A previous blog post shared information about the Chemical Heritage Foundation’s “It’s Elemental” video competition for high school students to celebrate the International Year of Chemistry. A recent report says that approximately 700 individuals and groups responded to their call for videos. Winners were notified this month. The grand-prize individual winner was Daniyal N. Khan of Berlin High School in Connecticut and the team competition was won by the Gadolonian Gladiators of Lincoln Southwest High School in Nebraska. To see these prize-winning videos and others and to vote for your favorite in the People’s Pick category (voting continues until noon EST, 3/23/11), visit their website.

My favorite part of any Chemical & Engineering News is the one-page column “Newscripts” that waits at the end of the issue, like a dessert after supper. It collects two or three short pieces related to science and tends to have an irreverent flavor. Take the January 10, 2011, column for example, with the subtitle “Fondue. Fruit Flies. Frustration and Felicity.” The three pieces then focused on a research group from a digestive diseases center investigating the best beverage to drink with cheese fondue, the use of flies to screen new sweetening ingredients, and a selection of 2010 referee quotes from the journal Environmental Microbiology.

It was this last piece that spurred this post. Having been deep in the review process for the Journal of Chemical Education this past decade, both from the point of view of a manuscript reviewer and as an associate editor reading comments returned by reviewers to make decisions about manuscripts, many these quotes went straight to my heart (and my funny bone). “Newscripts” highlighted five of the referee quotes, including “The lack of negative controls … results in the authors being lost in the funhouse. Unfortunately, I do not think they even realize this.” The much larger collection is available online. Some of my other favorites that highlight some of the ups and downs of the review process:

“Season’s Greetings! I apologise for my slow response but a roast goose prevented me from answering emails for a few days.”

“Always dear EMI takes care of its referees, providing them with entertainment for the holiday time in between Xmas and New Year. Plus the server shows, as usual, its inhuman nature and continues to send reminding messages. Well, between playing tennis on the Wii, eating and drinking, I found time and some strength of mind to do this work.”

“I agreed to review this Ms whilst answering e-mails in the golden glow of a balmy evening on the terrace of our holiday hotel on Lake Como. Back in the harsh light of reality in Belfast I realize that it’s just on the limit of my comfort zone and that it would probably have been better not to have volunteered.”

(from http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1462-2920.2010.02394.x/full, accessed Jan. 2011)

Do you peer review? If so, I thank you for volunteering your time and effort. A constructive, thorough review is a thing of beauty and of great benefit to editors and authors, along with the eventual readers who will see a final article that was improved through an author’s response to well-thought-out comments.

Happy International Year of Chemistry! 1-1-11 marks the start of a year-long focus on the “achievements of chemistry and its contributions to the well-being of humankind”, with the theme “Chemistry—our life, our future”.

The American Chemical Society has launched an online tool to help us learn more about these achievements and contributions. “365: Chemistry for Life” is an easy way to get daily dose of chemistry. Each day of the year is associated with a photo or figure and description of a particular event, person, process, etc. related to chemistry. They can also be sorted according to the four quarterly themes selected by ACS for the year: energy, environment, health, and materials.

The 365 photo for today has the caption “Chemical Abstracts First Publishes in 1907″, with a description of the Chemical Abstracts Service and what they do. Tomorrow’s entry is a close-up photo of walnuts and a discussion of their potential benefit against prostate cancer.

This tool could be a great way to start a class. For example, based on the photograph, what do students think it might have to do with chemistry? Then, the caption and brief description can fill in details.

Sounds like Washington, D.C., was the place to be just a couple weeks ago. The USA Science & Engineering Festival was held on the National Mall, among other locations over the weekend of October 23 and 24, 2010. From their Website, the mission of the festival is “to re-invigorate the interest of our nation’s youth in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational and entertaining science gatherings in the United States.” Rudy Baum, editor of the American Chemical Society (ACS) publication Chemical & Engineering News, posted several images from the day at the C&EN’s editor’s blog. Based on the crowds and some of the engaging activities, it looks like it was a success. I’d be interested to try the 3D geometry activity pictured at the American Mathematical Society booth. One image from the ACS booth is extremely familiar to me. It shows children swirling food coloring through shaving cream, in preparation for marbling paper. This inexpensive activity is a fun way for students to learn about polarity concepts; it appeared in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2007 and has become a signature activity for us to share at exhibit booths and during teacher workshops. Even after at least several hundreds of times doing the activity myself, it never ceases to amaze. A free sample copy of this activity is available at http://pubs.acs.org/page/jceda8/classroom.html. Terri Taylor of ACS reported that during the festival, they marbled at least 2,000 pieces of paper, went through at least 36 bottles of food coloring, and a sizable number of 120 cans of shaving cream. She says “The oohs and aahs were worth it all.”

