UC

What you're doing is making aluminum react with water by using sodium hydroxide solution. You're making a lot of hydrogen gas, and cells that use hydrogen tend to be awful at generating useable voltage. The best you'd be able to do would be a high surface area platinum electrode, I believe Voltage generated is characteristic of a set of materials. You won't improve it within the system, except by decreasing internal resistance. The iron probably becomes passivated by iron oxide and hydroxide in the solution, which would be a significant source of resistance. "Zinc-carbon" batteries use MnO2 and zinc with a potassium hydroxide electrolyte. The carbon is only for it's conductive properties and does not take part in the reaction. These rely on the reduction of MnO2 to MnO and the oxidation of zinc to zinc oxide/hydroxide. Aluminum generally makes poor batteries because of the passivating oxide layer. Perhaps you should try something like copper and zinc in copper sulfate first.

Water will preferentially form hydrogen and oxygen gas at the cathode and anode respectively. To make sodium, there has to be just about nothing else around that might be reduced instead. There are 4 ways to make sodium that I'm aware of: 1: electrolysis of molten sodium chloride 2: electrolysis of molten sodium hydroxide 3: electrolysis of a soluble sodium salt with nonreactive anion in pyridine. (I think I remember this being discussed) 4: Make use of Le Chatlier's principle and distill it from a mixture of calcium metal and a sodium salt brought up to the melting point of calcium. None of these methods is readily accessible nor suitable for the amateur, unless you have an excellent understanding of electrochemistry and some serious shop skills, as well as a considerable amount of money for construction materials. Are you sure that your sodium acetate was anhydrous? It does form a solid trihydrate that then melts upon heating. Vinegar also contains all sorts of crud like a small amount of acetaldehyde, bits of dead yeast, possibly sugars, etc. that will form condensation products and junk when heated, giving you that black color. Sodium carbonate is insoluble in acetone last I checked, and any acetone evolved would have been as vapor at the required temperatures.

Perhaps I was thinking of zinc and sulfur as excessively violent instead of the iron and sulfur. The iron doesn't seem to be too bad, but you can't do it in a beaker or anything. It does get quite hot. The aluminum I have done myself and can attest that when it finally ignites, it isn't nearly as tame.

MSDS are generally severely blown out of proportion for legal reasons, as you said. For example, read this one about table salt: http://www.jtbaker.com/msds/englishhtml/s3338.htm It suggests goggles, gloves, and having an eyewash station nearby when handling it.

Perhaps you could use a different synthesis route altogether. The acid form of the nitrile you want to prepare is easily produced by the action of oleum on citric acid, with the liberation of carbon monoxide. The free acid is not very stable, but there may be a good way to convert it to the amide and dehydrate it without it decomposing. Offhand, I don't know any way to transform esters directly into amides, but a link on that page also provides a high-yielding way to make the diester. http://www.orgsyn.org/orgsyn/orgsyn/prepContent.asp?prep=cv1p0010 I hope you meant CrO3 and not Cr2O3, since the latter would do absolutely nothing to oxidize a secondary alcohol.

You are completely missing the point of the silicon. First, let me ask you this: Even if the arc lets current flow, how do you control whether or not it flows? In computers, vast numbers of signals need to be coordinated or timed exactly in relation to one another. How would you manage all of this with this plasma comb? As for the silicon, if conductivity were the goal, tiny silver wires would be used in the most expensive electronics instead, but they are not. Silicon, a semiconductor, has some odd properties and it is these properties that allow transistors to be built. Essentially, a small trigger voltage at the "base" allows current to flow through the transistor from the "collector" to the "emitter." A logic gate is more than just on or off. It's on under a special set or sets of conditions for it's 2 or more inputs and off for every other condition. Take a NAND gate, from which you can build any other gate you want with enough of them. The basic NAND has two inputs. When both are high, the output is low. In any other set of conditions (high, low; low, high; low, low) the output is high. As you can see here, a NAND gate consists of two transistors and a resistor: http://www.cise.ufl.edu/~mssz/CompOrg/Figure1.16-NANDcircuit.gif If you build a chip on a wafer of silicon, you can create millions of transistors, resistors, diodes, capacitors, etc. right on the surface and at extremely small scale (and enormously low cost). Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedI would also like to point out that electricity doesn't move any slower though silicon than through copper or silver, but it does encounter a good deal more resistance.

