Pleiades

That's it? 40 mpg? Our Peugeot Partner gets 38 mpg (highway) on regular diesel (6.18 liters per 100 km). Damn gas guzzling American cars. Diesel is marginally cheaper than gasoline here, but gasoline is about US$5.67/gallon (0.856 British pounds per liter)

Vegetable oil can NOT be used in a gasoline engine. A gasoline engine can run on a gasoline/ethanol mixture, but must be modified slightly to use high concentrations of ethanol. Vegetable oil can be used in Diesel engines; the original diesel engine ran on peanut oil. In order to get vegetable oil to work in a diesel engine, the engine usually needs to be modified to preheat the oil, additionally, there needs to be some sort of system to switch between petro-diesel and vegetable oil, because the engine will probably not start with cold veg oil in its system. True biodiesel is made by processing vegetable oil using a process known as transesterification. It sounds complicated but can be done at home with methanol and sodium hydroxide, and some understanding of titration. Pure biodiesel can be used in any unmodified diesel engine and can be used in place of or mixed with regular petro-diesel. As for the energy efficiency, I agree, it usually takes more energy to make ethanol than you can get from burning it. But for vegetable oil and biodiesel it’s a different story. Firstly, if you use waste vegetable oil that is going to be thrown away, then it becomes very economical to use it as a liquid fuel, even after paying for the chemicals to convert it to biodiesel. Using new vegetable oil grown specifically for fuel production is less efficient, but still feasible depending on who you talk to. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel#Efficiency_and_economic_arguments for more info. Some general info on biodiesel caon also be found here: http://www.biodiesel.org/

RPMs are not everything, what about power and torque? Something tells me you are going to need some sort of system to stabilize it, gyroscopes maybe.

I couldn’t get any locally so I made some in a ball mill; it took about 2 weeks 24/7. Actually it was a small rock tumbler (bout 4 inches diameter, 5 inches long), I was using steel grinding media, just some regular cylindrical roller bearings. I started with regular household aluminum foil. The biggest problem I had was that the little squares of foil wouldn’t break up because aluminum is so malleable, I stuck the little squares in an old blender and this resulted in a bunch of rolled up balls of foil. These eventually flattened a bit in the mill, but did break up after several weeks. Drill shavings would have worked better I think. The resulting powder was fine enough that it stuck to everything, leaving a cool silvery film on the plastic of the ball mill, and on my fingers, and just about everything else it touched. You have to be sure that you open the ball mill every so often to let the newly exposed surfaces oxidize. Aluminum is pyrophoric, meaning the powdered unoxidized aluminum inside the ball mill will react violently with oxygen when you open it up. You have to open it up regularly to let it oxidize gradually instead of all at once. I haven’t actually had this happen so I don’t know for sure what it is like, but I’m not about to find out. I was making it for a thermite reaction, but the iron oxide I made was too impure.

I don’t know how pure a sample it would get you but aluminum oxide is less dense than all of those metals, it would float on top of the molten metal, this is usually how they remove the metal oxide slag from ore.

Silly Putty! From Wikipedia:

Many times a random number algorithm will use what’s called a ‘seed’ as its input, and will generate a predictable series of numbers that is unique to each seed. The algorithm is designed so that the series produced from each seed has relatively good distribution and periodicity. The seed is usually chosen by reading some value within the computer, such as the system time in milliseconds.

Points for articulate writing and realism.

I think the resin idea could help. The air pockets found in ICs will probably be square, and a hollow box will be easily crushed by pressure, but a hollow sphere can withstand quite a bit more. Forming a more spherical enclosure around the air pocket would give it a more uniform strength. Of course, it may turn out that some ICs have no hollow pockets at all. As soon as I decide on a design and control system for this ROV, I can test out how the electronics will withstand the pressure. My biggest stumbling block right now is deciding what kind of propulsion/navigational design to use. I thought about using a rudder and hydroplane system like on a large submarine, but this doesn’t allow the ROV to maneuver without going forward or backward. The more conventional ROV design is to use a system of thrusters. After some thinking I decided the best thruster system is to use a reversible thruster in a tube that goes through one side of the ROV and out the other (ducted thrusters), you would need 4 such thrusters and 1 main drive propeller. This idea is nothing new, and after some research I found that the navy has something similar to what I was thinking of. The DSRV propulsion system appears to be a good mix of maneuverability and top speed. http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/dsrv.htm The DSRV has a shroud or nozzle around its propeller; it can tilt on 2 axes, allowing it to steer the vehicle up, down, left and right. While this is a nice feature, I think the thrusters can achieve the same effect without adding complexity to the project.

