exchemist

Very interesting indeed. Lovely to see a simple idea like this can be practical. However it has to be recognised that this only works where there are regular fogs. The W coast of S America is special in that it has the cold Humboldt current coming up from the Antarctic, which forms fogs with regularity. I don't think this idea would be very transferable to other regions.

OK, hydrazine. This is N₂H₄, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrazine so made of molecules each of which has 2 atoms of nitrogen, joined by a single chemical bond N-N and with each nitrogen atom also being to joined by a bond to 2 hydrogen atoms. The astronauts and rocket scientists know what it is because it is made for them in a chemical plant, but if your question is how can someone , in principle, test this stuff to confirm its identity, then I think one would probably have a look at its infra-red spectrum. Molecules like this absorb infra red radiation at particular frequencies, according to the atoms present and how they are bonded. (The bonds are stretchy, so if the atoms are pulled apart or pushed together, the bond can be set into vibration, the frequency of which depends on the mass at either end and the strength of the bond. Infra red waves of the exact frequency required can pull or push them in this way and when they do the molecule absorbs some of the radiation, which the spectrometer can detect.) But your more general question is really about analytical chemistry as a whole. This is a big subject. The various forms of spectroscopy, one of which I have described above, play a big role in helping to identify chemical compounds. But there are also other methods which often involve trying to carry out chemical reactions to see what results. Normally this only works when you already have some idea of what you are looking for. I think your last question, about Mg and the significance of the number 12, actually gets us to an excellent starting point for some understanding of chemistry, because it gets us to the Periodic Table of the elements. Here's a link to one I use for reference: https://ptable.com/#Properties Mg is the chemical symbol for magnesium and it is the 12th element in the table. 12 is its "atomic number". And you are right, the atom has 12 electrons, to balance the 12 positively charged protons in its nucleus. Chemistry is all about the electrons in the atom: electrons are what form chemical bonds. The number of electrons in atoms of the various elements determines how each element will behave, chemically. Mendele'ev, who originally designed the Table in the c.19th, did so without knowing this (!). He just observed there were similarities in the chemical behaviour of certain elements and grouped those into columns. So for example, the column at far left with lithium, sodium etc. are all very reactive, soft metals which react with, say chlorine to form white salts with one atom of chlorine per atom of metal. (Common salt NaCl is one example.) The next group, with Mg, Ca etc in it, also form white salts but with two atoms of chlorine per metal atom. So he realised there is something important in common between Li and Na, and between Mg and Ca. The rest of the table was built up in similar fashion, from knowledge of the reactions of elements and the compounds they tended to form. Nowadays we know it is to do with the way electrons build up in layers ("shells") like an onion, as one moves from lighter to successively heavier atoms, so that repeating patterns come back over and over when the shells are similar. This is something we can discuss. Elements with higher atomic number have more mass, so as one reads the table starting at the top left, one gets a progression of successively heavier atoms. The table is divided nowadays into blocks, according to the types of properties one finds in the columns (known as periodic table Groups). Again, this is something we can discuss. If you click on an element in the version of the table I have linked, you will get on the left a rather technical summary of key data but also, probably more interesting to you, a blue link to a Wiki text article all about the element.I suggest having a look at magnesium, since you asked about it, and perhaps also nitrogen, since you asked about hydrazine.

Not at all. A lot of well-informed and intelligent Americans have great faith in the robustness of their constitution and its ability to self-correct, given time. But I think this is complacent. These Project 2025 people have worked out how to neuter it. And what they are doing will be extremely hard to reverse, especially the loss of trust among the population in the institutions of the state, including the law. That is a recipe for cynicism, corruption and anarchy.

Ukraine does have some rare earth deposits, at least according to Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/what-are-ukraines-rare-earths-why-does-trump-want-them-2025-02-05/ though apparently they are not yet being mined. But I’m sure you are right that Trump won’t grasp the distinction between these various minerals. As for my scenario being worst case, yes it is, but experience of this blitzkrieg approach to date, plus consideration of how previous coups in history have proceeded, convinces me one needs to plan and act on the worst case basis to have any hope of not being taken by surprise by it. I think there’s a good chance the mid term elections will be distorted in various ways. We’ve seen it already in some states. If the courts are ignored, which is an idea they are already testing, who is to stop them? There are already rumblings about Trump trying for a 3rd term. All this is classic authoritarian stuff. Anyone who still can’t see where this is heading has his head in the sand, in my view. You’d have to ask Trump. He is the one already suggesting it.

