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Zeth0s , (edited ) in Do metals concentrate at the bottom of boiled water after being cooled off?

If you have pieces of metal that you can filter out. Metals in water are usually in ionic form, they are “chelated” by water in solutions. Unless some salt is created and precipitate, solved metals distribuite over the solution to avoid concentration gradients.

So the answer is: what metal are you talking about? What is its form and concentration? Most likely, if you couldn’t see depositions before boiling it, metal ions will likely stay in solution.

Boiling water is used to kill biological organisms. If you want to get “pure” water you need to distillate it or filter it with material that can capture ions

orientalsniper OP ,

what metal are you talking about? What is its form and concentration?

Tap water, metal such as lead, copper, etc.

Zeth0s , (edited )

They stay in the water when you boil it, what you need is a good filter. Most filters you find in the shop don’t do much tbf, but I cannot suggest anything, I am not an expert on commercial products.

orientalsniper OP ,

I boil my water, but I usually let it cool off and discard the last of it at the bottom, my understanding was that there was more concentration there.

crypticthree ,

I don’t think that is how it works. You could buy an air still, but you really don’t want to drink distilled water unless you add some minerals to it like calcium or fluoride. Water in nature always has dissolved minerals in it, and your body is designed with the assumption that those minerals are there.

Zeth0s ,

Where did you read this? Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that, unless you have concentration so high that a deposit is created. But, in that case, I wouldn’t absolutely drink that water

orientalsniper OP ,

Not sure, I must have read it or heard from someone and it got stuck, thanks for clarifying though.

Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

Having done some pilot scale experiments (60 l barrels), I’ve noticed that mixers are absolutely essential. At that scale, metals really do form notable concentration gradients.

Zeth0s , (edited )

It depends on their form:

  1. solid metals are a separate phase, they create a deposit
  2. salts over a certain concentration, part create a deposit, so they slowly create a powder at the bottom, part stay in solution as ions
  3. Ionic metal in solutions spreads all over, as any concentration difference (gradient) generates an excess of free energy that the system naturally releases. You need to add external energy to maintain the gradient, such as a external electric potential gradient (an anode and a cathode)
Hamartiogonic ,
@Hamartiogonic@sopuli.xyz avatar

Generally speaking, the experiments should follow the third category, but the system didn’t have enough time to reach equilibrium.

If you have infinite time at your disposal, you can rely on diffusion to do its job. Unfortunately, the project had a finite amount of time allocated to it, and 60 l barrels are large enough that significant concentration gradients can exist. Found that out the hard way.

LPT: Don’t start your experiments until all the mixers have arrived.

sauerkraus , in Do metals concentrate at the bottom of boiled water after being cooled off?

You don’t have to wait for it to cool. As water evaporates the dissolved solids in it reach a higher concentration. If the concentration becomes greater than the molecule’s solubility it will precipitate and fall to the bottom.

kadu , in If we have such a high field of vision, why can't we focus on everything within the vision simultaneously?
@kadu@lemmy.world avatar

I’m sure there’s a physical answer as to why a spherical lens can’t focus the entire image (or maybe it can, physics is not my area and I think it shows haha).

But the biological explanation is that your retina isn’t uniform, instead you have a very small region called fovea where the vast majority of your cone cells are concentrated. If you could take an instantaneous snapshot of your vision, like a picture, you’d be scared to see that everything is grossly blurry and distorted save for a very small circle where the image is very clear - that’s the fovea. Your brain takes multiple images where different parts of a scene are focused on the fovea to create a composite end result that looks better. The rest of your eye still captures light, but with less detail, and therefore it’s mostly dedicated to getting broad positioning of objects, noticing fast changes in movement, tracking peripheral motion, and so on - not on focusing on text or small details.

Curiously, you also have a circle that would be completely black if your brain didn’t fill it in - it’s the blind spot left by the insertion of the optical nerve, where your retina can’t capture anything.

Datman2020 OP ,

you’d be scared to see that everything is grossly blurry and distorted save for a very small circle where the image is very clear

This is what interests and distresses me about the mysteries of the human body. I once saw a video about capturing a person’s recollection of his memory of a video clip by scanning his brain activity. The result was really obscured and blurry, but it actually did resemble the clip, which was deeply disturbing. I would have never known my actual vision is vastly different from what my brain makes me perceive to be.

