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If carbon is the foundation of life, oxygen is the fuel. The reactivity of oxygen, its ability to "burn" just about anything, is responsible for a lot of what goes on in living things, not to mention what goes on in cars and furnaces. (Actually, the term "fuel" is often used to refer to the thing that is burned by an "oxidizer", so I'm speaking metaphorically when I say oxygen is the fuel of life. Technically oxygen is the oxidizer of life.)
Here on earth we take oxygen for granted because it's everywhere. But I think that when and if large scale space colonies are established, oxygen is going to take on almost mythical connotations. It will be the one thing that you absolutely, positively can't do without, not even for a minute, not if you want to live.
All very large rockets are based on burning kerosene with liquid oxygen: This is the only practical way to get a huge amount of controllable thrust. How much liquid oxygen? The Saturn V rocket, the largest ever built, burned two thousand gallons, almost eight cubic meters, of liquid oxygen per second. Just imagine the pumps that could do that! (And don't forget it's at -183C, just to make things interesting.)
Oxygen is found not just in organic molecules and rockets, but in a whole lot of inorganic compounds and minerals as well: Notice how many minerals are listed below, all containing oxygen bound into them in some form.
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 Natural sample, 21% Pure.
I collected this sample of naturally occurring air (21% pure oxygen) from about 20 feet away from the table in May, 2002. The sound for this sample is a beautiful 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen wind sound borrowed from ftp://ftp.zib.de/pub/UserHome/Luegger/Urania/Sound/FX-03.WAV .
Source: Air
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 18 May, 2002
Price: $0/Free like the air we breathe
Size: 2.5"
Purity: 21%
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Mini welding gas cylinder.
Cylinders like this are sold in any hardware store for use with small welding/brazing torches. They are nothing like the heavy, thick-walled oxygen cylinders used with real welding torches. But they are cheap and do contain actual oxygen.
Many people don't realize that when you use an oxy-acetylene cutting torch to cut steel plate, the acetylene is just there to get things started. Once the steel is hot enough, you turn off the acetylene and blow pure oxygen at the advancing cut. The oxidation (burning) of iron in pure oxygen releases enough heat to keep the reaction going, and a jet of high pressure oxygen can literally burn through four inch thick solid steel plate.
I learned this from Harry Barnhart, a thinking farmer who showed me how it's done one day many years ago.
Because the air around us is only about 21% oxygen, steel will burn in air, but it won't generate enough heat to keep the burning going unaided. In air, the steel will cool down and stop burning pretty quickly unless you give it extra heat. This is the principle of the plasma-arc cutting torch (pictured under hafnium), which uses just electricity and air to cut steel. As when you turn off the acetylene in an oxy-acetylene torch, the steel itself is the fuel that powers the cutting action, but without pure oxygen to energize things, the plasma-arc cutter has to use an electric arc to supply the necessary extra heat.
Another fun thing you can do with oxygen in liquid form is use it to speed up the grilling process. The classic documentation for this was available here, except that it's been removed because of the concerns of the university that had been hosting it.
Source: Hardware Store
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 5 August, 2002
Price: $5
Size: 12"
Purity: >95%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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 Ruby. (External Sample)
Ruby, the name given to the red form of corundum, is just simply aluminum oxide. It's very hard: Common sandpaper is made with aluminum oxide grit. Artificial rubies are dirt cheap because they are easy to make. Natural rubies are very expensive because they are hard to find.
This specimen is natural, but not clear "gem quality" ruby, which of course makes it much less expensive.
Location: John Gray's Collection
Photographed: 11 March, 2003
Size: 3"
Composition: Al2O3
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Amber with bugs.
I picked this piece of amber out of literally thousands available at a big fossil show because it was really big, really cheap, and it had bugs in it. It's important to have bugs in your amber if you want to extract DNA and recreate dinosaurs, or impress the kids. I'm not sure what distinguishes this amber from other amber that costs a hundred times as much by weight, but I like it.
And it does have some really great bugs! Here's a close-up of one, which is about 1/4 inch in overall size:
I don't really know what the chemical composition of amber is, but it's an organic resin which means it must contain carbon and hydrogen, and I figure it probably contains at least some oxygen, so I've listed it as being composed of those three elements, with carbon being the dominant one. Feel free to correct me if you know better.
Source: Time Trips
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 29 March, 2003
Price: $45
Size: 5"
Composition: CHO
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