John

I've just clicked on three perfectly good questions to find each one of them has been deleted.

What a waste of time!

Do other users feel the same?

How can we get it changed?

It's all very well saying the sugar melts and is spun into thin strands, but how do the strands stay so thin and give so fluffy a final product?

The parsnips looked lovely when they were in full leaf, but now I come to dig them up, and they have loads of roots. Not a single pointed root like it showed on the packet.

What did I do wrong?

The chap at the garden centre said I need to plant them in a long thin cone of sand to make them grow into that shape, but it sounds like a lot of fuss to me.

I understand the solar wind to be caused by lots of tiny particles, such as alpha particles and beta particles, (as well as photons) that are shooting out of the nuclear reactions that take place in the sun.

SInce photons have no mass, I appreciate that they'll shoot out at the speed of light and carry on going, unaffected by the sun's gravity.

However, alpha particles do have mass. Surely the sun's gravity will affect them. So their path should be parabolic, rather than linear. They'd have a very high initial speed,, but it would be slowed down by the force of gravity, and many of them would not have escape velocity.

Or have I misunderstood something about the solar wind?

Copper is a transition metal, and copper II ions are blue.

Other copper II compounds have the blue colour, (copper II chloride, carbonate, hydroxide) so why not copper II oxide?

The enthalpy of combustion, or the enthalpy of formation have deltaH symbols,

deltaHf and deltaHc, and in each case there's a little circle with a horizontal line through it, as a superscript.

It stands for the standard conditions, but how do you say it?

The strong covalent bonds in diamond and graphite lead to rigid structures. Graphite might be slippery, but it's not flexible in the least.

So how come carbon fibres aren't brittle?

How do they put together carbon fibres together so they can be tough and resilient and springy?

For people who haven't studied British history at all and are new to the country, i want to give them a brief overview of 4 or 5 key events from the last century.

Culturally, scientifically, politically important. What do you think those events should be? What do you think has made the biggest news in the last 113 years? or the biggest impact on British life?

I've been considering

World cup win in 1966

Dunkirk

VE day

Death of Princess Diana

sinking of the Titanic

anything else to give it more balance, or is some of what I've got irrelevant?

Your thoughts please

Or are they two words for the same thing?

Can anyone give examples of situations where a document would definitely be one and not the other,

Thanks

They're both documents asking for payment for things you've bought.

can someone explain what the distinction is, please?

I've started to get damp patches appearing on the underside of my shed roof. The roof was re-felted a couple of years ago, so I'm confident that it's waterproof.

But there's a damp patch on one corner of the floor.

Should I leave windows open, or could I make some ventilation holes so air can circulate?

evolutionary biologists assure us that the life forms and behaviour have evolved over the centuries (milennia, even) to best occupy the many niches in the rich tapestry of life.

Does anyone have an explanation as to why snoring is of such benefit to its practisers that they have survived each generation to pass on the technique to their offspring?

I'd have thought that, in the days when primitive man was a hunter-gatherer, and slept in caves, hidden away from predators, snoring would be a death sentence. A predator would hear the individual, and the hiding place would be of no use.

Do chimps snore?

LIke which philosophers do they follow, and what methods do they use?

Someone told me they are all amateurs, and they don't offer any certificates or qualifications.

Nearly all metals are silver-grey in colour. Some a bit whiter, some darker.

The exceptions (as far as I know) are copper and gold.

Can anyone explain why these two are different from all the others? They have the same outer d-electron configuration, but then, so does silver, and that's, well, silver!!

Then there's brass and bronze; different colours again, but I suspect it's some property of copper that gives both of them their colour.

I've read that the most effective way to reduce slug numbers is to go round the garden in the evening, with a skewer.

Some of them are very small, and I've taken to slicing them in two with a knife, or squashing them on a paving slab.

But are all varieties of slug to be teated as pests?

Are any of them carnivorous?

The same question could be asked about snails, of course.

Then there's the problem of laving the slugs' natural predators with no food. Am I making more trouble and more work for myself by killng so many?

People from Congo; whether democratic rebublic or the other one, are Congolese.

Sudanese are now either North Sudanese or South Sudanese.

And I cringed when I heard a 2010 World Cup commentator describe the players in the Ivory Coast team as 'Ivorians'

But what do we call people from Burkina Faso?

Burkinese?

Burkina Fasians?

And do Nigerians come from Nigeria and Niger?

Zwitterions are positive at one end and negative at the other, right?

So why don't the two ends curl round and join up?

When I make a model of glycine it's easy to get a proton in the NH3+ end to sit right next to an oxygen on the COO-

What stops that happening in real life?

If it does happen, how can the species still have two opposite charges?

When they're right up next to one another, that proton is hydrogen bonded between the N and the O

When harvesting rhubarb, which stalks should be cut from the plant to keep it healthy?

Should I take the longest?

the thickest?

the ones whose leaves are going brown or being eaten away the most?

Should I take from the outside?

or the centre?

Or doesn't it matter?

Or does it depend on the variety of rhubarb I'm dealing with?

Earthquakes occur when two tectonic plates slip past each other. (or under/over each other)

Now, I imagine the contact between these plates as a plane, since both plates are 3D objects, pressed up against each other.

Then one plate moves, relative to the other one.

Surely the whole plane of contact experieces the jolt.

If the two plates are to remain the same shape and size, the focus can't be located in one particular spot.

If two carpets are overlapping, and I pull one out from under the other one, there is friction across the entire plane of contact between the two carpets. (all right, I know the analogy is a constructive margin, and earthquakes occur at destructive margins, but surely the principle is the same whichever way the plates are moving?

How come the focus is non dimensional, (a single point) rather than two dimesional, and the epicentre is non dimensional rather than one dimensional?