Lifeboat Foundation

Thanks for the niobium metal: http://www.samaterials.com/
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Thoisoi?ty=h
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thoisoi2
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thoisoi/
Do not repeat the experiments shown in this video!
So, today I will tell you about the metal that can replace gold, about niobium.
In the periodic table of chemical elements, niobium is placed in the 5th group, between vanadium and tantalum.
It got its name in the honor of Niobe, the daughter of the ancient Greek king Tantalus, and this is not a coincidence, because the properties of niobium and tantalum are very similar and at first sight they are quite hard to distinguish.
Niobium is mined from the mineral columbite, where tantalum is also present.
Because of that, until 1949 in the US, niobium was also called columbium, as in the 19th century, American scientists sometimes considered tantalum and niobium the same element and did not think about new names.
Now, when obtaining niobium from ore, it is purified from tantalum and other metals, and so pure niobium pentoxide is acquired, which is then subsequently dissolved with hydrofluoric acid, thereby obtaining complex niobium compounds.
Which are then reduced by the metallic sodium to a metallic state.
After such a process, what is obtained is a high-purity niobium which in its appearance resembles a white and a malleable metal.
If you compare its appearance with tantalum, then you can immediately see the difference in that tantalum has a more shiny surface, though it might be just the way they produce these rods.
Also niobium is about 3 times cheaper than tantalum.
Due to its high plasticity, it is easy to make a niobium foil, which is much harder to distinguish from the foil of tantalum.
Although, there is one way, as the density of niobium is almost 2 times less than that of tantalum, therefore these metals can be easily distinguished by means of scales.

UCLA researchers have identified a compound that can reproduce the effect of exercise in muscle cells in mice. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports Medicine.

Normally, muscles get stronger as they are used, thanks to a series of chemical signals inside muscle cells. The newly identified compound activates those signals, which suggests that compounds like it could eventually be used to treat people with limb girdle muscular dystrophy, a form of adolescent-onset muscular dystrophy.

When muscles aren’t worked regularly, they gradually atrophy. (The phenomenon is familiar to anyone who’s had a cast on their leg for several weeks.) Fortunately, for people with healthy muscles, that deterioration is reversible. Muscle use stimulates chemical messengers inside the muscle cells that increase muscle mass and strength.

Gaining a better understanding of the limiting factors for the existence of stable, superheavy elements is a decade-old quest of chemistry and physics. Superheavy elements, as are called the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 103, do not occur in nature and are produced artificially with particle accelerators. They vanish within seconds.

A team of scientists from GSI Helmholtzzentrum fuer Schwerionenforschung Darmstadt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Helmholtz Institute Mainz (HIM) and the University of Jyvaeskylae, Finland, led by Dr. Jadambaa Khuyagbaatar from GSI and HIM, has provided new insights into the fission processes in those exotic nuclei and for this, has produced the hitherto unknown nucleus mendelevium-244. The experiments were part of “FAIR Phase 0,” the first stage of the FAIR experimental program. The results have now been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Heavy and superheavy nuclei are increasingly unstable against the fission process, in which the nucleus splits into two lighter fragments. This is due to the ever-stronger Coulomb repulsion between the large number of positively charged protons in such nuclei, and is one of the main limitations for the existence of stable superheavy nuclei.

Imagine a mobile phone charger that doesn’t need a wireless or mains power source. Or a pacemaker with inbuilt organic energy sources within the human body.

Australian researchers led by Flinders University are picking up the challenge of “scavenging” invisible power from low-frequency vibrations in the surrounding environment, including wind, air or even contact-separation energy (static electricity).

“These so-called triboelectric nanogenerators (or TENGs) can be made at low cost in different configurations, making them suitable for driving small electronics such as personal electronics (mobile phones), biomechanics devices (pacemakers), sensors (temperature/pressure/chemical sensors), and more,” says Professor Youhong Tang, from Flinders University’s College of Science and Engineering.

Leiden chemists Marc Koper and Ian McCrum have discovered that the degree to which a metal binds to the oxygen atom of water is decisive for how well the chemical conversion of water to molecular hydrogen takes place. This insight helps to develop better catalysts for the production of sustainable hydrogen, an important raw material for the chemical industry and the fuel needed for environmentally friendly hydrogen cars. Publication in Nature Energy.

For years there has been a heated debate in the literature: how to speed up the electrochemical production of hydrogen on platinum electrodes in an alkaline environment? Chemist Ian McCrum watched from the sidelines and concluded that part of the debate was caused by the fact that the debaters were looking at slightly different electrodes, making the results incomparable. Time to change that, McCrum thought, who was a LEaDing Fellow postdoc in the group of Professor Marc Koper at the time.

Article. The research/article indicates that childhood trauma can not only impact the current generation, but future generations. Biochemical signals are sent to the germ cells, modifying the expression of some genes and/or the DNA structure.

Traumatic experiences can have a lasting impact, so children that suffer through them can feel their effects for a lifetime. Work has also shown that trauma can change the way genes are expressed, through epigenetics. Epigenetic changes do not alter the sequence of genes but they alter the biochemistry of DNA, and these changes are sometimes passed down to future generations through germ cells. Scientists have been working to learn more about how traumatic events get embedded in the genetic code of germ cells.

Continue reading “Early Childhood Trauma Affects Metabolism in the Next Generation” »

It looks like micro-plastics are now found inside human bodies.

Researchers found evidence of plastic contamination in tissue samples taken from the lungs, liver, spleen and kidneys of donated human cadavers.

“We have detected these chemicals of plastics in every single organ that we have investigated,” said senior researcher Rolf Halden, director of the Arizona State University (ASU) Biodesign Center for Environmental Health Engineering.

Continue reading “Autopsies Show Microplastics in Major Human Organs” »

We ask students to login via google as we share a lot of our content over google drive. To access the same, a google account is a must.

The CRISPR-Cas9 system has revolutionized genetic manipulations and made gene editing simpler, faster and easily accessible to most laboratories.

To its recognition, this year, the French-American duo Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna have been awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for chemistry for CRISPR.

In 1999, the Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail received the Nobel Prize for measuring the speed at which molecules change their shape. He founded femtochemistry using ultrashort laser flashes: the formation and breakup of chemical bonds occurs in the realm of femtoseconds.

Now, atomic physicists at Goethe University in Professor Reinhard Dörner’s team have for the first time studied a process that is shorter than femtoseconds by magnitudes. They measured how long it takes for a photon to cross a hydrogen molecule: about 247 zeptoseconds for the average bond length of the molecule. This is the shortest timespan that has been successfully measured to date.

The scientists carried out the time measurement on a hydrogen molecule (H₂) which they irradiated with X-rays from the X-ray laser source PETRA III at the Hamburg accelerator facility DESY. The researchers set the energy of the X-rays so that one photon was sufficient to eject both electrons out of the hydrogen molecule.