I hate to break it to you, but color (even by eye) is routinely used in pretty sensitive analytical chemistry techniques. Color can change a lot over pretty narrow concentration ranges. Theory can be important to tell you why the iodine-starch complex looks blue, but at the end of the day if...
Yes, you are correct, there would be inert electrodes of some sort
Physically, Cerium(IV) ions get close enough to the cathode that an electron can hop from the cathode to the cerium ion, reducing it to cerium(III). The cerium(III) ion then floats away in solution.
The iodine is likely...
I assume you're doing an aromatic sulfonation? If you google "aromatic sulfonation mechanism" you'll get various diagrams. There's different ways of depicting it; I think the most clear to me is just to consider sulfur trioxide as your electrophile (sulfuric acid, especially when concentrated...
I think whether Dimethylsulfide is a good biomarker is still up in the air a bit too. The paper looking at the Rosetta data is one piece of that conversation, but it's not a nail in the coffin or anything. They didn't actually detect DMS, and if it is on the comet it's in a lot lower...
I would say using ion thrusters only for station keeping is actually the rarer use case. The Starlink ion thrusters are used to raise the orbits from the initial low insertion orbit to their final operational orbit, so they are firing continuously for weeks or months slowly gaining speed. The...
Plenty of real spacecraft use ion drives, including SpaceX's Starlink satellites which are a majority of spacecraft in Space right now. NASA's Psyche spacecraft is using them, as is the mission the UAE is designing to go to the asteroid belt.
An ion drive doesn't really change the fundamental...
If the electron decays and emits light, that's known as fluorescence (or phosphorescence, depending on the exact mechanism). These are interesting phenomena, but most condensed materials do not appreciably fluoresce. Instead electrons relax through other mechanisms, which I will admit I don't...
Yes, explicitly chemical reactions involve the breaking and/or forming of bonds. In the case of diamond, the C-C bonds are broken, and C=O double bonds are formed.
The usual phrase to look for in the literature is "barrier-less reactions". For example imagine 2 hydrogen atoms each with one electron approaching each other from infinity: there is a constant decrease in energy from the free atoms to the bonded molecule. Lots of radical reactions are...
I think you want to be a little careful; it's not great to be breathing lots of isopentane either (OSHA PEL of 1000 ppm is similar to lots of refrigerants, in fact the NIOSH REL of 120 ppm is lower than lots of halogenated refrigerants). Those are for 8 or 10 hour workdays every day, so getting...