jdurg

I still say that the chlorine generation is a neat one because it shows how an element can be produced which is very pure and from common household chemicals. You would then be able to go on and show how good an oxidizer it is by burning some steel wool or bleaching some colored fabrics. The generation of the chlorine can be very quickly stopped by adding some Red Devil (lye) to the reaction chamber. That will then recreate bleach. It's too bad that they won't let you do it.

Don't forget the randomness of the particles in the nucleus, as well as the randomness in the electrons.

He's not kidding. I once set off a small pile of it by farting only about twenty feet away. Sure it was a low-bass, rumbling tooter, but I was laughing for hours after blowing it up with a fart.

That's kind of like saying "What's more dangerous; a nuclear bomb or a thermonuclear bomb?" hehe. They are both incredibly dangerous as the potassium will be reacting with the water in the solution, and the peroxide or HCl. I would just guess that the peroxide would be far more dangerous because the potassium would break down the water quite violently, producing hydrogen gas. At the same time, it would break down the hydrogen peroxide making more water and oxygen gas. The presence of oxygen and hydrogen at an elevated temperature would equal an incredible explosion.

You could do the generation of pure chlorine gas, and its reaction with a common metal like aluminum or iron? This can be done by taking a vessel and putting some Calcium hypochlorite (Pool chlorine super shock) or Sodium hypochlorite (household bleach) into it, then adding a relatively pure acidic medium. (Like an acidic drain cleaner that just has sulfuric acid in it, or pool acid which is known as muriatic acid which is just hydrochloric acid). You would then have a tube coming out of this vessel going into yet another vessel, but this one filled most of the way with water. (This will clean out any acid vapors, or other contaminants). You would then have another tube coming out of the water flask (Above the water line) and going into a flask filled with dry sodium bicarbonate (Baking Soda). This will dry the chlorine gas. Finally, you'll have a tube coming out of that flask and going into a bigger collection flask. This is where the clean, pure, dry chlorine gas will accumulate. You'll be able to see it because it will have a faint, pale-green color to it. (If you put some white paper behind it, you'll see the color better). Once you've got enough chlorine, you can quench the reaction by dropping some lye into the generation flask. With your bottle of chlorine gas, you can put colored fabrics in there and watch them bleach, or you could put some steel wool in there and watch it catch fire as it burns in the chlorine atmosphere.

Well, I hate to brag, but here's a link to my element collection. It's a mighty big file, but it's got a picture of every stable element, as well as Tc and Pm. If you go over to www.chemicalforums.com and take a look at their links section, I've posted a great deal of links to sites that I've gotten elements from. Dave Hamric is one of the best. For the alkali metals and some of the really dangerous ones, he's not really all too keen on shipping them outside of the USA, but if you talk with him he might be able to work something out. I've met the guy and he's a great person who takes the element business seriously. He has now begun to ampoule the more reactive elements so that they will retain their shine and "pure" look for eternity. I also helped him setup an apparatus for producing pure, dry chlorine gas and he now sells chlorine ampoules on his website.

If you need Zinc, you can just file the copper coating off of some American Pennies as they have a solid Zinc core with copper plating on it.

Actually, Hydrogen has ALL of the so-called electron shells. Just because they aren't filled doesn't mean that they don't exist. It's very possible that hydrogen could accept six electrons, but it's pretty much impossible since the attraction from the nucleus is VERY weak and the repulsion of the electrons would be VERY high. How do I know that hydrogen has more than just the 1s shell? Because hydrogen has an emission spectrum which occurs as the electron is excited into a higher energy level, then falls back down to the ground state. As has been stated before, NH3 has a lone pair of electrons on the Nitrogen Atom. The geometry of the NH3 molecule is trigonal pyramidal with the lone pair very well exposed at the top. (Hence one of the reasons why ammonia is quite reactive). So when ammonia is formed, the three unpaired electrons in on Nitrogen will bond with the electrons present on Hydrogen, thereby giving both the Nitrogen atom and the hydrogen atoms filled shells. This is why NH3 is stable. However, if you were to put an H(+) ion near ammonia, the hydrogen ion would be just as stable, and maybe even a little bit more stable, if it had a full shell instead of an empty one. So it will easily be attracted to the lone pair of electrons on the nitrogen atom, thus forming the NH4(+) ion. Now all the atoms involved in the compound have completely full shells. This is why NH4(+) is so stable. However, it also has that charge of +1 which is why it will form ionic bonds with negatively charged ions.

