I am dropping back to just one post a day for a while. There is plenty in the back catalogue if you need more. Happy Christmas! Melchior is an alloy of copper and nickel used to make coins and cutlery. It is silvery in colour and particularly resistant to corrosion, even in saltwater. One version …
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Category:Chemistry
It’s A Gas…
There are three common states of matter; solid, liquid and gas. This statement ignores other less common states of matter like plasma (very hot) or Bose-Einstein condensate (very cold). Exam questions often ask you to explain events in terms of the behaviour of the particles involved. This is easier if you can picture how particles …
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Diffusion…
Diffusion is the random movement of particles from areas of high concentration to areas of lower concentration. This happens because the particles in a liquid, solution or gas are able to move freely. The following video explains it quite nicely with a sugar lump dissolving in water as the example. . I will write about …
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Carbon…
Carbon, as the compound carbon dioxide, gets some bad press for its effects on climate – and so it should! But that is pretty harsh on the element carbon (and the element oxygen for that point). Carbon is the fifteenth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant in the Universe. …
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Gold Part One…
Pure gold is yellow, which makes it quite unlike other metals, but in every other way it is a typical metal. Like other metals it is… Gold is the most malleable and ductile metal of the lot, which means it can be rolled into incredibly thin sheets (called gold leaf). This is usually about 0.1 …
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Making Gas…
I am sure you are familiar with the processes involved in making and collecting gases in the laboratory. The two most common ones we encounter are carbon dioxide and hydrogen. You will know that carbon dioxide is produced when carbon combusts and when carbonates are heated, but we tend to use the action of an …
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Oily Fish…
I have eaten a lot of tinned sardines this week. Call me crazy but a warm baguette filled with good cheese and four oily sardines makes a great lunchtime snack. I prefer the ones packed in oil to the ones packed in tomato sauce but I am prepared to be open-minded on the issue. As …
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Where There’s Muck There’s Brass…
This was originally posted in March 2015. The title is a phrase meaning that where there are dirty or unappealing jobs to do, money can be made. Brass (an alloy of copper and zinc) is used to make coins – the pound coin being a good example. Several news outlets (BBC, Guardian) today reported that some …
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Atoms & Molecules Quiz…
It will really help if you have read this post before you try this. Please click here to go to the Quizizz on Atoms and Molecules.
Reduction and Oxidation…
We have seen reduction and oxidation as the removal and addition of oxygen. This is a perfectly good definition but we can use the words in a slightly more subtle way. We can talk about reduction as the gain of electrons and oxidation as the loss of electrons. Oil RiG – oxidation is loss, reduction …
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