There are two jars of nuts in the kitchen. One jar is always filled with unsalted nuts while the other jar is always filled with salted nuts.
Can you tell which jar holds the salted nuts?
Visit Corrosion Chemistry Tutorial (ausetute.com.au) for more information.
Chemistry is like cooking ... just don't lick the spoon.
Cooking can be used to help students understand fundamental chemical concepts, like chemical equations and stoichiometry.
Read how at https://www.ausetute.com.au/
My local bag shop is now full of bags that proudly state they are made out of "Vegan Leather".
Vegan leather? Surely that is an oxymoron?
vegan = not consuming/using any animal products
leather = animal skin that has been tanned or undergone a similar process.
So what is "vegan leather"?
It turns out that the majority or "vegan leather" is just poly(vinyl chloride) (PVC) or poly(urethane) (PU), polymers produced from reagents derived from fossil fuels. Handbags made out of PVC (vinyl bags) have been around for decades, and have been a much, much cheaper option than expensive genuine leather bags.Until now! By re-branding vinyl bags as "Vegan Leather" suppliers can increase the price, capitalizing on the significant consumer trend toward "vegan" products.
I live in a city that is trying to ban the use of single use plastic items including shopping bags and straws etc which end up in landfill and stay there for (not-quite but almost) ever. How do you feel about your new plastic "vegan leather" handbag? When it starts to fall apart (anything from about a month to a year or so depending on use and quality) and you throw it out, do you feel that you have done your bit for the environment?
If you live in a country where there are growing demands to reduce coal-fired power generation, and reduce the use of fossil fuels in cars etc, in order to reduce the community's "carbon footprint", how do you feel about your fossil fuel based "vegan leather" bag?
It isn't "vegan leather". It is plastic.
vegan leather bag = plastic bag
One of the most popular school holiday "science
projects" is to make slime by adding an aqueous solution of borax to PVA
glue. Young children, and adults, can have hours of fun playing with this oozey
slime, discovering some of its interesting properties along the way.
But what is slime and why should we be interested in it?
Read this edition of AUS-e-NEWS to find out more.
Subscribe to AUS-e-NEWS at https://www.ausetute.com.au/ausenews.html
This fabulous graph of enrollments in the most popular HSC subjects over time was published in the Sydney Morning Herald today:
In the newspaper article, concerns were raised about the declining number of physics students, and the fact that only 22% of these students were female.
What I see in this graph is a general downward trend in enrollments of most of these subjects. You'd be particularly concerned about your future employment prospects if you teach Ancient History, for example.
What I don't see in this graph are any dramatic increases in enrollments, so, where have all the students gone?
Are overall student numbers declining (and hence enrollments in individual subjects are declining)?
Or, are there other less popular subjects with massive increases in student enrollment?
If we are concerned about the lack of females in Physics (22% female) why are we not equally concerned about the lack of males in Biology (36% male)? Or the poor showing of males in English Extension 1 (33%) and 2 (29%).
We are still seeing student numbers divided along gender lines. So here are some "not-at-all-surprising" stats ...
And if I went back 30 or 40 years, I'm guessing the percentages would not be so very different.
What have we achieved in education in 4 decades?
A polymer is produced when lots of monomers bond together. Monomer has Greek roots, mono meaning one and mer meaning parts. Polymer also has Greek roots, poly meaning many and mer meaning parts.
So we can form a verb that means to produce a molecule of many parts. Because the words monomer and polymer have Greek roots, we should use the "ize" suffix, that is, polymerize. Yet, particularly in Australia, the Latin "ise" suffix is used to produce the verb polymerise.
The word, polymerise, would have a Greek root (poly, many), a French root (mer, sea), and a latin suffix (ise). This would appear to suggest that to polymerise would be to make many seas. On the other hand, a monomer would be just one sea.
Merde!
In chemistry we have a verb to describe the process of producing ions, but how do you spell it?
Is it ionize? (rhymes with prize)
Or is it ionise? (rhymes with surprise)
The root of the word is Greek, so according to my school grammar teacher, the suffix should be "ize". The preferred IUPAC spelling appears to be ionize, and hence ionizing and ionization.
Similarly, we also have a verb to describe the process of producing atoms, also from a Greek root, so the preferred spelling should be atomize, not atomise. Hence we form the words atomizing and atomization.
I'm sure we'll continue to see the alternative spellings with an "s" rather than a "z" but they won't get you a Nobel Prise. Surprize!
