Gilded

Looks pretty eerie and organic. I like it.

That's quite an impressive collection of photographs he has on his site. I especially like the nebula ones.

16 is legal. Anyway, these conveniently selected quotes make me seem like some sort of perverted, insane, lazy nolife bum. How absurd!

Mu-metal is fine up to a point. And you don't have to mess with liquid helium/nitrogen. How strong are the fields exactly?

Mountains are mostly measured from sea level, it's pretty much the standard. Mt. Everest reaches higher altitudes than Mauna Kea and that's pretty much the point. Mountains erode, they grow and their surroundings are altered so it's sort of pointless to measure any other than the current situation. And anyway I haven't seen any estimates of there being an over 10km deep ocean on Mars.

Since gold can be made into a very thin wire with relative ease I wonder if you could use it to weave an extremely fine multilayered net to make it stronger. Speaking of the lead balloon, lead has a density of 11.34g/cm^3 where as gold is significantly denser at 19.3g/cm^3. I'm not convinced even "nanobuilt" gold structures can take the strain a parachute is subjected to without being too heavy for that purpose.

Rhenium diboride is harder than "normal" diamond, but AFAIK the diamond nanorods are even harder.

Argon isn't really dense at all. But SF6 has a density of 6.164 g/L and xenon has a density of 5.894 g/L. So it's doable with xenon, but I'm not sure if it's any less expensive than SF6.

Why? How about survival? Smoke and fire, a stormy sky and lightning etc. Smoke doesn't mean there's a fire, but if your house is filled with smoke you might guess it's because your toaster has exploded and set your curtains on fire. The human brain is making associations all the time. Some of them might be considered irrational, but overall it's essential that such associations are made. I don't think synaesthesia is that odd at all and is comparable to thinking that an instrumental song is sad, for example.

If you want to do something more concrete than just read books you might want to try the double slit experiment. It's wonderfully simple and demonstrates wave-particle duality nicely. Then again I think it's pretty much the only QM experiment you can do without the "expensive equipment" npts2020 mentioned.

The energy output of the Sun is enough to boil all the water on Earth in about a second, roughly. So... yeah, what yourdadonapogos said.

Wait... how can you tell "normal" schizophrenia apart from microwave-caused effects? Or is all schizophrenia caused by these microwaves? And how about you explain how these machines travel back in time and why haven't we detected any nanobots in anyone's brain. I'm not sure if there's really that much science here to refute.

I'm pretty damn jealous if it's this one. This one looks awesome as well.

Follow the white rabbit, choose the red pill etc. and you'll be just fine.

That sounds an awfully lot like something a microwave-controlled, nanobot-wired person might say. The truth is out there, trust no one!

It has to be quite a big piece of rock to completely destroy all of civilization, but yeah it is possible although unlikely. And there isn't much we can do about it. Some meteors have a kinetic energy equivalent to thousands if not millions of thermonuclear bombs. While diverting the object from the collision path requires only a fraction of this it's still quite a lot. Perhaps some day we will have some sort of adequate plan for these kinds of scenarios but I'm guessing it won't happen in a few hundred years.

Seeing how you're married I think it would be safest if the pictures were sent to me as well, you know, as a backup copy if you need to delete them to avoid awkward questions.

I like the subforum descriptions on the front page, but I'm not exactly opposed to the change. As for Homework Help I think it's OK to remove it.

It does to some extent, but the crystals are only visible if you sort of expose them by pouring out the excess liquid metal when the bismuth starts to solidify. Instructions on how to do it can be found here: http://www.unitednuclear.com/crystals.htm

While we've had a lab picture thread and some threads regarding element collecting I thought it might be cool to have a thread dedicated to just pictures of neat looking element samples and chemicals you have lying around your house/lab. Crystals, powders, gases, liquids... everything goes. Emphasis on samples you think look especially cool. I have a decent element collection but since I've gotten a new camera I haven't photographed all samples. I'll take more pictures later but here's what I've photographed so far:

Some fluorides also come to mind... Like KF. Likely to be more effective than chlorides but I don't know if they're as common in chemistry labs. The more I think about it I can't really come up with anything "better" than hydrogen cyanide. I also tried to figure out some sort of explosive mixture or compound that could be done in a relatively short time but couldn't think of any that could be lethal in such a short time or small amounts. Also regarding possible collateral damage that's not very considerate if the guy has given thought to that. On the topic of cyanide this is perhaps one of the most touching suicide cases I've ever read about (with the "Do not resuscitate" note and all): http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?sec=health&res=9D00E5DB1F30F93AA15752C1A96E958260

I agree, but luckily you can meet a lot of nice, trustworthy people on forums and such... which is why I'm currently a proud owner of a 5g piece of depleted uranium.

Actually if you add a proton to Fe-58 (which is a rare but stable isotope of iron) you'll get Co-59 which is stable. But if you add a neutron you get Fe-59 which is actually quite unstable with a half-life of about 44.5 days. This is a fine example of this balance being quite easily upset. "Some degree" is a pretty ambiguous term in nuclear physics. For example one might say bismuth is unstable to some degree as it has a half-life of ~1.9*10^19 years.

Well obviously it affects mass, which is especially apparent in light elements such as hydrogen. But perhaps more importantly it affects nuclear stability. Too many or too few neutrons and things start to fall apart, so to speak, which is why some isotopes are radioactive. The strong force keeps the protons and neutrons together in the nucleus, one of the physics experts can probably explain why certain amounts of neutrons cause instability. AFAIK these stable ratios aren't perfectly understood yet though, for example we can't really determine the half-life of any nucleus by just looking at how many protons and neutrons it has.