[Boris]

anyone know what relative abundance is, i know its what a mass spectrometer finds out, but what acctually is it?

[Camborner]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_abundance

[KingEdward1st]

I do A level chemistry so I should know really!

Luckily I do! I will type up what it says in my notes for you.

Bare with me on this!

Bassically it is the number of organisms of a particular kind as a percentage of the total number of organisms of a given area or community. E.g. the number of birds of a particular species as a percentage of the total bird population of a given area.

I think that is what you are after. Or do you mean the realtive abundance of an isotope of an element?

[Teleman]

I think that is what you are after. Or do you mean the realtive abundance of an isotope of an element?

I think so Jake , or it would the first time i have heard of using a mass spectrometer for counting birds

[Boris]

i do mean reletive abundance of an isotope of an element, outhewise it biology.

[Boris]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_abundance

i was looking at that, and it just confused me more

[Teleman]

No expert but how about these
http://www.avogadro.co.uk/definitions/ar.htm
http://www.chemguide.co.uk/analysis/mas ... ments.html
and it even spat this out to
http://www.answers.com/topic/atomic-weight

[Boris]

thats, theve helped.

[Teleman]

They came up in the Yahoo search , I have found its better than google for odd and strange things