jdurg

The industrial process for sodium generation involves the electrolysis of a molten NaCl/CaCl2 mixture. The calcium chloride lowers the temperature needed to melt the salt so that electrolysis can be performed. The anode and cathode are isolated from each other as well because you do NOT want molten sodium metal reacting with chlorine gas. That is incredibly dangerous. For the small scale, using the anhydrous, molten hydroxides is the better method. However, keep in mind that the hydroxides will readily absorb water from the air and carbon dioxide as well. This can have serious implications on the electrolysis products. (I believe that sodium bicarbonate has a much higher melting point than sodium hydroxide does). Also, sodium hydroxide is extremely corrosive in a molten state. Not only would you get severe thermal burns if it contacted your skin, but severe chemical burns would result as well. (Accelerated in reactivity, might I add, due to the increased temperature). Platinum electrodes are optimal when doing this, but carbon electrodes may work too. You want to avoid things like copper, zinc, etc. since they are fairly reactive and might lead to some nasty side reactions. (I'm not 100% sure of this because I have never done this myself. Only a LOT of research on the process which afterward made me decide to just buy the damned metal instead of making it. ) So it can be done, but it's not an easy 'baking soda + vinegar' process. A good deal of equipment needs to be used and numerous safety precautions as well. An inert atmosphere is also an absolute requirement so you'll have to get yourself a nice big tank of argon to bathe the electrolysis setup as well. While it's fantastic that you have this strong interest in chemistry, it is vitally crucial to do copious amounts of research before getting started on anything like this. Even one mis-step or overlooked 'danger' can result in serious injury.

Lead also has some neat coloring. Kind of a navy blue type of oxidation with an occasional flash of purple/red on it. Doesn't stand out nearly as much as that on Bismuth, Manganese and Scandium, but it is noticeable. (Manganese is really intense, although after a short while it turns a poop-brown color and isn't so neat looking anymore).

This might be a bit easier to do. Take a bunch of pennies which are dated AFTER 1982 and scrape off a small notch on the side to expose the zinc core. You then take these notched pennies and put them into any acidic solution. A weak sulfuric acid solution or a weak hydrochloric acid solution will do a fine job of dissolving the zinc and not even touching the copper. You'll then have your zinc ions in solution which you can crystalize out without any worry about copper contamination.

I have always thought of light as a stream of particles (photons) which move in a wavelike pattern. Depending on how you are viewing the light, it will either look like a wave to you or a bunch of quantized particles. (I believe someone else had looked at it like this before). Think of it like drawing a wave on a piece of paper but instead of using one continuous line, you use a bunch of VERY closely spaced dots. From a distance and from most angles, it would look like a solid line. But when you get really close to the paper, you see that the solid line is actually composed of a bunch of same sized dots. These 'dots' would be the photons. The Rebel: I think you misinterpreted that thing about the glass. I believe what it was saying was that if a beam of light goes through the glass, it gets reflected/diffracted internally based upon the thickness of the glass. So the light goes through the front of the glass and is bent due to the interaction with the glass. How far the overall bend is depends on the thickness of the glass. On a very thin piece of glass, there isn't a whole lot of 'stuff' to interact with so the light goes right through the other side and isn't bend a whole lot. On a thick piece of glass, there's a large amount of matter to slow down the light beam and cause it to bend substantially. If it's thick enough, the light loses its energy and is completely blocked. This is why I too believe in the bunch of particles moving in a wave pattern type of theory. As these 'particles' move through the glass, they interact with the glass and lose some energy. As a result, the wave pattern changes and the light appears differently than it did before.

That would actually seem to make sense, since the more massive the black hole is, the more 'stuff' is packed into the smaller area. As a result, the molecules/atoms have very little space to move around, therefore their temperature would be cooler since they don't have the ability to move like molecules around us can (Since temperature is a measurement of molecular motion). Now while I'm probably WAAAAAAAAAAY off on that explanation, it does sound logical.

Some of my Bismuth samples are the nice crystals. Those are the ones with the really intense coloration and look to them. Even on the one crystal I had that I dipped in vinegar to remove the oxidation from it, the coloring is coming back and is a brilliant gold right now.

