Oxidation in the context of "Omega-3 fatty acid"

An incandescent light bulb, also known as an incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe, is an electric light that produces illumination by Joule heating a filament until it glows. The filament is enclosed in a glass bulb that is either evacuated or filled with inert gas to protect the filament from oxidation. Electric current is supplied to the filament by terminals or wires embedded in the glass. A bulb socket provides mechanical support and electrical connections.

Incandescent bulbs are manufactured in a wide range of sizes, light output, and voltage ratings, from 1.5 volts to about 300 volts. They require no external regulating equipment, have low manufacturing costs, and work equally well on either alternating current or direct current. As a result, the incandescent bulb became widely used in household and commercial lighting, for portable lighting such as table lamps, car headlamps, and flashlights, and for decorative and advertising lighting.

Fire is the rapid oxidation of a fuel in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, releasing heat, light, and various reaction products.Flames, the most visible portion of the fire, are produced in the combustion reaction when the fuel reaches its ignition point temperature. Flames from hydrocarbon fuels consist primarily of carbon dioxide, water vapor, oxygen, and nitrogen. If hot enough, the gases may become ionized to produce plasma. The color and intensity of the flame depend on the type of fuel and composition of the surrounding gases.

Fire, in its most common form, has the potential to result in conflagration, which can lead to permanent physical damage. It directly impacts land-based ecological systems worldwide. The positive effects of fire include stimulating plant growth and maintaining ecological balance. Its negative effects include hazards to life and property, atmospheric pollution, and water contamination. When fire removes protective vegetation, heavy rainfall can cause soil erosion. The burning of vegetation releases nitrogen into the atmosphere, unlike other plant nutrients such as potassium and phosphorus which remain in the ash and are quickly recycled into the soil. This loss of nitrogen produces a long-term reduction in the fertility of the soil, though it can be recovered by nitrogen-fixing plants such as clover, peas, and beans; by decomposition of animal waste and corpses, and by natural phenomena such as lightning.

Cyanobacteria (/saɪˌænoʊbækˈtɪəriə/ sy-AN-oh-bak-TEER-ee-ə) are a group of autotrophic gram-negative bacteria of the phylum Cyanobacteriota that can obtain biological energy via oxygenic photosynthesis. The name "cyanobacteria" (from Ancient Greek κύανος (kúanos) 'blue') refers to their bluish green (cyan) color, which forms the basis of cyanobacteria's informal common name, blue-green algae.

Cyanobacteria are probably the most numerous taxon to have ever existed on Earth and the first organisms known to have produced oxygen, having appeared in the middle Archean eon and apparently originated in a freshwater or terrestrial environment. Their photopigments can absorb the red- and blue-spectrum frequencies of sunlight (thus reflecting a greenish color) to split water molecules into hydrogen ions and oxygen. The hydrogen ions are used to react with carbon dioxide to produce complex organic compounds such as carbohydrates (a process known as carbon fixation), and the oxygen is released as a byproduct. By continuously producing and releasing oxygen over billions of years, cyanobacteria are thought to have converted the early Earth's anoxic, weakly reducing prebiotic atmosphere, into an oxidizing one with free gaseous oxygen (which previously would have been immediately removed by various surface reductants), resulting in the Great Oxidation Event and the "rusting of the Earth" during the early Proterozoic, dramatically changing the composition of life forms on Earth. The subsequent adaptation of early single-celled organisms to survive in oxygenous environments likely led to endosymbiosis between anaerobes and aerobes, and hence the evolution of eukaryotes during the Paleoproterozoic.

An inert gas is a gas that does not readily undergo chemical reactions with other chemical substances and therefore does not readily form chemical compounds. Though inert gases have a variety of applications, they are generally used to prevent unwanted chemical reactions with the oxygen (oxidation) and moisture (hydrolysis) in the air from degrading a sample. Generally, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and all noble gases except oganesson (helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon, and radon) are considered inert gases. The term inert gas is context-dependent because several of the inert gases, including nitrogen and carbon dioxide, can be made to react under certain conditions.

Purified argon gas is the most commonly used inert gas due to its high natural abundance (78.3% N₂, 1% Ar in air) and low relative cost.

Corrosion is a natural process that converts a refined metal into a more chemically stable oxide. It is the gradual deterioration of materials (usually a metal) by chemical or electrochemical reaction with their environment. Corrosion engineering is the field dedicated to controlling and preventing corrosion.

