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oh cool! So they use real gold sheets to electroplate? does it decrease the mass of the gold plate over time?

Yes and yes! Some textbooks will show the gold material that is being used for plating shrink over the course of the reaction in order to show that the gold material is indeed being used to coat the material.
In a class that I took where we plated using copper, we weighed both the copper and material to be plated before and after the reaction. We found that the amount of mass that the copper lost was = to the amount of mass that the material gained!

That is super cool! It's hard to believe ancient people used to electroplate in Iraq.

Thanks for the info!

Definitely is hard to believe, and this article does say that this is only a hypothesis, but they definitely were on to something!
Glad you enjoyed the post!

True, on the hypothesis.
It;'s really difficult trying to explain how a culture from 2000 years ago understood the principles of building and using a battery. :)

I had no idea this is how it's done. So educative! Thanks.

Im so glad that you learned something! This is one of my favorite subjects in chemistry!

Is this how metal alloys are made as well?

Not quite. Metal alloys are made by heating two metals to their melting point and then mixing them. After they cool, you will get an alloy of the two metals. For example, if you mix copper and zinc, you get a brass alloy. Steel is an alloy of iron and primarily carbon.

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Hello @battlr
While I really like #science on Steem, I don't think that this is a an best way to present it here like that, i.e. whole post as image (including text).
Here are some issues:

  • it doesn't read as well as good quality fonts
  • can't be effectively scaled which makes troubles on some devices
  • can't be translated by non-english users
  • text-to-speech would not work
  • for search engines it's just a picture

Plain text + some drawings would be much, much better (IMHO)

I really appreciate your input!
I have thought about a lot of these things, and when I decided to do the series this way I made the choice based on the fact that if someone wanted to learn these topics, they could just google them, I wanted to present these things in a way that is fun for me (and hopefully the readers) so that it didnt feel like another assignment from one of my professors. I definitely need to work on making it more tidy, and I think that I have ironed out a few issues with my formatting. Let me know if my newest post is a bit better in terms of legibility -- I finally found an app that takes advantage of the full width of what Steemit allows, and also found a way to preserve vibrancy with the colors.

I hope that I can improve my handwriting to mitigate some of these issues, and if not, I need to find a way to present the ideas more visually with less text. But at the end of the day, I wanted to present something unique to this community that you don't get from googling a topic.