Homeland Security and Tritium

Fascinating how relevant our studies of isotopes can be to “everyday life”…

Shortage Slows a Program to Detect Nuclear Bombs – NYTimes.com: “WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.

The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989. “

Is Lithium the Key to Finding Extra-Solar Planets?

If you are in Robotics this semester, we briefly discussed this on Friday…

New Clues Discovered to Detect Alien Worlds (A Weekend Feature): “The key is lithium.  A stellar spectography survey of over five hundred stars reveals that known-planet-bearers, including our own Sun, have less than a hundredth of the lithium of ‘barren’ stars.  Stars don’t produce much lithium in their fusion reactions, so most share the same proportion of the element, which was created at the beginning of the universe.  But some stars seem to destroy their stock, fusing it into other elements, and a European team have found that they all have one thing in common: planets.”

I love lithium.

Journal Article Due Date Moved (Again)

Check out the assignments calendar and you’ll see that the Journal Article due date has been moved to Friday December 4, 2009 and will count as part of your exam grade.

That is due to the web being down at school today and the possibility that it will be down more this week.

In the meantime, we’ll be working on our intro to energy (which is a bridge to what we are studying in the Spring).

See you tomorrow!

Chemical Equation Practice

Here are the 10 problems we started on today (click).

Additionally, you can try your hand on the interactive balancing activity site here:

Element Balancing Activity

Let me know if you have any questions!

Class Notes for Thursday Oct 15, 2009: Lavoisier

Today we continued our studies of Antoine Lavoisier and his importance to chemistry (and many other areas).

Here is a link to the reading that we covered in class on the life of Lavoisier.

Additionally, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article we discussed which has a couple of fantastic pictures relating to Mr. Lavoisier and his experiments.

Remember, your homework is due tomorrow. In case you forgot…

Your Homework:
Find 10 important points about Lavoisier from our conversation in class or from your own readings of their linked texts.

Write/type/blog those points and your responses to them in complete sentences.

(Your points should not just regurgitate what others have said but include your own insights).

See you tomorrow!

Class Notes for Tuesday October 13, 2009: Lavoisier and Mendeleyev

Here are the notes we started covering in class on Tuesday and will finish up on Wednesday (your homework is on the last slide):

If you have trouble finding points for your homework, try clicking on Antoine Lavoisier’s and Dmitri Mendeleyev’s names at the top of slides 9 and 10. Those links will take you to the texts of their respective books.

Incredible Hydrogen Torch

Check this out:

I wonder if your cars will be powered by hydrogen combustion someday? I hope so.

Test 1 Review Wednesday Sept 30, 2009

Today in class we took the Test 1 Review to help prepare for this quarter’s only major test (worth 12 points).

Here is the link to the Test 1 Review.

Use the review to help you study and prepare your notes for Test 1 (Thurs-Fri this week) since many of the questions will strongly resemble these questions and the topics they cover. The formatting will also be the same.

We’ll go over the answers in class.

Element 114 Confirmed!

We spent a little time discussing element 114 and why it was so difficult to make in a lab.

It’s taken time, but it looks like we’ve finally been able to produce the super-heavy element!

Berkeley, CA – Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have been able to confirm the production of the superheavy element 114, ten years after a group in Russia, at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, first claimed to have made it. The search for 114 has long been a key part of the quest for nuclear science’s hoped-for Island of Stability.

via Superheavy Element 114 Confirmed: A Stepping Stone to the Island of Stability « Berkeley Lab News Center.

What does this mean for you?

In your lifetime, you might see all sorts of new materials and building components either made from or influenced by the properties that these super heavy elements possess.

Not to mention, it’s pretty amazing that we can keep adding to the periodic table!

Thursday September 24, 2009: Quiz 5

Today, we took Quiz 5 on Ionic and Covalent Bonds via the http://www.mygradebook.com site. The “retest” will be posted tomorrow morning and you’ll have until tomorrow night (Friday) at midnight to complete that if you’d like.

You can also head over to MyGradeBook and look at your grades and what assignments you’re missing if you haven’t done so already.

Quiz 5 in Word Format

Quiz 5 in PDF Format

Quiz 5 as a Web Page