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You Slashdotters are all alike, you think its about the diamond. The diamond has nothing to do with it. It is about the GARAUNTEE due to the size of the diamond and it's rarity that you are willing to either 1) spend large amounts of hard earned cash or 2) go work like a slave in a diamond mine somewhere to impress your woman.

When diamonds are cheap you will instead have to appear with something else rare expensive. For example, an intricate(for looks) ring made of Lutetium(for the garauntee)

WebElements

As said before, there will always be alternatives that don't do such things. Boycott the ones who do.

Technically O is 1s(2) 2S(2) 2P(4)
H is 1S(1)

The actual electronegativity delta between O and H disregarding all other factors is 1.34 not 1.4...
Without the aformentioned polar covalency ( see your post) which is just a fancy term for a covalent bond with SIGNIFIGANT ionic properties

Now are you a chemist or a student who will be when he grows up one day? Not to be terribly harsh but when you put a smiley after you IAAC and use wiki for citations on scientific matters I start to have my doubts.

I deal with and build laser systems (so I know a little something practically about atomic valances and their quantium states) as part of my part time job as a security consultant and the rest of my time I spend in seminary or writing medical database applications.

*sigh*

It seems that even geeks don't understand geek humor.

Plutonium - Pu 239 has a half-life of 24,000 years. A piece of plutonium feels warm since it actually generates heat by nuclear reactions.

Get your facts straight, will you? Plutonium-239 will not boil water. Plutonium-238 on the other hand, has a half life of 87 years and is hot enough to produce energy for deep space probes. Both are Alpha emitters and do not pose a health risk as long as they aren't inhaled. (Pretty damn hard when you consider that the stuff is... well... pretty damn hard.)

Radium - a extremely radioactive element. It has a half-life of around 1600 years...

Thrilling. Radium is only dangerous if you digest the stuff. And even then it's not guaranteed to kill you. It just increases your risk of cancer.

And all this stuff is lethal at extremely low quantities!

Better run chicken little! Meteorites burning up in the Earth's atmosphere are dropping the highly poisonous (and radioactive) substance "Uranium" on your head! The sky is falling, the sky is falling!

Sheesh.Almost as bad as that pansy ass, Ralph Nader.

Anyone who takes chemistry advice from an AC instead of the periodic table deserves what they get.

Oxygen has an atomic weight of 8, Hydrogen 1.

Oxygen has an atomic number of eight - and an atomic weight of 15.9994 - against Hydrogen, atomic weight 1.00794.

-Chris

There's also an interactive one, color-coded for lifetimes, here. The half-life of these elements decreases from millenia to microseconds.

Cool link! As usual, since I'm not a physicist, the chart brings up more fun questions than it answers. Here's a question that I hope doesn't get me in trouble with Mr. Ashcroft & co!

According to the page I linked above, Uranium and Plutonium, the most well-known nu-cu-lar bomb materials, have isotopes with half-lives > 100,000 years. That explains how they can be stable enough to be worked into a sub-critical mass that can be compressed explosively into a critical mass.

But look up a couple of steps. Curium, element 96, has a couple of of isotopes with similar longevity. We know that after WWII, scientists studied the heck out of the trans-uranium elements... I wonder if anyone ever attempted to use Curium as a fissile material? Someone had to have the crazy idea to try Plutonium, so you have to figure someone tried it.

I did a quick Google, and didn't find much. But this article is pretty cool -- it turns out that Curium is patented! Glenn Seaborg (immortialized with his own element, #106 Seaborgium) patented it along with Americium -- the radioactive element in your home smoke detector. Does that mean that nobody can use Curium in their bombs without paying royalties to his estate?

Both 114 and 116 exist...

http://www.webelements.com/

Sean

Radon seems to be the most massive noble gas, but I guess it is useless here "because of its short half life (the longest life isotope has a half life of less than 4 days)".

You could consider a state of no fingers on either hand, thus giving you base 12. coincidence?

