Happy Christmas! I have been a little slow with my posting, but now that things have settled down I will start to work a little harder. The following video shows how different metal salts change the colour of a flame. This can be used to identify what metal is in an unknown compound. I recorded the …
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Category:Chemistry
How Old Is The Earth…
4.54 billion years old (4.54 × 109 years old) Well, I am glad that is settled. I heard a fellow on YouTube deriding science by saying… “First they told us that the Earth was less than 10,000 years old, then it was hundreds of thousands of years old, then millions, now it is billions of years …
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Putting It All In Perspective…
This amazing graphic takes you on a journey from the highest mountain on Earth to the deepest trench of the oceans. Enjoy it as you scroll down the page. The outer layer of the Earth (the crust) ranges from 5 and 70 km thick. The Mariana Trench is just under 11 km deep. A journey all the way …
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Eratosthenes…
I was marking a Winchester paper a while back that had a question about Eratosthenes. Winchester don’t often make mistakes in their papers but on this occasion they spelled it Eratothsenes throughout. I realised that this meant it could be spelled using the elements – ErAtOThSeNeS (erbium, astatine, oxygen, thallium, selenium, neon and sulphur). Sadly the correct …
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Elbaite…
Elbaite is a mineral belonging to the tourmaline group. It has a complicated molecular structure but is made up of repeating groups of sodium lithium aluminium borosilicate. It can include a number of other metal elements as impurities which change its colour. It was first found on the island of Elba, from where it gets its …
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Shooting…
I went shooting in South Wales on Tuesday. I shared a peg with my father shooting driven pheasant, occasional woodcock and, on a couple of drives, mallard duck. We were sharing a shotgun that fires cartridges filled with shot. The diagram shows how they are constructed. When the primer is struck, it ignites the gunpowder …
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Oxygen Is (Roughly) 20% Of Dry Air…
I do love a snappy post title! Air contains lots of moisture. It can be as much as 30 g of water in every 1 m3 of air. If you dry the air (by passing it over a chemical that reacts with water) then the mixture remaining is slightly more than 20% oxygen. You can …
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Galvanised Into Action…
This is another post in the Rusting Series. Please make sure that you have read the others if you are here revising for upcoming exams – otherwise just relax and absorb. Many metals corrode over time; they become weaker as they react with their environment and often eventually break, crumble or otherwise fail. Iron (steel) …
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Lithium…
Lithium is the third element on the periodic table and first metal. It sits in Group I with the other reactive metals such as sodium and potassium. It is soft, low density and highly reactive – although the least so of the alkali metals. Apparently they used to put lithium citrate into 7-Up although they no …
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Rates Of Reaction…
A chemical reaction involves reactants turning into products. You can tell when a reaction has happened because there will be production (or sometimes absorption) of energy; usually in the form of heat but sometimes light & sound too. There may also be a change of colour but this doesn’t always happen. The end products will …
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