Appears to have? On what do you base that supposition?
If you have found a research paper which states that the CoV-19 virus has a net positive charge, then please supply a link.
Identification of Functionally Important Negatively Charged Residues in the Carboxy End of Mouse Hepatitis Coronavirus A59 Nucleocapsid Protein | Journal of Virology
Specifically for covid-19, no but this speaks generally about corona virus make up as it relates to humans also
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I know next to nothing about viruses, but this is extremely unlikely to be the case.
Atoms are inherently neutral - the number of positive protons equals the number of negative electrons, and the total amount of positive charge is *exactly* equal to the total amount of negative charge. Net result, no charge at all, unless you peer inside the atom itself.
It *is* possible to rip an electron or two away from a neutral atom, leaving a net positive charge (you now have a positive ion).
It is also possible to stick an extra electron or two on a neutral atom, leaving a net negative charge (you now have a negative ion.)
But left to their own devices, atoms are electrically neutral, and so are molecules made of atoms - and so are viruses made of molecules.
If you read the article you quoted, you will see that it says "The ionizer generates negative ions, rendering airborne particles/aerosol droplets negatively charged and electrostatically attracts them to a positively charged collector plate."
So the recipe is to use energy from a battery or your wall outlet to first spray negative ions onto the airborne particles, then suck/blow them near a positively charged collector plate that attracts them to it.
I have an ozone generator at home, which we sometimes use to get rid of irritating cigarette smoke that filters in from other apartments. Ozone is a lung irritant, so the machine is operated only when there's nobody (and no pets) around. The machine generates ozone (O3), which is a very strong oxidizer, and "burns" (oxidises) airborne particles when it encounters them. It does a good job of removing smoke odours, and might kill viruses too - but I am in no way qualified to judge the latter.
Want lower airborne Coronavirus concentrations? Spend more time outdoors, where the slightest wind blows away virus aerosols, and where UV from sunlight kills viruses. As a bonus, being outdoors lifts our spirits and helps combat the cabin-fever many of us are suffering from after days of spending too much time indoors.
-Gnobuddy
Missed that one earlier, took a look now.
Remember, I know next to nothing about viruses, so I'm not qualified to comment, and I may very well have misunderstood some of the following. However, I looked at the beginning of the paper (attached image), and it seems to state that within the structure of the protein containing Coronavirus RNA, there are electrical charges that help pull together the molecules, self-assembling from pieces. The paper then looks at the effect of interfering with this self-assembly process by putting different "residues" there instead, which took on a positive charge instead of a negative one, disrupting the electrostatic forces that normally self-assemble the RNA.
Note that there is nothing that says the entire virus has a charge - only that there are different internal charges within it. Just like a neutral atom itself, that has both + and - charges inside, but they cancel out and there is zero net charge when you look at the atom as a whole.
You may know that Alessendra Volta, about 220 years ago, made the first battery by putting salt water soaked paper between copper and zinc discs; he had discovered that different chemicals (copper and zinc in this case) develop different relative voltages when immersed in an electrolyte. These days we call this field electrochemistry.
Our own bodies take advantage of the same phenomenon that Volta discovered. Our nerves conduct electrical signals all over our bodies, using the slight potential difference between sodium and potassium in our bodies. But our bodies overall have no net charge, unless we've done something to charge them (like walking over a synthetic carpet in dry weather.)
Spiders, incidentally, take advantage of natural electric fields in a quite extraordinary way. When an electrical storm is starting to form, there can be strong vertical electric fields between the earth and the air above (eventually culminating in lightning if things go far enough.)
It's been known for a long time that spiders can float through the air for huge distances and to enormous heights using a loop of spider-silk - but nobody was quite sure how the spiders managed to get the lift needed to fly. (I tried to make loops of my mother's sewing-thread fly when I was a child, and also loops of light cassette tape; they didn't fly, they just fell slowly to the ground. How did the spiders do it???)
If you've put two and two together from my last two paragraphs, you may have figured it out: spiders, it turns out, use the electric field in the atmosphere caused by stormy weather to lift off the ground and float through the air! Spiders fly on the currents of Earth’s electric field | PBS NewsHour
I'm not fond of spiders, but I admire them immensely. There are spiders that build diving-bells and live underwater, without gills. There are spiders that fly through the air, without wings. There are spiders that make traps with trap-doors, and pull the trapdoor shut to catch prey (imagine if you saw a dog do that - that would be a terrifying level of intelligence in a dog, but it's routine in spiders!). There are spiders that spin a little net, and fling it onto their prey using four of their legs. There are spiders that spin a thread with a sticky blob on the end, and fling that at their prey to catch them (imagine your terror if you saw a lioness do that to catch a deer.)
