John Cuthber

Yes, it would be cheap, simple, low tech and accessible. But it would not work. The potassium oxide vapourises at temperatures high enough for potassium carbonate to decompose. On the other hand, you can use a simple charcoal fire furnace to make quicklime. And then you can add water to make the calcium hydroxide needed for causticisation. The by-product is calcium carbonate and you can reuse that by putting it in the furnace again. Much as I would like to claim credit for this rather clever system, it isn't my invention. The process was used for centuries. No Arguably, it should be replaced with "Slaked lime". Quicklime is calcium oxide and the material used to make caustic in solution is slaked lime..

It's hard to see how you can get that poor a grasp of science without being actively biased against it. No. Do you understand the idea of quoting an (additional) example to illustrate a point? It's the figure Republican House Representatives; you would like to think that's the clever ones. It's important to recognise that, for most Americans, cuts to public services make their lives worse, so the Republican parity has to rely on deceit in order to get elected. Part of that process is the undermining of objective truth, and one big part of that is the role of science,. Credit for what?

Do you understand the distinction between " we can not imagine" something and " we recognise the physical impossibility (or impracticability) of something? Your idea seems to be a less practical version of this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrodialysis

The body does expend energy in maintaining pH differences- pumping hydrogen ions into the gut makes it acid and takes energy. But I don't think it's a big part of the energy budget.

It depends... For example, it's probably safer to abstain while driving down the motorway.

One of the commonest ways of obtaining potassium carbonate is to leach it from the ashes of a wood fire. What does that tell you about how well it is absorbed by charcoal? While you could separate it from water by reverse osmosis, I think it's going to be easier to let the water evaporate.

In fairness, Nature didn't just take a stand against Trump. The whole of the Republican party seems riddled with anti-science. https://god.dailydot.com/moons-orbit-climate-change/?fbclid=IwAR2ty1F0BrUSa02Pk3JZjj5ARQheENsyjLSi41EMfVY9bYC-FUCXbmb4PK4

If people being near you was assault (and I doubt it is) then assault and battery (or worse) would not be a legally reasonable response anyway. Did you miss the thing? Let's just say I think this is a medical issue, but not a respiratory virus issue.

It is utterly impractical to consider getting K2O by heating the carbonate. It will not work. If you want KOH there are ways that do work. The same chemistry they discuss here https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/ie51398a020 is probably the easiest way.

Not to any meaningful extent. The decomposition temperature is very high and there's a lot of CO2 in a fire which drives the reaction in the "wrong" direction." The question does not arise. You can make potassium hydroxide from the carbonate by reaction with slaked lime

That's what I wondered about. What you seem to be doing is making a crude vinegar as a source of acid by leaching plant material and then "fermenting" it to glucose, then ethanol, then acetic acid. If you apply that directly to the soil, various bacteria will oxidise the acetic acid (to CO2) and you will essentially have added anything water soluble from the plant waste. That's likely to include essentially potash and will make the soil alkaline rather than acid. But I would have thought the cost of purifying the dilute acid was more than the cost of buying something like (NH4)2SO4

By the time Millikan was doing his experiment, the nature of the electron was sort of know. Thomson had characterised cathode rays as a stream of some sort of particle. It's plausible that Millikan was trying to characterise the particles better.

What do you think the word "glacial" means in this context?

The Raman effect is not reflection. That image is neither a reflection, nor a Raman image. It's not clear that you have enough understanding to ask good questions here. YT videos can be a great way to learn stuff, or they can be so "dumbed down" as to be useless. You probably need to expand your list of sources.

For those who aren't aware of it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRC_Handbook_of_Chemistry_and_Physics But, not every possible reaction is in there. So, fundamentally, if you produce (or find) a new compound, you might be able to guess it's properties but generally, you will have to measure them.

Why not? The temperature dependence is usually quite strong; the pressure has less effect. Yes, but it won't help much because you need to know the energy change for the reaction. https://www.chem.purdue.edu/gchelp/howtosolveit/Thermodynamics/TemperatureDependanceOfK.html Pure HCl is a gas. The case of pure liquid acids like H2SO4 or HNO3 is complicated.

How do you know it wasn't simply that your immune system did its job? Dilute solutions of chlorine (prepared electrolytically or otherwise) are certainly antibacterial. So, nearly a million fold range of H+ concentration. Doesn't look like the sort of quality control I would like for a medical product.

Not where I am. In the EU there's a limit of 200 mg/ l for sodium in drinking water. That's about 8 mMol per liter If you electrolytically exchanged all of that for H+ ions you would get a pH of about 2.1, so a pH of 2.4 means you are close to the limit for good drinking water. My tap water has about a tenth of that much- corresponding to a pH of about 3.1 Is there any evidence that it works?

A matter of indifference to the agricultural community. How? Anyway, I'd avoid the use of hydrochloric acid; the chloride ion tends to build up in soil and "poison" the plants. If there was a "cheap" way to make, for example, sulphuric acid, then the people who make sulphuric acid would already be using it. So it's unlikely that you could make it much cheaper. I vaguely wonder what would happen if you mixed powdered pyrites into the soil. It might oxidise to sulphate (slowly) .An interesting experiment; but with no guarantee that it works or even that it's cheap.

And for zinc- which is often used in school experiments on photoionisation, the reflectance drops like a rock in the UV region https://tubingchina.com/HDG-Hot-Dip-Galvanized-Surface-Reflectivity.htm

Is not a common recipe

As an anti-caking agent in salt. It's not the only one used. That's why I also motioned MgCO3

How?

Air is a good enough oxidant. I can imagine either magnesium carbonate or sodium ferrocyanide acting as a catalyst.

I wouldn't like to have to rule out Cr(VI) as the cause of the yellow colour. How important is the beer?