John Cuthber

Yes, you can and they do. In particular it's used to measure ozone but it's used for a lot of other things like measuring along the perimeter of a manufacturing site so they know if there's a leak. The ozone measurements are UV I think but a lot of other stuff is done with IR. None of these seem to be a chemical nose to me because my nose isn't a hundred metres long.

Right so far. I assume this reaction was done in dilute sulphuric acid which,as you say, supplies the extra H+ ions. If I say the other products are potasssium sulphate, ammonium sulphate Cr(III) sulphate, and Fe(III) sulphate does that help?

OK so for UV, vis, IR spectroscopy oyou have to measure the change in the of the refractive index. But what people actually measure and generally report is the absorbance. For a lot of things this will be near zero but a few things can definitely be measured this way. Mercury sniffers, for example, work on the absorbtion of light from a mercury lamp. I'm pretty sure you could get some sort of spectrum out of the "smelly" air that was different from clean air. What would be tricky would be making any sense of mixtures of compounds. That might be part of the reason Mass spec gets used

I don't know if you can sample the plant without affecting it. The solution is to use lots of plants and only sample each one once- then it doesn't matter what effect the sampling has. The problem is that you might need a lot of plants. Also You need to check on wherther or not the plants communicate (No, I have not gone mad) some plants give off "alarm pheromones" when atacked by insects. If tobacco does that then you need to grow each plant in a separate atmosphere. Provided that you don't mind ignoring some of the questions about growing particular plants- most notably cannabis, you can find lots of data on the web about growing plants under atrtificial light. Search for lamps and hydroponics.

It's a good start. Do you know what the products are?

Captain, you said "You must at least consider the possibility that Davis and Rawls are not the ones who are "error prone"." I considered it. They are the only people who believe in their idea. All the other reports you cited just refer to their work. More people reporting ther work doesn't make a difference to the fact that it's wrong. It only takes a compass or a bit of paper, a magnet, and some iron filings to prove that they are wrong. Perhaps it's you who needs to do some reconsidering.

Commoner than I thought. I have a similar detector (in need of general maintainance I think) and I didn't know it was electret based. Do you know how it works?

Do you know what the products are or what sort of reaction this is?

Raman spectroscopy might work but, unless you stick the molecules to something solid, the Raman effect is very weak. Mass spectroscopy gets used for this sort of thing. I don't understand the reference to "n".

They are called electrets by analogy with magnets. I'm suprised the prof hadn't heard of them but to be fair, except in microphones, they are pretty obscure.

Is it an AC magnetometer? Anyway, since these people have a demonstrably wrong view of the earth's magnetic field I don't see any reason to credit the rest of their beliefs. Since the UN article and the other journal article are just repeating these same error prone guys it doesn't really say a lot.

When you say "There is actually a curve where the freezing point rises above 0 C then drops again. " do you realise that's a departure from the normal laws of physics? Are you getting confused with the fact that if you cool a solution of salt down then salt might come out of solution, rather than ice? Here's a nice page with a phase diagram. http://www.chemguide.co.uk/physical/phaseeqia/saltsoln.html The fact that they heat the brine to make it easier to pump isn't relevant.

Well, the paper here http://www.magnetage.com/Journal_Report.html just says they could measure the magnetic field near MRI scanners and such (this isn't exactly shocking- all they would need would be a compass). It also repeats a claim that a magnetic field was onece found to apparently affect the growth of some cells in a lab but that the results were not published. This one http://www.unep.or.jp/ietc/Publications/INSIGHT/Sum-95/7.asp doesn't really say anything; they could be talking about a magnetic stirrer from the description given. It certainly doesn't offer any proof that the asserted effect is real. And re. "How does this meter tell the difference between the two poles if there isn't any? http://www.magnetlabs.com/shop/index...50c5990184a9a7 How are you going to explain it away this time? " What's to explain? Nobody ever said there wasn't a difference between the two poles. In fact, one of the arguments put forward was that these jokers had got thr poles the wrong way round; you can only say that if you already know the 2 poles are different. Please come up a better straw-man next time.

"CRYSTALS MUST BE TOTALLY ABSENT FROM OUR EXPERIMENTS" So what are you going to make the stuff out of? Anyway, as has been said, the experiment was done; QM was verified.

I realise that placebos are real (in a sense) I just wondered about the other way round. Could an entirely imaginary drug work; my guess it that it would, by the placebo effect.

"I wonder, though, what would happen if someone deposits semen .." I thought that was Clinton's party trick. If a man wipes out his entire species does he qualify for a (posthumous) Darwin award? I think Bush is more likely to get an igNobel prize; I think he might qualify for the peace, ecconomics or biology prizes.

If that's a valid definition of power then I rule the world.

Hmmm, I see. "I think the monarch still technically has the right to veto new ministers, but it's extremely unlikely that they would as it'd threaten their position and they would loose their powers pretty quickly if they started using them too much." Now can someone please explain to me the difference between not having power and having power but not being allowed to use it?

"I need to prove the Law and its variations i presume for A-A A-B and B-B solutions (some explanation on wtf those are might be nice " Yep, it would. If I knew what you were on about, I might be able to help.

I can tell "down" from "sideways" without maths.

If all you guys want to use SI units that's fine, but if that's the case then not only will water be frozen at 40 but the air will be liquid.

"Considering Tesla's stance, maybe you should reconsider yours." Tesla's stance was that the physicists were doing too much maths and not enough experiments. My stance is that the simple experiment of measuring a dip angle shows that this "new model" for magnetism is nonsense; no maths reqiuired. I'm sure Tesla and I would agree on this.

Copper (I) oxide can be yellow if it's finely divided.

I think the amount of heat stored would be a bit small for the size of the store. In terms of stored energy you would do better with batteries.

OK you should be able to dissolve the lot in aqua regia- I think it works better hot (though boiling it will lose you some of the chlorine etc). Ypu might need more acid than you expect because there are losses of HCl etc. Anyway, the acid's cheap. I'm not sure about recovering the Am from the solution. I would see how people ppt gold from solutions for recovering scrap gold, though I suspect a fair bit of the Am would stick to the gold. The alternative would be to add a carrier and precipitate the Am and carrier while leaving the gold in solution.