydrogen atoms): the nitrogen has 5 atoms, and would like 3 more. The hydrogen all have 1. The nitrogen shares 1 electron with each individual hydrogen: all hydrogens then get 2. The hydrogens in turn also share their electron: so that the nitrogen gets its own 5, plus 3 (one from each hydrogen). That makes 8. Next lesson is perhaps functional groups. The amino acid got its name from the amine group, and the carboxylic acid group. But if you never had chemistry lessons, then I think you have enough to disgest in 1 day already.

If light travels at 10 m/s, the world would be a lot noisier. Screw fibre-optics. Shouting is faster.

I know this is homework... and I know I'm not supposed to give the entire answer. But I also know that you will get much more than this one exercise... so I'll just show how it all fits together, then you can do all the other exercises yourself. In the picture below, the two formula's are the same! On the left is the "easy" way which is popular because it takes less time to write. The right is the "complete" version. Note that each carbon atom has 4 lines attached to it (4 bonds, sometimes it's a double bond, noted with a =). Note also that the neutral nitrogen has 3 bonds. The neutral oxygen has 2 bonds. The nitrogen with 4 bonds has a +, because the nitrogen itself lost an electron. That also means that it can have not 3, but 4 bonds. The oxygen got an electron (probably from the nitrogen) and it can now no longer have 2 bonds, but only 1.

There is plenty of field research in bio-related topics.

Could it be possible that some water dripped into the molten butter? If you have some liquid at 180 deg C, and you drip a bit of water into it, it will explode (don't try this at home). the other option is that the butter de-mixed. Butter is essentially a stable emulsion, but the stability of an emulsion is temperature dependent. If a water phase forms at 180 deg C, it will also immediately boil off... and that looks like an explosion.

CH is no existing chemical, but sometimes all the hydrocarbons are called "[math]C_x{H_y}[/math]". As you learned before in this thread, you can determine how many hydrogen you will need to make the carbon get its desired 8 electrons (like the nitrogen in ammonia).

Frankly, the schematics are described as: motor, with 2 connections (positive and negative). It's not quite rocket science. You can make it a lot more difficult, but that's not necessary. I advise you to salvage the entire thing as a whole. Just remove the outside casing, and make the wires inside longer where necessary. You'll probably want to have the wiring still attached to the motor, because it includes the "throttle" button. (Press harder to go faster). You are indeed quite demanding, and if you want to do this for fun, you'll have to invest some time in it. If it's for school, then you really should invest time in it. And each and every electric motor contains magnets... so your information was correct. Some web-based resources suggest that magnets will greatly increase the efficiency of combustion engines. I say that's total crap...

If you want to include any calculations into your project, you might want to take a look at fluid dynamics. (Chance is that you'll soon realize that the ice project was easier). Here's some wikipedia links to relevant parameters. I'm not saying you should fill in all the formula's you'll find on those webpages. If you're new to the topics, then I think you do a good job if you just understand the concepts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_mechanics In fluid dynamics, the use of "dimensionless numbers" is quite common. These seem relevant for propellers. A commonly used dimensionless number is the Reynolds number. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynolds_number And perhaps the power number is also relevant. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_number

So? I don't understand this argument. Is socialism bad by definition? This community service is part of the education. So financial aspects should not be included. Therefore the whole socialism argument is invalid. Education simply costs money. There exist plenty of examples in Europe where community service is mandatory (Scandinavia and Germany as far as I know). It's not always nice to work for little money, but on the other hand... in the Netherlands a similar system is introduced, and we don't call it "community service", but instead something like "your first internship". It meets a lot less resistance (in fact, I hadn't heard about it until the program started a while ago). It's not country-wide yet though. Community service does not automatically mean "cleaning up shit in the parks". Some jobs can be cool, (like driving an ambulance). But even for rich kids with proper education, it can be good to see the dirty jobs. Perhaps they'll respect those people that do those jobs a little more.

Aww, comon! Just let me blast it with a nuke! Pleeeaaaase?

