John Cuthber

"any effect would not be noticable and the conditions under which it would need to occur would result in the cats being dead" Surely if it killed the cat this woulds be noticable.

They (Li to Fr) are alkali metals. They are not alkalis. Similarly the alkaline earth metals are not alkaline and not earths. "it's very strong compared to anything this fellow is likely to have come across if he is forced to extract lithium from batteries rather than just buy it." Sodium hyroxide is (at least in solution in water) just as strong a base as lithium hydroxide. I can buy NaOH at the supermarket as a cleaner. I've never seen LiOH on sale there.

I'm not sure if the reaction takes place at any sensible rate at the low temperatures required to liquefy Cl2. If it does then the next question would be does CuCl or CuCl2 dissolve in liquid Cl2? If not then the reaction will just oxidise the surface of the Cu. If the salt dissolves exposing fresh Cu to the liquid then the reaction will give CuCl if there's an excess of Cu and CuCl2 if there's an excess of Cl2. However I'd sugest leaving this as a thoretical matter because liquid Cl2 really isn't nice stuff to play with

Magnets don't stay magnets forever, they lose their power. Any moving conductive object in a magnetic field will have eddy currents induced in it. If the material isn't a superconductor then these will draw energy from the system. The system will end up stationary but slightly warmer than it was.

"so you`re saying we should ban cars as well then, or that gun owners are drunk? or was your post just Non Sequitur?" Strawmen, and you should know better. I was pointing out that people don't recognise themselves as part of the majority. The people who get killed (and kill others) while driving home drunk would almost certainly have said (if they had been asked just before the accident) "I'm OK I can handle it". The people who get killed in gun accidents would have made similar claims. We take a dim view of drunk drivers and, where I am, we take a similar view of gun owners.

It would be essentially impossible to do a proper controlled study to see if gun ownership increases the rate of suicide so, as far as I can see the original question is never going to be answered. If someone wants to kill themselves, they will find a way. Handguns, being designed (so far as I can see) for killing people and no other purpose are an obvious choice for a suicide if they happen to be available. The arguments for the restriction of gun ownership are not strongly influenced by the suicide rate, rather the murder rate and accidental death rates from firearms should persuade people they can do without their guns. Of course this will never work because the owners of the guns always say that the accidents and murders- while clearly terrible- won't happen to them because they are too clever, carefull and well trained. That's exactly the excuse used by most habitual drunk drivers.

Lithium is a metal, it's neither an alkali nor alkaline. Alkali is a noun alkaline is the corresponding adjective. Be to Ra are alkaline earth elements. Without the word "earth" the description is inacurate.

Just to be pedantic, whooping cough is a bacterial infection. Anyway, I have no objection to Alan seeking a second opinion. It's just that it he refered to some of the answers he had already received, it might have saved others the bother of posting the same points.

Interesting point about that data. "Honestly, I'd rather have the option to buy a handgun and learn how to protect myself and my family, and let a couple more people die from handgun deaths each year. " Fair enough, but for each person who kills an intruder in the legal defense of their home (ie one of the legal killings) there are roughly 1.5 people killed by accidents. (of course the cops killing people make up a lot of the legal killings so the figure is more than 1.5:1) You are, it seems, more likely to have one of your family accidentally killed by that gun than to defend one of your family with it. Perhaps you would be better off without it.

If you don't put them in the periodic table, where do you put them?

"ok, but what if the impurity is Glass powder" Then you wash it with HF. Logically though, I admit there's still a problem. If I used HF (I didn't) I'd have needed to use something a like polypropylene or PTFE filter. If I did that, how would I know there wasn't PP or PTFE in the red P. I knew what I was looking for in the the red P from another part of the incident investigation. You could burn the stuff in a stream of air and titrate the phosphoric acid.

"Apparently it didn't occur to them that there might be unknown land on the other side of the earth!" At the time that made perfect sense. Why would God have put land where there were no people? Incidentally, anyone who watched a ship sail over the horizon and back knew the earth wasn't flat.

Somewhere, something is the strongest acid. Next to it, everything is a base. The alternative would be that the protonated form of some material was a stronger acid than the original "strongest acid". By similar logic virtually everything is an acid. The improtant question is under what circumstances you are talking about acidity and basicity. In Conc sulphuric, nitric acid is a base. In magic acid, sulphuric acid is a base.

I have been asked to measure the purity of red P before. I weighed it, then washed it with a variety of solvents (knowning that none of them would dissolve the P) then reweighed it.

"As a non- medical man I have often wanted to ask the medical profession does the virus have any postive use in nature?." You did. http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=15399.0 Did you forget the answers already?

"That is why I rely on VISUALIZATIONS" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion That's why I don't.

I think this "caffeine has no more of a diuretic effect than plain old water." constitutes an extraordinary claim. Do you have extraordinary evidence for it? There is, it seems, a clinical trial that comes to the oposite conclusion. http://www.aquaban.co.uk/index.asp?Page=aquaban

"there`s a 2 in 4 chance (you didn`t read the article) that it would proceed in the way You advised, and chance the same it would proceed in a better way. but ALL leave more environmentally friendly product. " Pardon? Anyway I think the environmental impact of one bucket of mixed nitrate/ chloride is trivial whether it's the Na or Ca salt. The foaming is only a problem if you don't expect it.

The flame is typically yellow due to the presence of sodium so I think it's fair to assume that at least some of the sodium vapour burns.

"seems there are 4 types" So there's a 3 in 4 chance that the advice you offered the guy with the spare acid is wrong. By the time he found out it fizzed it would be a little late.

The strange thing about the faked caesium explosion is that, if you do it properly, you don't need to fake it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSZ-3wScePM

"The one on the webpage is missing an oxygen." No, the structure on that wiki page is correct for delphinidin. The one on the building is some obscure stuff that nobody seems to have heard of. I still think they tried to put up an image of delphinidin, but messed up.

YT2095, The box of "arthur J Borwn's " garden lime that I have is labeled as containing "screened limestone" It fizzes with acids. Shouldn't you have checked what garden lime is before assuming I was wrong? Why would someone choose to use a more dangerous and more expensive material when crushed rock would do?

I think you are right; but I'm not sure we agree on the meaning of "practical".

Pick a trait you'd like to see more of.... Ok; then wait until that trait is common and the counterpart is rare. Now the other trait has rarity value. Further, imagine that circumstances change - whatever that might mean- Now the trait that's rare is the desirable one. Oh dear- you bred it out earlier. Your species is now doomed. Since you cannot predict the changes in circumstances nor the requirements for "fitness" in those cirumstances you cannot predict what is a good or bad trait . The only way to avoid killing off what might, in the future, be a valuable trait is to avoid killing any of them. That's why biodiversity is a good thing.