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Chemistry / Re: How well understood is the Chemistry of the trans-uranic elements?
« on: 16/05/2022 20:47:23 »Thanks @chiralSPO .you're welcome!
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Thanks @chiralSPO .you're welcome!
I can't help wondering about the original question.I believe this is correct.
"Is there a limit to how hot things can get?".
I wonder if the answer is "As hot as they were".
(about 14 billion years ago)
Is it possible to slow the decay down by other methods? A few years ago, school-level physics would have stated that nuclear reactions are unlike chemical reactions - nuclear decay is a random process and the decay rates are un-affected by environmental conditions like pressure and temperature. The general explanation being that the nucleus is dominated by the effects of nuclear forces (the strong and weak force) and effectively independent from whatever else is going on outside the nucleus. It was a good explanation but like the semolina pudding they served at school lunchtime, it was just so wrong.
This belief was seriously adjusted in my life time when a type of nuclear change called electron capture was studied. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron_capture ). In electron capture it is possible to adjust the nuclear reaction rates just by ionising the atom (for example the nuclear change 74Be+ → 73Li+ proceeds more slowly than 74Be → 73Li ). You can get a smaller (but statistically significant) difference just by bonding the atom to certain things.
I've not seen any information about it - but it begs the question that you might be able to adjust the rates of other nuclear changes. For example, alpha emission may be reduced if the unstable nucleus can be surrounded with ligands that are positively charged and create a potential barrier against the emission of another positively charged particle. Maybe just putting the unstable nuceii under pressure is enough to slow the decay (since the appearance of more particles tends to increase pressure PV = nRT etc). I don't know and It's important to point out that this is just speculation: I have a personal belief that nuclear reactions are much more like chemical reactions than we had first imagined (just in terms of their reaction kinetics, obviously chemistry goes on outside the nucleus but nuclear change doesn't).
Building a rocket to Mars. Having fantasy to beat Elon Musk at it!If you're hoping to go to mars using diesel as fuel, you'll need to bring your own oxygen too! Just heating the fuel without the oxygen won't get you very far...
water only:I have to eliminate water if it reacts with steel. What if at 500 deg C for 1 sec.
diesel only: seems normal boiling point low - 380 deg C. If could be heated to 500 deg C for few seconds, any major decomposition. Would it still be combustible diesel?
Can we heat water/diesel to 500 deg C in a strong closed steel chamber(oxygen free or fully filled with water/diesel) without decomposition to constituent elements.Well, it won't turn entirely into the constituent elements, but it probably won't be the same as what you started with either. Products will depend on how long the reaction is held at 500°C (2 seconds probably won't look much different, but 2 years will be very different), what type of steel is used (mild steel will likely react with the water at this temperature, and other grades of steel might have transition metals that would catalyze different types of reactions, like Cr, Ni, Co, Mn, Mo etc.), what the ratio of water to diesel is, and what kind of diesel it is (any diesel is a mixture of many compounds, but what exactly the compounds are might have a significant effect on which reactions occur)
The most likely explanation is that a falling bubble has a small chip of pyrites or something stuck to it, weighing it down.Agreed. This was my first thought as well. I have seen this kind of thing before.
Genetic science has figured aout a way to turn off genes so as to help people with problematic genes with their condition. Can nature employ similar genetic affectation?As I understand it, we learned this trick from nature. This subject is called "epigenetics."
For the first day or two.It's unlikely that a houseplant would produce enough oxygen to significantly increase the amount of available oxygen in a house.This would be like living at altitude.
However, it's possible that houseplants could, in some situations, provide a significant (significant meaning measurable, not necessarily useful) decrease in carbon dioxide concentrations in a house.
Imagine a small airtight room with a volume of 27m3. At atmospheric pressure and it would contain roughly 20% oxygen (5400 L O2 = 240 moles of O2 = 7700 g of O2). If the air inside were 400 ppm CO2 (10.8 L CO2 = 0.482 moles of CO2 = 21.2 g of CO2)
So if the room were totally air-tight, and there was no plant inside, the oxygen would decrease from 7700 g to 6970 g (from 20% to 18.1%, which wouldn't be great—this is why we don't typically live in airtight rooms!)
What difference would it make if it lasts for less than 1 nanosecond instead of more than 1 ns?If we were to view the system at such a fine resolution that we could observe extremely short fluctuations (ie 10–20 seconds), then the ice could be interpreted as being in equilibrium with superheated plasma (due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty relationship of time vs energy, which can be demonstrated as physically "real" and meaningful by the broad spectrum of ultrafast lasers).