CaptainPanic

Can you write down which reactions we're talking about? I propose to "model" the cookies as glucose (sugar): [ce] C6H12O6 + 6 O2 -> 6 CO2 + 6 H2O [/ce] And TNT can be itself. Let's also assume that TNT detonates in stead of burning up... [ce] 2 C7H5N3O6 -> 3 N2 + 5 H2O + 7 CO + 7 C [/ce] Before I spend any time on this, I want to reach a conclusion about the TNT-reaction. We can also agree on complete combustion: The remaining CO and C will also burn. [ce] 7 CO + 7 C + 10.5 O2 -> 14 CO2 [/ce] If we can agree on this (detonation or combustion, and also if glucose is satisfactory to model the cookie?), then we can proceed to calculate the heat of reaction. If the cookie is to be represented by another molecule, or even a group of them, please provide a heat of formation or combustion. Note that although the TNT contains oxygen, it is not oxidized. It's like gunpowder... it contains the oxygen (in the form of nitrate) but it will only oxidize when you ignite it. On TNT, the oxygen atoms break their bond with the nitrogen atom, and form another one with hydrogen to form water. This releases quite a bit of energy. I still think we're talking about the digestion-energy... that I cannot calculate, but I wouldn't recommend to eat TNT anyway.

Case 1: We get the electrons as a present (a gift from... eeh... some nasty person, it's not a nice gift!), but we get no equal amount of positive charge. Therefore we'd charge the earth, and the difference will cause lightning to spark from Earth to the Moon and Sun and Mars and Venus. Case 2: We also need to dump 1 gigaCoulomb of positive charge somewhere... Balance outside the system of the earth remains the same... but we have one massive charge buildup in Garrettguy457's body, and in another place... Any ideas? I propose we make a very very large glass sphere (VVLGS), put all the electrons in through the mother of all diodes (MOAD), and disconnect it from reality exactly at the moment they're all inside. This might be the least scientific post I've made on this forum ever... apologies.

That's probably "energy from digestion"? It's like the question: which has more energy: a relatively fresh yellow/green banana or a ripe and brown/yellow banana? Answer: for total energy it's the greenish banana. The banana burns some of itself while it ripens. It produces CO2. However, it also produces more free sugars (monomeric), and those are easy to digest. So for us people, a ripe banana "contains more energy"...

hermanntrude, I am afraid I do not understand what you wrote here (in your previous post)... quoting from an older post of you: I was wondering if you can show an example of a catalyst that'll make the scooping go faster (by whatever means, let's not get stuck in the metaphore)... "no change" does not seem a likely answer at this moment to me... the only thing I can come up with is an increase in temperature, which is not a catalyst.

Your body is 70 kg (70000 g), and the average molecule weighs about 6 g/mol (you're mostly water, and that has 3 atoms and 18 g/mol)... so you contain about 11700 mol of atoms. Or, 11700 * 6.022*10^23 = 7.03*10^27 atoms. A coulomb is 6.241506×10^18 electrons. So, you suddenly would have an excess charge of 1.12 GigaCoulomb... which is totally ridiculous btw. I think you'd have more charge than all the thunderstorms on earth put together, and I wouldn't be surprised if you would pull the moon out of its orbit or something ridiculous like that Anyway, let's try it! *looks around for a volunteer*

Have a look around for means of transportation for 1 person: There's all kinds of (carbon based) fuel engines, and you might be able to transfer such a system onto your creeper. Make sure you do it safely (fuels can burn, some can even explode). There's electric powered vehicles. Some bikes, scooters and mostly used in those things for the elderly. In any case, you'll need a pretty decent battery pack, and a good sized engine, or you'll look like a joke I'd go for pedals (like on a bike) though. It's safe, simple technology, easy to fix and cheap too... and after all, muscle power is still the most used for 1-person small distance transportation of people.

It could be that the 0.12 C is an average temperature increase, while local temperature changes can be much larger. If the mean value has risen by 0.12 C, then the necessary 1 degree temperature increase will occur more frequently too. As written above, the weather and seasonal changes influence the water temperature a lot.

