jdurg

True, and with a mixture of water and alcohol, I'm not 100% sure but I think the reaction with the water would be more favored.

For getting the gases out, hydrogen is a VERY not-dense gas. (In fact, it's the least dense gas in existance). So any hydrogen that is formed will automatically rise upward whether you're sucking it out or what. Oxygen is approximately the same density as air, if not a bit more dense. So for the oxygen part of your contraption, you may want to just flush out the electrolysis chamber with oxygen gas so that as more gas is formed, the oxygen will be pushed out into your apparatus. Either way, once enough gas has been formed it will have no place to go except through your outlet and into whatever you're trying to inflate. As for the H2/O2 dangers, to fully understand what we're talking about you should really give it a small test. It is almost unfathomable how loud that perfect stoichiometric mixture explodes. It completely took me by surprise the first time I did it. A couple of years ago I had a balloon about the size of a softball filled with that perfect 2:1 ratio of H2/O2. When it was filled, I used some warm (body temperature as in I had it held in my hand for a few minutes) Pt wire and popped the balloon. The introduction of the warm Pt wire catalyzed the reaction and KABOOM! Scared the living crap out of me. I wasn't hurt, but my ears were ringing for a while.

You could probably take a concentrated NaOH solution and pour that over the stain and let it soak for a while. The very caustic NaOH should break down any long chain oil compounds and allow them to become water soluble. Then you just wash it all away.

I'll let you know right now that if you have an electrolysis chamber sealed with both hydrogen and oxygen in there, you have basically built yourself a bomb. There is a perfect stoichiometric mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in an enclosed container, and the slightest spark or even a source of heat may cause to explode with violent force. Also, be absolutely sure that you have no platinum metal anywhere inside the chamber. Platinum metal alone will catalyze the reaction between hydrogen and oxygen and will result in a very loud KABOOM!

It's analagous to the reaction with water, but instead of H-OH reacting, you get H-OR reacting. For example, in the equation 2Na + 2H2O -> H2 + 2NaOH you get sodium metal reacting with water to form hydrogen gas and sodium hydroxide. Here's the same reaction but with ethanol in place of the water. 2Na + 2EtOH -> H2 + 2NaOEt. (Et = CH3CH2-) So instead of sodium hydroxide, you get sodium ethoxide.

I was always fond of dropping a gummy bear into a test tube half-full of molten potassium chlorate. Talk about a fast reaction!

Hmmm. One of the 'best' labs I did was in biochemistry. We brewed hard apple cider . The best part was when we got to 'consume' our product to make sure everything worked right. Another fun lab was in organic chemistry where we produced trinitroglycerol. Kind of nervewracking, but interesting nonetheless. Especially when we 'used' the product and saw it both detonate and burn rapidly. It was VERY small quantities (0.5 cc at most), but was a blast to work with. (no pun intended).

One piece of advice that I can give for students in high school looking into colleges is that the first and most important thing to look at is price. It doesn't matter if some super elite hard to get into school accepts you if you can't afford the tuition. Just because you go to an expensive school does NOT mean that you will get a high paying job. If you risk your financial freedom for four years at a VERY expensive school only to get out into the job market and not find the high paying job you're looking for, you'll put a lot of extra stress and financial burden on yourself. Take me as an example. Going through high school I really wanted to attend Connecticut College which is a very small, VERY difficult to get into private school. They have a great chemistry program there and I just loved everything about it. My 'backup' was the University of Connecticut. Everybody I went to high school with was going there, and frankly I didn't want to go someplace that everyone can get into. Even though Conn College was outrageously expensive, I thought that I could handle the price with some help from my parents. Well, my parents didn't help me out one iota and when Conn College accepted me, I immediately said 'Yes' without thinking of the financial aspects. After one year and about $30,000 worth of loans I had to transfer as I could not afford any more years. Meanwhile, had I swallowed my pride and gone to UCONN it would have cost me a total of about $2,500 per year thanks to the bevy of scholarships they were offering. Chances are, I would have wound up with a much better job than I have now and would not have a massive amount of debt which I am STILL paying off. So when deciding on a school, make sure you can afford all 4 years of the school. There's nothing worse than having a high profile degree and no place to display it since you're too poor too afford a place to live.

My father was a nuclear submarine reactor operator for about 20 years in the Navy. The pay isn't/wasn't all that spectacular. He found much greener pastures and MUCH higher pay after he retired and began working at a nuclear power plant. Now he's able to make the big money that he should have been making while in the Navy.

Back when I took my AP Exams (1997-1998) I only took the English Literature, Chemistry, US History, and Calculus exams. Chemistry was an utter joke and the Calculus was no problem either. English Literature was a bit rough, and U.S. History was a pain in the ass. I got a 5 on chemistry and Calculus and a 4 on the rest, but the History one just drove me bonkers.

CSI is glamorized, hollywood altered garbage. They glamorize everything to make it entertaining. If you went and visited an actual forensics laboratory, you'd be bored to death watching all the typical chromatography, GC/MS, and other 'analytical techniques' going on. Most of the stuff they do would result in mistrials and evidence being thrown out of court for improper handling and improper tracking.