I'd use a calorimeter. You can test anything about the worms now: the heat of combustion, heat of vaporization ( I hope that the worms don't mind me suggesting this.) ... But I think you'll encounter problems when you want to measure the worm's vocal energy output (in dB) or the kinetic energy in full sprint (in Gigajoules/worm ). Good luck, and keep us up to date. Somebody might want to include the worms data in a handbook. You can become famous.

The orbit of 99942 Apophis takes 7 years. It will come close to earth, but 3.5 years later it's really far away... in fact, it will come relatively close to Jupiter's orbit. Should be quite safe to blast this asteroid over there. But finally, I must agree that a little push might be better than a big blast. Sadly. My other point was that it is quite easy to plant any device on this asteroid (whether it's a little nudge-device or a bomb), because it comes so close to us every 7 years.

Then I would go with the electric motors you find in the battery-powered drills or electric screw drivers. You will need a gearbox though. The batteries on those tools will give you at least a few minutes of fun before they are empty...

Eeh... yeah. That's probably true as well. The link I provided before showed that nitrogen can become a (weird) solid at really high pressures. I'm not sure whether such ridiculous pressures are achieved. It was assuming a constant density of about 3-4 kg/m3, and a constant 9.8 m/s2. In short, it was a totally inaccurate underestimation. I was not in the mood to calculate the real pressure. The gravitational acceleration will change, but the weight pressing down also changes (because the gas is compressed). The temperature changes as you go down, which should be taken into account.

Old questions, old dreams... still, let's have a go at it. You cannot come out of the hole on the other end, because you need to close it off in order to maintain a vacuum inside. If you just leave it open, you cannot reach the center of the earth. The pressure of all the air above you will cause the air at the center to become solid. You'd slam into a solid block of air well before you reached the center. hmm... More precisely, because the air resistance would become enormous, you'd gently land on a solid block of air well before you reach the center. You need to travel 6378 km to the center of the earth, but at 10 kilometers down, the pressure is already at about 3 bar. Even if that would go up linear at that rate, (which it certainly does not, it goes up much faster, since air is compressible) the pressure at the core would be about 2000 bar. I'd guess the real pressure of an open tube to the center would be somewhere in the millions of bars. And air (or nitrogen) will not behave as your happy friendly near ideal gas. Now stop daydreaming, and build that warp drive.

Waw, that's cool! Hope they scale it up! I'd love to get sea-sick in one of those once

Indeed. I can only agree. And to answer this question, we need to know more about the ventilation of the house. That makes it house-specific... which means we should stop here

Do you want electric engines, or combustion engines? If you want combustion engines, do they need to be so small that it will look nice like a rollerskate, or is it acceptable if you get a big thing next to it? I'm asking because you'll never succeed in making it look nice and small... simple reason is: you are at least 50 kg. Other vehicles that can typically make you move at an acceptable speed with acceptable acceleration are mopeds, scooters and such. They all have quite an engine, and a gearbox. If you want to make it electric, I would worry more about the battery. In electric vehicles this is the major headache. If you just want to take it up and down the street once, you should be fine. Still, the engine you will need is not small. In short: give a better description of what you want... and tell us how you plan to make both skates go exactly at the same speed at all times (because I don't see that happening if you build it yourself).

MIBK, methyl isobutyl ketone perhaps. Quite a standard solvent too.

[sarcasm]Ah! Yeah, if you don't want to destroy the floor, it is probably best to play with dangerous chemicals like strong acids. Water (dihydrogenoxide) is really bad for the floor. [/sarcasm] On a side note, has a video of a water-rocket-car. Perhaps you will become enthusiastic if you just check that out. The title is "WORLD RECORD Water Rocket Car 0 - 343.5 kph in 2.5 sec", says enough. And of the 1st video. It does reach the 60 meters, and it's made of stuff you find in and around the house. Finally, this one is a video of rockets (that go up, rather than horizontal). At about 1.30 minutes there's a part with an on-board camera. Quite cool.