Well, what classification does the product you want to make fall under? There is a named reaction that generates that kind of structure. If you are doing this homework, I suspect you've heard of it before, and it uses 2 reagents on that list.

fire

acid reaction? base reaction? So, you are saying that the hydrogen on the aldehyde would be replaced by the O from an acetate group? But, in changing a the carbon-hydrogen bond to a carbon-oxygen bond, you've oxidized the vanillin. What got reduced? Now, being attached to a carbonyl carbon, that hydrogen is decently acidic, but there is one much more acidic hydrogen on the vanillin molecule that will react instead. In order for the reaction to occur, the electrophilic carbonyl carbons on the acetic anhydride need a nucleophile from vanillin. The only thing nucleophilic on vanillin are the oxygens and the phenol oxygen has electrons being given to it from that hydrogen. The carbonyl oxygen only has it's two lone pairs and a little electron density from the carbon. Keep in mind that the general scheme of carboxylic acid anhydride reactions is: [ce] (RCO)2O + R[/ce]'[ce]OH -> RCOOR[/ce]'[ce] + RCOOH [/ce] (anhydride + alcohol -> ester + acid)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice So, any normally liquid or gaseous covalent compounds. Rocks and minerals are generally ionic compounds and thus are out of the equation.

we need another sticky about sodium and potassium nitrates. *facepalm*

Discussion of explosives of any kind is against the rules of this forum. Either settle for some interesting aqueous chemistry or this thread will be locked.

You can make a solution go from inky-purple to pale pink (almost colorless) very quickly with a bisulfite or metabisulfite solution. This is a simple oxidation-reduction reaction, where the KMnO4 oxidizes the bisulfite to bisulfate and is itself reduced to [ce] Mn^2^+ [/ce]. Don't bring any hydrochloric acid near it or you will make toxic chlorine gas. I did this series of color changes with my little cousins: KMnO4 in water (dark purple) Add some NaBr (No change) Add a little sulfuric acid (purple vanishes and is replaced by the sort-of-pale reddish-brown of bromine water) Add a little KI (Solution goes dark brown from formation of iodine and triiodide ion) Pour a little hexane or heptane on top and swirl (heptane goes violet from dissolved iodine) Pour a little bisulfite solution into the beaker (the lower (water) layer goes pale yellow as any remaining iodine is reduced and a yellow iodide-sulfite complex is formed. The complex is something woelen reported a long time ago.)

KMnO4 is a very powerful oxidizer and would normally oxidize an alcohol to the carboxylic acid, but formic acid is itself oxidation sensitive and readily converts to carbon dioxide and water. If you refer to the hypergol of KMnO4 and glycerin/glycerol, no it won't work with methanol. Methanol and it's oxidation products are too volatile and would boil off before reaching ignition temperature. Generally speaking, it needs to be a polyol of some kind.

Science, unlike religion, is a logical system. A system has a framework of basic information that is assumed to be correct (in this case, all sorts of equations that can't be derived from other equations). From these basics, it derives all other content (many equations in physics can be derived if you have enough time on your hands). A system has the power to accurately predict and explain based on it's contents. It is far from a perfect system, which would be complete, have no internal contradictions, and establish the validity of all assumptions (including the validity of deductive reasoning, but that's largely *the* big project for logicians). Religion on the other hand is more like a list of "facts." If I have a question, I consult the large holy book of your choice and look up the answer. If the answer isn't there, I'm screwed.

How will you accurately calibrate a pipette without another method of measuring....You could buy maybe a 5ml mohr pipette (and pipette bulb), but they're rather crude and probably not much cheaper than if you catch a deal on a burette. My burette is kimax glass with teflon stopcock. $20 on ebay...you just need to have patience sometimes and don't go by ebay store prices.

Try taking an english course while you're at it. It should read something like this: By the way, some lovely fallacies you have in there. You said earlier in the thread that there is a possible test for your idea (NOT A THEORY) Unlike other topics, such as the existence of a god, this means that we can in fact have evidence against it. You don't need to have any proof for your idea for others to point out errors and evidence to the contrary.

In which case, allow me to accuse him of blatantly lying.

The reaction of iron powder and sulfur powder is violent, as is the reaction of aluminum with sulfur (difficult to get to ignite and it reeks immediately after making it from toxic H2S). Copper sulfide needs to be made by adding a source of sulfide anion to an aqueous solution of a copper salt. Treat them like pyrotechnics.

You misunderstand what electricity is fundamentally and how changing magnetic fields induce a current in wires (how a generator works). No electrons ever leave anything. Current flow is just electrons moving around in a definite direction in a loop of wire (okay, so it doesnt have to be in wire, but lets leave that out of the picture for now). These electrons are already there, but don't move in a definite direction in any old piece of metal. When pushed in one direction, they dissipate potential energy (voltage) across a load (something with a resistance; a lightbulb in this case) and it emerges as photons of heat and light. The net effect is that the energy you expend turning the crank gets turned inefficiently into light.

Any of the valve metals (tantalum, titanium, niobium, tunsten, hafnium, etc.) or platinum group metals (commonly platinum and nickel)

(except for blayzovich) This. thread. is.

Because current flow has nothing to do with more electrons, just the motion of the ones that are already there.

I'm hoping he means aqueous ammonia... try ebay. You can get a burette for like $20. Or get a good quality graduated syringe. The latter won't really save you much money and the accuracy will suffer.

Use foam-core board It's a good deal thicker than what you want, but very lightweight and rigid. I've done two maglev track projects before (The "car" was constructed out of this material) and the stuff is more than light and strong enough to be held up by ordinary permanent magnets.