exchemist

My favourite Napoleonic story concerns something I once read in a guide book on Sicily, to the effect that he at one point landed troops on the island but the campaign failed because the soldiers were bitten in the night by spiders that caused an outbreak of debilitatingly painful farts. However I have since been unable to substantiate this story, amusing though the image it conjures up undoubtably is. Maybe I am mixing it up with some story from the ancient world, though. Everyone, but everyone, has been to Sicily, even the Normans. It sounds the sort of bizarre and implausible thing Herodotus might write about.

That's an excellent point. So in the case of Mg there will be less tendency for the accumulating OH- ions to migrate through the pores and neutralise the accumulating acid.

Well that seems to be wrong, so as usual the journos have screwed up😄. This Wiki article is pretty unambiguous in stating the nodules are concretions composed of silicates, oxides and hydroxides of metals, in which Mn and Fe are major components: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manganese_nodule. "In both marine and terrestrial environments, ferromanganese nodules are composed primarily of iron and manganese oxide concretions supported by an aluminosilicate matrix and surrounding a nucleus.[2][3]" I expect the confusion arises due to the previous focus on the value of them as ores to be mined. Articles on that topic will talk in terms of the metal resource they represent, rather than the actual chemistry of the ore.

That was one of the things I noted with interest in the paper. I too had got the vague idea, from the newspaper reports of "manganese nodules" etc., that they were metallic. However it seems clear from the paper they are oxides and hydroxy-oxides, rather than native metal. When one thinks of it, given that even the lowest depths of the oceans are far from anoxic, the environment is an oxidising one, so it seems implausible that any mechanism could exist that would reduce metal ions to the metallic state.

OK sorry, I see what you mean and I'm sure that's right. But we don't have any metals here, so far as I'm aware, just chunks of porous aggregates of metal oxides and mixed oxide/hydroxides, in a saline aqueous environment. So it seems to me it's going to be more like an electrochemical cell than the potential difference between 2 metallic conductors.

Yes. To get to a molar acid concentration, i.e. pH ~0, might be a challenge, though - and of course there would still be metal cations present so it would be far from pure. But I suppose it depends on what you want to do with it.

Your doctors?

Well indeed, it’s the paper that is suggesting electrolysis, but the absence of free hydrogen is why I was speculating in my earlier post about some other process trapping hydrogen in some way.

I have to acknowledge the logic of swing state tactics though, as others have pointed out. But he's very useful guy to have around during the campaign, at least.

OK but work function is not really the right criterion. This is not removing an electron from a metal surface in a vacuum, it is taking water molecules, splitting them and forming new molecules of H2 and O2, in an aqueous environment, and in the process donating 2 electrons per molecule, from a metal oxide or hydroxide. What I took from the paper was that one needs 1.23V + 0.37V overpotential, so 1.6V whereas the potentials they have detected are only up to 0.95V. So I guess they must be assuming there are spots with a potential difference >0.95 that they just have not picked up. I can see that if Mn II goes up to MnIV, say, you have your 2 electrons, but the rest looks handwavy.

Just to come back to Buttigieg for a moment, this is what I mean about wiping the floor with these Republicans: Just watch the first 3 minutes. It's all done very gently, with humour, but he manages to make JD Vance look a prize a**hole without saying anything rude - and has the audience laughing. It is in truth hard not to laugh. The guy is a Rolls Royce. Harris will be nowhere near him in effectiveness.

Yes I saw this. I have tracked down the paper in Nature Geosciences and have been reading it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-024-01480-8 It's not entirely clear there is sufficient potential difference to electrolyse water, but the researchers do seem to have evidence that oxygen is produced from the nodules rather than via something else. What the bobble hat persuasion has seized on, of course, is another argument for preventing the mining of these nodules to help the green energy transition. But the interesting thing to me is what the mechanism for electrolysis can be. I can't seem to find any mention of detecting hydrogen, which strikes me as suspicious if electrolysis is assumed to be the process. Or can it be some other process involving reduction and abstraction of hydrogen into the structure of these compounds? The paper doesn't really seem to get into the chemistry. Perhaps someone will pick this up and look into it further.

