exchemist

Curious. I rather like this one, from an Australian (where else? 😁) construction site:

I think the answer to that has been evident for quite a while. 😁

It seems to me a lot of this is not fair to @Eise 's point. As I see it, all he was suggesting was that purely political discussions, i.e. those that are unrelated to a science topic, should perhaps not be hosted in this forum, when there is another forum created expressly for that purpose. I do not think @Eise or anyone else has been suggesting science can live in a "purity bubble", divorced from all other topics or modes of thought. It was just a question of what the focus of this forum ought to be. I suspect part of the issue is that people tend to have strong opinions about politics, whereas actual science topics generally elicit polite interest at best. Also, silly people tend not to understand or be interested in science much, whereas any fool can sound off on politics like a pub bore. And then again, trolls often have political motivation, whereas trolling science topics is more of a niche pursuit. So, one way and another, political discussion can tend to swamp the science. On the other hand, one needs a certain degree of life on the forum, so if having a lot of politics churning away is the price we have to pay to keep the forum going, I guess we will all have to put up with it.

Yes I suppose if hulling of rice is chiefly done on an industrial scale in large mills then it would work.

"Excellent questions". "showcase". This is AI talking.

Reading the link, it seems this is about combined ashes from controlled burning of rice husks and wood. Rice husks apparently contain a lot of silica(!) which is present in the ash as finely divided amorphous silica. Wood ash contributes calcium oxide and other alkalis. The combination allows a "pozzolanic" reaction to take place in the presence of water, forming a hydrated, combined CaO.SiO2 structure which subsequently takes up CO2 from the air as it hardens. The term "pozzolanic" originates from Pozzuoli, near Naples in Italy, where the ancient Romans quarried siliceous volcanic ash which they used in this way for construction materials. What isn't clear to me is how much building material can be produced from the amount of rice husk and wood ash available. Clearly this can be an elegant way to deal with rice husk waste but is enough generated, I wonder, to support commercial scale production of blocks for building? Or will the idea founder on the need to spend a lot of effort collecting rice husks in enough quantity to feed a viable manufacturing operation?

Consult your physician if you suspect something abnormal, or if you are finding you can't sleep or carry out your normal activities because of it.

With a thing like this some context is helpful. What is this and where from? I feel sure some archaeologists will have come up with some ideas. But we have no chance of looking that up unless we know what pictures these are. In the absence of such information I would assume the "rolex" is some kind of decorative bangle. No idea about the oval object. Possibly a representation of some fruit or seed?

Dynastic politics is another aspect of populism. India and the USA spring to mind. But returning to the issue of fascism, it is hard to characterise Magyar as fascist I think.

Regarding Orban, my understanding is the EU withheld funding from Hungary on account of its lack of political freedom and Magyar, who defeated him, campaigned largely on the promise of getting the EU funding back by restoring a proper democracy.

I'm a bit less pessimistic, though I agree the threat is real. There was a reflective piece by Gideon Rachman in the FT some days ago, in which he pointed out that EU membership has proved to be a great political stabilising force. It has - eventually - seen off Orban in Hungary, PiS in Poland and has softened Meloni's government in Italy into something resembling a normal centre-right one. There are signs that Le Pen may be starting to go the Meloni route. At any rate the RN has given up on the idea of leaving the EU - which means she would be constrained to working with it. Germany's AfD does sound nastier I agree, but so far they are a long way from gaining the Chancellery. Across the Channel, Farage is fucking up, with sleaze over donations (incl. a criminal police investigation) and now facing competition for the swivel-eyed vote from a red-faced country squire-type drunk called Rupert Lowe, who aims to out-Farage Farage, splitting his target electorate. There is yet time for the skeletons to come tumbling out of the AfD closet in similar fashion. These far right parties are chock-full of unsavoury characters whose murky pasts can come back to haunt them. The media have an important job to do to shine a spotlight on them and make the public aware of the personalities and history of the people they are being tempted to vote for. The other point is that so long as they do not actually leave the EU, these countries do have to carry on holding more or less free elections, or they lose funding, which is very important for many of them (though not in Germany's case). In Hungary and Poland's cases, elections have booted far right parties out, once they have had time to show themselves incompetent in office. But yeah, it will be a bumpy and nervous ride for some years yet. A change in regime in Russia would help quite a bit! And for that, a return to principle and reliability on the part of the USA would be a big help too......

What I had in mind was that it may help to make Macron’s government seem unable to control events and thereby improve the chances of Le Pen, Bardella and the RN. That would suit Putin.

Perhaps the same people who burned down the covered food market in Paris yesterday. Now is a good time, given the school riots in France, to further destabilise French society. Attacking food supply in France is probably seen as a good option.

