Minerals and Crystals

Find a crystal growing recipe. This table includes recipes for preparing solutions of common crystal grown in aqueous or water solutions.

Crystal Growing Solution Tips

In most cases, prepare a crystal growing solution by dissolving a powdered or granular solid in boiling water. You want a saturated solution, so dissolve as much of your chemical, called the solute, as possible in the water, which is your solvent . Usually it's fine to add too much solute to the water, so that you get some undissolved material at the bottom of your container. Filter this liquid through filter paper, a coffee filter or a paper towel and use the filtered solution to grow your crystals.
http://chemistry.about.com/od/crystalrecipes/a/Crystal-Growing-Recipes.htm
 

The Age of Earth

Aristotle thought the earth had existed eternally. Roman poet Lucretius, intellectual heir to the Greek atomists, believed its formation must have been relatively recent, given that there were no records going back beyond the Trojan War.

The Talmudic rabbis, Martin Luther and others used the biblical account to extrapolate back from known history and came up with rather similar estimates for when the earth came into being. The most famous came in 1654, when Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland offered the date of 4004 B.C.

Today, we know better.

http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/correlation/GSAchron09.jpg

http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/geotime/correlation.html

Form and Function

Charles Darwin observed in his journal that finches living on different Galapagos Islands had different beaks. He also observed that the environment on each of four islands was quite different from the environment on the other three islands; in particular, the type of food available to the finches was different on each island. He developed an hypothesis that the finches had all been the same at one time, (probably blown over from the coast of South America), with some variations in their beaks which made some beak types better adapted to the food on each island and so the birds with those beaks survived and reproduced and the others did not on that particular island with its particular type of food.These are an example of four different types of beaks found in finches living in the four different islands.

http://www.stem.neu.edu/programs/re-seed/activities-and-labs/natural-selection-bird-beak/