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Calcium and Vitamin D Supplements Still Don't Work, New Study Says1 week ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site1 year ago in Variety of Life
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Does mathematics carry human biases?3 years ago in PLEKTIX
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM5 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV7 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!7 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens9 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl11 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House12 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs12 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
Quantum quivering
One thing that still stuns me about quantum mechanics is the notion that all molecular motion does not cease at zero degrees Kelvin (despite what you might read in your intro chemistry book). Quantum mechanics tells us that when molecules vibrate, they can only do so at certain frequencies -- or energies. Fascinatingly, the ground state vibrational energies (the lowest vibrational energy state a molecule can be) are not zero. The molecules continue to vibrate, not matter how cold you get the system, you can never freeze out that vibrational energy. Nor is the so-called "zero-point energy" of a molecule negligible. The zero point energy of water is about 7 times as large as the thermal (translational) energy at room temperature). I imagine all these water molecules arrayed in the solid, gently breathing, no matter how much energy you suck out of the system, they keep on vibrating.
Fine, fine, atoms are quantum mechanical objects and I'm willing to believe that the rules are a bit different in this realm, but surely such things are not true of macroscopic object? Physicists Amir Safavi-Naeini and Oskar Painter have shown that objects far larger than atoms exhibit this quantum effect. Watch the video to see how they did it!
While looking for a basic reference on zero point energy to link to, I discovered zero point energy wands...but that's a tale for another day!
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