Search

Chapter 5 of the book "The Complete Guideline to Eco-Friendly House Cleaning: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply," by Anne B. Kocsis is presented. It offers the option of making one's own cleaning products as an alternative to commercial products and which are safer and environmentally friendly. It cites the household ingredients that can be combined to make cleaning products such as vinegar, salt and baking soda. It also provides several formulas for making cleaning products including information on how to label them and their storage.

A 7-year research project into the long-term performance of reclaimed landscapes on saline-sodic overburden from oil sands mining in north-central Canada has demonstrated the importance of a multi-disciplinary approach. The land capability assessment tool used by the industry evaluates three key areas: available soil moisture, salt impact, and biological response (including nutrients). Detailed field monitoring and sampling demonstrated the relative performance of three different layered covers (35, 50 and 100 cm) and one monolayer cover (100 cm) through the tracking of water content, suction, stored water volumes, interflow/runoff and water availability for plant growth. Salt ingress into the cover from the underlying waste and salt release through interflow flushing has also been monitored. This long-term monitoring has provided physically based measurements of cover performance that clearly highlight the inability of thin (35 cm) or monolayer covers for providing sufficient moisture to meet all demands throughout a growing season. Interpretation of this data has also provided key insights into the mechanisms governing cover performance. This physically based evaluation was supported by direct measurements of tree development and tree ecophysiology. Vegetation indicators included plant species composition and abundance, tree growth rates, foliar nutrient contents, and plant ecophysiology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'tis, we musicians know, the C Major of this life. Paintings and museum reconstructions depicting the activities of medieval alchemists can easily give the wrong impression of the chemical knowledge of that period. Inanimate objects such as crystals are seen sharing shelves with the preserved bodies of small creatures, a common feature of the early laboratory. This could be taken to suggest that the scientists of those days had grasped the unity of chemistry: that in spite of great differences in their external appearance, Nature makes no distinction between chemical combinations in living and dead substances. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The universally held belief was that the matter contained in living organisms possessed an essential extra ingredient, a vital force, the mysterious origin of which was attributable to divine powers. This attitude was epitomized in the succinct classification to be found in the book Cours de Chyme, published by Nicholas Lemery in 1685. His division is still to be found in the standard first question of a popular parlour game: ‘animal, vegetable or mineral?’. By the end of the eighteenth century, the vital force theory was in rapid decline. Antoine Lavoisier, analyzing typical organic compounds, found them to contain inorganic substances such as hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulphur and phosphorus. The basic principles that govern chemical change, such as conservation of total mass, were being established during this period, and in 1844 Jöns Berzelius showed that they apply to all matter irrespective of whether it is inorganic or organic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them. Water is the most common substance on Earth, and it no doubt has the best known of all chemical formulas: H2O. It is one of only two liquids that occur naturally in appreciable quantities, the other example being petroleum. More than three quarters of the Earth's surface is covered with water, and if it were not for this compound, there would be no life. About 60% of the weight of the human body is water, it being present in the interior of every cell. It also accounts for the bulk of such specialized aqueous media as blood and mucous. The central role played by water was of course clear from the earliest times, and Aristotle regarded it as one of the four elements, together with air, fire and earth. Its chemical structure became clear in the late eighteenth century, when Henry Cavendish and Antoine Lavoisier established that it is a combination of hydrogen (discovered by Cavendish in 1766) and oxygen (discovered by Joseph Priestley in 1774). Cavendish burned measured quantities of these two gases together and found that they produced water, no change in total weight having occurred during the reaction. The reverse process, decomposition of water into hydrogen and oxygen, was first achieved by Lavoisier. In spite of its abundance and apparent simplicity, water is an unusual compound, and compared with other liquids we could call it exotic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chapter 3 of the report "Evaluation of Certain Food Additives and Contaminants" is presented. It presents the results of the evaluation of two food additives, namely diacetyltartaric and fatty acid esters of glycerol and Quillaia extracts, conducted by the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)/World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Committee on Food Additives. It also cites specifications for certain specific phosphate salts established by the committee at its fifty-sixth meeting.

This section provides information on drilling mud operations. Topics explored include the addition of dense minerals particularly barite to enhance mud density, mud filtrate and cake characteristics that indicate rock porosity and permeability, and other mud additives which improve drilling such as salts, organic fluids, and lignosulphonates.

Chapter 4.11 of the book "Vitamin and Mineral Requirements in Human Nutrition," is presented. It presents information on dietary calcium. It is considered an essential nutrient that plays a vital role in neuromuscular function, as well as providing rigidity to the skeleton by virtue of its phosphate salts. Dietary requirements of calcium are determined essentially by the relationship between absorptive efficiency and excretory rate.

A definition of the term "azo dyes" is presented. It refers to industrially used diazonium salts, derived from anilin and its derivatives by reaction with nitrous acid. These dyes covalently modify aromatic amino acids in proteins, resulting in structure-dependent colors.

A mathematical quiz concerning the calculation of amount of salt available is presented.

An encyclopedia entry for "NADPH-diaphorase," which refers to the ability of an enzyme to reduce soluble tetrazolium salts to an insoluble formazan, is presented.