jdurg

It's all because of physics. The muriatic acid (HCl) will eat through the aluminum foil's oxide layer and eventually eat through the aluminum forming hydrogen gas. The pressure of the H2 gas will cause a physical failure in the bottle which results in the explosion. Of course you'd have to be the biggest ****ing idiot on the face of the earth to even try it.

The thing is charcoal IS carbon. In fact, the name 'carbon' comes from the french word 'charbon' which is where charcoal comes from. If you grind up charcoal, you have powdered elemental carbon. Charcoal is another name for a particular allotrope of carbon. You are probably familiar with diamond and graphite. Those two allotropes (different forms of the same element) have a particular arrangement of the atoms. Another allotrope is known as 'amorphous carbon'. Amorphous carbon just means that there is no set structure of the carbon atoms. Charcoal is amorphous carbon. The charcoal we use in chemistry labs is simply pure carbon. The charcoal you buy in a grocery store is pure carbon with a bunch of lighter fluids and other hydrocarbons in there. I'm really having trouble understanding what it is that you are asking. It is meaningless to talk about 'one atom' as throwing one atom into ANYTHING will not have a visible effect that we can see. In addition, it's impossible for someone to throw just 'one atom of carbon' onto a fire. In the initial post, you had theorized that if you throw fuel into a burning fire that the burning fuel will create CO2 gas which will extinguish the fire. All of us here on the boards have provided copious amounts of evidence to prove that it won't work. I just don't know what else you are asking for.

Check out http://www.periodictabletable.com. Theo has quite a few pictures of uranium metal and some of them are 360 panaromic shots.

The bulk of all oxygen gas that is used in this world comes as a byproduct of the production of liquid nitrogen, helium, neon, krypton, argon, and xenon.

I don't know what the activation energy is, but each gram of CO2 that is formed releases nearly 9,000 Joules of energy.

Lead azide is very barely soluble in hot water, but VERY soluble in acetic acid. You could take a warm vinegar solution and wash the azide away slowly as it should be more soluble in the CH3COOH than most metals are.

Just the other week, after drinking a bit of Jack Daniels, I kind of burped and coughed at the same time. This resulted in a VERY corrosive mixture of stomach liquids purging up into my throat for a small amount of time. My throat was raw and killing me for days after that. Couldn't believe how much that hurt.

I'm assuming that you mean the density of Cs is much less than 20 times the density of Li? I'm pretty certain that's what you meant because cesium is indeed denser than lithium. While the density of the alkali metals does increase as you go down, potassium is kind of an oddity (or is it sodium that's the true oddity?) as K's density is LESS than that of sodium. So either sodium is abnormally dense, or potassium is abnormally "light". For the density, as has been already pointed out the VAST bulk of the mass of an atom is contained within the nucleus. However, the VAST majority of the volume of an atom is contained outside the nucleus in the electron cloud. So as you increase the mass of the nucleus at a greater rate than you increase the volume of the electron cloud, the density will go up. If you look at the densities on the periodic table, you'll notice that the denser elements seem to be bunched up in the middle and towards the end of the d-blocks. This would be because at that point on the table the nuclear mass is increasing a great deal but the volume of the electron cloud is not increasing all that much as the electrons fill in, pair up, and contract inwards towards the nucleus a bit. Also keep in mind that the comparions of atomic size and atomic mass is only a simplistic view of density. If the atoms themselves pack in an odd manner, it can result in various oddities in the densities that you just aren't expecting.

It's very difficult to "instantly" cool a water based liquid because water has a VERY high specific heat. That means that it would have to give up a great deal of energy in order to drop one degree celcius per gram of water. (To be exact, it's something like 4.134 J/g*K). You can't "add cold" to something. That's like saying you can add darkness to something. Cold is the absence of heat just as dark is the absence of light. So to make the drink cold you need to have something that can quickly absorb a great deal of energy from the drink in order to make it cold. If you mix anhydrous ammonium nitrate and barium hydroxide, then add a few drops of water you can make a VERY cold solution instantly. The problem is that barium salts are INCREDIBLY toxic and barium hydroxide is also somewhat corrosive. Nitrates aren't something you want to mess around with either, so even just using ammonium nitrate to cool the drink would be a bad idea. Chemically, I do not know of anything that I'd want anywhere near a drink that would result in a strongly endothermic reaction.

Not if you have a little bit of an acid available, or a high oxygen atmosphere. You can't measure "indestructability". As mentioned earlier, various things are impervious to various other things. With a nuclear explosion, there is NOTHING that is impervious to it. The temperatures generated in a nuclear explosion are MUCH greater than the boiling point of ALL known substances. Hence why everything is "vaporized". If you get nuked, you're dead. There's nothing you can do.

I believe that it's methylene blue that will turn your urine a blue-green color and is relatively benign. (Though I'm NOT 100% sure about it so I would not go and and slip chemicals into food and/or drink).

In reality, the steel wool into a flask of elemental Chlorine is a pretty standard demonstration and one that your teacher would be able to do. In addition, it is quite "sparkling" as the iron ignites and begins to "burn" in the Cl2 atmosphere.

