Slashdot Mirror

24L? 22.4L?
http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/GasLaw/MolarVo lume.html

One thing I've learned over the years: Slashdot editors aren't much interested in science. The publish a lot of pseudo-science articles, or nonsense science articles like this one.

The issue here is that the process works, but it is very expensive in energy, because the metal oxide must be refined.

Anyhow, there is nothing new in the referenced article. The fact that it is possible to produce hydrogen using reactive metals has been known since perhaps 1860, maybe much earlier.

If I remember correctly, there was an explosion in Antoine Laurent Lavoisier's lab caused by hydrogen released by heating with metal. Mr. Lavoisier died in 1794, and not from the explosion.

If you're talking about Lise Meitner, her interest was in the pure science rather than its most terrible application. She fled to neutral Sweden in 1938, but continued to communicate with former co-workers Hahn and Strassmann in Berlin. In early 1939 she published this classic paper in Nature, where the term 'fission' (borrowed from biology by her co-author and nephew Otto Frisch) was used for the first time. It explained the bizarre results coming out of the lab in Berlin, and together with Hahn & Strassman's paper, had a profound effect on many physicists, including Leo Szilard. Szilard quickly realised the implications of the amount of energy released in fission and, with Eugene Wigner, persuaded Einstein to write to Roosevelt about the possibility of nuclear weapons.

Quantum Mechanics is all about the working man.

This site strongly implies mass is lost in exothermic checmical reactions, but says that the mass lost is too small to measure. this site implies the same thing.

I'd welcome any other references (scientific journals?)

-- Agthorr

Just a footnote but it is amazing some of the
pages built by K-12 teachers in math and science. These people have far fewer resources than college faculty who end up using WebCT, SmartCourse, or BlackBoard or something else that lets them drag and drop or having department secretaries convert Word documents to pages.

Here is an example. Here is another one. My webliographies are full of sites like these. The science ones are mine and I coded the html from scratch.

The web is a very powerful tool. Please don't sell those of us in nontechnical professions short.

Roanna

ZOID CITY Community and Community Competition

1942: Enrico Fermi, and a team of scientists, operated the first man-made nuclear reactor under a football field at the University of Chicago. A cadmium control rod was suspended over the pile with a rope. Should something have gone wrong, a scientist was to cut the rope with an ax, thereby dropping the rod into the reactor, hopefully solving the problem. Ever since then an emergency shutdown has been called a SCRAM, which stands for "safety control rod ax man".

While polymers are often hard to work with, we are gaining a lot of knowledge on the workability of the molecular structure of polymers and synthetics. Therefore, this expands our possibilites. The size of polymer molecules are enourmous when compared to those of others, in fact, polymer molecules are the largest known to man.

Example: A Mole is a collection of 600,000 billion billion molecules. In Salt, this comes to about 18 grams. In Polyetheylene, however, (used for milk jugs, etc,...) a "mole" of molecules can weigh up to...Damn, I can't remember, and I can't find it either, I believe it's several tons, anybody know? It's far, far more, and that's the point I'm trying to make.

Anyway, I'm getting offtopic. Due to the workability of polymers, it only makes sense to use them in every way possible. Their inherent size gives us many options.

Dang. Wrong link. Bob's School of Quantum Mechanics lives here, among other places.