Is arsenical iron or arsenical iron pyrites hazardous? | AskScience Blog

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Thursday, September 22, 2016

Is arsenical iron or arsenical iron pyrites hazardous?

Is arsenical iron or arsenical iron pyrites hazardous?


Is arsenical iron or arsenical iron pyrites hazardous?

Posted: 22 Sep 2016 05:46 AM PDT

I'm a science teacher and geology is not my strong suit. I just found a very old geology kit containing an immense amount of different types of rocks. However, one caught my eye: Arsenical iron. I looked around online and could not find this rock and if it was hazardous. I know arsenic is dangerous. Any help would be appreciated. Additionally just found primary and secondary uranium ore. Are these particularly dangerous? These are fairly big samples like size of a golf ball each.

submitted by /u/onwisconsin1
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Could an atomic bomb explosion be seen by someone standing on the moon?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 04:17 PM PDT

What is the origin of human sexual fetishes? Why can some be so particular and even self-harming?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 04:12 PM PDT

I can understand why humans would find things sexually attractive from an evolutionary standpoint, but some fetishes do seem out there and confusing. Some even self-harming. Like, cannibalism, BDSM, scat, castration, etc.

What led the human species to originally develop such fetishes?

submitted by /u/Josh_From_Accounting
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Does Diffusion Require Energy?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 07:42 PM PDT

Does the process of diffusion affect the net energy of a system?

If so, is there a temperature at which diffusion will stop happening (above absolute zero)?

submitted by /u/tinkoh
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Does a neuron undergo multiple depolarizations within the same action potential?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 05:46 PM PDT

I am challenging an exam question in a medical program for a physiology course.

During an action potential, the membrane "depolarizes", eg. crosses the threshold potential for a given neuron resulting in an action potential (becoming less "polar".

After hyperpolarization of the cell during the relative refractory period, the membrane would technically become less polar again as it approaches the resting membrane potential of the cell.

I realize this does not represent the conventional definition of depolarization when referring to an action potential, but based on technicality of definition of depolarization, isn't the membrane becoming less polar after the hyperpolarization of the membrane?

submitted by /u/Squidmaster2013
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Does the Radius of the Sun Oscillate Over Time?

Posted: 22 Sep 2016 04:49 AM PDT

As the title states, I viewed a video of the Sun earlier today and noticed what appeared to be major oscillations of its size over time, basically the Sun would appear to expand and then contract again.

I understand that this could be camera oscillations but I was wondering, would it be able to do that over even a small length of time like a day?

I understand star's will expand and contract over millions, perhaps billions of years based on activity and cool down and warm up respectively but on a time scale of days, doesn't seem right to me.

Help me /r/askscience, you're my only hope, Google isn't helping at all.

submitted by /u/WinOSXBuntu
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[Physics] Why do Materials sound the way they do?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 02:22 PM PDT

How does the mass and molecular crystalline structure affect the way a material or an object sounds/vibrates?

submitted by /u/Relaxel
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What is the importance/usefulness of calculating earths capacitance?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 02:37 PM PDT

In my physics lecture today we calculated the capacitance of the Earth as a nested spherical shell. I understand that the earth works as a capacitor as we ground things in the earth such as a home. The question I have is what else is the capacitance of the earth used for? Are there useful calculations involving it?

submitted by /u/coldjungles
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[ASTRONOMY] Did galaxies form at roughly the same time throughout the observable universe?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 11:57 AM PDT

The farthest observed galaxy is 13.2 billion light years away. This puts it's formation at around 480 million years after the big bang. The Milky Way (to my understanding) is estimated to be 13.2 - 13.4 billion years old.

Does this mean that the energy that coelesced into the matter that formed the galaxies was spread throughout the universe in a relative instant? Was this due to expansion of space itself (faster than the speed of light?) How can galaxies be around the same age, yet be 13.2 billion light years away from eachother?

Sorry for so many questions, this has been on my mind for a while.

submitted by /u/SumthinCrazy
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Can we deduce any properties of an element from its emission spectrum?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 05:07 PM PDT

Are people with nut allergies allergic to the rest of the plant?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 01:30 PM PDT

Could for instance someone allergic to hazel nut react to a leaf from a hazel tree?

submitted by /u/Kogster
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If single-letter variable names are intolerable in programming, why are they the standard for formulas?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 10:34 AM PDT

I have a BS & MS in CS, but I've been out of the academic world for some time. Recently while reading some lecture slides I was surprised to find how high the mental load of parsing long formulas written in the usual greek alphabet is when you aren't working with them daily anymore.

