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Newbie
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Elemental Composition
#5971123 - 08/16/06 09:09 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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Aren't scientists at that level of manipulation where they can rearrange subatomic particles? If so, why can't they just use chemical formulas to build something from scratch?
I mean, we have C20H25N3O, can't they just piece them together? I mean we're cutting and pasting DNA, why not chemicals? Imagine the potential...just type in a formula and out pops your molecules. They could just experiment with random numbers and create more elements than we could name. *sigh* I wish I could stay around and at least observe the future. I can only image how far we'll go.
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Diploid
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Newbie]
#5971148 - 08/16/06 09:14 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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They could just experiment with random numbers and create more elements [sic] than we could name.
That would be like tossing a million random junk yard parts in a huge bin, shaking, and expecting a new car to roll out.
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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Newbie
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Diploid]
#5971239 - 08/16/06 09:39 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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Yeah but even if it wasn't a working car, it would still exist; something from almost nothing. Obviously they'd fiddle with pertinant numbers, but I don't think it's out of the future realm of possibility. I mean think of the artistic possibilities. Creating works that will be able to withstand a millenia because they we're created starting from the atomic level.
Edited by Newbie (08/16/06 09:40 PM)
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Mezcal
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Newbie]
#5971351 - 08/16/06 10:12 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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Take a course in chemistry 
Even relatively small molecules can require many steps for synthesis.
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DocPsilocybin
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Mezcal]
#5971792 - 08/17/06 12:39 AM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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I agree with above poster.
It's not as simple as one might imagine. Organic molecules look simple on paper but their structure is quite complex.
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Nashbar
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chemical synthesis is easy, chemical companies are doing it all the time with robots and computers. people make synthesize random molecules and get patents before they have a use for them.
sub atomic particles are easy, manipulating them is a nuclear reaction. So sure, people are creating new elemental species all the time, but only at the nuclear level, and most of those decay very quickly.
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Newbie
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Nashbar]
#5978506 - 08/19/06 01:42 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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I see what you mean. That's still interesting though.
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Diploid
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Nashbar]
#5978906 - 08/19/06 03:52 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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So sure, people are creating new elemental species all the time
Last I checked, atomic number 112 was the densest atom yet created artificially. There have probably been a few more made since 112, but higher atomic number elements are very hard to make and I'm pretty sure new ones aren't made all the time.
-------------------- Republican Values: 1) You can't get married to your spouse who is the same sex as you. 2) You can't have an abortion no matter how much you don't want a child. 3) You can't have a certain plant in your possession or you'll get locked up with a rapist and a murderer. 4) We need a smaller, less-intrusive government.
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thatiAM
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Newbie]
#5979479 - 08/19/06 07:41 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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The reason that we can make amino acids is that they all share a commonly and easily manipulated bond: the peptide bond.
It is a -COOH bonded to an NH3, which releases an H2O. CO-NH2. All polypeptides (proteins) share this specific bond.
DNA molecules are similar. Their sugar backbone is made of some carbons and PO4. So if we can snip around the PO4 where we want to, DNA could be put together. I've never heard of that being done, though. But I'm sure it's relatively possible.
Making crazy compounds would require crazy amount of manipulation of weird bonds that are not so simple. One of the reason life is based on these simple bonds is because it is relatively simple/easy for them to bond the way they do.
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jungjedi
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: thatiAM]
#5984353 - 08/21/06 05:05 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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There are about 90 different elements that we can find in nature - elements such as hydrogen and gold, copper and uranium. There are some even heavier elements. Last time I talked about how these elements are radioactive, and decay and breakdown so rapidly, that today there are none left in nature. If we want these heavier elements, we have to make them by banging smaller elements together.
As the scientists gradually made heavier and heavier elements, they found that their half-lives became shorter and shorter. An element that existed for a few billionths of a second might be an interesting laboratory curiosity, but it would be of no use to anybody. But the scientists had reason to believe that the trend to shorter half-lives would reverse itself, and that they could make super-heavy elements that would have longer half-lives. They believed that once they crossed the radioactive Sea of Unstable Elements, they would reach the shores of an Island of Stable Elements. Here they might find elements that were useful because they lived for long enough.
This stability is because of how the protons and neutrons, that make up the central nucleus of the atom, are arranged. They're not just randomly jumbled like a pile of balls, but they're arranged in shells - a bit like the layers of an onion. The first shell can have two of these protons or neutrons, the second eight, and so on through 20, 28, 50, 82, and so on. The physicists call these numbers "Magic Numbers", because they lead to stability.
An isotope of lead called Lead-208 has 82 protons and 126 neutrons. Both 82 and 126 are Magic Numbers - and Lead-208 seems to be virtually eternal. Lead-208 is firmly on the main Stable Continent of the Elements that we already know. But as we get further into the Sea of Radioactive Unstable Elements, we've found the elements decaying and splitting more rapidly. But back in the mid-1960s, the Polish physicist, Adam Sobiczewski predicted that an atom with the doubly-magic nucleus containing 114 protons and 184 neutrons should be really stable.
Sure enough, as the scientists have been making elements with more than 110 protons, they've been finding that the lifetimes of these elements are longer.
Now the way that the physicists make these super-heavy elements is to bang together, at very high speed, two lighter elements. Sometimes the clash involves a very heavy and a very light element, and sometimes they collide together two medium weight elements.
Over the last two years, scientists from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna in Russia, manufactured Element 114 - which had 114 protons but only 175 neutrons. This was about nine neutrons short of the doubly magical super stable Element 114 which supposedly had 184 neutrons. They made Element 114 by smashing relatively light calcium atoms into heavy plutonium atoms. Element 114 lasted for the incredibly long time of 30 seconds before decaying into Element 112.
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California at Berkeley made Elements 118 and 116 using a different approach. They smashed together two middle weight atoms - krypton and lead. Over some 11 days, they blasted 2 trillion atoms of krypton at the lead target - and created just three atoms of Element 118. These three atoms almost immediately, within a millisecond, decayed to Element 116.
Now you might not think that a millisecond (a thousandth of a second) is a very long time, but the nuclear scientists in this field regard even a millionth of a second as a long time. After all, a proton or a neutron can scoot from one side of the nucleus to the other in a ten thousandth of a millionth of millionth of a millionth of a second. So if any nucleus survives for an entire microsecond, it's survived for 10 thousand million million passes of a neutron or proton across that nucleus.
At the moment, the scientists are using all sorts of different methods to try and get closer to this Island of Stability where the stable super-heavy elements should live. It can be very frustrating work. Sometimes, according the nuclear scientist Neil Rowley, the nucleus that they make pops into existence over the beach of the Island of Stability, but the prevailing winds make the neutrons evaporate and the atom lighter - and it blows out to sea, and plunges into the shallow waters off the coast.
A few decades ago, we had no idea how to make super-heavy elements. Yet today, several teams are working on this project. Quite frankly, we're not too sure just what we'll do with these super-heavy stable elements when we finally make them. But some physicists predict that they could give us fantastic sources of energy.
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Nashbar
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: jungjedi]
#5987512 - 08/22/06 06:56 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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as a caveat, all of the "synthetic" elements that a created via nuclear reaction are also produced as duplexes.
So, when producing Ununbium #112, there is an insignificant amount of atoms that are around #220. They all decay so quickly that what is defined as a new element is totally ambiguous.
edit: quantum/statistical mechanics
Edited by Nashbar (08/22/06 09:18 PM)
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jungjedi
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Re: Elemental Composition [Re: Nashbar]
#5987717 - 08/22/06 08:00 PM (17 years, 5 months ago) |
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what are you talking about?
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