You've heard of social Darwinism, now in the US we have social Daltonism: classifying people based on their weight. You do know that Americium is an unstable, overweight atom...

Well, that one sucks, it doesn't even have the element this article is about. Try WebElements.

The of course then go on to point to here for the description of element 110. So Sorry.

www.webelements.com had it in there for ages (dated 17th March 03), proving they rock.

So.....for all your printable periodic table needs, go to Web Elements!!

"Pentium 5"?

No, they'll just call it Manganese, the 25th element.

I'd further suggest that Md-doped would mean Mendelevium doped, not Mangenese doped... seeing as Md is mendelevium, not manganese.

I'd further suggest that Md-doped would mean Mendelevium doped, not Mangenese doped... seeing as Md is mendelevium, not manganese.

Suggest you make your own fresh batch. Receipe is here.

...thinking that it was already called Ununnilium.

I wonder how small it's decay time is. I know the elements before it have halflives of several nano- to picoseconds. It'll be gone before you can say "fast". These scientist better not have a cold: Press the button to start experiment. HATSJOO!!!". Oh darned, missed it.

Ununnillium gone, Darmstadtium in. Mendelev would be proud.

It's already on the webelements.com page, with some interesting info on the chemical makeup.

I applaud the faith in humanity that the proponents of nuclear power have, but to believe that we'll be able to safely handle the waste for the next 200,000 years is just going too far.

Furthermore, you mention using breeder reactors, in order to make the most usage of the fuel as possible. No doubt you're aware, but fail to mention, that the final product (beyond electricity) of a breeder reactor is Plutonium.

I don't think it is ethically responsible to advocate the creation of a power source that will create thousands of tons(*) of plutonium each year, and expect that all that plutonium will remain unused, contained, and out of the "wrong" hands for the next two hundred millenia.

There are options apart from nuclear (fission) that we can explore (wind, waves, sun, conservation).

To be pithy, I'd rather risk global warming than nuclear winter.

-Zipwow

* tons of plutonium: Taking the Gipper at his word that all the waste from a reactor in a year will fit under his desk, lets say that's a cubic meter of plutonium. We'll round down the number of plants in your estimate to 500 for easy calculations. That's 500 cubic meters of plutonium, per year. Webelements says that plutonium weighs 19816kg per cubic meter. 500 * 19816 = 9908000kg. Google says that 1ton = 907.18474 kg, so we're talking about 10,921 TONS of waste, per year. For the united states.

Well, there is Americium, after all.

Well a rough answer looks pretty simple to guestimate me. An Si-Si bond is 0.235nm. We're about to head into the 90nm scale and there are plans to move quickly to the 60 and 45nm range by the end of the decade. Although there are many reasons things might slow down before then, it sure as hell is going to slow down within the next twenty years. That aint no mystery. Even if single atom silicon circuits are possible, we'll soon be within a few powers of ten from such a beast. Sure there's non conventional computing, but CMOS will certainly be used up before too many more doublings can occur. That should be common knowledge and it makes the article seem a bit ridiculous.

Well, let's see..

Science 169, 670 - Documents the existance of giant halos, but pretty much admits that they are the result of standard decay of U and Th. At that time, the idea of superheavy elements with long half-lives was not out of the question.

Science 173, 727. - Documents the existance of halos dominated by U-238 derived lead; i.e from Radon movement.

Annual Review of Nuclear Science 23, 347. - Now this actually gives some interesting data, notably that Po-210 and Rn-222 haloes are going to be virtually indistinuishable. Indeed, the given uncertanties in measurement are larger.

Science 184, 62 - Apart from the given diagram siomply not supporting the text, there is no new evidence here. There is a *claim* [That the haloes can't come from Rn-222], but no supporting evidence is given.

Most of the later references either seem to be in non-peer reviewed publications or unavailable online, which is a pity.

And this is the problem. None of the published material excludes the alternative hypothesis [i.e. decay chain element migration].