The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) offers Web-based seminars throughout the year that highlight different areas of science. NSTA describes the seminars as “free, 90-minute, live professional development experiences that use online learning technologies to allow participants to interact with nationally acclaimed experts, NSTA Press authors, and scientists, engineers, and educaiton specialists from NSTA partner organizations.” In the past, both the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) as well as the American Chemical Society (ACS) have offered seminars through a partnership with NSTA. A schedule of seminars for 2010-2011 are listed at http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/webseminars.aspx, along with many archived seminars which are available for viewing after the live event has occurred.

ACS has a green chemistry-themed Web seminar on the schedule for November 9, 2010 at 6:30-8:00 p.m. Eastern time. The seminar “Green Chemistry—Is There a Place for it in High School Chemistry?” will “explain the basic principles of green chemistry and explore how they can be applied to typical high school courses” and will discuss ways teachers can integrate this additional topic into an already-packed curriculum. Registration and more information about the seminar is available at http://learningcenter.nsta.org/products/symposia_seminars/ACS/webseminar2.aspx.

Last week the President spoke at a White House Summit on Community Colleges (information, fact sheets, and a video of the closing session are available at http://bit.ly/arp7X8). Chaired by Dr. Jill Biden, a community college educator for 17 years and the Vice President’s wife, the summit was designed to “highlight the critical role that community colleges play in developing America’s workforce and reaching our educational goals”.

As a result of the summit, there has been increased attention to the role of community colleges in linking K-12 and higher education (for example, see a report on the summit at http://bit.ly/a9gXJy). This has led to calls for better integration among all three groups of educators. That is definitely a goal worth pursuing, because better communication could address issues of whether students are adequately prepared for college work, how secondary and tertiary curricula could better be meshed, and how transfers in either direction between community colleges and four-year institutions could be made seamless and easier for students to negotiate.

The goal of a single, integrated educational system from K-16 and beyond is well worth pursuing. Its benefits for students and for the society as a whole are great and it is a worthy goal for us to pursue. Let’s see what we can contribute toward that goal.

About Community Colleges Teaching by Choice: Addressing the National Tea…

At the recent American Chemical Society (ACS) national meeting in Boston, I spent an evening on the exhibit show floor. Walking the floor at an ACS meeting always leaves me a little bit wanting, as my current stage in life and employment does not require the purchase of cutting-edge instrumentation, specialty glassware, or textbooks. However, toward the end of the evening, I ran into Gordon Bain. We were both previously at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he as director of the general chemistry labs, I during the Madison portion of my time with the Journal of Chemical Education. Gordon now works for ThermoFisher Scientific, and at their booth, he showed me the next generation of the “Spec 20″, which I remembered from my undergraduate days in the chemistry laboratory. As he pointed out the features of the “Spec 200″, which he knew intimately as head of the design team for the instrument, I was struck by the number of design features that were related to his knowledge of how the instrument was typically used (and abused) in the lab by students. His knowledge from inside the experience and its actual use allowed features to be built into the new instrument that took care of previous problems. For example, Gordon brought up the times when students were instructed to “Place the sample in the instrument”, and then poured the liquid sample directly into the instrument, rather than placing the cuvette with its sample into the instrument. The Spec 200 has a solution for that. There was a solution to make it easy to ensure that the instrument would never have to be near running water, but still allowed students to easily prep liquid samples. The design even paid attention to the typical budget constraints of an educator. The instrument has a Spec 20 emulator built into it for teachers who would like to purchase and use one, but cannot replace all of the lab instruments at once, and still need to use the older Spec 20s.

Designing something from the inside out. Isn’t that what chemical education is? Finding out what to teach and how to best design instruction to minimize the misconceptions and the mistakes. And the best way to know it is to study and engage in actual practice—work at it from the inside out.

Letters written to Francis Crick and from Crick to others have resurfaced. The letters highlight rivalries between Watson and Crick at Cambridge University and Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin at King’s C0llege, London, with the specter of Linus Pauling in the background. The British researchers wanted desperately to find the DNA structure before Pauling–but not enough to collaborate with each other. A description of some of what the newly found letters reveal is at http://nyti.ms/c4GAfh. An article in the journal Nature (http://bit.ly/bIMWXO) by the discoverers of the letters provides more information and some facsimile copies.

