LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Neon (Element)
built 217 days ago
Neon is a chemical element that makes up about 1 part per 65,000 in the Earth's atmosphere. The British chemists Sir William Ramsay and Morris W. Travers discovered the element in the atmosphere while they were studying liquid air in 1898. Ramsay had predicted the existence of this gas in 1897. Ramsay and Travers named the gas neon, for the Greek word that means new. The gas is produced industrially by the fractional distillation of liquid air; the most volatile fraction is composed of a mixture of helium, neon, and nitrogen. Nitrogen is removed by condensation under increased pressure and reduced temperature, followed by adsorption on highly cooled charcoal. Neon is separated from helium by selective adsorption on activated charcoal at low temperatures.
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Neon is a very inert element... it has been reported to form a compound with fluorine. It is still questionable if true compounds of neon exist, but evidence is mounting in favor of their existence. The ions, Ne+, (NeAr)+, (NeH)+, and (HeNe+) are known from optical and mass spectrometric studies. Neon also forms an unstable hydrate.
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Neon atoms have 10 electrons. Two of these fit into the first shell, and the remaining eight electrons fit into the second shell. Because its outer shell is full, neon is stable and unreactive.
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Neon has three stable isotopes: 20Ne (90.48%), 21Ne (0.27%) and 22Ne (9.25%). 21Ne and 22Ne are nucleogenic and their variations are well understood. In contrast, 20Ne is not known to be nucleogenic
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Neon is used chiefly for filling lamps and luminous sign tubes. When under low pressure, neon emits a bright orange-red light if an electrical current is passed through it. This property is utilised in neon signs (which first became familiar in the 1920s), in some fluorescent and gaseous conduction lamps, and in high-voltage testers. Its usual colour in lamps is bright reddish-orange. The addition of a few drops of mercury makes the light a brilliant blue. Many aeroplane beacons use neon light because it can penetrate fog. A number of aeroplane pilots have reported that neon beacons were visible for 32 kilometres when it was impossible for them to see other kinds of lights.
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Neon works with the MidasPlus package to create solid stick or ball-and-stick representations of molecular models. The currently displayed atoms, their orientation, position and colors are taken from the interactive display of [M]idas(1) using the pdbrun Midas command and are sent to neon. Neon processes the information under the control of parameters set in the neon.dat file (in the current directory) and the output is sent to the Midas utility conic(1) to create the final image. See conic(1) for a detailed description of its command-line options. Neon has three parameters for the depiction of a simplified backbone: a `smooth' tube connecting A-carbons, an intermediate `bent' tube, and a `straight' tube with straight segments connecting A-carbons. Neon has two parameters which create a smooth gradient of color over the the model based on the temperature factors of the atoms.
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