It wouldn’t have to interfere with people choosing mates, or having kids. With the technology we have, a person who doesn’t wish to have kids can donate their sperm/eggs. The people who want kids could receive donor sperm and/or eggs if necessary. It could be arranged so that the donated sex cells would be chosen from donors with similar physical features to the parents. If done this way, I don’t think it would take much for society to eventually come to accept it. The goal of artificial selection of the human race is an all-round improvement of the species. The main issues with artificial selection are: Is it ethical? What should we select for? Who is doing the selection? And can we do it without screwing up and inadvertently selecting a negative trait? I think we could find an ethical way to do it. However, I’ve been thinking a lot and I’ve changed my mind about how it should be done. Selective breeding for or against a trait isn’t the best way improve the human race; there are a lot of problems with it. Instead, we could imitate nature and create artificial selective pressure in order to guide our own evolution (cash incentives are the first example that come to mind). Selective breeding is saying “you WILL produce offspring with this person” and “you CAN’T have any offspring”, whereas applying selective pressure is saying “you would benefit from having many children” and “you would benefit from having no children”. Applying pressure allows people freedom of choice, and it allows us to change things gradually, and observe the results over a longer period of time, allowing us to catch and reverse any negative selections. Selecting for or against a specific trait is a bad idea, it would be better to select individuals with many desirable traits, and select against those with few or no desirable traits. This would reduce the risk of indirectly selecting a negative trait. You might ask: why would we want to guide our evolution, when we could just let nature take care of it? Why risk screwing it up? The answer is that humans have already done things that affect our own selection, take contraceptive and fertility assistive technologies for example: those who nature would allow to reproduce can choose not to, and those who would otherwise be infertile can still pass on their genes. It’s great that people have these choices, but you can’t deny that they affect our evolution (well, I suppose you could deny it, but I don’t see the logic in that at the moment). Say we have a hypothetical group of humans who will soon die out and are currently failing to due to their genetic makeup. Maybe they can’t compete with a more advanced group, maybe they are susceptible to disease, maybe they are too physically weak, or not intelligent enough. Because we are compassionate humans we want to help these people, we give them food, medicine, technologies, and we help them to thrive. That’s fine, compassion is good, we would be in pretty bad shape without it, but just because we save them from dying doesn’t mean we should encourage them to breed and create more humans which will have trouble surviving without help. I don’t want to deny people the right to have a family; the family unit is the cornerstone of civilization, and is one of the most important experiences a person can have in their life. But I do object to people having offspring that will fail to thrive without the assistance of society. It’s not nice; no one likes getting the short end of the stick, but natural selection isn’t nice either, if you have bad genes, you die, or at the very least you don’t get to reproduce. Deciding who should be encouraged to reproduce and who should be discouraged is a tough choice, but I don’t think it is unreasonable to believe that we could come to consensus on it. It would take an immense about of thought, planning, and careful consideration, but it could be done. I’ve probably made some sort of logical error in here somewhere, or forgot to consider something, but it’s almost 5 am and I want to get to sleep.

Heh, sorry about that, good to know its proper name tho. I'll shut up now.

I think http://www.discoveryofatlantis.com/ has some interesting things to say about it. Atlantis was probably more advanced that the rest of the world at the time, but no where near as advanced as we are now, so no laser weapons.

