Science!
Hay guys and gals, i now control the horizontal and the vertical, for the time being (read, i hijacked kate's blog ^_^)
I imagine that you all have seen those hokey pictures in chemistry textbooks where they have all those beakers with pretty colors in them. (see figure 1, lots of volumetric flasks with pretty colored solutions in them, bleh, so fake and hokey looking)
I never really liked those pictures because its not a particularly accurate depiction of what most chemists deal with. Usually, i deal with colorless solutions and white powder or white crystals. Very rarely, outside of teaching labs, do i deal with the transition metals and their multitude of colorfulness.
Today, i got one hell of a surprise, some of that "fake" chemistry was in our lab. During this past summer, we participated in an American Chemical Society (ACS, www.chemistry.org) project (Project SEED). This project introduces lower income highschool students into the research lab, and essentially, try to hook them on research early in their academic careers. The hope is that they will go to an undergrad institution and continue research as an undergrad, then like it so much they get their Ph.D. Its a good program in my opinion, but it really does require special advisors.
I imagine that you all have seen those hokey pictures in chemistry textbooks where they have all those beakers with pretty colors in them. (see figure 1, lots of volumetric flasks with pretty colored solutions in them, bleh, so fake and hokey looking)
I never really liked those pictures because its not a particularly accurate depiction of what most chemists deal with. Usually, i deal with colorless solutions and white powder or white crystals. Very rarely, outside of teaching labs, do i deal with the transition metals and their multitude of colorfulness.
Today, i got one hell of a surprise, some of that "fake" chemistry was in our lab. During this past summer, we participated in an American Chemical Society (ACS, www.chemistry.org) project (Project SEED). This project introduces lower income highschool students into the research lab, and essentially, try to hook them on research early in their academic careers. The hope is that they will go to an undergrad institution and continue research as an undergrad, then like it so much they get their Ph.D. Its a good program in my opinion, but it really does require special advisors.
Our Project SEED student worked with extracted cabbage dye in the hopes that it would react with chlorine and be useful as an analytical method. (It didnt work, oh well, such is life and research) But, it turns out, extracted cabbage dye will change color depending on the acidity of the solution. I was simply amazed that something like this (figure 2) could actually happen. That is all the same solution, simply at a different pH. Needless to say, i geeked out and took many pictures, and this was one of them. So now, whenever i see those hokey textbook images, ill know, that they aren't that far out of the realm of possiblity, and can be obtained by extracting red cabbage juice.Science! is awesome!
(Formatted because i am becoming a perfectionist towards presentation, and not spelling or grammer checked because that requires printing and checking, and hay, its the internet, no need for that)
posted by The Fluffies at 12:03 AM
Copyright 2001-2009, L.K.C.S. It's MINE, all MINE. If you wanna use it, gimme credit and a link, okies? And don't run with scissors, because you're just going to poke somebody's eye out with that thing. No, really. 
5 Comments:
The Fluffies?
yes, the fluffies. we are an army of awesomeness
::grins:: I just like the sentence: "Science! Is awesome!"
I said it out loud a couple of times. It made me feel like I was on Square One. Come on, somebody has to remember that show besides me.
i do
math squad (or whatever they were called) was my favorite.
AWK, 1,1,2,3,5 EUREKA, AWK!
As a fellow scientist, I envy you for even being around the beakers and flasks of clear liquid and white powder. The only labs I ever get into are high tech to be sure, but lake that touch of the old Dr. Frankenstine chemistry set. Oh well, such is the life of one in computer science. I will mention that one time a company I worked for got a chance to bid on a project to update some educational software that taught chemistry. The program was full of simulated beakers filled with colored liquids that you changed colors in by adding acids and bases (thereby changing the pH and learning about molality, molarity, normality and the like). They never mentioned what the starting solution was, but only refereed to it as "The starting solution." From now on, I will always think of it as cabbage juice.
Thanks Dr. Anonymous!
(wow, does THAT sound like a superhero or what?)
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