In the most common use of the word, this means electrochemical oxidation of a metal reacting with an oxidant such as oxygen (O₂, gaseous or dissolved), or H₃O ions ( H, hydrated protons) present in aqueous solution. Rusting, the formation of red-orange iron oxides, is perhaps the most familiar example of electrochemical corrosion. This type of corrosion typically produces oxides or salts of the original metal and results in a distinctive coloration. Corrosion can also occur in materials other than metals, such as ceramics or polymers, although, in this context, the term degradation is more common. Corrosion degrades the useful properties of materials and structures including mechanical strength, appearance, and permeability to liquids and gases. Corrosive is distinguished from caustic: the former implies mechanical degradation, the latter chemical.

Pentacene (C₂₂H₁₄) is a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon consisting of five linearly-fused benzene (C₆H₆) rings. This highly conjugated compound is an organic semiconductor. The compound generates excitons upon absorption of ultra-violet (UV) or visible light; this makes it very sensitive to oxidation. For this reason, this compound, which is a purple powder, slowly degrades upon exposure to air and light.

Structurally, pentacene is one of the linear acenes, the previous one being tetracene (four fused benzene rings) and the next one being hexacene (six fused benzene rings). In August 2009, a group of researchers from IBM published experimental results of imaging a single molecule of pentacene using an atomic force microscope. In July 2011, they used a modification of scanning tunneling microscopy to experimentally determine the shapes of the highest occupied and lowest unoccupied molecular orbitals.

Phosphorus is a chemical element; it has symbol P and atomic number 15. All elemental forms of phosphorus are highly reactive and are therefore never found in nature. They can nevertheless be prepared artificially, the two most common allotropes being white phosphorus and red phosphorus. With P as its only stable isotope, phosphorus has an occurrence in Earth's crust of about 0.1%, generally as phosphate rock. A member of the pnictogen family, phosphorus readily forms a wide variety of organic and inorganic compounds, with as its main oxidation states +5, +3 and −3.

The isolation of white phosphorus in 1669 by Hennig Brand marked the scientific community's first discovery of an element since antiquity. The name phosphorus is a reference to the god of the Morning star in Greek mythology, inspired by the faint glow of white phosphorus when exposed to oxygen. This property is also at the origin of the term phosphorescence, meaning glow after illumination, although white phosphorus itself does not exhibit phosphorescence, but chemiluminescence caused by its oxidation. Its high toxicity makes exposure to white phosphorus very dangerous, while its flammability and pyrophoricity can be weaponised in the form of incendiaries. Red phosphorus is less dangerous and is used in matches and fire retardants.

A reducing atmosphere is an atmosphere in which oxidation is prevented by the absence of oxygen and other oxidizing gases or vapours, and which may contain actively reductant gases such as hydrogen, carbon monoxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide that would be readily oxidized to remove any free oxygen. Although Early Earth had a reducing prebiotic atmosphere prior to the Proterozoic eon, starting at about 2.5 billion years ago in the late Neoarchaean period, the Earth's atmosphere experienced a significant rise in oxygen and transitioned to an oxidizing atmosphere with a surplus of molecular oxygen (dioxygen, O₂) as the primary oxidizing agent.

In biochemistry, chemosynthesis is the biological conversion of one or more carbon-containing molecules (usually carbon dioxide or methane) and nutrients into organic matter using the oxidation of inorganic compounds (e.g., hydrogen gas, hydrogen sulfide) or ferrous ions as a source of energy, rather than sunlight, as in photosynthesis. Chemoautotrophs, organisms that obtain carbon from carbon dioxide through chemosynthesis, are phylogenetically diverse. Groups that include conspicuous or biogeochemically important taxa include the sulfur-oxidizing Gammaproteobacteria, the Campylobacterota, the Aquificota, the methanogenic archaea, and the neutrophilic iron-oxidizing bacteria.

Many microorganisms in dark regions of the oceans use chemosynthesis to produce biomass from single-carbon molecules. Two categories can be distinguished. In the rare sites where hydrogen molecules (H₂) are available, the energy available from the reaction between CO₂ and H₂ (leading to production of methane, CH₄) can be large enough to drive the production of biomass. Alternatively, in most oceanic environments, energy for chemosynthesis derives from reactions in which substances such as hydrogen sulfide or ammonia are oxidized. This may occur with or without the presence of oxygen.