I’m sure we could all find something about the human race we’d like to improve, but as you said, we don’t all agree on the same thing. I say that society is incapable of implementing a breeding program at the moment primarily because we can’t all come to a unified decision on what is to be selected for or against, and who will be doing the selection. I’d like to think (although I may be wrong) that one day there will exist a governmental body/system that we can actually trust to make such important decisions. We’d probably have to fix most of the social/behavioral problems to get to such a state, so any selective breeding would probably be physical improvement (elimination of genetic diseases, improved immunity to disease, etc), but anyway. Even if we could find a perfect, absolutely infallible group to make the right decisions to improve the human race, there is no way the majority of the population would submit to their decisions in our current social state. So yes, eugenics could be a science, but let’s just forget about it for a few hundred (or few thousand) years until the social conditions are favorable before we even begin to worry if it’s ethical or not.

You know what? Forget eugenics, throw it out the window, it has too many undesirable things attached to it. Consider this phrase on its own, completely out of context of any prejudices you might have: “The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding”1. Now what is so bad about that? I think we can all agree that improving the human race is a good thing. Is selective breeding the right way to do this? I don’t know, but it’s a place to start. Selective breeding to improve the human species doesn’t have to involve inbreeding. Instead of selecting for a particular positive trait within a small gene pool, we should focus on selecting against a variety of negative traits over the gene pool of the entire human species. I’m all in favor of a better human, but society is in its current state is incapable of accepting and/or implementing a successful human breeding program on a global scale. However, the mores of society change, and eventually the idea of selectively breeding humans will become acceptable, hopefully we will have the understanding to do it properly by that time.

Haha, speaking of explosions reminds me of the time I prepared some ammonium tri-iodide: I had spooned the wet crystals onto pads of folded up tissue paper and then folded up the pads and tied them off into little bags. Well, I left about 12 of these little bags to dry out on the porch, and something set them off, and being shock sensitive, the whole lot went off in a chain explosion, my mother told me it sounded like a machine gun. I learned my lesson there. I thought it was pretty funny, but my mother wasn’t so impressed, I was just glad to see I had made it right.

I don’t know about garlic, but for the purposes of cooking, adding salt doesn’t affect things much. As I said, adding salt raises the water’s boiling point, but it doesn’t actually change the temperature of the water. As you may know, water in a pot will stay at its boiling point, no matter how much heat you add, due to the latent heat of vaporization. Adding salt will actually allow the water in a pot to become hotter, which is probably a good thing when cooking, as long as you are aware the food will cook faster. Ammonium nitrate on the other hand actually consumes heat energy when it mixes with water

I never said it would be a good idea, but I didn’t do enough research to see that it’s a highly exothermic combustion reaction. I don’t know what material would stand up to high temperature, high pressure, corrosive HCl, but if you could find one, I don’t see why you couldn’t make 100% HCl at home, wouldn’t catch me doing it though, as you said, it would be incredibly foolish. So to answer your question jowrose: Making 100% HCl isn’t impossible, it’s just highly dangerous, expensive, impractical, and just about useless to the amateur chemist.

He was probably banned under section 2.e or 2.f of the rules (http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?t=6206). Have a look at his posts: http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=228628#post228628 http://www.scienceforums.net/forums/showthread.php?p=228836#post228836 He basically asks the forum to design a levitation device for him, the basic principals of which he doesn’t seem to understand, even though he claims to have written a “65 page theroy-hypothesis” [sic] about it. The questions he asked display an overall lack of understanding about almost all scientific aspects of his “Classified Project”. Ignorance can be tolerated, but it’s much harder when an ignorant person thinks they know everything. He also claims outright to work in a field of science that is not simply not science. He defines “Psinetics” as something pertaining to “Supernatural Phenomena”. However, ‘supernatural’ by its own definition, deals with thing outside the realms of science. We can thus call “Psinetics” a pseudoscience, and discussing it outside of the pseudoscience section is against the rules. That’s just my view on the matter, maybe the mod/admin who banned him will elaborate.

Since adding salt to water actually raises the boiling point, I would say that yes, the reason you get more bubbles when the salt hits the water is because it provides a lot of nucleation sites. Once the salt is dissolved, the water will sometimes stop boiling for a bit, until it reaches the new, higher boiling point.

