Tag: white

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Separating Salt out of Water

Separating Salt out of Water

Salt (NaCl) is a natural mineral made up of white cube-shaped crystals composed of two elements, sodium, and chlorine. It is translucent, colorless, odorless (officially, though we think you can smell the freshness of the sea in one of our boxes) and has a distinctive and characteristic taste. Salt occurs naturally in many parts of the world in mineral form and has been mined for thousands of years. Chemically, sea salt is the same.

Gastronomically, it’s very different. I’m going to show you how salt can be separated out of water.

Things you’ll need: a beaker, water, salt (ocean water would be better), and an alcohol lamp.20170627_143414

  1. Mix 50 ml water with 19 grams of salt together, stir the solution until dissolve.
  2. Light the alcohol lamp and place the beaker on the stand.20170627_143509
  3. Wait until the water is all gone (don’t let the salt be in there for too long, or it will burn)

Here’s my salt. It’s fluffy and soft like snow when I touched it.20170627_191307

I wish I could weigh it and see the difference from where I started.

Salt evaporation ponds, also called salterns, salt works or salt pans, are shallow artificial ponds designed to extract salts from sea water or other brines. The seawater or brine is fed into large ponds and water is drawn out through natural evaporation which allows the salt to be subsequently harvested. The ponds also provide a productive resting and feeding ground for many species of waterbirds, which may include endangered species. The ponds are commonly separated by levees.

Natural salt pans are geological formations that are also created by water evaporating and leaving behind salts. Some salt evaporation ponds are only slightly modified from their natural version, such as the ponds on Great Inagua in the Bahamas, or the ponds in Jasiira, a few kilometres south of Mogadishu, where seawater is trapped and left to evaporate in the sun.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_evaporation_pond

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The Silver Tree

The Silver Tree

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As said on my post (it finally came 2) the silver nitrate is only 10 grams and it’s about $20. 10 grams is a little amount and it is very expensive, so I hope I don’t make any mistakes. The classic silver tree demonstration! Very simple to set up and perform, it’s great to introduce kids to the world of chemistry.

Things you’ll need: copper wire, silver nitrate, a beaker, and distilled water.

  1. Pour 120 ml of distilled water into the beaker.20170624_111346
  2. Pour about 4 grams of silver nitrate into the beaker.20170624_112031
  3. Make a copper coil by wrapping copper wire around something round and taking it out. Put the copper coil into the beaker.20170625_102905

As you could see the reaction has started.

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0 minutes

The more silver nitrate you add, the quicker the reaction starts.

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15 minutes

 

Silver Crystals are covering the copper. It looks very pretty.

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30 minutes

 

Prettiest experiment I ever performed.

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50 minutes

This experiment is very easy to setup and very fun for kids.

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1 hour

You can keep going, but the more you wait, the more crystals will grow and turn blacker because when silver nitrate absorbs light, it will turn black. Now the silver nitrate is turning into silver metal.

Now I’m going to filter the silver metal out and see what comes out.20170625_115600

I got the silver metal. I put it in a bottle to preserve it.

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The silver nitrate is in solution and the metallic copper will dissolve to form copper nitrate; as it does so, the silver in solution will be precipitated out as metallic silver. That is, the silver in solution is exchanged for copper and the copper that is not in solution is substituted for silver. Hope this makes sense!

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How to make the Surface of the Moon

How to make the Surface of the Moon

The Moon is an astronomical body that orbits planet Earth, being Earth’s only permanent natural satellite. It is the fifth-largest natural satellite in the Solar System, and the largest among planetary satellites relative to the size of the planet that it orbits (its primary). Following Jupiter’s satellite Io, the Moon is second-densest satellite among those whose densities are known.

The average distance of the Moon from the Earth is 384,400 km (238,900 mi), or 1.28 light-seconds.

The Moon is thought to have formed about 4.51 billion years ago, not long after Earth. There are several hypotheses for its origin; the most widely accepted explanation is that the Moon formed from the debris left over after a giant impact between Earth and a Mars-sized body called Theia.

The Moon is in synchronous rotation with Earth, always showing the same face, with its near side marked by dark volcanic maria that fill the spaces between the bright ancient crustal highlands and the prominent impact craters. It is the second-brightest regularly visible celestial object in Earth’s sky, after the Sun, as measured by illuminance on Earth’s surface. Its surface is actually dark, although compared to the night sky it appears very bright, with a reflectance just slightly higher than that of worn asphalt. Its prominence in the sky and its regular cycle of phases have made the Moon an important cultural influence since ancient times on language, calendars, art, and mythology.

The Moon’s gravitational influence produces the ocean tides, body tides, and the slight lengthening of the day. The Moon’s current orbital distance is about thirty times the diameter of Earth, with its apparent size in the sky almost the same as that of the Sun, resulting in the Moon covering the Sun nearly precisely in total solar eclipse. This matching of apparent visual size will not continue in the far future. The Moon’s linear distance from Earth is currently increasing at a rate of 3.82 ± 0.07 centimetres (1.504 ± 0.028 in) per year, but this rate is not constant.

The Soviet Union’s Luna programme was the first to reach the Moon with uncrewed spacecraft in 1959; the United States’ NASA Apollo program achieved the only crewed missions to date, beginning with the first crewed lunar orbiting mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six crewed lunar landings between 1969 and 1972, with the first being Apollo 11. These missions returned over 380 kg (840 lb) of lunar rocks, which have been used to develop a geological understanding of the Moon’s origin, the formation of its internal structure, and its subsequent history. Since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972, the Moon has been visited only by uncrewed spacecraft.

Now, after we know what the moon is, let’s make the surface.

Things you’ll need: plaster dust, a deep plate, small rocks, forceps, and a sprayer.

  1. Pour the plaster dust onto the plate and spread it around. This is the surface of the moon.20170604_103100
  2. Drop the rocks on the plate carefully. The rocks are meteors.20170604_103127
  3. Use the forceps to take the rocks out.20170604_103226
  4. Spary some water on it. Now you have a moon surface.20170604_103912

A permanent asymmetric moon dust cloud exists around the Moon, created by small particles from comets. Estimates are 5 tons of comet particles strike the Moon’s surface each 24 hours. The particles strike the Moon’s surface ejecting moon dust above the Moon. The dust stays above the Moon approximately 10 minutes, taking 5 minutes to rise, and 5 minutes to fall. On average, 120 kilograms of dust are present above the Moon, rising to 100 kilometers above the surface. The dust measurements were made by LADEE’s Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX), between 20 and 100 kilometers above the surface, during a six-month period. LDEX detected an average of one 0.3 micrometer moon dust particle each minute. Dust particle counts peaked during the Geminid, Quadrantid, Northern Taurid, and Omicron Centaurid meteor showers, when the Earth, and Moon, pass through comet debris. The cloud is asymmetric, more dense near the boundary between the Moon’s dayside and nightside