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What is holding our universe together?

⚛️Our universe is made up of atoms, which in most cases are not just floating around individually, but usually interacting with other atoms (or groups of atoms).

Atoms might be connected by strong chemical bonds and organized into molecules or crystals. Or they might form temporary, weak chemical bonds with other atoms that they bump into or brush up against.

❗️Both the strong bonds that hold molecules together and the weaker bonds that create temporary connections are essential as they are literally holding our universe together.

Chemical bonds are formed because atoms are trying to reach the most stable (lowest-energy) state that they can.

Chemical bonds broadly fall into 2️⃣ categories:
🔄 intra-bonds that hold one building block to another inside a compound
➡️⬅️ inter-bonds that attract one compound to another

Intra- and inter-bonding are further divided into different types, but electrons control all types of bonds.

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What happens if atoms are gaining or losing electrons?

Some atoms become more stable by gaining or losing electrons.

When they do so, atoms form ions, or charged particles.

Ions come in 2️⃣ types:
➕Cations are positive ions formed by losing electrons. E.g., if a sodium atom loses an electron, it becomes a sodium cation, Na+.
➖Anions are negative ions formed by electron gain and named using the ending “-ide”: for example, the anion of chlorine (Cl-) is called chloride.

⚛️➡️⚛️The process itself is called electron transfer.

ℹ️The word ion comes from the Greek word ion or ienai, meaning “to go.” English scientist Michael Faraday coined the term in 1834.

ℹ️Certain ions are referred to in physiology as electrolytes (including sodium, potassium, and calcium). These ions are necessary for nerve impulse conduction, muscle contractions and water balance. Many sports drinks and dietary supplements provide these ions to replace those lost from the body via sweating during exercise.

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How ionic bonds are formed?

Ionic bonds are bonds formed between ions with opposite charges. It’s an intra-bond type.

🫙 For instance, positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions attract each other to make sodium chloride, or table salt. Like many ionic compounds, it doesn't consist of just one sodium and one chloride ion; instead, it contains many ions arranged in a crystal lattice (repeating, predictable 3D pattern) ⬆️.

Within sodium chloride all of the attractions between the ions are strong. A lot of energy is required to pull these ions apart. This trait means sodium chloride has a high melting point and a high boiling point. Those charges also mean that when salt is dissolved in water or melted, it becomes a good conductor of electricity.

ℹ️ Just a few grams of salt could contain more than a septillion ions. It’s a quadrillion times a billion (or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000).

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What is another way atoms can become more stable?

Rather than fully gaining or losing electrons, another way atoms can become more stable is by sharing them, thus forming covalent bonds, another intra-bond type.

They are more common than ionic bonds in the molecules of living organisms. E.g., they are key to the structure of carbon-based organic molecules like our DNA and proteins. Covalent bonds are also found in smaller inorganic molecules, such as H2O, CO2 and O2.

One, two, or three pairs of electrons may be shared between atoms, resulting in single, double, or triple bonds, respectively. The more electrons that are shared between two atoms, the stronger their bond will be.

Two basic types of covalent bonds are:
▫️ Polar bonds in which the electrons are unequally shared by the atoms.
▪️ Nonpolar bonds that form between atoms of the same element, or between atoms of different elements that share electrons more or less equally.

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What chemical bonds are considered weak?

Covalent and ionic bonds are both typically considered strong bonds.

However, more temporary and weak bonds can also form between atoms or molecules.

2️⃣ types of weak bonds are:

📍Hydrogen bond ⬆️, an intermolecular force (IMF) that behaving a bit like a magnet forms a special type of dipole-dipole attraction when a hydrogen atom bonded to a strongly electronegative atom, exists in the vicinity of another electronegative atom with a lone pair of electrons. For example, in water molecules (H2O), hydrogen is covalently bonded to the more electronegative oxygen atom.
Individual hydrogen bonds are easily broken, but many hydrogen bonds together can be very strong.

📍 London dispersion forces ⬆️ occur between atoms or molecules of any kind, and they depend on temporary imbalances in electron distribution.

ℹ️ These weak bonds are both often defined by a general term of van der Waals forces.

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What is a new ultra-strong chemical bond lately discovered by scientists?

❗️Scientists have recently discovered a totally new type of chemical bond.

⚪️↔️⚪️ In the new study, the researchers dissolved a hydrogen-fluoride compound in water, and watched how the hydrogen and fluorine atoms interacted. What they found was a hydrogen bond with the strength of a covalent bond, binding atoms together into something resembling a molecule.