Am-241 has a half-life of approximately 430 years and it a predominant alpha emitter with some beta emissions as well. In addition to the particulate decay, it also is a moderate gamma ray emitter. Here are the decay energies reported for Am-241: Alpha: 5.5 MeV. (Though it is stopped by a thin piece of paper). Beta: 0.052 MeV. (Doesn't take much to stop this). Gamma: 0.033 MeV. (About 0.03 MeV is the borderline for "don't worry about it" levels. Above 0.03 MeV is when you should start to take notice of what is around you. For comparison's sake, the gamma emmissions of U-238 is only about 0.0014 MeV. It's U-235 that has the quite strong gamma emissions of 0.16 MeV. This is why natural uranium, and uranium ores, are far more dangerous than depleted uranium. DU doesn't have nearly the amount of strong gamma emissions that the other type of uranium have).

If plunged into an atmosphere of Chlorine gas, steel wool will ignite quite readily. Same with an atmosphere of Fluorine gas, and possibly Bromine as well.

I believe that hydronium is correct because the "hydrox" prefix would indicate an -OH group attached to something while "hydro" would indicate a hydrogen atom attached to something. Therefore by logic the "hydronium" name is more appropriate.

I had always thought that in an aqueous acid, the hydrogen ions don't exist as a free proton. They "attach" themselves to a water molecule forming H3O+ whereby all three hydrogens have two electrons they can play with.

Woah. First off, codeine is most definitely NOT synthetic. It is a naturally occuring opiate which comes from the poppy plant just as morphine does. Raw opium is a tarry mixture containing specific proportions of morphine, codeine, and another natural opiate whose name escapes me. Synthetic opiates are heroin (Di-acetylmorphine), oxycodone, vicodin, dihydrocodeine, etc. Codeine is a less potent opiate than morphine is because of its chemical structure. It is unable to cross the blood/brain barrier as effectively so it is not able to work as quickly or potently. (Heroin is incredibly potent as it crosses the blood/brain barrier with ease and is metabolised into morphine inside the brain tissue. Hence it delivers a massive quantity of morphine directly to the brain). When you take codeine or morphine in the form of a pill, the overall effectiveness of the drug drops off dramatically. Almost ALL of the drugs that go through your stomach are metabolized by the liver before it gets into your circulatory system. (Unless it can pass through your stomach, or you ingest a great deal of it). The liver is incredibly effective at metabolizing opiates so a very small percentage of the codeine or morphine that you ingest makes it into your brain. This is the reason why addicts will either inject or smoke the substances. (So that they can avoid the hepatic metabolism). In addition, the likelyhood of an addiction, or even a great "high" from taking a codeine or morphine tablet is pretty low. aj47, you were ALMOST right about codeine being synthesized as an alternative to morphine. If you replace "codeine" with "heroin" then you would be correct. It is VERY horribly ironic in retrospect how heroin came to be. I believe it was in the late 1800's when doctors were noticing that a lot of their patients were abusing morphine and codeine and they wanted to develop an alternative that would be just as effective at suppressing coughs and being an expectorant, but did not have all the addictive qualities. Researchers came up with an alternative which could easily be made from morphine. This alternative was diacetylmorphine. The problem is that they NEVER did any type of actual trials on the stuff to see if it was any less addictive. They just announced their findings and called it the "heroin" of the modern age. (They named it like a female as it was the "in" thing to do). The Bayer corporation bought the drug and started marketing it like crazy, but pretty soon the reality of how bad it is showed through and it's been a plague of society ever since.

It's even worse when you awake in someone else's house and the room you are in looks EXACTLY like a room in your house. Then when you exit the room and there are people there who shouldn't be and the rest of the house is totally different, it takes a good while before your brain recognizes the fact that you are not in your own house. That creepy feeling lasts a good long while for me. Hence why I try to not drink to the point that I can't legally drive an automobile anymore.

In addition, here in the scientific world nobody really cares about where an undergraduate degree comes from. It's your masters and doctorate degrees that carry all the weight. You should ask yourself "Is it really worth it to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an undergrad degree when nobody will really care about it?" You'd be much better off going to a standard, "affordable" school for your undergraduate so that you don't have to deal with the insane amount of loans that would be needed to afford an Ivy League school. Besides, once you go after your masters and/or doctorate you'll REALLY start seeing the debt build up. Another reason to go for a less expensive undergrad degree is what happens if you decide later on that nuclear physics isn't right for you, or for some reason you're not able to succeed in that field? The financial burden of going to an expensive school for your undergraduate degree is far greater than most people think. Unless you are guaranteed a high paying job immediately after graduating college, you're really shooting yourself in the foot by putting yourself in immense debt.

Ahhhhh. Thanks for the explanation. I never really looked into it much further other than "Add KI to H2O2 and it decomposes". Interesting explanation.

I just recall in high school chemistry class dropping crystals of KI into some H2O2 and watching it rapidly decompose while little bits of iodine are formed.