carbon.
puts the o in organic....
the building block of life, carbon turns out to also be a semiconductor. with the atomic number 6 and the famous atomic mass of .....???..... yep, 12, it has a very special place in chemistry and life as we know it.
it's the fourth most abundant element in the universe, and second only to oxygen in human bodies. it's present in all other forms of life too, or at least all forms of earthly life. i'm not giving up yet on some silicon based aliens coming to town.
and speaking of silicon.... when used as an elemental semiconductor, engineers at princeton university believe carbon could replace silicon in the i.t. industry in just a few years. a new graphene substrate, a few atoms thick, has been created which performs ten times faster than silicon. according to the researchers, future cell phone and wireless devices using this technology will not only be faster, but also smaller and more energy efficient. eventually carbon will also be used in cpus.
one fun thing about carbon is that both diamonds and graphite are carbon, yet almost completely opposite in external appearances. diamonds are translucent, while graphite is a dark grey-black opaque, and though diamonds are the hardest naturally occurring substances, graphite is a soft black-smearing pencil filler. fullerenes, sometimes in the form of buckyballs, are also made of carbon and offer all kinds of exciting new uses for carbon, medical and otherwise. i guess when it comes to carbon, it makes a huge difference whether you're a tetrahedral lattice arrangement (diamond), hexagonal layered lattice sheets (graphite), or some crazy mixed hexagonal, pentagonal, heptagonal (huh? - that's 7-sided) lattice contraption created in a lab (fullerene)..... i think i'll just be ok with being carbon-based.
chembalancer:
fun and pretty easy. nice instant feedback.
balancing equations:
less fun, and less independent thinking. and unless i did something wrong, it's pretty short.
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