A fictional example,

If one would never consider it acceptable to write code with variable names such as:

int a = (r * (b - d)) ^ l; 

Why is it standard practice to write formulas such as:

 Ω = (β(μ - ε))^σ 

And not using descriptive names such as:

reactionSize = (timeBias * (initialValue - currentValue)) ^ userBias 

Is there a practical benefit to representing concepts in such a hyper-concise way or is it more than just a long-standing convention?

submitted by /u/the320x200
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Are there any external factors (stressors) that can hasten or delay the maturing of the brain's prefrontal cortex?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 10:52 AM PDT

From what I understand, the prefrontal cortex does not fully develop until the age of about twenty-five. So, for example, if a teenager experiences something stressful (pregnancy, war, prison), could it hasten or delay the maturing of his/her prefrontal cortex?

submitted by /u/TeaCozyDozy
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What causes the specific amount of neurotransmitters to be present in an axon terminal?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 12:12 PM PDT

In class, we were discussing how an action potential can result in the release of inhibitory neurotransmitters (we found it perplexing that the action potential was an excitatory response that results inhibition). However, we figured out that the action potential was just releasing the neurotransmitters that were present in the axon terminal, the action potential wasn't itself an inhibitory message.

So, what is the cause of those neurotransmitters being present there to begin with? What regulates whether or not there will be a certain amount of inhibitory neurotransmitters rather than excitatory, and ect?

submitted by /u/feynmannerdfighter
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How is it that rapid fluctuations of light levels can trigger siezures?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 07:33 AM PDT

Like when you go to a lazer light show there are trigger warnings, or whenever lights switch on and off super fast

submitted by /u/CptSnowcone
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Why are face transplants so rough?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 10:21 AM PDT

This might seem like kind of a brash question, I don't mean it to be. It seems like with all the advances in plastic surgery, facial transplants should be more convincing than they currently are. What are the reasons it's so difficult to make a convincing facial transplant?

submitted by /u/Tom_Haley
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Are Ice Ages a phenomenon exclusive to Earth?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 10:01 AM PDT

Since from what I understand the exact cause of Ice Ages occurring, and the fluctuations within an Ice Age itself are likely tied to the Earth's climate, would a more "stable" planet be less prone to cyclical changes like these?

submitted by /u/Sleelan
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Are drug-resistant bacteria evolving to become more immune to destruction in general, or does adaptive resistance to current drug treatments expose new vulnerabilities?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 05:29 AM PDT

I definitely agree that the growing resistance to antibiotics is a major problem for humanity (a constant, never-ending struggle in my understanding), but hearing an expert answer this question will help me get a better grasp of how major we are talking, and I couldn't get Google to return search results that were specific enough to the question I want to explore.

To help clarify what I'm asking: In a world with countless entities competing over finite resources, it is extremely difficult (if not impossible) to gain a benefit without incurring some type of partially offsetting cost. The cost obviously doesn't completely negate the advantage gained from the benefit (because if it did then we wouldn't even notice an acquired net-benefit), but there has to be some opportunity cost to the evolved defensive mechanisms observed in drug-resistant bacteria (unless one of my assumptions is wrong).

Is the problem that we don't understand the relevant physiological mechanisms well enough yet to identify new vulnerabilities that can be exploited, or are drug-resistant bacteria evolving to become objectively less vulnerable to attack?

Thank you in advance for your time!

submitted by /u/Commodore_Obvious
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Can I have some help understanding the intuition behind Poynting's Theorem?

Posted: 21 Sep 2016 08:57 AM PDT

I understand that Poynting's theorem is basically the work-energy theorem of electromagnetics, and I understand how it's derived, but I'm having difficulty wrapping my mind around the intuition. The theorem is usually expressed in the following terms: "The amount of work done per unit time on charges by the electromagnetic force is equal to the decrease in energy stored in the magnetic and electric fields in some charge and current configuration within some volume, minus the amount of energy that flows out through a surface bounding the volume" My confusion lies in the latter half of the explanation...the bit about electromagnetic energy flowing out through the surface. This refers only to electromagnetic radiation, does it not? I realize the Poynting vector can be applied to any magnetostatic configuration to describe the direction of the flow of power, but lets say for the example of a current carrying loop of wire (for simplicity lets pretend its a superconducting wire and no energy is being lost to any sort of internal resistance and the circuit bears no load) , where the net flux of the E and B fields through the surface are zero, this cannot possibly transport energy out of the bounding surface, can it?

submitted by /u/s1gmalol
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