KonaKoder ,

What you perceive is vastly different than a continuous filmstrip. Have you ever tried to watch unstabilized footage from a person jogging? Totally unwatchable! But your brain smooths it out better than the best steadicam. Tilt your head from side-to-side: what you perceive stays upright. And of course you know hat your eyes don’t smoothly pan from subject to subject but are constantly “saccading” around, but your brain processes that all away.

Visual processing is amazingly complex. Its also interesting that our other senses have different levels of processing. Our sense of smell is nothing compared to a dog’s, our sense of hearing is nothing compared to a whale’s, etc. A metaphor I heard once (don’t know how accurate it is) is that when a human walks into a kitchen they might smell that a stew is cooking. A dog would smell both the overall smell but would also smell the individual carrots, peas, chunks of meat, etc.

Lennvor ,

I think a useful way to think about it is that your perceptual brain isn’t in the business of making you see, or hear, or anything like that - it’s in the business of giving you an accurate-enough-to-be-useful idea of what’s around you. You see the world as being sharp and stable and consistent even though the literal visual signals going from your eyes to your brain aren’t… because the world is sharp and stable and consistent. Or at least it’s enough those things that it was useful for the brain to evolve to generate that specific perceptual experience. The signals coming from your eye are just (some of) the information the brain uses to generate that experience.

Snowman44 , in What was the historical science debate that seems silliest in hind sight?

Do people get sick because of germs or demons?

NoIWontPickaName ,

Demon germs

Foggyfroggy , in Dehydration: How exactly does it kill you?

As water level decreases, the total amount of sodium stays the same. So, essentially it is increasing in concentration. Too much salt interferes with heart cells’ ability to contract together. So less water = more salt = less heart coordination.

Cardiac arrhythmia due to hypernatremia and hypovolumenia can be fatal. There are many changes that occur, but the effect on the heart will kill ya.

PunnyName , in Why are honeybee stingers barbed?

It has a harder time with softer flesh. Apparently the barbed stinger can be retracted while dealing with the exoskeletons of various arthropods.

PunnyName , (edited ) in Is the heat produced by fossil and nuclear fuel negligible?

The greenhouse gas “problem” is necessary to survive. If the greenhouse effect didn’t exist, neither would life as we know it.

The issue with combusting non-renewables is that that energy used to be sequestered away from the carbon cycle, effectively allowing for a balance without too much overall disruption (certain natural events notwithstanding).

So now, with all this stored away, not-part-of-the-carbon-cycle carbon being burned up, we’re adding more to the carbon cycle, disrupting it, and causing a new higher thermal equilibrium (which has yet to be reached due to geological time scales). Side note: water is a better greenhouse gas than methane or carbon, but it’s accounted for.

Because the greenhouse effect still exists, and we’re adding more greenhouse gasses, the greenhouse effect will not allow heat to transfer to space as easily.

With solar being “captured” by a black roof, that would be mostly negligible, as a portion of that energy will potentially radiate away during the capture process. However, with more greenhouse gasses being dumped into the atmosphere, that radiative cooling will become less viable as time goes on, as it too will stay largely captured.

We need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, otherwise it’ll cause a runaway effect. That part might be too late.

atx_aquarian , (edited ) in Is there a temperature so hot that relativistic effects are noticeable?
@atx_aquarian@lemmy.world avatar

Based on one of your comments clarifying what you’re wondering, I don’t know that this helps you in what you’re looking for, but the “OMG particle” came to my mind. It was traveling at such high energy when it hit our atmosphere that…

If the proton originated from a distance of 1.5 billion light years, it would take approximately 1.71 days in the reference frame of the proton to travel that distance.

The energy of the particle was some 40 million times that of the highest-energy protons that have been produced in any terrestrial particle accelerator.