It's incredible what evolution can accomplish in a creature without a brain, given hundreds of millions of years to fine-tune successful adaptations!
-Gnobuddy
Attachments
FWIW, I believe there's no individual 0.1 micron wide individual virus' floating around in the air. I think they're embedded in water (or close to watery substance) that - while still small enough to float - is somehow necessary for the virus to convey itself across space.
I think the way a mask or other filter material works, is based on the "hydrophilic" nature of the material; it attracts water. I'm guessing the much larger water bead wicks away into the material and evaporates, leaving the virus's inside it stuck onto a filament of whatever its made out of. (The filament that carried off the water by capillary action)
Could it be possible to heat the air (and everything in it) to, say, a couple hundred C, cool it down again and breathe that? A SMD rework or paint removal gun comes to mind. There must be some reasonable temperature value that kills this thing instantly - when riding within a microscopic water droplet or naked.
I think the way a mask or other filter material works, is based on the "hydrophilic" nature of the material; it attracts water. I'm guessing the much larger water bead wicks away into the material and evaporates, leaving the virus's inside it stuck onto a filament of whatever its made out of. (The filament that carried off the water by capillary action)
Could it be possible to heat the air (and everything in it) to, say, a couple hundred C, cool it down again and breathe that? A SMD rework or paint removal gun comes to mind. There must be some reasonable temperature value that kills this thing instantly - when riding within a microscopic water droplet or naked.
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Couldn't you just run the air/droplet/particle through a miniature microwave oven?
Would that blast the virus enough to kill it and you wouldn't have a couple hundred C
cool down again.
Chlorine is the preferred killer of smallpox virus (from what I've read).
Probably good for this COVID-19 as well.
Cheers,
Would that blast the virus enough to kill it and you wouldn't have a couple hundred C
cool down again.
Chlorine is the preferred killer of smallpox virus (from what I've read).
Probably good for this COVID-19 as well.
Cheers,
I'm a wee bit confused, what don't they do?
As far as I know, free radicals are actually electrically neutral (equal number of protons and electrons), but the rules of quantum mechanics kick in (that incomplete orbital you mentioned), and result in the rather peculiar fact that ionising the free radical (by sticking an extra electron on it) *lowers* the total energy of the system, rather than raising it as you'd expect for more typical atoms and molecules.
Systems like to fall to the lowest energy state they can get to (which is why rocks roll down mountainsides), and so free radicals actually "like" to get ionized when left to their own devices, unlike most normal atoms and molecules, which you have to kick in the tucchus to get them to ionize.
-Gnobuddy
Thank you. You may have noticed I'm on a MISSION. Galu knows
. Here's an indication:Is it possible to calculate the total charge on bacteria and virus surface?It looks like the viral envelope has a charge opposite the interior.
I know I can't win!Galu knows
You're still unnecessarily cluttering up a thread by quoting a previous post in its entirety.
What did I teach you!
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I'm a wee bit confused, what don't they do?
As far as I know, free radicals are actually electrically neutral (equal number of protons and electrons), but the rules of quantum mechanics kick in (that incomplete orbital you mentioned), and result in the rather peculiar fact that ionising the free radical (by sticking an extra electron on it) *lowers* the total energy of the system, rather than raising it as you'd expect for more typical atoms and molecules.
Systems like to fall to the lowest energy state they can get to (which is why rocks roll down mountainsides), and so free radicals actually "like" to get ionized when left to their own devices, unlike most normal atoms and molecules, which you have to kick in the tucchus to get them to ionize.
-Gnobuddy
I think you stated that all electrons had a proton with which they paired.
From my 'A' level chemistry, a free radical has an unpaired electron, making the molecule volatile.
In a neutral atom, yes.
If an atom has more (or fewer) electrons than protons, it is an ion (not a free radical). An ion has a net electric charge.
So far, so good - that was part of my chemistry classes also.
Free radicals were not in any of my chemistry classes. Perhaps the terminology is only used by biologists, I don't know.
