The Cool Science Stuff Thread

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To understand and use octonion algebra you need a special brain, which I don't have, but I understand their purpose and aim. The linked article explains it very well and how Cohl Furey ( great name ) sees it as a solution to the loose ends in the Standard Model and why the latest upgrade at Cerne is unlikely to find new particles
So quaternions and octonions are basically vectors. Can't really visualise that, but the mathematics involved should be familiar for any university level engineer - and there are plenty of us.

Had never heard the term quaternion before, but 3 physical dimensions + time already makes for a vector with 4 parts.
 
Unfortunately, the carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS are among the most inert in organic compounds, which means that their destruction requires brutal treatment, such as incineration at high temperatures. On page 839 of this issue, Trang et al. (4) show that under specific mild conditions, perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs), which are a type of PFAS, undergo spontaneous decomposition into benign inorganic fluoride ions and simple oxygenated organic molecules.
PFAS can be destroyed by incineration (6), electro- or photochemical oxidation, or reductive defluorination. However, these methods require substantial energy input and are usually expensive to operate. Trang et al. discovered a low-energy pathway for decomposing PFCAs in which decarboxylation of the compound’s acid group turns it into carbon dioxide (CO2) and a perfluorinated carbanion (a trivalent carbon anion). The carbanion can then undergo a series of chemical reactions to eventually break all the carbon-fluorine (C–F) bonds in the parent compound, producing inorganic fluoride and a combination of CO2, formate (CHO2−), and other oxygenated small molecules that no longer contain C–F units. The reaction occurs under mild temperatures (80° to 120°C). Outside of the reaction media, only the addition of sodium hydroxide (NaOH) is needed for the reaction to occur, making it potentially much cheaper than the processes currently used.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.add1813

let's hope this study bears out!
 
Apparently there's a charmed quark in the proton. Which throws the standard model for a curve.
 
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