In the center-of-mass frame of reference (which moved at almost the speed of light in our frame of reference), the products of the collision [with a particle in our atmosphere ] would therefore have had around 2900 TeV of energy, enough to transform the nucleus into many particles, moving apart at almost the speed of light even in this center-of-mass frame of reference. As with other cosmic rays, this generated a cascade of relativistic particles as the particles interacted with other nuclei.

I don’t know if that cascade is the same as the Cherenkov radiation it produced, but that radiation is how they detected this particle, and it’s interesting a.f.

[It is] emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium (such as distilled water) at a speed greater than the phase velocity (speed of propagation of a wavefront in a medium) of light in that medium. … Its cause is similar to the cause of a sonic boom…

I.e., (layman’s understanding here) the particle, having a dual particle- and wave-like nature, is propagating through the vacuum of space “close” to the max speed of propagation of causality itself. As it encounters a medium, our atmosphere, it is going faster than causality itself can possibly propagate through that medium. But the energy is still there and isn’t going to just vanish, so it has to split out into multiple particles that would, with their fraction of the original energy, then be able to propagate through the medium. Or something amazing like that?

Edit: My layman’s understanding of Cherenkov radiation requires a bigger disclaimer, like a strike-through. :)

Cosmicomical ,

I have never heard that causality slows down in a medium. I understand the use of “speed of causality” to refer to the speed of light in a vacuum, and while I’m aware that light slows down in air, water, etc I’m not sure it has ever been shown that causality itself slows down. My understanding is that also light slows down just because it’s captured and re-emitted by other particles. Though I would be happy to learn something new if my understanding is wrong.

That said, the OMG particle stuff was very interesting, thank you for sharing.

atx_aquarian ,
@atx_aquarian@lemmy.world avatar

Good point, I think you’re right. I’ve probably been making an unsupported leap in logic there.

Glowstick , (edited ) in Can someone explain what the various parts of this picture of atoms are?

Atoms are almost entirely empty space. And electrons themselves don’t really occupy a specific dot in space, they’re more of a blur that fuzzes out in a “large” region of space around the nucleus. So what’s shown here is most likely a visualization of the area that the electrons occupy.

But I’m no physicist and i didn’t read the article, so take this with a big grain of salt

EDIT

Another person here said the round things are actually the nuclei, and they sound like they know what they’re talking about. So while the informational stuff i said is right, it might not actually be a description of the image we’re looking at

kashifshah , in Can someone explain what the various parts of this picture of atoms are?

“The high–spatial resolution phase image of Fig. 2A is borne out by quantitative analysis. In real space, the Pr–Pr dumbbells with a separation of only 59 pm are resolved with a contrast of 63% (Fig. 2B), which is better than the 73% contrast for two point objects separated at the Rayleigh criterion. Therefore, the Rayleigh resolution of the image is much better than 59 pm. Nevertheless, the exact resolution can be determined only after considering the finite atomic size instead of assuming point objects (28). We can also resolve the O–Sc–O triple atom projections, even though the light O atoms are only 63 pm (26) from the heavier Sc atoms “

They are looking at a crystal lattice of PrScO3

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

Saying the same thing as the text doesn’t help anyone.

kashifshah ,

It helps those that know how to read the text… It clearly states that those are Pr-Pr dumbbells in the PrScO3 lattice that you are seeing. Also, you should be seeing some O-Sc-O triplets, but I didn’t look for them.

This is a picture of a crystal of a molecule made up of three different types of atoms.

I’m too tired to help you more, right now, sorry.

BearOfaTime ,

OP specifically asked:

the glowing yellow balls or the entire meatballs.

I’m sure if OP understood the text, this wouldn’t have been asked.

kashifshah ,

I gave the OP the benefit of the doubt that it didnt know where to look in the article for the description of the image.

Will stop trying to help, sorry.

laughterlaughter ,

Can someone explain what the various parts of this picture of atoms are?

You didn’t do any of this. You just were condescending to the OP. It doesn’t help people to be more interested in Science.

Good thing you stopped “helping.”

Edit: Sorry if I sounded aggressive. I see that you replied to a different comment and appreciated their simpler explanation.

kashifshah ,

I will definitely wait until i see that there are actually 0 replies after a day before I reply to anything science related.