And if we look for example, we see that Po-209 is the most stable isotope of polonium, yet we don't see any haloes from that. This is really the show stopper.

So, I've looked at the papers. There is nothing there to support instantaneous creation. Now, will you answer my questions?

I think Kathy Albrecht may be exaggerating a mite when she claims that the RFID tags will "burst into flames" when microwaved.

First off, you're dealing with a silicon chip. The melting point of silicon is, according to this site, over 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. Its boiling point is even higher, at over 5,000 degrees F.

Another thing to remember is that any RFID device is going to have conductive paths in it. It is, in essence, a small integrated circuit chip. Considering that the thickness of conductive paths in a typical IC can be measured in micrometers, it seems to me that said paths would vaporize under microwave-oven level bombardment, thus rendering the chip useless, with only a few seconds (at the most!) of exposure to the high-power field.

Yet ANOTHER thing to think about. Microwave ovens work by heating water molecules trapped in food. How many water molecules do you think are trapped in a silicon chip?

I can see one possibility here, and I certainly intend to E-mail Ms. Albrecht about this. Under strong microwave fields, such as are found in a typical oven, it may be that the chip gets hot enough, with more than a few seconds exposure, to cause melting or scorching of the surrounding material.

Why might it do this? Because, once the microwave energy vaporizes the normal conductive paths, one or more of those paths may melt together on the chip and form a big diode, capable of passing lots of current. This could result in the chip generating lots of heat.

However, as for the chip itself, I don't think there's a consumer microwave oven on the planet that puts out enough power to make it "burst into flames." Not with a 2,500+ degree melting point!

here's a nice link.

Bismuth-209 is the most common isotope of bismuth (with its mean atomic mass being 208.98038), so it would be acceptable to say ' Bismuth No Longer the Heaviest Stable Element', according to webelements and The Jefferson Lab.

The stable isotope of gold is 197Au anyway! ...

Sorry, that'll teach me not to proofread better before posting. After 196Hg absorbs a neutron it becomes 197Hg, which decays to 197Au. (See the fine Web Elements site for details.)

And yes, it is still hopelessly too expensive to show a profit.

Wolfram, not "Volfram".
history

Nope, I don't see N2O2 listed...

From WebElements.com the listed Oxides of Nitrogen are :

NO
N2O
N2O3
N2O4
N2O5

Note that N2O2 is missing from the list.

On the other hand, NO2 is Nitrogen Dioxide, not Nitrous Oxide (N2O).

(could N2O/2/ that have been a typo?)

Just what's wrong with fission, anyway? According to this list, nothing touches uranium for energy density. Nothing even comes close.

Coal has an energy density of a little less than 30 GJ/tonne (10^9 Joules per 1000 kg). Natural gas is almost 40 GJ/tonne. Kerosene and gasoline are about 45 GJ/tonne. Metallic uranium has a listed energy density of 560E3 GJ/tonne, twelve-thousand times as dense as gasoline!

In other words, to get as much energy from coal as we would from one metric ton of uranium metal, we'd have to burn nineteen thousand three hundred ten (19,310) metric tons of coal.

You'd think that finding a place to put the equivalent of a cube 37.4 cm on a side (actually smaller; the fission products would be lighter and smaller than the parent uranium!) would be easier for the environmentalists to handle than burning 19,310 metric tons of coal!

you idiots- the Gi was obviously a typo, as he used Ge below that. look here.

"I'm holding out for a liquid sodium cooled computer, just like valves on decent cars."

According to the data sheet on Sodium, the melting point for good old Na is "370.87 Kelvin [or 97.72 C (207.9 F)]." For the slow, this means it's solid at any temperature below this. So, to use liquid sodium in a computer, the coolest you could get the system while keeping the sodium liquified is ~208F. I think I'll stick with H2-0 for now...

Don't fire alarms use radiological material?

Not fire alarms, but smoke detectors. They use a small amount of Americium in smoke detectors as well as some of those nifty advanced smoke/vapor detectors you might find in data centers. Still, I see the number of cases of people carrying smoke detectors through the subways in New York as rather small.

