Silica stories

• Main Authors: De La Rocha, Christina (Author), Conley, D. J. (Author)
• Format: Electronic eBook
• Language: English
• Published: Cham, Switzerland : Springer, 2017.
• Subjects: Silica.; elektronické knihy; electronic books
• ISBN: 9783319540542; 9783319540535
• Physical Description: 1 online resource : illustrations

Do you know silica, the tetrahedra of silicon and oxygen constituting the crystals of New Agers and the desiccant in a box of new shoes? It's no mere mundane mineral. As chemically reacting silicate rocks, silica set off the chain of events known as the origin of life. As biomineralized opal, i...

Table of Contents:

• Preface; Acknowledgements; Contents; 1 A Brief Introduction to the Players; 1.1 Silicon; 1.2 Silica; 1.3 Silicic Acid; 1.4 Silicate; 1.5 Silicone; 2 The Origin of Life Was Brought to You in Part by Silicate Rocks; 2.1 Setting the Stage; 2.2 A Flight of Fancy; 2.3 The Early Earth Was Not Hellacious; 2.4 A Fly in the Soup; 2.5 The Lost City; 2.6 Generating Organic Compounds; 2.7 Inventing Metabolism; 2.8 The World's Earliest Biological Carbon Fixation; 2.9 Replication; Further Reading; 3 The Making of Humankind: Silica Lends a Hand (and Maybe a Brain); 3.1 Stone Tools and Their Makers.
• 3.1.1 The Earliest Stone Tools3.1.2 The Oldowan Industry and Its Practitioners; 3.1.3 The Acheulean Industry and Its Practitioners; 3.1.4 Neanderthals and the Levallois Technique; 3.1.5 Homo sapiens; 3.2 Hands and Brains; 3.2.1 Give Us a Hand; 3.2.2 If I Only Had a Brain; Further Reading; 4 Mystical Crystals of Silica; 4.1 What Is a Crystal?; 4.2 Pyroelectricity; 4.3 Piezoelectricity; 4.4 Sonar; 4.5 Quartz Oscillators; 4.6 But Why Is There a Piezoelectric Effect?; Further Reading; 5 Glass Houses and Nanotechnology; 5.1 Silica-Centric Musings on the Origin of Biomineralization.
• 5.2 The Early Fossil Record of Silica Biomineralization5.3 Not All Biomineralization Is Silica Biomineralization; 5.4 The World's First Arms Race; 5.5 How to Make a Glass House: Man Versus Nature; 5.5.1 Man; 5.5.2 Nature; 5.6 Some Silica Biomineralizing Organisms that We Are Learning From; 5.6.1 Choanoflagellates; 5.6.2 Siliceous Sponges; 5.6.3 Diatoms; 5.7 Siliceous Nanotechnology; Further Reading; 6 Chicks Need Silica, Too; 6.1 It's All About the Chicks; 6.2 Silicosis; 6.3 The Dog Days of Silica Medical Research; 6.4 Collagen; 6.5 Do Human Beings Require Silica?
• 6.6 To Supplement or not to Supplement6.7 Silica, Aluminum, and Alzheimer's Disease; Further Reading; 7 Of Fields, Phytoliths, and Sewage; 7.1 All Plants Have Silica; 7.2 Opal Phytoliths; 7.3 The Benefits of Opal Phytoliths and of Dissolved Silica; 7.4 Is Silica an Essential Plant Nutrient?; 7.5 Impact of Agriculture on the Silica Cycle; 7.6 The Growing Creep of Silica Removal; 7.7 Let's Go for a Walk Through Time; 7.8 Silica in Sewage; 7.9 A Plea for Hardy Souls; Further Reading; 8 Silica, Be Dammed!; 8.1 To Put It in a Nutshell.
• 8.2 A Brief History of Human Damming, or How Long Has This Been Going on8.3 Dams and Silica; 8.4 Dams, Eutrophication, and Silica; 8.5 Case Study #1: The Laurentian Great Lakes; 8.6 Case Study #2: The Baltic Sea; 8.7 Case Study #3: The Black Sea; 8.8 The Global View; Further Reading; 9 The Venerable Silica Cycle; 9.1 The Silica Cycle; 9.2 Silicate Weathering; 9.3 Getting Silica from Continent to Ocean; 9.4 The Weathering of Oceanic Crust; 9.5 Silica Biomineralization in the Ocean; 9.6 Silica's Return to the Mantle; 9.7 The Earth's Early Ocean Was a Tremendously Siliceous Place.