If you ask a common person "What's Ammonia?", they'll tell you that it's the smelly stuff in a bottle people use to clean their bathroom. If you ask a chemist the same thing, they'll tell you that it's a toxic, corrosive gas. It just happens that the "Ammonia" you buy in the grocery store and from chemical suppliers is a solution of ammonia gas in water, which goes on to form ammonium hydroxide. It's the same thing with HCl. HCl is actually a gas, but almost everyone is familiar with it as hydrochloric acid which is just HCl dissolved into water. Reacting iodine with pure liquid ammonia won't work for a number of reasons. A major reason is that the water in an ammonia solution kind of holds things in place and allows the reaction to proceed. The iodine molecule needs to break apart in order to get the solitary iodine atoms, and then these atoms have to find an ammonium ion and replace the hydrogen on it. I believe that the very polar nature of water helps hold onto things while the reaction is taking place. Also, if you throw a tiny bit of KI into the mixture, it will help the iodine dissolve much easier and will create a bigger yeild.

You could try and distill it out. Whenever I make nitrogen triiodide, I just use clear, nothing else added, ammonia that I buy from the grocery store. If you want to concentrate it, you could just get a small glass jar and put a very small bit of water in it, then connect it to another bigger jar that will house the ammonia. Then you just heat up the weak ammonia to just below the boiling point of water and you will drive a good deal of the ammonia out of the original solution, and it will then travel over to the smaller vial with the little bit of water in it and absorb into there. Then that solution of ammonia will be much more concentrated.

Actually, you are a little bit incorrect there. You described Distilled Water which is slightly different than De-Ionised Water. De-Ionised water really contains no ions in it, but it can have other things like sugar, or non-ionic substances. Distilled Water, on the other hand, is just pure water. A LOT of people get that confused since it's basically the same thing, but Distilled is a bit more pure than De-Ionised.

Plus, if the temperature is elevated enough, the steam will react with the magnesium and generate even more hydrogen.

in the small doses that fluoride is present in toothpaste and water, it's good for your health. At higher concentrations, it will cause your teeth to take on a mottled appearance. However, at this level it is still below the "toxic" level. In higher doses, it is pretty nasty and will royally mess you up.

I'm always amazed at how if you take a few -OH groups on sugar and replace them with a Cl atom, you get 'Splenda' which is an artificial sweetner. It's also something that a diabetic can safely ingest without causing problems, unlike the unsubstituted sugar.

Probably because you can have NG in a liquid form that is easy to store, and easy to administer. NO is a gas which makes it a bit more difficult to store, and much more difficult to administer. Also, upon contact with air it will immediately oxidize to the much more corrosive and toxic NO2 which is not something you want people putting in their lungs. Again, NG can be absorbed through the skin while NO would have to be absorbed through the lung tissue where it would most likely have turned into nitrous, or nitric, acid by the time it gets there.

Halogen ions are 100% completely colorless. They do not, and cannot, produce any color. So I think you mean aqueous elemental chlorine. When you electrolyze a solution of NaCl, you produce sodium hydroxide, hydrogen gas, chlorine gas, and teency, tiny amount of oxygen gas.

Why wouldn't they? Tritium, like EVERY atom in existance, is made up of the same basic particles; neutrons, protons, and electrons. (Well, protium only contains protons and electrons, but that's nitpicking. ) So anti-matter would not care what it is that it's destroying.