Yes I suppose that’s right: you could reduce the diffusion of H+ and OH- into each other’s presence by an intermediate reservoir of sodium sulphate. Also by making it a saturated solution, you could provide a reservoir of counterions to allow higher concentrations of H+ and OH- to be eventually reached.

Bikers? What’s your problem with them? More to the point, what does your rant have to do with the thread topic?

heh heh.👍

OK fair enough, that makes sense.

I quote from the Wiki article on SCIRP: "In 2021 Cabells' Predatory Reports described SCIRP as a "well-known predatory publisher".[2] In the Norwegian Scientific Index the publisher and all of its journals have a rating of 0 (non-academic).[18] An academic study published in 2022 stated that SCIRP was "widely known to host 'fake journals'".[3]" From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_Research_Publishing It does not sound from this as if SCIRP has improved at all in recent years. It has an office in California but is a Chinese operation, apparently exploited by Chinese researchers trying to get their publication count up. Furthermore the author, John A Macken, seems to be some kind of retired inventor of optical devices, apparently without much background in the relevant cosmological physics: http://onlyspacetime.com/about.html. He also has a YouTube video out, posted in April this year. And he's also published his paper on Academia.edu, a notorious host for cranks of all shapes and size - people like Gareth Meredith, banned from this forum many times, publish there: https://independent.academia.edu/GarethMeredith None of this is how serious scientists go about their business. So it does rather look as if it is likely to be some sort of homespun crankery. [cue the Galileo Gambit?]😉

Hmm, maybe, though an American friend, not specially liberal but urban admittedly, thinks most of the country is ready for a gay president now. Anyway he's quite young so could wait until next time (if there is a next time, which there may not be if Trump wins). I do wonder though if Harris has what it takes in terms of breadth of political experience and communicating. She got eliminated pretty early in the 2020 campaigns, I gather. If she is the nominee, I think one thing she should avoid like the plague is trying to make a virtue out of being a woman and being of colour. That would give off vibes of the "my turn now" entitlement that helped to sink Hilary Clinton and would play straight into the "talentless D&I appointment" narrative. She's got to stand on her real merits, show good ideas and attack Trump effectively. On the last point it would be amusing to see her, or whoever the eventual candidate turns out to be, attacking Trump for being too old and for self-evidently going nuts, both of which are absolutely true. About time someone a generation younger pointed out this Emperor has no clothes.

Thanks for the link. I've added it to my bookmarks, though SCIRP is notorious and has been on Beall's List for ages.

Don't disagree with your basic thesis but, on a point of detail, there are many constitutional monarchies nowadays that are fully democratic. They are not necessarily authoritarian states, as you seem to assume, cf. Spain, the UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium.

I’d like to see Buttigieg. That guy could wipe the floor with Trump and would be a real breath of fresh air. CV is fantastic and great communicator.

Utter ballocks.

I suppose in theory it must be limited by the amount of metal cation and sulphate available as counterions, to match the increasing H+ and OH- concentrations on either side. Though I still think there will come a point at which a significant proportion of the counterion movement through the bridge will be H+ and OH-, at which stage neutralisation will increasingly compete with the production of acid and base.

OK that's interesting. I was thinking more about this yesterday afternoon after my original post. I suppose the porous clay pot is in effect a "salt bridge" with MgSO₄(aq) as the bridging solution. At the start, the counterions that move through the pores to preserve electrical neutrality will be Mg²⁺and SO₄²⁻ and it will only be as the acidity and alkalinity build up that a proportion of the moving counterions will start to be H⁺ and OH⁻. So yeah, I think I see how it works now. (It's been half a century since I did this stuff.)

Mind you, that actually happened to President Carter.