John Cuthber

The grignard reaction is elegant, simple, and damn near useless. It is mesed up by just about any other functional group on the molecule

I think you just made a blancmange. Hot water and starch will form a gel.

It is.

I'm pretty sure that wouldn't supply enough folic acid or vitamin C. I haver heard you can live for quite a while on just beans on (buttered) toast.

Classically you convert it to a grignard reagent then add water. Doesn't work with fluorides.

That particular tragedy was not a case of fear of Westren medicine; it was just religious bigotry.

Possibly; but probaly wrong. Evolution might have got it right over all those millennia. I might have to eat all those desserts just to keep alive. Are you paying?

I don't That's the classic way of making NaOH (and KOH). You need to use fairly dilute solutions to get it to work. It relies on the fact that Ca(OH)2 is a lot more soluble than CaCO3.

"Should these antivirals be modified and more extensively tested, and is there a need for Government to legislate for more thorough clinical testing before letting them loose on children? Your comments please." We could spend from now till doomsday trying to produce an antiviral without side effects. Experience shows that absolutely every drug know has side effects so we are probably not going to get an antiviral that doesn't. On the other hand, we need a selection of drugs that can be used to combat flu (and other diseases too). Since flu is occasionally lethal and the side effects of tamiflu aren't I think the stuff is good enough. (it would be nice if the side effects were milder but ...) Incidentally it's just by chance that (so far) this strain of flu isn't particularly lethal. If it were as dangerous as, the 1918 strain there would be no question about the advantages of the drugs compared to the illness. When the drug was developed and aproved nobody knew what the next outbreak of flu would be like.

Is "give the sampel to an analytical chemist and pay them lots of money" an algorithm?

At high concentrations H2O2 will damage skin. What's wrong with washing the bleach off with water? A bit of lemon juice might help kill the smell of chlorine ( because vitamin C is a strong reducing agent and will remove chlorine)

They are talking about the same thing but giving it two different names. It doesn't matter which one you get so go for the cheap one. It comes from the fact that you can look at alum as K2SO4.Al2(SO4)3 24H2O or KAl(SO4)2 12 H2O Also, I guess the experiment will be growing crystals so you will need enough to make a staurated solution. In that case Fswd's idea that you will add too much is impossible.

"In light of all the other potential methods, why continue using the worst?" I have a ruler and a set of scales. Strange as it may seem, I don't have MRI equipment; nor does my local doctor's surgery. You seem to have failed to account for the fact that BMI, which was always intended as a "cheap and cheerfull" aproach, is much easier to measure. Also re "Take a look at how utterly the BMI fails to reflect reality"; you can scarcely tell anything from many of those pictures. How, for example, are you meant to judge the physique of someone who is wearing a bulky coat and sat in a doorway? "I thought the point of science wasn't to half-ass it?"

In a working cell electrons travel from the Al electrode, through the external circuit to the copper electrode where they reduce water to hydrogen. Aluminium is attacked by NaOH (whether there's a cell there or not) generating hydrogen

Do the aircraft which use fuel that (deliberately) contains lead leave contrails? Incidenatlly, wouldn't it be easier to poison the water supply rather than the exhaust of aircraft engines?

Stop talking bollocks. It would be F***ing hard to do a double blind trial.

He wants us to delete it as spam; that's why he put an advert in it.

"I do not think that measuring BMI is that easy.... I have read of much more precise method..." What is it? "It's for lazy researchers who can't get off their ass and make real measurements." You need to make two measurements to calculate it. In terms of identifying people who are obese (by whatever standard) it's a lot better than either of those measurements on their own. It fails for some people- so what? Of course you need to look at individuals. It's still fair to say that if your BMI falls in the "normal" range, then you don't need to worry about your weight and you can concentrate your efforts elewhere- like stopping smoking, drinking less or whatever. it was never designed as the be all and end all of classification of human body shapes, just a simple tool to see who needs to watch their weight one way or the other. Of course, you can just look in the mirror but what you see depends on your personal bias and what society expects. Would these models get work in today's world? http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rubens/rubens21.html At least the BMI is objective. You can plot out mortallity rates for different BIMs and so on.

There's not enough information to answer the question. While you are looking it up you might want to look up the site,s policy on answering homework questions.

Do you know how nasty SO3 is?

"if you dissolve insoluble impurity " ?

Was anyone else tempted to buy the books they advertise? "bible codes revealed" and "aliens on the internet" (sorry, but I don't think they deserve capital letters)

If someone creates the virus you were talking about then, whether I like it or not, I become a guinnea pig in your experiment to find out. Try selling that to the ethics committee.

There's another factor. If you live in a city or big town and don't have a car to drive out into the country then you can pretty much forget the telescope. I live in a city and light polution blots out pretty much anything except the moon.

I do reuse them sometimes. If I were using them a lot I might buy a different bottle, but I don't see the point. If I buy a drink in one of those bottles it is pretty much water. If I drink it and refill the bottle with water how does it "know"?