He certainly is an

But is there anything here about instability leading to more complex products?

In case anyone is curious, here is a link to the Nobel explanation of the award: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2026/10/advanced-chemistryprize2026.pdf And here is the Soai reaction, named after the Japanese chemist who was one of the two joint winners: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soai_reaction Yes, I would be interested if you can. I didn't pick this up myself from skimming the Nobel description of the award or the Wki entry on the Soai reaction.

Yes, one to add to the armoury for when creationists claim chirality in biochemistry could not have arisen naturally. I have come across this argument once or twice, though admittedly most creationists have no idea what chirality is.

It would take more than a nomination from the Norwegian government. I doubt the Nobel committee would take kindly to being leant on by any government, even that of Norway.

Ah yes, that accounts for why Trump keeps trying idiotically to threaten the Norwegian government.

Fair point. And there is a huge amount of bio stuff these days, of rather more significance than advances in chemistry. But it seems (I had to look this up) that the so-called Nobel Prize for economics is sponsored by the Swedish central bank "in memory of" Nobel. By the way, I had not really taken in that Nobel was a Swede but his will specified a Norwegian committee should be formed to administer the prizes. The prizes are presented in Stockholm. All a bit confusing. Must make it hard for Trump to know whom to threaten 😁.......

I suppose that is due to the interests of Alfred Nobel and perhaps also to the preoccupations of science at the end of the c.19th.

There are quoted electrode potentials for reduction of the respective cations to the metal, certainly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_electrode_potential_(data_page) I should have also clarified that the energy level diagram should really consider Gibbs free energy not just enthalpy, since entropy changes will come into play regarding solvation shells and the ordered array of a solid crystal. But this poster is a bit weird. I don’t believe he or she is teaching, to judge by the posting history. But he or she has popped up at intervals for several years, so doesn’t look like a student either. Oh well, let’s see if there is a response.

In fact the Nobel Committee made some very pointed remarks when announcing this award, about the importance of international law in promoting peaceful cooperation among nations. QUOTE .....The reach of international law expanded after the Second World War, in particular with the creation of the UN institutions. The key insight was that lasting peace must be built on legal principles, not on the will of the strong or a fragile balance of power. Additional legal mechanisms were introduced in the post-war decades, and momentum picked up further after the end of the Cold War. However, the rules-based international order has never been perfect. The greatest powers have often evaded responsibility...... UNQUOTE No prizes (haha) for guessing whom that is aimed at. 😁 So this is basically the Nobel Committee telling Trump to stick his demand for a prize up his arse and set fire to it.

I stress I am very rusty on my electrochemistry but this strikes me as a potentially risky oversimplification in the context of teaching students. While your explanation of the apparently anomalous order of relative ionisation energies seems reasonable, electrode potential seems to me to be a resultant of that and other factors. Ionisation energy is the energy required for the simple process M(g) -> M+(g) + e-(g), whereas the reduction of the aqueous ion to the solid metal also involves two other very significant energy contributions, viz. the lattice energy of the solid metal i.e. for M(g) -> M(s), equivalent to the latent heat of vaporisation, and the solvation energy of the cation, M+ (g) -> M+(aq). If you look for instance at the order of electrode potentials for reduction of alkali metal cations, the order is Li ~ Cs < Rb ~ K < Fr < Na. So evidently even for elements with the simplest electronic configurations, electrode potential does not align with ionisation energy. I would have thought you need to show the students an energy level diagram with 3 steps: Aqueous ion to gaseous ion, gaseous ion to neutral gaseous atom and then neutral gaseous atom to solid metal. The electrode potential would be the resultant of all 3 steps in combination. Unfortunately this would mean there is no simple way to predict the order of electrode potentials in the Ni-Pd-Pt series, unless you make the assumption that latent heats of vaporisation and solvation energies of all three cations will be very similar, which seems doubtful to me. But, as I say, I am very rusty on this stuff. Maybe someone else here can comment.

Yes, I read about this. It seems the prize was awarding for discovering a class of autocatalytic organic synthesis reactions in which the chirality of the first product molecule, produced at the start of the reaction, determines through its autocatalytic effect on the rest the predominant chirality of the product generated. It is hypothesised that such chiral autocatalytic processes could, maybe, have been responsible for the predominance of specific enantiomers in biochemistry. So yeah, that is important. We now have a possible route by which the chiral exclusiveness that we see in biochemical molecules could have arisen. But as far as I am aware, nobody has yet come forward with natural autocatalytic pathways of this kind, during abiogenesis, for specific biochemically important molecules. Though maybe others will know more about this. Footnote: But I don’t quite follow the significance you see in this for the Fermi paradox. I’ve always thought that was adequately explained by Slartibartfast: “In space travel all the numbers are awful.”