Last night I was looking over a bunch of my elements, and I realized that some elements have some really cool looking oxidation to them. Scandium and Bismuth both have a multitude of different colors to them from the different thicknesses of the oxide coating. The scandium in particular looks really neat because the colors are quite pearlescent and the base color is kind of yellowish. The bismuth just has really intense blues, golds, reds, purples, and other colors of the rainbow. Potassium has a neat look to it............. to a certain extent. When the oxidation is first starting, it has a violet colored taffy-looking oxidation to it. Sadly, as the oxidation furthers it becomes a dullen gray to an almost white color. So the nice color only lasts for so long. On the rare-earths like lanthanum, cerium, and praseodymium, the oxidation color is really intense. The luster of the metal is fully lost, but on tope there is a nice coating of the dark blue oxide of lanthanum and the green colored oxides of praseodymium and cerium. Neodymium is particularly interesting because the metal surface has dullen and looks nearly black, but the oxide powder that comes off of it is light pink in color. Really unique. Of all the oxides, however, I have to say that the uranium oxide is the most interesting. Looking at the metal turnings, you can see a wide range of VERY dark colors which have a pearlescent sheen to them and seem to change color depending on the way the piece is held in the light. There are dark purples, blues, greens, reds, oranges, etc. It looks really neat and I wonder how much of that is due to the natural oxidation of the metal and how much is from parts of it which have become other elements. (Though I'm fairly certain due to the incredibly long half-life that the colors are from natural uranium oxidation). Still, it's neat to take the vial out of the lead-lined box and examine the turnings which are sealed in there. I was also happy to continue my research on the uranium metal and come to a final conclusion; the sample size that I have is so freaking small that it poses zero radiological harm to me. A full POUND, that's 454 grams, of depleted uranium has an activity of about 150-175 uCi. So my approximately 1.75 gram sample has an activity level of, at most, 0.67 microCuries. To put that in perspective, the amount of Am-241 used in smoke detectors is 0.9-1 uCi. So the smoke detectors in many houses are far more radioactive than my Uranium metal is. That one really caught me by surprise and showed just how weak uranium really is. I think it's far more of a toxicological hazard than a radiological hazard.

Perhaps a diet cola?

The coca-cola had absolutely nothing to do with the polishing ability. You could take some warm water with sodium bicarbonate or table salt in it and it would accomplish the same thing. How do I know this? The fact that they used aluminum foil. All they did was a VERY simple electrochemical reaction. It's the same thing as putting tarnished silver in a solution of baking soda and hot water on aluminum foil. The coca-cola was just providing the electrolyte. (Since it has a good amount of phosphoric acid in it which allows current the flow). The bad thing is that you would then have a bunch of sugar syrup all over the place.

All of the low molecular weight alcohols have a really nice smell. I think methanol smells fantastic, but I also know that it can pretty damned quickly make me go blind and dead. lol. But pure ethanol does have a nice smooth smell to it, and a viciously painful burn to it.

The whole thing about radiation and cancer has always confused me to no end. Everything seems so contradictory. Radiation supposedly causes cancer by altering the DNA of cells which are in the process of dividing. This causes a gene mutation which MAY result in a cancerous growth. (Though what's more likely to happen is that the body will terminate the cell when it notices the damage to it). So radiation is more damaging to parts of the body which have a high rate of cellular growth (Genitals, bone marrow, internal organs), as opposed to parts of the body with very little cellular growth (skin, extremities, etc). Radiation is thus able to work as a very effective method of cancer treatment since cancer cells divide very rapidly and are far more susceptible to being killed by the radiation than 'normal' cells. So because radiation damages rapidly dividing cells more readily than normal cells, how come infants and teenagers don't have the highest rate of cancer amongst all humans? If X-Rays and the like were so dangerous, you'd figure that infants and teenagers would be incredibly prone to getting cancer since their cells are dividing at an incredible rate. Yet we really don't see that. We see cancers developing more in eldery people than we do in the young. So I think there's something in relation to radiation and cancer that we haven't fully grasped yet. As for why the dentist/radiologist leaves the room for the x-ray, it's pretty much just a matter of reducing the quantity of radiation. The amount of radiation in one x-ray is next to nothing. It's a little blip on the overall scale and you get far more radiation from going outside to get the mail than you do from the x-ray. The thing is, the dentist/radiologist performs a lot more than one x-ray each day. If they have a lot of patients they may take a few dozen x-rays every single day. So while one isn't going to do anything, if you start adding them up the overall dose becomes much higher. I guess you could look at each x-ray like a marble. Just one isn't going to cause much damage to you, but if you fling a lot of them at you it can cause some major pain.