But what I found from some online research is that a free radical is an atom or molecule that is electrically neutral - there are equal numbers of protons and electrons. For example, an atom of chlorine is a strong free radical; but it has 17 protons and 17 electrons, making it electrically neutral.
If atoms were as big as lemons, that would be the end of the story. But atoms are so small that they don't follow the same rules as larger objects, but instead, follow the rules of quantum mechanics. And quantum mechanics states that all electrons in an atom are not equal; the electrons are distributed in different "shells", and each shell can only accommodate a specific number of electrons.
The rules of quantum mechanics dictate that the innermost electron shell can accommodate 2 (and no more than two) electrons. A helium atom has two electrons, both in this innermost shell. The shell is full or complete, and as a result, helium is a very, very stable atom. (Which is why it's safer to fill your dirigible with helium than with hydrogen, as humanity learned at great cost of human life.)
If an atom has more than two electrons, only the first two can fit into that innermost shell. The others are forced to go into the next higher shell. An oxygen atom has 8 electrons, so 2 go into that first shell (quantum number n=1), while the other 6 are forced to go into the second shell (n=2), grumbling as they climb upstairs to the higher energy levels in this shell.
Here's where quantum mechanics gets weirder. It turns out that the n=2 shell can accommodate 8 electrons. With only 6 available in an oxygen atom, there are two vacant spaces begging for electrons. The oxygen atom is electrically neutral - there are 8 protons and 8 electrons after all, adding up to zero charge - but it still "wants" to attract two more electrons to itself, to fill up those two empty spaces in the n=2 shell.
This is what I was referring to in my previous post - the rules of quantum mechanics make an oxygen atom, for example, "unhappy" when it's electrically neutral. It ends up in a lower energy state if it can steal two electrons from somewhere, leading to the odd fact that a negative oxygen ion has less energy than a neutral atom of oxygen.
Oxygen is so desperate for those two extra electrons, so reactive, that it will tear them away from just about anything else it comes in contact with. I suspect, then, that a single (neutral) oxygen atom would be described as a "free radical", since it will oxidise anything in the body that it comes into contact with.
I know for sure that a neutral atom of chlorine is considered to be a (dangerous) free radical. A neutral atom of chlorine has 17 electrons. Of these, 2 go in the innermost electron shell (n=1 shell). 8 more go into the n=2 shell, filling it up.
That's disposed of 10 electrons, leaving 7 more. These end up in the n=3 shell. But, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the outermost shell of an atom "wants" 8 electrons; in the case of chlorine, it's only got 7. This makes a chlorine atom very keen to grab one more electron from any other atom it can get it from, which is why chlorine is such an extremely reactive substance.
So what's this business of "unpaired" electrons in free radicals? This doesn't mean "unpaired with a corresponding proton in the nucleus", but instead, refers to another complication that comes from quantum mechanics - the pairing of electrons in "orbitals". The outermost orbit of an atom can accommodate 8 electrons, yes, but they are actually not all equal - there are "subshells" and "orbitals" as well.
In a nutshell, then, the "unpaired" electron in a free radical is missing a second electron to pair with it and "complete the set" in its specific electron orbital. But it is NOT an ion - it still has an equal number of positive protons, and negative electrons, making it a neutral atom.
The incomplete electron orbital, however, makes it eager to grab an electron from a neighbouring atom if possible - as said earlier, this is another of those odd cases where ionizing an atom actually lowers its net energy, so those free radicals zip about inside your body, tearing electrons away from other atoms and disrupting the normal chemical activity in your body.
I have now just about reached the limits of what I know about the quantum mechanics of atoms and the resulting effects on chemistry, so any further clarification will probably have to come from someone else.
This link may be helpful (or it may just confuse the issue more, because the author doesn't discuss the quantum mechanical rules that dictate these weird characteristics of atoms): What is the difference between an ion and a free radical? - Quora
-Gnobuddy
I think you're quite correct - they are two terms describing the same thing, one older and one newer. Chlorine is very electronegative (older term) because there are only 7 electrons in the n=3 shell, and that leaves an unfilled outermost orbital (newer description.)
A lot of information about atoms - chemical properties and atomic spectra - predated the arrival of quantum mechanics. When quantum mechanics arrived, it provided explanations for those older discoveries, but didn't always replace the older terminology in the process.
-Gnobuddy
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