I dont feel welcome here and good bye.

laughterlaughter ,

Or you could just accurately answer the question. This community is called “AskScience” after all. Then use the links or excerpts from the papers or articles as a backup.

vk6flab ,
@vk6flab@lemmy.radio avatar

Indeed.

catloaf ,

To put it in English, each blob is an atom, the thing as a whole is a crystal lattice of praseodymium orthoscandate (PrScO3).

In the article, figure 1d and 1e annotate the image to tell you exactly which part is which. The bright pairs are Pr-Pr, the single bright blobs with wings are O-Sc-O, and the dimmer blobs standing alone are O.

By my count that means each repeating section has two Pr, one Sc, and four O, which doesn’t add up to me, given the chemical formula PrScO3. But maybe that’s because they’re arranged in three dimensions and we’re only looking at two. I haven’t read the full article.

kashifshah ,

Thank you for that

AmalgamatedIllusions , in Why can't Strings in String Theory be replaced with Springs?

I only have surface level knowledge of String Theory, but my understanding is that strings vibrate in simple harmonic motion and that different frequencies correspond to different particles. Since idealized springs are simple harmonic oscillators, you could perhaps say that, in some sense, the strings in String Theory are springs.

But maybe that’s what inspired your question. If you’re asking why they can’t be springs in a more literal, geometric sense, then I would speculate that it’s related to the world sheet that a spring would trace out as it propagates through spacetime. A world line describes a trajectory of a point particle not just through space, but through time as well - thereby describing the history of the particle’s motion. In quantum field theory, these world lines are used in Feynman diagrams to describe interactions between particles. However, these diagrams always have sharp interaction vertices. In other words, the interaction occurs at a specific point in spacetime, which is problematic in terms of relativity (different observers should not need to agree on when a spacetime event occurred). For reasons I don’t understand, this can give rise to infinities (ultraviolet divergences) when doing certain calculations. These have to removed through renormalization, but apparently this doesn’t work when trying to develop a quantum theory of gravity.

In the case of a one-dimensional object like a string, instead of tracing out a world line, it traces out a two-dimensional surface called a world sheet. A consequence of this is that the sharp vertices of Feynman diagrams disappear: while an interaction did occur globally, it did not occur at a specific point in spacetime (different observers will see the event occur at different times, so no relativity issues). This eliminates the ultraviolet divergences and the need for renormalization (again, apparently), allowing for a full quantum theory of gravity. If you were to change the geometry of the strings to something more spring-like, my guess is you would no longer get this nice behavior.

Justas OP ,
@Justas@sh.itjust.works avatar

Thank you for your amazing answer! This explains my concerns exactly.

spittingimage , in Why can't Strings in String Theory be replaced with Springs?
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

Have you ever tried to tie a knot in a cosmic spring? You need hands in all 10 dimensions.

FreeLikeGNU ,

Apparently, there are enough dimensions for this. We just need to observe them on a multidimensional stair case to really enjoy the phenomenon

quicksand , in If you have some cold water evaporating, is it possible to make it evaporate sooner by adding hot water?

I’m curious what prompted this question. Why not just evaporate the hot water if your goal is evaporating water?

SaintWacko ,

Maybe there’s standing water somewhere that they’re wanting gone

quicksand ,

Go out there with a blow dryer or heat gun I guess lol. Adding more water isn’t gonna help you get rid of all the water. But I was curious if it was just a homework problem or what lol

SaintWacko ,

Yeah, I have no idea, that’s just the only real-life scenario I could think of lol

towerful ,

I think even just moving air increases evaporation rate.
No need to waste energy on heat, just a fan will do

not_woody_shaw OP ,

Just curious. There’s no real world scenario. This is not c/askEngineering.

quicksand ,

It would mostly depend on surface area available then. If you can add warmer water and also increase the surface area available to evaporate, then you could evaporate it faster

Harbinger01173430 , in Have we been able to reproduce the conditions to bend rocks? (Even if in a lab.)

You mean you can’t do earth bending? Skill issue

Kolanaki , in What's the equivalent of physics constants for social studies?
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Death and taxes? 🤔

souperk OP ,
@souperk@reddthat.com avatar

that got me rolling 😂

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