Roto-Rooter is indeed a good source of sulfuric acid; it is easily recognizable as a white bottle with red writing, packaged in its own sealed plastic bag. If you could get a hold of a cylinder of chlorine and a cylinder of hydrogen (which is pretty unlikely), you could probably buy several regulators to lower the pressure to just above atmospheric, then mix the two in some tubing that is highly acid resistant, plastic or something maybe. You would have to make sure the two mixed in the correct ratio, probably by adjusting the flow. Of course, the 100% pure HCl produced would be highly dangerous, and would have to be contained in some sort of reaction vessel until it reacted to produce something less dangerous. Allowing 100% HCl to escape into the air would be very bad as it attacks everything. I left a bottle of 28% aqueous HCl on a countertop for a few days and it left a bleached ring in my expensive granite countertop. The liquid on the threads of the sealed bottle was probably the culprit. I can only imagine the horror of allowing 100% gaseous HCl to contact skin. *shudders*

Imagine a liquid as a box of Lego blocks that aren’t snapped together; imagine a solid as a bunch of Lego blocks that have been snapped together. An amorphous solid, such as glass, is where all the Lego blocks aren’t snapped together but are still stuck to each other so that you can’t pour them like a liquid. Glass is a funny thing. It can be made from pure silicon dioxide (silica) but usually contains other things. Silicon dioxide is quite a diverse chemical, in addition to being able to become an amorphous solid it has 17 crystalline forms. See http://www.minsocam.org/MSA/collectors_corner/arc/silicanom.htm If glass does flow, it does it over a really long time, any variation in thickness of old glass is due to imperfect manufacturing. Modern sheet glass is made by pouring glass onto a bath of molten tin, causing it to flatten out; the process can still leave minute variations in the thickness of the glass, causing it to distort the view through it. See http://www.glassonline.com/infoserv/history.html What I’d like to see is a glass rod suspended at one end horizontally to make a cantilever, with a weight hung from the unsupported end. Set this up somewhere stable and check on it every few years. If could blow up if you added a spoon of sugar to it, creating thousands of nucleation sites.

Even his made up word doesn’t make sense: “Psi” doesn’t mean “an energy which psychics and supernatural phenomena are connected with” it’s simply a bastardized abbreviation of “Parapsychological phenomena”. “Net” had no meaning in this context, in similar words, (cybernetics, phonetics, kinetics) it is a part of the root word. “Ics”, as far as I can tell, is a suffix which simply means “stuff” in Greek.

I didn't think it thorugh before i hit "Reply"

EDIT: IGNORE THIS POST, I made it without thinking, it doesn't belong here, I shouldn’t be bringing my personal beliefs into a scientific discussion, I’m sorry. I’m only leaving it here because I feel it’s wrong to delete a post that has already been commented on. *** *dons flameproof suit* My beliefs on the concept of race within the human species are result of my religion, and while they may be correct (or incorrect); the book I take the following from presents no evidence to back up the claims. Just in case anyone cares, I believe there were 6 races of humans, but that there are no humans currently alive who can be classified as belonging purely to one race or another, 2 of these races no longer exist. Since these are religious beliefs, and this is a science forum, I doubt anyone cares, but you can take a look at the paper from the religious book here: EDIT: <link removed> There is it, take it or leave it, but don’t bitch about it to me because it’s not scientific; I’m already aware of the fact.

I have a plasma ball and I noticed when I put my digital watch next to it the watch goes nuts, the alarm goes off sporadically, the numbers on the screen become nonsense and the watch refuses to work until I power cycle it by removing the battery. As has been said before, the microwave radiation also will ionize the gasses in the Geiger counter and make it show a reading, just like a fluorescent tube will light up in a microwave oven. I assume my watch went nuts because the plasma ball puts out so much stray electromagnetic radiation (probably in the microwave and radio bands) that it induces currents in the circuitry and makes it do weird things. The Geiger counter could be going nuts for either reason, or both. Edit: I highly doubt the plasma ball would give off x-rays. See: http://van.hep.uiuc.edu/van/qa/section/Electricity_and_Magnets/Stuff_that_Sparks/20040229205522.htm