I earned my Bachelor's of Science in Forensic Chemistry from West Chester University of Pennsylvania in 2002.

Somewhat. The oxygen and water don't 'combine' to form hydroxide ions. During electrolysis, the bonds between hydrogen and oxygen are broken as the H+ ions get reduced to elemental hydrogen and the oxygen atoms are ripped from the OH- ions and become oxidized to elemental oxygen gas. The problem is, the oxidation potential for the formation of oxygen is about -1.27 volts while that for chloride to become chlorine gas is about -1.36. That is so freaking close that if there are enough chloride ions present, the chloride becomes more easily oxidized and will form chlorine gas. When there isn't a lot of chloride present, the conditions that cause chlorine to be formed more favorably dissipate. As a result, the expected output of oxygen gas occurs.

Chlorine and Oxygen are produced at the same electrode. Based upon their potentials, oxygen should be produced and chlorine should remain as the chloride ion, but that's going under perfect conditions. In reality, the difference between the two is so small that chlorine production actually predominates as long as there is a large concentration of chloride ions. So if you have NaCl in your solution, it will produce chlorine gas in preference to oxygen. Once the chloride ion becomes a low enough concentration, oxygen gas takes preference and oxygen is produced in place of chlorine.

Yeah, red selenium is really neat looking, but I'm now starting to wonder about it's 'stability'. I had a nice ampoule filled with red selenium, and over time it has darkend and is now a deep dark brown color as opposed to the bright red color seen in your photos or the charcoal gray/black color of standard selenium. I'll have to investigate that a bit further.

As a collector of coins myself, I can verify that the last year there were pure copper pennies was 1982. From 1983 onwards, you will never find a copper core penny. (In 1982 there were zinc core and pure coppy pennies produced in about equal quantities).

It's easy. The fish weighs 'one pound plus half it's own weight'. So it weighs half its own weight plus one pound. So its weight (x) = 1 + 0.5x x - 0.5x = 1 0.5x = 1 x = 1/0.5 x = 2 = fish's weight.

I would assume that it would mean metals which don't share similar chemical properties. (Like sodium and potassium do). So I'll give a go with the following: Sodium Mercury Platinum Bismuth Indium Gallium Beryllium Copper Neodymium Tantalum I would consider those 10 UNIQUE metals as they have different chemical and/or physical properties from each other.

Yes. I define an 'element' as a basic part of matter which is comprised of a central, positively charged nucleus and an external cloud of negatively charged particles. This 'element' is also able to react in such a way with other elements as to transfer electrons from one species to another. A single neutron does not meet any of these criteria. (Also, as mentioned earlier, Helium doesn't react to any known degree, but theoretically it is possible to make a helium compound. It is not possible at all to make a neutron react chemically).

Esterification is probably one of the better 'beginner' organic chemistry labs. All you need is a relatively pure organic acid (and you can make that by concentrating vinegar), and a relatively pure alcohol (And you can get virtually pure isopropanol pretty easily). Take the pure acid and alcohol and mix them with a little bit of concentrated sulfuric acid in a flask on a hotplate with constant stirring. The ester will form and you should be able to distill it off. You'll definitely know if you made it simply by the smell alone. Oh, one more warning. The human body can easily become 'sensitized' to organic esters (organic esters just sounds redundant, doesn't it?). Ethyl acetate is notorious for doing this. In an internship and in many organic labs I used gallons of the stuff as a solvent. At first, the smell was kind of nice and I didn't mind it. But after a few weeks, I started getting headaches from the smell and it was no longer 'nice'. Now, if I even get a tiny whiff of the stuff I start getting a headache. I can tell if a bottle of acetone free nail-polish remover was opened simply from the smell and the headache that the ehtyl acetate gives me.

Actually, the iso terminology is limited to when the functional group is on the middle carbon in the chain. So 2-pentanol would not be isopentanol. 3-pentanol, however, would be as by putting the -OH on the third carbon you have it right smack dab in the middle. (For butanol, there is no isobutanol. You either have n-butanol, or 2-butanol). Edit: Oops, I made a bit of an error there. Isobutanol does exist, but not as a straight chain alcohol. Isobutanol is simply n-propanol with a methyl group attached to the 2nd carbon of n-propanol. So technically, it could be called isomethyl-n-propanol.

However, chlorine exists as a diatomic molecule, as does Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen, and all of the halogens. Therefore, you never truly have them as a radical since their diatomic nature removes that 'odd number' of electrons.

It means that the Hydroxyl (-OH) group is at the end of the butane chain and not on a middle carbon. (So the structure would be CH3-CH2-CH2-CH2-OH).

The Am-241 from a smoke detector does have gold mixed in there, but it's such a small amount and such a fine form of gold that it doesn't have the typical yellow color to it. Instead it's more of a dark brown/black/purple color. It's value is probably about 1 cent.