All the Amoxycillan I've ever had here in the USA was a pink powder that tasted HORRIBLY bitter. I'd have to put it in a bunch of applesauce just to get it down, and even then it was nasty.

That is not correct. The only way that is correct is if the NaCl precipitates out of solution. The ionic equation for NaOH reacting with HCl is Na+ + OH- + H+ + Cl- -> H2O + Na+ + Cl- The Net Ionic Equation is H+ + OH- -> H2O For the reaction with aqueous NaOH and HCl gas, the reaction is the same as hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide. This is because in order for the HCl to react with the ionic NaOH, it has to dissolve in water first. If the NaOH was anhydrous, then you could get a reaction between it and the HCl gas.

If you want to get REALLY picky, you can say that there is no such thing as scientific FACT because every property of everything known to man relies on observation. If you're not observing it in some manner, than it doesn't have that property. The only reason you say it has the property is because you observed it as such. To a person who is deaf, blind, and completely numb, nothing has properties to it since they can't see it, hear it, or feel it. (And if that instance were me, I'd be asking for the cyanide mighty quickly. ) So for me, the reason I'm arguing that it is more spherical is because observing it as a sphere relies on far fewer things than observing it as blue does. Also, more people are able to observe it as a sphere than as blue. To observe it as a sphere, you need to have the ability to touch and interpret that 'touch' in your brain. To observe it as blue, you need to be able to see that light is reflecting off of the surface, that the light being reflected is able to be absorbed by your observation device, and that your brain is able to interpret those results as 'blue'. To a blind person, they can't observe it as blue. A blind person can 'observe' it as a sphere. This is the whole reason behind my argument. (Though in reality, this argument is about as foolish as arguing over whether burning in magma is more painful than burning in the sun. )

Okay. I had just always been instructed to refer to it as calcium metal and not as a calcium atom. (Since that would be really impressive if you could move solitary atoms. )

Why is Ca2+ not a calcium atom and Ca0 is? They both have 20 protons.

But ya see, I can easily add calcium atoms to a solution of water by adding in calcium chloride, or calcium nitrate, or any other calcium salt. I guess this is why it's so VERY important to be specific in what you're describing. If you say elemental calcium, then I fully agree that it forms a basic solution upon addition to water. But just saying a 'calcium atom' can mean many things. (Because Ca+2 is just as much a calcium atom as Ca itself is).

That's calcium metal. If you seriously believe that calcium chloride is a basic salt, you need to check your sources again.

But the calcium ion is neither acidic nor basic. That's like saying that sodium chloride is acidic.

Here's another thing. Think about the bisulfate ion in an acidic solution. That's analagous to the bicarbonate ion in an acidic solution. It just does not want to exist. It will break down and form sulfur dioxide and water.

That still doesn't make sense. You're saying that if the calcium hydroxide and sulfuric acid are in equal concentrations, that it will form water and calcium sulfate. But if you have an amount of sulfuric acid that exceeds the amount of calcium hydroxide, the calcium hydroxide will no longer be a strong base and will fail to neutralize the sulfuric acid. I find that very hard to believe. Calcium hydroxide is a strong base so it has no problem neutralizing a weak acid. Saying that it can't neutralize the weak acid just doesn't make sense. That's like saying that sodium hydroxide is unable to neutralize formic acid because formic acid has a small Ka.

There's also the theory that if you eat enough garlic, the body odor and bad breath eminating from you will keep people away from you, thus lowering the number of bacteria/virii you encounter.

It makes the drugs MUCH more soluble in aqueous solutions, I.E. your body, so their absorption and effectiveness is MUCH greater than if it were the free base itself.

Every time I feel a sniffle coming on, I down OJ by the gallon and take a lot of zinc supplements. It always seems to kill off whatever is trying to attack me. I actually haven't been 'sick' in a little over a year now. So I must be doing something right. (Either that or all my elements have effectively sterilized my room. lol).

Are you sure about that? Ca(OH)2 is considered a strong base and H2SO4 is a strong acid, so I think you'd be more likely to see the complete neutralization to CaSO4 and 2H2O.