Welcome, and ask away! It may save time if you can read a bit on each issue, e.g. by scanning at least part of a Wikipedia article or something, first and then ask the questions about the parts you don't understand. (I say "part" because I realise these articles tend to plunge into a lot of detail, using possibly unfamiliar terms.)That way, people here don't have to recite a lot of stuff that is readily available on the internet. There are one or two other good sources we can direct you to as well, if necessary. But we can see how it goes.

The first step, surely is for independent-minded people and what remains of the independent press to stop being mealy-mouthed and deferential and call it what is it: an authoritarian coup (a "soft coup", because it the army is not participating). I was pleased to see Martin Wolf in yesterday's Financial Times saying this for the first time. He also articulated, for the first time in print, my own suspicions that in future free and fair elections must now be in doubt. Wolf also sees this as an example of "state capture", in this case by the tech barons. None of this is what people elected Trump to do. It is Project 2025, which Trump disavowed on the campaign trial but is now in full swing, with Trump having appointed its leading lights to powerful positions and executing its programme.

.....and Gaza. I think you are right: he sees everything in terms of his notions of business, which are largely those of a real estate crook, and through the lens of global competition with China. Territorial acquisition is very much to his taste. Even in the case of Gaza, he sees it in terms of a real estate play, for building seaside casinos and hotels. The ethnic cleansing of 2 million poverty-stricken people from their ancestral homeland - not to mention the issue of where the hell they would go, if they are not exterminated by the IDF - is of zero concern. With similar lack of concern for its population and nationhood, he has thrown Ukraine and its brave leader under a bus. That's because he wants the war to stop, on his extortionate terms, to get at its rare earths. He wants Greenland for similar reasons and casts a greedy eye on Canada's resources too. He and the people around him also hate the EU passionately, because they see it as an economic rival built on a very different social model from the devil-take-the-hindmost one they like to promote - a model which, by the way, is very convenient for billionaire tech-bros. For the benefit of its citizens, the EU regulates business, including social media and data gathering on the population by US internet giants. So the EU must fail. Empowering Russia to attack its eastern borders is therefore to be welcomed. These ideas are far easier to implement if domestic opposition is neutralised. After all, they represents the overturning, not only of 80 years of US foreign policy but the basic ideals of respect, fairness and morality that go with upholding the rule of law and respecting national borders. At home, the soft coup is now well in progress, with Congress neutralised, the courts ignored, the media cowed and state employees subjected to a Stalinist terror by Musk. DOGE is sacking vast numbers of them arbitrarily and furthermore encouraging them to inform on one another, as a means of sowing internal suspicion and destroying any attempt to resist. The stated goal in Project 2025 is to replace those sacked with those loyal to The Leader, the first interview question no doubt being, "Do you agree the 2020 election result was stolen by Biden?"

Yeah and now, with $$$ signs in his eyes, Trump is actually accusing Zelensky, a man who has out-Churchilled Churchill for his country, of being a dictator! WTF?

A useful word, which was adopted some years ago in our household to refer to decaffeinated coffee, to distinguish it from the unadulterated version.

Thanks for these further references. I too had stumbled across Haüyne . This mineralogists' discussion about nomenclature was interesting. Whatever the ins and out of the naming of these minerals, it seems clear than when they are bright blue it is due to polysulphide anions in the cages, replacing a proportion of what would otherwise have been sulphate. Chivers comments in his paper that in earlier work people thought the anion was S₂⁻ (your scanned pages reflect this earlier view) but it is now recognised to be this S₃•⁻, with the odd electron in the π* antibonding orbital, that is responsible for the absorbance that creates the colour. Pyrite is indeed found in association with lapis lazuli but my suspicion, from the Chivers paper about the reversible formation of S₃•⁻ in the lab at elevated temperature and pressure, is that the same hydrothermal fluids that create pyrite can also alter suitable rocks to create lapis lazuli, by partial replacement of sulphate with this trisulphide radical anion. Anyway, all good and interesting stuff. I must pop back to the Natural History museum for another interesting mineral. There were some very dramatic, long, blackish crystals of stibnite, for example.......

