In this case it sound like rough handling and a rough road. It's case literally shook apart in transit.

As for what it was use for, it was probably a calibration sample for a piece of detection equipment. An known quantity to ensure the device is reading properly.

As for how dangerous, the worry is more only if it is kept near someone for a prolonged period of time. Especially if it is kept on their person. So they are more worried that someone will for some reason keep it.

That's how these scams work though, right? They prey on half-truths, things that "feel" right.

Been doing some home electrolysis for fun. Everything I read about chromium has me feeling like this.

depends on the water. 'pure' water is actually an insulator, so that wouldn't work

if it has ions dissolved, e.g. SALT (not sugar!) or SOAP (don't drop the radio in the tub!) then it becomes a conductor and then, depending on what is IN the water, might kill it

but then you're left with ionised (salty, soapy, other) water full of muck

just boil it dude.

More like what's in the toilet after a night of drinking and greasy food.

The science that keeps our heart moving is the same science that keeps their fluid sacks not shriveled or exploding. The concentrations of ions/salts on each side of the membrane creates a difference in voltage across the cell membrane, which creates potential energy. if that goes to equilibrium the cell is dead.

Idk if electricity would kill what’s in the water, but if you do something to the water to make the difference in voltage across their membranes become zero, they are essentially dead. It would be hard to calculate a voltage and duration or whatever to make every singe membrane in your sample go to equilibrium. Idk dammit Jim I’m a dietitian not a mad physics professor.

Also, not everything needs to be living to be dangerous. Many pathogens make things that cause us illness, if that thing is still in the water even after the microbe has died, we still get sick. And there are inorganic things that can make us sick, also. Plus spore-forming bacteria could die but leave tough little spores behind waiting to respawn. So..ya. Now I’m having physiology flashbacks and I’ll probably have nightmares on differentiating calcium channels.

Fruit flies, not normal flies. Normal flies are large enough to die. The heating of an object significantly below the wavelength (centimeters) is proportional to the size, due to the electric potential created by the microwaves. The fruit flies also have the added bonus of much surface area per volume.

It is also not just the sweet spots, the flies survive even if they move around randomly. Anyway, here is a video by Cody.

Fun fact: bacteriaphages (viruses that only target bacteria) are very effective at decontaminating and preserving food.

And lye, NaOH.

Fair point. they usually do have bleed or bypass channels but that's a technicality.

Some of these puns, they need to be inducted into the pun hall of fame!

What's an afterburner?

I dunno, I feel like this isn't conductive to stimulating discussion.

Edit. I was too late, but I'm glad to see there's a spark in people to make more puns.

throw in some water and make sugars. About the same idea as photosynthesis. Of course, electricity-driven reactions don't tend to be all that controlled and there is a lot of competition by other reactions, so costly and inefficient is probably a good description. It is why we don't already do that.

Just making carbon would be a fool's game, because the carbon would want to react back with any free oxygen as soon as it could. generally as a big fire. Sure, we can deal with elemental carbon in lots of ways (it doesn't generally spontaneously combust) but you would have to do something with all that carbon. And, of course, there is the question of how you make the electricity in the first place, ideally not from burning coal or inefficiencies would mean you release more CO2 than you break apart/recover.

But yeah, at least it is an idea. Thinking and coming up with ideas is usually a good thing. Most ideas turn out to have more problems than they solve, but occasionally a good one comes up, so don't stop, don't get discouraged that your idea isn't practical. Hardly alone with that.

Like salt. Even the usual one, NaCl, dissolved in water and electrolyzed, dissipates to NaOH, NaOCl, HCl, H2 and Cl2. HCl, H2 and Cl2 are gaseous, so they bubble out, but NaOH (lye) and NaOCl (bleach) stays in solution.

And that's just one example, there's multitude of other chemicals that's produced by electrolysis, potentially making water toxic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjoDnJU243M

applying current to water will boil it. Note that the water became relatively darker than it was. Often it is harmless - oxidized iron. Sometimes it forms toxic compounds like sulfuric salts (such compounds do not darken the water and it is indistinguishable from normal water)

I'm positive someone will be able to come up with one...

lightening sparked life on earth then.

I’m not sure you have the capacitance.

To be fair, pure water doesnt conduct elctricity. So theyre technically correct

Electrical current requires energy to produce

Heat requires energy to produce

Energy is expensive

All else equal, a process that is less expensive is preferable

The energy it takes to sterilize water with heat is less than the energy it takes to sterilize it with electricity

Therefore sterilizing water with heat is preferable to doing so with electric current

Yeah, if it's stainless steel for example, you're getting some delicious chromium, which is a Bad Time.

So, all air-breathing heat engines (from internal combustion engines in your car to supersonic aircraft engines) require the air to be compressed above atmospheric conditions before you add fuel and combust it. The more you can compress the air before igniting it, the easier it is to extract the energy from the reaction and use it for work or thrust.

For engines designed for really really high speeds this gets tricky as the physics behind how air flows get really wonky when you get up to the speed of sound or faster, which can make it really really difficult to compress the air (and, more importantly, make it really difficult to make a single kind of engine that can compress both subsonic and supersonic airflows).

Turbojets are just turbine engines, where the airflow is run through a series of compressor blades on the inlet of the engine. These are outwardly similar to the engines on most jet aircraft, although modern engines are turbofans, which bypass a significant portion of the air around the compressor for efficiency reasons (instead of in a turbojet where everything goes into the compressor).

Ramjets have no compressor blades, and instead are ducted in a special way to use the aircraft's forward momentum to compress the air as it enters the engine ducts. Scramjets are the same concept, but are used for even higher speed airflows (ramjets compress air to subsonic velocities inside the engine before combustion, scramjets allow it to remain supersonic). However, this poses a problem at low speeds, because without the forward motion of the aircraft, the ramjets don't work.

Nuke it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

Is it not possible to electrolyse them? Every cell uses ion pumps and things, to my knowledge.