The name of the element is Aluminium

Lithium was more reactive than sodium? It's the other way around. The reactivity of group 1A elements increases with period. Lithium is in period 2, sodium is in period 3. Cesium is the most electropositive element (i.e. the most entertaining/life-threatening when thrown into a lake) and occupies period 6. Francium (group 1A, period 7) would be more impressive, but it's so radioactive that even if you could scrape together a chunk of it, it would have decomposed into other elements before you got a chance to get it wet.

Here's a fun site with a periodic table and details on all the elements.

Web elements lists the radius of a singular silicon atom as 111 picometers, or 4.3701 x 10^-9 inches. So you could fit 228828828.83 wafers in a cubic inch. Of course, not even considering the issue of reading, I doubt the actual atomic structure would be that compact. In case you were curious, that's about 1,784,864,858,400 DVDs or 67,110,918,675,840,000,000,000 bits.

Your numbers for lifting power don't seem to compute. If you check out the data available from Spec Lab (Hydrogen) (Helium) you'll see that the lifting power is quite different from what you assumed. Using the volume that you computed, I calculate 1118 tonne (metric) lifting capacity for Helium, or 1241 tonne lifting capacity for Hydrogen... Of course that's assuming that the volume that you calculated is correct...

Yeah yeah protons, HS chem was 10 years ago :P

Three of them for lead? Which element is next to gold? Looks like Mercury would be minus one..

Whoops :)

I just ordered a new case for my dual Athlon Linux box made of Ununhexium with Ununoctium details! Man did I get screwed...

I just ordered a new case for my dual Athlon Linux box made of Ununhexium with Ununoctium details! Man did I get screwed...

Good old WebElements has a little something to say about the biological reaction to palladium:

All palladium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic and as carcinogenic.

Good old WebElements has a little something to say about the biological reaction to palladium:

All palladium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic and as carcinogenic.

..... whose half life is measured in seconds. The heavy artifical ones.

After reading the original article I looked up the periodical table. I decided to find out which element officially has the highest Atomic Number. Ununbium has an atomic number of 112, but more intrestingly has a half-life of 240 microseconds.

Picture him removing the lid to show a friend (both in Radiation suits) - "It was here a second ago" :-)

..... whose half life is measured in seconds. The heavy artifical ones.

After reading the original article I looked up the periodical table. I decided to find out which element officially has the highest Atomic Number. Ununbium has an atomic number of 112, but more intrestingly has a half-life of 240 microseconds.

Picture him removing the lid to show a friend (both in Radiation suits) - "It was here a second ago" :-)

By adulthood, Mendeleev's periodic table of the elements is firmly planted in a typical mind either as a tool for study or proof of mystical forces at work in nature. There are alternative structures: some clever and others using alternate media, extensions to the table providing nuclear structure, fermi surfaces, and line spectra.

Still others are extraordinarily cross-thematic, merging chemistry with comic books, poetry or haiku. But only the grouping-nature of the columns is retained in rejected elements, condiments and beer. Eventually the elements and the periodic qualities have been lost entirely, reducing the periodic table to a design template for topical lists of funk and rock music, comedy and TV shows, famous mathematicians and presidents, even SGI products. Soon a complete breakdown of the scientific aspect yields no similarity to the original, becoming a glorified table, a marketing tool, or hype itself. There is mounting evidence of a conspiracy.

There are many industrial methods for the production of hydrogen and that used will depend upon local factors such as the quantity required and the raw materials to hand. Two processes in use involve heating coke with steam in the water gas shift reaction or hydrocarbons such as methane with steam.
CH4 + H2O (1100C) -> CO + 3H2

In both these cases, further hydrogen may be made by passing the CO and steam over hot (400C) iron oxide or cobalt oxide.

CO + H2O -> CO2 + H2

Oh for <SUB> & <SUPER> tags to be allowed on slashcode.