Hmm, but all you are saying is that we don’t as yet have a model for the process. That’s what makes it an object of study, of course. Wondering about reproducibility in the lab is the sort of thing only someone with little understanding of the science would do. As a “question to ask”, it is very naïve - or disingenuous, but in your case I’ll assume naïvety, pro tem. The biochemistry of a living organism is very complex indeed. There is no reason to expect that assembly of all the components required, in a functional form, could be accomplished in a lab on a human timescale. Other contributors to the thread have already made this point.

But how is this any different from us not being to observe directly geological processes, say, or the formation of stars? There are many aspects of science that depend on inference of a process from observations, without being able to observe the process directly. Do you think the origin of life is unique in this respect, for some reason? If so, what?

Incidentally I notice from your link that there is some variation in how the formula for lazurite, responsible for the blue of lapis lazuli, is written. Reading a bit more about this it looks as if the zeolite cages can hold either sulphate or this trisulphide radical and it qualifies as lazurite if >25% of the cages contain trisulphide. Also, rather paradoxically, Wiki describes it as being formed from contact metamorphism (metasomatism?) of limestone. This seems very counterintutive as it does not explain where the aluminosilicate matrix comes from, let alone the sulphate/trisulphide content of the cages. Curiouser and curiouser.

Counterexample: Jonathan Woss? He has a London working class accent and went to local schools in East London. But you may be right that the non-rhotic pronunciation of Southern England is what can lead to these "wotten wabbits", as we used to call them. Probably due to the phoneme set picked up in early speech. It was interesting when my bilingual son was learning to talk that he developed two independent sets of phonemes: one for English which he used with me and one for French which he used with my French wife. (This became apparent when he used, with my wife, a family nonsense word he had learnt from me. Speaking to her, he pronounced this word like a stage Frenchman speaking English, with a strong accent.) I've yet to hear of a Scotsman who can't pronounce his Rs, no doubt because from the cradle Scottish children learn to pronounce it rhotically.

I’ll look forward to that. In the meantime I’ll see what I can discover about lazulite, which I see does contain a transition metal, though it is Fe which is not normally associated with blue colours, pace Prussian Blue.

Curious non-sequitur in your final sentence. What on earth do “materialist atheists” have to do with the topic?

So, Vance has laid it out clearly for us in Europe. We no longer have shared values with the USA and the USA is no longer an ally of Europe. NATO is now effectively dead. Which means Eastern Europe is at serious risk of invasion. Welcome to World War III. Thanks, Vance.

I see that Associated Press has now been refused access to White House press briefings and travel on Air Farce 1, because they have reiterated, in their style guide, that the Gulf of Mexico is to remain described as the Gulf of Mexico, because that is how it is known to its worldwide audience.

It's not quantum theory but radiometric dating that is used to estimate the age of the Earth. This gives a value of approx 4.5bn years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Earth

I've found that the odd electron does indeed go into a relatively high energy orbital: a π* antibonding orbital which is shared across all 3 atoms. The information was buried in this interesting but very long review of polysulphide anions by Tristram Chivers and someone else: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2019/cs/c8cs00826d. What I have yet to find out is what it gets promoted to in the transition responsible for the colour. There is a comment that neutral sulphur molecules have a +ve electron affinity, such that addition of one extra electron is both exothermic and exergonic (ΔG<0), so the radical anion is stable with respect to the neutral atom. Adding a second electron, to make a 2- anion, is energetically favourable in polarisable solvents but not in the gas phase, so is more marginal. Lapis Lazuli has a quite open zeolite-type aluminosilicate structure, with cages big enough to sequester this big anion and prevent it from reacting further, in spite of the reactivity implied by the odd electron. It would be interesting to know how this unusual mineral is formed in the Earth's crust. The Chivers paper says it has been found that S₃•⁻ has been found to form in sulphurous hydrothermal fluids, at temperatures >200C and pressures > 1kbar. So perhaps lapis lazuli is formed by some kind of metamorphic alteration of a pre-existing aluminosilicate mineral, involving sulphur-containing hydrothermal fluids.

Head of the Office of Goverment Ethics was fired this week: This guy Schiff is rather good value, I must say. (As he should be: Stanford and Harvard Law School). As he says in closing: "So much for draining the swamp".

Perhaps Google should be renamed Grovel, while they are about it.

Well, you jest, but…… 😁

Bye. What a plonker.

Pickwick Papers and Dava Sobel’s biog of Marie Curie.