CoNi2728 Blog

Don’t forget that semester final exams are coming! We’ll be testing in periods 1 and 6 on Tuesday, January 22, in periods 2 and 3 on Wednesday, January 23, and in periods 4 and 5 on Thursday, January 24.

If you are interested, please come to review sessions in room 701 on any or all of the following days:
THURSDAY, JANUARY 17 . . . from 5:30 to 8:00 p.m.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 19 . . . from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
MONDAY, JANUARY 21 (Martin Luther King’s Birthday) . . . from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. 

Let me know how I can help you!

As you can imagine, animations can be very effectively used to demonstrate some of the most important principles in chemistry. Explore these sites - let me know which simulations are the most helpful or most impressive. Enjoy!

NSHS Animations from Georgia Tech
Tom Greenbowe’s Animations from Iowa State

As you begin to work on your element reports, here are a few sites that you may wish to visit. You’ll be able to find many others, and I would appreciate your writing back with a comment about any sites that you think are especially helpful. Don’t forget to include the web address for your bibliography, and don’t forget to include units with any kind of quantitative information about the element. Have fun! 
WebElements
A Periodic Table from Los Alamos National Laboratory
ChemiCool
LennTech Periodic Table
Chemical Elements
A Pictorial Periodic Table
Environmental Chemistry Periodic Table
Visual Elements Periodic Table (flash version) 

Here are the report templates themselves for you, too.

HONORS CHEMISTRY
Honors Chemistry Element Report

CHEMISTRY
Chemistry Element Report

 The idea of a temporary dipole - explaining the very, very weak van der Waal’s (dispersion) forces that we discussed in class today - is a tricky one.  I found an animation on this site that may help you better ’see’ in your mind’s eye what happens as atoms approach each other.  In fact, explore all the animations that are provided on the page - everything from ionic bonding to metallic bonding.  They’re simple, but effective. As an interesting example of hydrogen bonding, consider the material Kevlar.  Kevlar is the DuPont Company’s brand name for material made out of synthetic fiber of poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide.  In Kevlar,  polymer strands are held together by hydrogen bonding.  Currently, Kevlar has many applications, ranging from bicycle tires and racing sails to body armor because of its high strength-to-weight ratio—famously: “…5 times stronger than steel on an equal weight basis…”.

 After discussing the fundamental aspects of fractional distillation in class today, I thought you might like to see a very important and specific example of the separation of chemical components because of differences in boiling temperature.  The refining of petroleum is such an example.  Here is a really well-outlined procedure that you can read about.

 I’m going to try to post this every Monday evening and give you a chance to read about some special chemical. As you can see, this week it’s about gemstones and what gives individual gems their characteristic (and often highly prized) appearance. By the way, the picture above shows a beautiful sample of aquamarine - a beryllium aluminum silicate mineral.  Enjoy!

If there are those of you out that who like to be amazed at the amazing nature of Nature, try checking this site on a daily basis!  Each day you will be treated to a different photographic astronomical phenomenon.  My recent favorite is the picture from November 25.  If you want to look around, look through the archives.

 After the brief introduction today to the reality (as opposed to the ideality) of gases, I thought you might like to see a little more development of the idea.  Here is an article that I enjoyed reading through.  Notice the increase in non-ideal behavior as the temperature gets lower and the pressure gets higher.  There is also a *cool* calculator at the end of the post that will be very helpful for you when we apply the real gas relationship to our lab data.

Well, did any of you use this weekend to start your candy-making? I’m excited to see what you all will come up with! Here is a site that I found from MIT that links you to various articles related to the chemistry of cooking. The home page site - with all sorts of connections to many things about food chemistry - is found here.  I tracked a connection to candy-making specifically, and I think you might find some of the facts given really helpful when you consider your candy report.  You may just find the cooking facts interesting no matter what! 

After commenting on Lake Nyos in class today, and how that unique body of water released massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the air in 1986 . . . I thought you might like to see more information about it.  Here you go!