In normal fission reactors, the fuel used to start the nuclear fission is Uranium-235.
Generally, fuel rods enriched with uranium-235 are used to start the fission. When a nucleus of uranium-235 absorbs a neutron, it becomes unstable and then it breaks apart, producing two smaller nuclei, several neutrons and energy. The additional neutrons produced in the reaction are then absorbed by other nuclei of uranium-235, triggering other fission reactions, and so on.
Sorry I didn't see this before...
Okay, I see two major problems with this student's experiment:
1) Nitric acid Won't Dissolve in Methane
Nitric acid is what's called a mineral acid. That means it is inorganic (it doesn't contain carbon) and dissolves in water.
Methane is an organic molecule (it contains carbon). It literally cannot dissolve nitric acid. Here's why:
For nitric acid (HNO3) to dissolve into a solvent, that solvent must be polar. It must have a charge to pull the positively charged Hydrogen off of the Oxygen. Methane has no charge, since its carbon and hydrogens have nearly perfect covalent bonds. Thus it cannot dissolve nitric acid. There will be no solution. That leads to the next problem:
2) He's Not actually Measuring a Solution
He's picking up the pH of the pure nitric acid. Since it didn't dissolve, what's left isn't a solution—it's like mixing oil and water. He has groups of methane and groups of nitric acid. Since methane is perfectly neutral (neither acid nor base), the electronic instrument is only picking up the extremely acidic nitric acid. There's no point to what he's doing.
Does that help?
Answer: When a pathogen enters their colony, ants change their behavior to avoid the outbreak of disease. In this way, they protect the queen, brood and young workers from becoming ill. These results, from a study carried out in collaboration between the groups of Sylvia Cremer at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (IST Austria) and of Laurent Keller at the University of Lausanne, are published today in the journal Science.
Explanation: search for it.