ℹ️ The new bonds had a strength of 45.8 kilocalories per mol (a unit of chemical bonding energy), greater than some covalent bonds. E.g., in nitrogen molecules two nitrogen atoms are bound together with a strength of about 40 kcal/mol. A hydrogen bond typically has an energy of about 1-3 kcal/mol, an ionic bond - between 5 and 10 kcal/mol.

✍️ According to scientists, this hybrid covalent-hydrogen bond not only challenges our current understanding of what a chemical bond exactly is, but also offers the opportunity to better understand chemical reactions.

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How does electronegativity affect chemical bonding?

✔️Electronegativity
is the ability of an atom to attract a pair of electrons in a chemical bond.

✔️The higher the electronegativity of an element, the more strongly it attracts the shared electrons.

⬆️The difference in electronegativity between two bonded elements determines what type of bond they will form.

⤴️When atoms with an electronegativity difference of greater than 2️⃣ units are joined together, the bond that is formed is an ionic bond.

⤵️When atoms with an electronegativity difference of less than 2️⃣ units are joined together, the bond that is formed is a covalent bond.

ℹ️The concept of electronegativity was introduced by Linus Pauling in 1932; on the Pauling scale, fluorine is assigned an electronegativity of 3.98, and the other elements are scaled relative to that value.

In the periodic table ⬆️ electronegativity increases from bottom to top in groups, and increases from left to right across periods.

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Ask Me
What chemical bonds are considered weak? Covalent and ionic bonds are both typically considered strong bonds. However, more temporary and weak bonds can also form between atoms or molecules. 2️⃣ types of weak bonds are: 📍Hydrogen bond ⬆️, an intermolecular…
What are some hydrogen bonding examples and applications?

I. Some examples of hydrogen bonding are as follows.
☑️ Ammonia
The hydrogen bonds in ammonia (NH3) are formed between nitrogen and hydrogen atoms. Nitrogen is a highly electronegative atom that is linked to hydrogen atoms in order to make hydrogen bonds.

☑️ Hydrogen Fluoride
❗️ Fluorine is an element that has the highest value of electronegativity, and it forms the strongest hydrogen bond.

☑️ Alcohols
Alcohols are organic compounds. It contains at least one -OH group. When any molecule containing the hydrogen atom is connected to either oxygen or nitrogen directly, it usually has the tendency to form hydrogen bonding.

☑️ Carboxylic Acid
Hydrogen bonding can occur in a pure carboxylic acid in between two molecules of acid in order to produce a dimer. The hydrogen bonding in carboxylic acid doubles the size of the molecule.

II. Some of the applications and effects of hydrogen bonds are given below.
🟢 Hydrogen Bonds in Plants
Water has the property to stick to itself (cohesion) and also with other molecules (adhesion). When water droplets fall on a leaf, the hydrogen bonds present between the molecules of water are more substantial than the intermolecular forces of adhesion between the water molecules and the leaf. The high surface tension of water is explained by this property.

⚪️ Hydrogen Bonds in Proteins
Intramolecular hydrogen bonding is responsible for different types of proteins such as secondary proteins, tertiary proteins, and quaternary proteins and as well as for the structure of the nucleic acids.

🧬 Hydrogen Bonds in DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid)
The double-helix model of DNA consists of two intertwined strands held together by a base pair. The hydrogen bonding present between the bases on adjacent strands is responsible for this. Because of different structure bases, adenine (A) always forms hydrogen bonds with thymine (T). Guanine (G) always forms hydrogen bonds with cytosine (C) in contrast.

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Why does paper tear more easily when it's wet?

📍The answer comes down to the paper's chemical structure.

📍At the heart of it, paper is just cellulose fibers — natural polymer molecules from wood — woven around each other to form a sheet. Within a normal sheet of paper, these fibers are interlocked with each other through little hook-like irregularities on the individual strands of cellulose and also bonded between each other by hydrogen bonds.

📍When you tear a piece of dry paper, you just need to overcome all the intermolecular forces, the friction, and the fiber entanglements.

📍On a chemical level, the water disrupts the vital hydrogen bonds. Because water contains oxygen-hydrogen bond, it begins to form its own hydrogen bonds with the cellulose, blocking the other fibers from binding. With fewer interactions between the individual cellulose polymers, it becomes easier to separate the fibers, so less force is needed to tear the paper.

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What were the first currencies?

💰 When, where and why money originated is uncertain and complicated. Because ancient civilizations developed at different times and recorded their history with a range of different approaches, archaeologists and historians can only make best guesses.

🐚🌾💎 Both shell money (comprised of shells or beads) and commodity money (comprised of objects that have a practical use, like grain) appear to have made up early forms of currency all around the world, from the Indigenous tribes of America to the villages of Africa to the populations of Asia and the South Pacific islands. Other objects likely used as early forms of currency vary immensely, from bricks of tea and livestock to gems and metal fragments.

