Call number:
9783319540542 (e-book)
Description / Table of Contents:
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, it is the cell wall, skeleton, spicules, and scales of organisms ornamenting numerous lobes of the tree of life. Cryptocrystalline silica made into stone tools helped drive the evolution of our hands and our capability for complex grammar, music, and mathematics. As quartz crystals, silica is impressively electric and ubiquitous in modern technology (think sonar, radios, telephones, ultrasound, and cheap but precise watches). Silica is inescapable when we take a drink or mow the lawn and it has already started to save the Earth from the carbon dioxide we're spewing into the atmosphere. This book tells these scientific tales and more, to give dear, modest silica its due.
Type of Medium:
12
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (xi, 201 Seiten)
,
Illustrationen
ISBN:
9783319540542
,
978-3-319-54054-2
URL:
Ebook (access only within the AWI network)
DOI:
10.1007/978-3-319-54054-2
Language:
English
Note:
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 Tools
3.1.2 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 Biomineralization
5.3 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 Supplement
6.7 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 on
8.3 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
9.8 Silica, Cyanobacteria, and Banded Iron Formations
9.9 And then Along Came True Silica Biomineralization
Further Reading
10 Silica Saves the Day
10.1 The Goldilocks Zone
10.2 Most of Us Can Model
10.2.1 The Warmth of the Sun
10.2.2 Albedo, Which Is Not a Pasta Sauce
10.2.3 Emissivity
10.3 The Importance of Greenhouse Gases
10.4 Silicate Weathering Consumes Carbon Dioxide
10.5 The Temperature Dependence of Silicate Weathering
10.6 The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum
10.7 Enhanced Weathering
Further Reading
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