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Author | Topic: Quick Questions, Short Answers - No Debate | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Admin Director Posts: 13038 From: EvC Forum Joined: Member Rating: 2.1 |
This thread is for quick inquiries. Maybe someone could propose a thread to discuss Setterfield's ideas over at Proposed New Topics.
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foreveryoung Member (Idle past 610 days) Posts: 921 Joined: |
For the first time in my life, it is required of me to find out what the scientific literature says regarding a topic. The college has provided several search engines but when I enter several words in the search field, I rarely get results that put all the words together in one sentence. Another problem is that I am finding very little research when I narrow the topic down to what I will be doing doing with my own actual research. Does anybody have expertise in doing online searches in the literature in order to find research that is specifically tailored to what you are doing?
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Wounded King Member Posts: 4149 From: Cincinnati, Ohio, USA Joined: |
It might help if you specified what the field is you are researching. There are a number of niche resources out there and while I would feel confident giving someone advice on searching the biomedical literature I would be a lot less sure for disciplines such as geography or physics.
TTFN, WK
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
A good resource is Google Scholar:
scholar.google.com You can even choose to keep patents out of the search results. Most of the returns will be peer reviewed papers. I actually prefer Google Scholar over Pubmed when searching for biomedical research papers. For physics, the classic database is arXiv.org, but biology is more my thing so others may know of a better resource for physics papers.
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foreveryoung Member (Idle past 610 days) Posts: 921 Joined: |
I will be doing research this summer on the correlation between total precipitation and precipitation intensity of individual storms on bank gully erosion. At the end of the summer, I will gather all the sediment collected by the silt fences and compare that to the estimated soil loss as measure by erosion pins. I need to be aware of all the research that has been done before in this particular area of soil erosion. So far, I have pulled up a lot of research on soil erosion in general, and little on gully erosion in particular. Of the gully erosion literature I have found, the bulk of it is rill erosion and ephemeral erosion. Perhaps the problem is not in my method of using the google scholar and other search engines, but there may actually be a scarcity of the exact type of research that I will be doing. I have actually read papers that stated as much. They went even further to say that soil erosion research has also been dominated by simulated rainfall instead of actual rainfall, and that large scale land areas being studies are scarce in comparison to plot sized areas.
It could be true that my exact method of study is not well represented in the literature. That is exactly what I stated in my proposal to the university in order to get grant money for it. I just hope that I was actually accurate in that statement.
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Taq Member Posts: 10077 Joined: Member Rating: 5.1 |
Using the search terms "bank gully erosion precipitation" at scholar.google.com returned quite a few papers that appear to be up your alley.
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foreveryoung Member (Idle past 610 days) Posts: 921 Joined: |
thanks
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I vaguely remember a story like this, possibly from one of Gould's essays: A sort of organism, I think a shellfish, was once widespread in the fossil record. Then it apparently went extinct --- at least, it went missing from the fossil record. Which was odd, because this variety of shell is still around today. The puzzle was resolved when a specimen was found in the strata from which it was thought to be missing, showing that it hadn't gone extinct, just become scarce and/or localized.
Can anyone name the species and fill in the details for me? Thanks.
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
I'm having to write about this for my geology thread. A couple of questions.
(1) Is it true that all radioactive decay involves a change in the atomic number? Is there no decay that just involves an atom spitting out a neutron or two but remaining the same element? (2) If so, is there a reason for this? My own guess is that the instability of nuclei is down to the difficulty of holding together the positively-charged protons, given that like charges repel, but I would be the first to admit that I know nothing about quantum chromodynamics.
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cavediver Member (Idle past 3671 days) Posts: 4129 From: UK Joined: |
(1) Is it true that all radioactive decay involves a change in the atomic number? No
Is there no decay that just involves an atom spitting out a neutron or two but remaining the same element? Yes. e.g. -> by emission of a neutron
(2) If so, is there a reason for this? My own guess is that the instability of nuclei is down to the difficulty of holding together the positively-charged protons At a basic level, the neutrons are there to buffer the repulsive nature of a bunch of positively charged protons, allowing the nuclear force to dominate over a much larger distance scale than normal, countering the electromagnatic force. Too many neutrons, and the effective nuclear force at the "surface" of the nucleus becomes "repulsive". But this is all a fair amount of handwaving to describe the effect of some hideously complex chromodynamics which is best left to the lattice boys and girls - certainly not for me!
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined: |
Thanks.
So would it be accurate for me to say that radioactive decay involves any change of the atomic number, the atomic weight, or both --- that by definition it involves a change in the composition of the nucleus?
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cavediver Member (Idle past 3671 days) Posts: 4129 From: UK Joined:
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Yes, I think that is an accurate statement
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Dr Adequate Member (Idle past 312 days) Posts: 16113 Joined:
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Thanks.
Really I don't know if I'd have started this course on geology if I'd known how hard it would be. I thought I'd be explaining to people: "Sandstone is lithified sand. You wanna guess what mudstone is?" But in fact it has gone on and on and on and on, and now I have to explain nuclear physics to people without myself being a nuclear physicist, and I've written about 80,000 words. I do feel very satisfied with my achievement, but looking back I should probably have tried to achieve something easier.
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jar Member (Idle past 421 days) Posts: 34026 From: Texas!! Joined:
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Well many of us are glad you took the challenge.
Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!
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foreveryoung Member (Idle past 610 days) Posts: 921 Joined: |
CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 = H/sub>+ + HCO3- = 2H + CO3
Don't know how to type the ions in. When carbon dioxide is dissolved in the ocean, does all of it immediately react with water to form carbonic acid or is there dissolved, unreacted carbon dioxide in the water too? There are 3 equilibrium equations listed above. Are they endothermic or exothermic in the forward reaction? Which ones are endothermic and which one are exothermic in the forward direction? My whole reason for asking is this: If you do not add any additional carbon dioxide into the oceanic system, will an increase in oceanic temperature make the ocean more acidic or less acidic based on the three equilibrium reactions above? Edited by Admin, : Add subscripting. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given. Edited by foreveryoung, : No reason given.
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