[math] reaction rate = constant * [H2][br2]^{1/2} [/math] It means that you take the concentration of H2, multiply it by the square root of the concentration of Br2, and (optionally, but commonly) multiply it by a constant. The reaction is (probably): [ce]H2 + Br2 --> 2 HBr [/ce] So, you can see that 1 mole of H2 react with 1 mole of Br2, to form 2 moles of HBr. p.s. if you just have a question, you can just ask... no need to post other things (like about rubber or Kr)... some people ask, some give answers... but it's not a market where you must sell something before you can buy something

If you are interested to learn more about spontaneous reactions, and non-spontaneous reactions, I suggest that you study the topic of "Gibbs free energy" a bit, and then come back to this forum if you have any questions. To explain the whole theory goes perhaps a bit far at this moment... besides, the wiki page is not too bad. It would help if you understand "entropy" too.

It would certainly help if you also post a scientific reference, so that those who are interested can find the whole article somewhere. Scientific reference is usually something like: Authors of article, Title of article, name of journal/magazine, year, volume, page number

You're only 17, and still learning... Keep up the creative thoughts. Everyone has made similar mistakes at some point. This is how creative thinking works: learn some things, try to extrapolate them to achieve something new... and sometimes that means you'll find out it was all quite impossible after all, or that someone else thought of the same thing before you. In any case, it's a good way to study... unless you're planning to live in a fantasy world, in which case I think this forum is the wrong place. It's a science forum Keep posting and visiting the forum... and don't get depressed from some of the more harsh replies here. You're only 17 and a student, and you're dealing with people who have been in the field of relativity for more than 20 years perhaps. (I'm pushing it now)... remember that old people find it harder to completely step out of the box than young people... But also don't forget that these people know a lot about the topic you're interested in.

When you try to optimize something, step #1 is to identify the bottleneck. So, what costs the most energy when you're planting corn? I have searched around on google a bit, and I found some info. So, I guess this planting corn isn't a matter of just pushing some seeds into the soil. Perhaps anyone can enlighten me... what is the bottleneck here? What costs the most energy? (And as I read from the link above, a planter is just expensive, it doesn't use much energy, because it's only used once per year... so why are we optimizing it in the first place?)

hermanntrude, do you have an example of a catalyst that speeds up reactions in an equilibrium, without changing the equilibrium constant (without moving the equilibrium)?

Indeed... and as I like examples myself: A common spontaneous reaction that actually requires extra energy: the dissolution of salt (NaCl). When you dissolve a lot of salt into water, the solution will cool down... but it's still spontaneous... just to show that the two are not necessarily linked...

Creating a nice plasma for producing bulk chemicals is not very cheap, which is exactly why it's not being used. Plants like nitrogen in the form of NH4+ or NO3- These are better produced from other feedstock, and not N2. (It's cheaper, people have already looked into the economics, really!) It just costs too much energy to use N2... but it's true that there's a LOT of it. Pity we just can't use it for much

Sounds as a plausible explanation. Tea is full of all kinds of organic substances, and tannin could react with other things in a medicine. On the other hand... it might be simply be the pharmaceutical industry who cannot be bothered testing their medicine with every compound in tea to make sure nothing happens... so they advice you to take it with normal water. My guess (note: I'm no doctor!) is that it's perfectly safe to use tea. If not, it would also be unwise to take tea right after swallowing the medicine Let's move this one to organic chemistry, shall we?

Market price of what? Large bulk prices are low. Small quantities for use in a lab are expensive. - and you're only buying 1 kg. It's the same stuff, but comes in a different packing... the price difference doesn't make much sense, but it's common for a lot of chemicals. Even purity doesn't necessarily increase for lab chemicals.

