exchemist

I should have thought the reason is to enable quick decisions, without having to wait until it is too late to act. One uses partial evidence and consults one's prior learning and experience as to what the evidence suggests and decides on the basis of what seems probable. We do it all the time. I think you are not correct to assume these decisions are based on no evidence. It is just that the evidence supplied is misinterpreted due to biased learning. For instance: light in the sky, moving apparently oddly, without sound -> little green men, because we've just read "Chariots of the Gods".

Mes félicitations! Tres bon poisson d'avril. 😁

There is no such thing as "astrological science". It is a contradiction in terms.

🤪🫖🙃🤡🔫

I thought talc was sometimes classed as a clay mineral though. It too has sheets only bonded by van der Waals attraction, I think. With mica I think there is a cation between the sheets.

The micas and talc (soapstone) spring to mind.

Yes, Wynn-Williams chose that from Great Gatsby exactly because that was how she came to see Zuckerberg, Sandbag and the rest of them. They simply don't care what mess they create for other people, in their pursuit of more eyeballs. Perhaps the most disturbing thing is the way they decided to access the Chinese market, from which they were banned. They ended up offering the Chinese government access to all the data on Chinese users, including those in Hong Kong, making Facebook a tool of state surveillance while still pretending to users everything was secure. And there was the sleazy business of Sandberg, the big boss, trying to get Wynn-Williams into bed on a private jet [sic]. Apparently she had hired an entourage of suspiciously nubile young women to be her assistants (voile et vapeur, evidemment). "Me Too" or what? Having read the book I have no doubt that the recent court case has gone the right way. I hope more follow. These people have no conscience at all. (They tried like hell to get the book suppressed of course and are still trying to pursue the author through the courts.)

"Agribees" made me think of "angrybees"and "aggrobees". Whatever append to the threat of those "Africanised bees" that were supposed to be flying in huge swarms across the Mato Grosso about 30 years ago and taking over the Americas? There was that terrible film "The Swarm", a source of much amusement to Clive James, as I recall.

Where in these articles are monomolecular layers referred to?

Who or what is Gaiven?

However the elephant in the room is industrialised agriculture, things like pulling up the hedgerows to make giant fields that are easier for ploughing and harvesting. Wildlife diversity collapses. Making yet another industrial intervention to try to correct the damage done by the original industrialisation does not sound like a brilliant strategy. However better than doing nothing, certainly.

Duplicate of this thread? https://www.scienceforums.net/topic/140403-engineered-yeast-provides-rare-but-essential-pollen-sterols-for-honeybees/

Constitution in the quoted passage means principles for the governance of the country. The USA has a written constitution, which can be consulted by legal authorities. The UK does not. It has a set of traditional understandings about the powers of the two houses of Parliament and the roles of the monarch and his government ministers and a number of laws codifying aspects of this, but there is no collected definitive body of rules: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kingdom It's not really very relevant to the discussion about the language, except that it is the same idea: nobody has bothered to regulate it officially. It is all a bit laissez faire. This is in contrast to France, where the Académie française does set out rules for French. (They had an earnest discussion a few years ago before pronouncing on what gender "covid" should have. It is la covid, apparently: https://www.academie-francaise.fr/le-covid-19-ou-la-covid-19)

Aha, thanks, so there is a progressive kink in the heat capacity curve, suggesting more degrees of freedom become available as the temperature rises through this transition range. Perhaps, thinking about this, part of issue for me is that glasses are non-equilibrium states. Just about all the chemistry I learnt was really about equilibrium states. The statistical mechanics of non-equilibrium states will be quite a bit more complex.

This is sort of interesting. I thought this, but someone told me that is wrong because window glass, for example, is below something called the "glass transition temperature". So, according to this, a glass is an "amorphous solid" rather than a very viscous liquid. However, when I look up what a glass transition temperature is, it appears it is an imprecisely defined range of temperature, rather than a specific value. Furthermore, when making this "transition", there don't seem to be any of the features one associates with a genuine phase change, such as release of latent heat, change in order at the molecular level, etc. So now I am left with the suspicion that the distinction is a bit bogus and based only on how it seems best to treat the material in practice, rather than any physical or chemical change in state. But I'd be interested in a comment from anyone better informed.

This immediately made me think of bitumen. Bitumen blocks will slowly flow under their own weight, given enough time, yet you can shatter them with a hammer. Technically bitumen is a liquid, but one that is so viscous it behaves in practice more like a solid. So I suppose what they have done is explore this for liquids of relatively low viscosity and found there can come a point at which the liquid is unable to flow fast enough to react to the force pulling it apart, whereupon it breaks like bitumen. I would imagine in molecular liquids the bonds being broken will be just the intermolecular forces rather than the bonding within the molecules.

Weird. I don’t seem to have acquired any recently. Could it be Tiassa under a pseudonym, conducting a vendetta? 😆 Or maybe it’s Lizardberg exercising his uncanny internet power to destroy you.

What flaws are these? Have you a link to an example of someone saying this?

Careless People, by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This confirms all my darkest suspicions about Zuckerberg and his sidekick, the horrible Sheryl Sandbag, who is just as hypocritical and creepy as I had imagined she might be. Timely too, in view of the recent court judgment against Meta for negligently deploying algorithms designed to addict people to social media. Interestingly, the way Zuckerberg and Sandberg are treated like gods who cannot be questioned, and whose every whim must be indulged, reminded me of the shock I experienced in my time working for an oil company in Houston. There really does seem to be a fascist streak in corporate American culture. And so many of the underlings seem to be such creeps, with no morals or independent thought.

I vill not buy zees tobacconist, it is scratched.

So drying out the mucous membranes and......bingo! I see. That makes sense.

Would that make the bacteria more likely to enter the bloodstream? Or are you thinking of some other mechanism?

True enough. But at a given molarity, the amount of dissociation into H⁺ would be in the order of decreasing pKa, i.e. lower pKa more H⁺. I suppose there could be other effects, though, from the conjugate base of the acid. Citrate for instance can in principle chelate with the metal ions in the corrosion. I don't know whether in practice this helps remove the corrosion, but would not be surprised if it did.

What is the use of associating parts of the body with heavenly bodies? There does not seem to be any analogy that can drawn. And why come to a science forum to post this?

Indeed. The tech bros won’t be happy about the helium, as it is needed for integrated circuit chip manufacture. More seriously, raw materials for fertiliser are held up too. Urea, sulphur and sulphuric acid (used to digest phosphate minerals for phosphate fertilisers). This will have a big impact on food production in Africa and Asia. (I see my earlier remarks about diesel are in line with what the CEO of Shell had to say today.) By the way, for Shell too, lubricants production will be impacted. A lot of both diesel and lubricants base oil these days comes from their Gas to Liquids synthesis plant in…….Qatar!