ℹ️For example, shells ⬆️ were used as currency in ancient China and, about 5,000 years ago, Mesopotamians developed a banking system where people could "deposit" grains, livestock and other valuables for safekeeping or trade.

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What were the first coins?

The oldest known uses of coins as currency can be traced back to many archaic civilizations.

🪙 The Lydian stater ⬆️ is often considered the first minted — or state-produced — coin, issued by King Alyattes in the 7th century B.C. in a Greek kingdom of Lydia, located in modern-day Turkey.
These Lydian coins were made of electrum, a naturally occurring gold and silver alloy, and were supposed to conform to a specific standard of weight.
They weren’t very uniform compared to modern coins. Minted in the Lydian capital of Sardis, the coins generally featured a lion (known as the Lydian Lion) and bull facing each other.

🪙 Even before the Lydian stater, coins could be minted in ancient China.
According to scientists, clay molds ⬆️, discovered in a bronze foundry at Guanzhuang, in China’s Henan Province, were likely used as a mint for making standardized coins around 640 B.C. - the approximate birth year of Lydia’s King Alyattes.

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How many pets are in the world?

✍️According to different sources, there are over 1 billion pets in the world.

🇺🇸🇨🇳🇪🇺In the USA, China and the EU alone, there are more than 500 mln 🐱 and 🐶.

Besides cats and dogs, the world pet population also includes animals like reptiles, fish, birds, rabbits, livestock, horses, hamsters, guinea pigs, mice, ferrets, iguanas, snakes, etc.

🐹After dogs and cats, hamsters are popular pets.

🇧🇷🥇Brazil ranks first in having the most small 🐶 per capita on the globe. In terms of exotic pets, it has the most unique number of animal pet species in the world.

🇷🇺🏆59% of Russian households have pet cats, making it the country with the highest overall share of cat owners.

🇬🇧🐢🐍🐊The highest pet reptile concentration - 1.45 mln reptiles - is in the United Kingdom.

🇮🇹🥇Italy takes first place in ornamental pet 🦜 in the world with 12.88 mln in households.
🇹🇷🥈Turkey takes second place with 11.2 mln ornamental birds in households.

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How does the ‘Spanish Dancer Galaxy’ look like?

🔭🌀This vibrant and dynamic-looking image ⬆️, recently released by the ESA, features the spiral galaxy NGC 1566, which is sometimes informally referred to as the ‘Spanish Dancer Galaxy’.

💃🏻The galaxy owes its nickname to the vivid and dramatic swirling lines of its spiral arms, which could evoke the shapes and colours of a dancer’s moving form.

🌌NGC 1566 lies around 60 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Dorado, and is also a member of the Dorado galaxy group.

ℹ️In spite of more sophisticated observation techniques, it is rather challenging to pin down members of groups such as the Dorado group. When working out members of a galaxy group, astronomers are not necessarily equipped with the knowledge of the size of the individual galaxies, and so have to work out whether galaxies really are relatively close together in space, or whether some of them are actually much closer or much further away.

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How does feeling lonely relate to spending time alone?

ℹ️ Loneliness - the subjective experience of social isolation - is a common experience that can become an enduring feature of everyday life.

Researchers have discerned the nuanced relationship between feeling lonely and actually being alone. The study involved over 400 participants with archival data collected in a series of studies completed over the last 20 years.

Key facts:
✔️ Loneliness becomes pronounced when individuals spend more than three-quarters of their time alone.

✔️ In older adults (above 67 years), the correlation between loneliness and time spent alone is particularly strong, with a 25% overlap.

✔️ In younger people, aloneness and loneliness are just two different things. Young persons may feel lonely in a crowd, or they may not feel lonely when they are by themselves.

To better quantify social behavior, the research team is developing a smartwatch app akin to fitness trackers.

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What is the International System of Units (SI)?

✍️ The International System of Units is a global standard for expressing the magnitudes or quantities of important natural phenomena.

📌 Also referred to as the Metric system, the System of Units is commonly abbreviated as SI, which comes from the original French name, Système international d'unités.

📌 The SI standard builds on an earlier system of measurement called the meter-kilogram-second (MKS) system.

📌 The Bureau international des poids et mesures (BIPM) ⬆️ is responsible for promoting and describing the SI standard. Known as the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in English, the organization was established in 1875 and operates under the supervision of the International Committee for Weights and Measures (CIPM).

ℹ️ The International Treaty of the Meter was signed in Paris on May 20, 1875 by seventeen countries and is now celebrated around the globe as World Metrology Day.

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