Yes, if there is equilibrium, both reactions are occurring at the same time, and the net-effect is that there is no change. I don't know how to be more elaborate actually... so I'll go for an example If in 1 second time, you have: 2 moles of A + 1 mole of B --> 1 mole of C but also (in the same second): 1 mole of C --> 2 mole of A + 1 mole of B then, one second later, a lot of reactions have happened, but nothing much changed. Good examples of equilibrium are: water! The following reactions happen all the time in water! In the sea, in your body, in beer, everywhere! [ce]2 H2O -> OH^- + H3O^+[/ce] and: [ce]OH^- + H3O^+ ->2 H2O [/ce] The average concentration in normal water (with a pH of 7) is: 10^-7 mol/liter of both OH- and H3O+

Enthalpy of formation (or reaction) is used to calculate the temperature change of a substance or mixture due to a reaction taking place. It is define so that all compounds involved are at 298K at the start of the reaction. The value given then says how much energy is available (or required). With the specific heat you can then calculate the temperature change. So, What happens in real: You take a strip of magnesium, place it in air, ignite it, form MgO and a lot of heat. How much heat? Well, -602 kJ/mol ... (so, in this case the heat of combustion is the same as the heat of formation, but that's not always the case). So, that means that this heats up... and we knew this already, because this burns with a pretty beautiful and very hot flame Example of the calculation: So, say you want to do the combustion of magnesium (forming 1 mol MgO, or 24.31+16.00 = 40.31 g, or 0.04031 kg), and your strip of magnesium is nicely at 298K. And the air (oxygen) around you is also 298K. It generates -602 kJ/mol... or -602 kJ/0.04031 kg = 14934 kJ/kg. Then you look up the specific heat of MgO (877 J/kgK, or 0.877 kJ/kgK). This enables you to calculate how hot the MgO will become (assuming it is not losing heat to the surrounding air): 14934 kJ/kg / 0.877 = 17028 K That hot (the answer surprised me too)? Well… there is the fact that with every mole of O2, about 4 moles of N2 enter the system, and they too need to be heated up… so the actual temperature will be much less. I’m too lazy to calculate that too… but I found that experiments have shown that magnesium in air (so, heating up all the nitrogen too) gives 2800 deg C temperatures! (They read the color of the flame to estimate the temperature, no thermometer will survive the heat).

Milk is not homogeneous, it's a stable emulsion ... or can you call an emulsion homogeneous too? (Well... stable emulsion for a couple of days, and then it evolves into a monster that will attack you once you open the fridge).

I think every region should do what fits best. Densely populated areas could be better off with large scale energy suppliers, perhaps outside the city. This goes especially for those people living in apartment buildings, without a roof or garden of their own... In rural areas I think smaller scale is best as space is much less of an issue. In the world of sustainable renewable energy there is not one single best solution. We should just get started with the whole thing... I sometimes get tired of all the talking

I think plants in general are thriving. This is supported by a study (2 links to it below): http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/ http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=569586

Let me doublecheck that, because sometimes algae productions are heavily overestimated, or the energy input of algae production systems are underestimated. Ok, the US consumes an average of 3.3 TW, and 40% of that is petroleum (so: 1.32 TW). - a TW is 10^12 W, or a million MW, or a thousand GW. I am assuming that the insolation value used in the study is pretty good: 6 kWh/m2/day, or 250 W/m2. - these are southwest desert values. As a comparison for Europeans, the Madrid value (10 year average) is 4.62 kWh/m2/day, or 192.5 W/m2. The 40,000 km2 (equal to 4*10^10 m2) receive a total of 10*10^12 W, or 10 TW. So, as I thought, the US department of energy has indeed used the upper (only-reached-in-a-laboratory) value of algae production, where algae are supposed to approach solar panels. The US department of energy study apparently assumes that algae can convert >13.2% of the sun's energy into biomass (and perhaps completely neglects the CO2 mass transfer system, O2 removal, purification and drying steps). And I shouldn't forget to mention that mixing is of vital importance to achieve high algae productions. Mixing at huge Reinold's numbers (over 10000).

It's a basic fertilizer... Not sure if it's used on fields and pastures and such, but I am certain that it is used in greenhouses. Farm shops might sell it in large bags (25 kg or more)... I used to live in the middle of the greenhouse capital of Europe, and we had several shops around the corner. Bulk prices should be as low as 1-2 euro/kg. For small quantities I'd be surprised if you can find it... The world has become paranoid, and it is an ingredient for gun powder. Fertilizers for normal consumers are generally pre-mixed blends of several compounds.

What kind of %? There is mass% (also known as: weight %), mol% (or molar%) and volume% (%vol.).