It was the Salters’ Festival of Chemistry at Keele today, organised by Dr Jane Essex from Education. The school children did two lab based activities then were sent to the lecture theatre with me for a chemistry magic show. I did the usual demos (for me) with liquid nitrogen, hydrogen balloons, the blue bottle, the [...]
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I’m off to the HEA STEM conference in Birmingham this Wednesday and Thursday. I have to admit I’m on the back foot a bit for this conference as I had no time to prepare my presentation and the CLEARS poster before the end of semester, then time off took priority (also known as a [...] Watching the RI Christmas lectures used to be an integral, if surreptitious part of Christmas. My Grandma would watch them when they used to be on BBC 2 (I think) in the mornings between Christmas and New Year, just about in time for morning coffee. The timing’s have shifted around a bit over the years but [...] One of the things ‘going on’ this academic year is a project investigating safety in the laboratory. We’re not trying to come up with better lab rules, I think that’s one of the biggest differences. We all comment that in the chemistry lab students (and sometimes staff) do very bizarre things, but more lab [...] While the internet was wringing its collective mouse cords over the spectacularly badly thought out http://gizmodo.com/5954522/how-to-use-basic-chemistry-to-scare-the-hell-out-of-your-neighbors this Hallow’een, we were out doing some fairly decent and safe science to impress local families. We had three experiments on the go: flame tests, alien blood and enzyme catalysed decomp of hydrogen peroxide. The flame tests were [...] I have written previously about our work identifying the contents of Blists Hill Victorian Pharmacy Jars (http://www.possibilitiesendless.com/?p=931), and we’ve pretty much solved the riddle of the jars. Briefly this Victorian Pharmacy exhibit has many jars filled with either the original and sometimes labelled contents, but possibly also poorly documented replacements made by well-meaning curators [...] Sciencegeist has set the challenge for a bloggy carnival for us chemists, aimed in part to combat ‘chemophobia’. You know, the ‘oh noes teh chemicalz iz teh badz’ attitude that’s pretty pervasive. I personally would just give up on the anti-chemical thing and move on, but that’s another blog post. The brief seems largely [...] Well last week was busy! National Science and Engineering week often falls at the wrong time in the academic year – middle of semester, surrounded by marking and other catastrophes. This year I’ve been fortunate to take part in two events, I’m a Scientist and Voice of the Future. I will freely [...] A while ago I wrote a blog post about a molecule I was particularly fond of as part of a chemistry meme (May 2010 http://www.possibilitiesendless.com/?p=186). I will not name the molecule for reasons that will become clear later. About 7 months later I noticed that my blog was getting a number of hits from [...] |
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