Not to mention that it's a VERY potent vasodilator, so if you were to spill some on your skin you would become VERY ill and your blood pressure would plummet to very dangerous levels. heh. I remember being an ER one time and the patient in the room next to mine was having a heart attack, so I see this nurse running down the hall with this giant bottle of Nitroglycerine. I didn't know at this point that Nitroglycerine was used to dilate blood vessels, and I kind of got a bit nervous seeing it haphazardly lugged around. (I later found out that the concentration is only like 0.5% which renders it completely non-explosive).

Lead metal is completely harmless and non-toxic if you're not ingesting the metal. An Iron pot will quickly rust through if there's humidity in the air, while the lead pot will remain fairly stable. Also, the lead is a much better blocker of radiation than iron is. As for it being more harmful than a medium-activity uranium ore sample, that's also false. Lead doesn't emit alpha particles and gamma rays, while a uranium ore sample does. I highly doubt that you'd be eating out of the container holding the radioactive materials, nor do I believe that you'd store anything in there that you might eat. So when dealing with radioactives, lead containment is really the only safe way to contain them. If you are even remotely worried about the lead, you can coat it in a thick layer of clear varnish and you'll easily solve that problem.

You cannot chemically oxidize the fluoride ion into fluorine gas. It just cannot be done, period. That is why fluorine is generated by the electrolysis of a molten fluoride/HF mixture. Fluorine and fluorides are bloody insane in terms of toxicity. People generally don't think that the fluoride ion is all too toxic since it's added to toothpaste and water, but the amount added is fantastically small. In a pool sized container of water, there's maybe a few specs of fluoride salt crystals added to it. The fluoride ion is able to really mess you up, and the gas is up there with cyanide in terms of "kill-you-instantly"ness. A lot of people became really ill and dead when they were first trying to isolate elemental fluorine.

I tend to use small borosilicate glass vials which I purchased off of E-Bay, or off of the person I bought my elements from. Iridium is neat, and it's like a slightly cheaper version of Osmium. That is, if you want an incredibly dense metal, it's a LOT cheaper to get a big piece of Iridium than it is Osmium. I remember when I got my sample of Osmium. I was simply amazed at how heavy that tiny little button was, and at how blue the metal was. It's really impressive, and I'm very happy that the solid metal doesn't oxidize like the powdered and sponge forms do. So many of the elements are just so freaking neat to see. My bromine is really neat looking inside the sealed ampoule it's in. The liquid is so thick and dark, and the vapor fills up the tube nicely. I also am quite happy that it can't leach through the sealed glass ampoule and emit any nasty odors. (Bromine REALLY reeks). If I was ever fortuneate enough to come across a few hundred million dollars and retire for life, I would spend a lot of money and build myself a nice lab inside a new house where I could work with all the air sensitive and reactive elements. My dream is to have a nice wooden display on the wall of where I live which would have one mole of each element. I think that would be cool to make molds for each element stating the element name, symbol, molecular weight, and state "1 Mole". For the liquids I'd have some special vials made up, and for the gasses, well, it's hard to have a mole of gas in a transparent container, so I'd probably just have glass tubing made out in the shape of the element it contains. If only I were Bill Gates. hehe

I can't really imagine being able to contain anti-matter since it would just annihilate anything it was contained in. hehe.

Brandt discovered White Phosphorus by collecting LARGE amounts of urine and letting it putrify in a bathtub, I believe. When it became putrid and thickened up, he then boiled/heated it with charcoal. This was all performed in a large distillation apparatus where the white phosphorus vaporized and then condensed inside a distillation flask. Brandt then noticed that the white, waxy substance inside was emitting light when it was exposed to the air. Hence the name "phosphorus" which roughly means "bearer of light" in Greek.

Not really. Trioxide just means that there are three oxygen atoms present. So if you had Uranium Trioxide, UO3, there would be three oxygen atoms attached to the the Uranium atom. In H2SO4, the sulfur atom has four oxygen atoms attached to it, thus creating the SO4(-2) ion. The O-O bond is not very strong, so I cannot even imagine how unstable an -O-O-O-O- bond would be.