cafen8d

2024/04/14

Meatballs - SNL

Why do some people always get lost?

Experience may matter more than innate ability when it comes to sense of direction.

BOB HOLMES, KNOWABLE MAGAZINE - 4/14/2024, 3:55 AM

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others...

Todays Thought

The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.

-Arnold J. Toynbee, historian (14 Apr 1889-1975)

2024/04/09

Todays Thought

Everything considered, work is less boring than amusing oneself.

-Charles Baudelaire, poet, critic, and translator (9 Apr 1821-1867)

2024/04/08

Where Does One U.S. Tax Dollar Go?

Aqua regia

Aqua regia (/ˈreɪɡiə, ˈriːdʒiə/; from Latin, "regal water" or "royal water") is a mixture of nitric acid and hydrochloric acid, optimally in a molar ratio of 1:3.^[b] Aqua regia is a fuming liquid. Freshly prepared aqua regia is colorless, but it turns yellow, orange or red within seconds from the formation of nitrosyl chloride and nitrogen dioxide. It was named by alchemists because it can dissolve noble metals like gold and platinum, though not all metals.

History[edit]

Aqua regia first appeared in the De inventione veritatis ("On the Discovery of Truth") by pseudo-Geber (after c. 1300), who produced it by adding sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) to nitric acid.^[6]^[d] The preparation of aqua regia by directly mixing hydrochloric acid with nitric acid only became possible after the discovery in the late sixteenth century of the process by which free hydrochloric acid can be produced.^[8]

The third of Basil Valentine's keys (c. 1600) shows a dragon in the foreground and a fox eating a rooster in the background. The rooster symbolizes gold (from its association with sunrise and the sun's association with gold), and the fox represents aqua regia. The repetitive dissolving, heating, and redissolving (the rooster eating the fox eating the rooster) leads to the buildup of chlorine gas in the flask. The gold then crystallizes in the form of gold(III) chloride, whose red crystals Basil called "the rose of our masters" and "the red dragon's blood".^[9] The reaction was not reported again in the chemical literature until 1895.^[10]

Antoine Lavoisier called aqua regia nitro-muriatic acid in 1789.^[11]

When Germany invaded Denmark in World War II, Hungarian chemist George de Hevesy dissolved the gold Nobel Prizes of German physicists Max von Laue (1914) and James Franck (1925) in aqua regia to prevent the Nazis from confiscating them. The German government had prohibited Germans from accepting or keeping any Nobel Prize after jailed peace activist Carl von Ossietzky had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935. De Hevesy placed the resulting solution on a shelf in his laboratory at the Niels Bohr Institute. It was subsequently ignored by the Nazis who thought the jar—one of perhaps hundreds on the shelving—contained common chemicals. After the war, de Hevesy returned to find the solution undisturbed and precipitated the gold out of the acid. The gold was returned to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and the Nobel Foundation. They re-cast the medals and again presented them to Laue and Franck.^[12]^[13]

2024/04/07

Todays Thought

Mark Twain once said, “I take my only exercise acting as a pallbearer at the funerals of my friends who exercise regularly.”