Though much has already been written about the discovery of DNA, letters from and to someone who was instrumental in the original discovery can serve as excellent pedagogical tools. The fact that scientists share the rivalries and failings of everyone else can be nicely illustrated by using the words of scientists themselves–especially scientists as competitive and driven as those who discovered the DNA structure.

I recommend these articles highly.

The discovery of the double helix structure of …

A recent article in the New York Times (http://nyti.ms/93t30y) gives a recipe for making edible nanostructures. It requires sugar (gamma-cyclodextrin), a salt (potassium benzoate), 190 proof ethyl alcohol, and water. The recipe involves mixing the sugar, salt, and water in a small glass or plastic cup, placing the cup into a larger glass, cup, or bowl, adding the alcohol to the larger container, and then enclosing everything air-tight in a plastic bag or container. After standing for a week, cubic crystals several millimeters on a side grow inside the cup. These crystals are built from metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) with many tiny pores. On the atomic scale the crystals consist of rigid structures with lots of empty space inside lots of tiny compartments. As a result the structures have lots of surface area on which other molecules can adsorb and where reactions might be catalyzed. The surface area is more than 1300 square meters per gram of crystal.

The abstract of a paper describing these nanostructures written by scientists at Northwestern University reads: “Take a spoonful of sugar (gamma-cyclodextrin to be precise), a pinch of salt (most alkali metal salts will suffice), and a swig of alcohol (Everclear fits the bill), and you have a robust, renewable, nanoporous (Langmuir surface area 1320 square meters per gram) metal-organic framework for breakfast.” (Everclear 190-proof alcohol is available in some states in the U.S. and some Canadian provinces, but not others; see http://bit.ly/aJPCPS. Clearly such concentrated alcohol needs to be handled with care.) The paper is slated for publication in the journal Angewandte Chemie in November.

In addition to revealing that scientists have a sense of humor, the edible nanostructures seem to me to provide many opportunities for students to experiment–as a science fair project or even an in-class project. Close supervision would be required because alcohol is involved, but otherwise all of the ingredients are safe and edible. It appears that a broad range of salts could be tried (NaCl and KCl certainly) to see whether the crystals form. Once the nanostructures have been synthesized, students could experiment with adsorption of other substances. The article quotes chef Wylie Dufresne regarding various ideas for using the nanostructures to encapsulate other foodsutffs. For example, they might provide a way to make crunchy soy sauce!

What ideas do you have for using edible nanostructures as a pedagogical tool?

Size Matters: Introduction to Nanoscience

At the recent ACS National Meeting in Boston I attended a symposium on global climate change. The first speaker challenged educators to provide better background for students to understand the science of the atmosphere and climate. In a democracy, that seems absolutely essential, but how many of us are really including these things in what we teach? There is so much to teach and so little time to teach it. How can we find time to discuss things like chemical reactions in the atmosphere, absorption of infrared radiation by molecules, and many other topics that relate to issues our society faces?

I was reminded of this when I ran across an article from the New York Times titled “Europe Finds Clean Fuel in Trash; U.S. Sits Back”. In Denmark trash is a clean source of energy. In the U.S. it goes into landfills. Granted, the latter may eventually become the mining sites of the future, but what a waste of waste! We could be using that energy now. Also, the usage of energy in Denmark, where trash incinerators are located in residential communities, is an excellent adjunct to discussions of entropy and Gibbs energy–the waste heat from the incinerators is piped to houses surrounding them and provides heating in addition to the electricity generated by the plant.

Understanding thermodynamics is essential to understanding why the incinerators make sense. Lack of such understanding is likely to lead to suspicion that the experts don’t have it right, which seems endemic to political discussion in the U.S. at this time. The inability to comprehend science seems to permeate our society, which is a serious indictment of science education in the U.S. (It is probably a good deal more serious than the low scores by U.S. students on international standardized texts, which are usually quoted to indicate how bad things are.)

Another aspect of the New York Times article is that other countries are developing the technologies of the future and we are not. Despite our “wide open spaces”, which make it easier to landfill out of sight of most of the public, waste to energy plants make more sense (a 2009 study by the EPA strongly favored such plants over landfills for non-recyclable waste on the basis of  reducing greenhouse gas emissions, alleviating local pollution, and providing home-grown energy). Eventually waste to energy is going to be recognized as a much better long-term solution, but the U.S. is going to be behind in development and likely will need to license from other countries technology that could have been developed here and could have contributed to our GDP instead of Denmark’s or some other country’s.

Improving science education (and specifically chemistry education) has far-reaching, long-term effects. We are concentrating too much on short-term gains (both in the classroom and in society at large) to the detriment of gains that will benefit our children and their children. That’s really unfortunate. We can do lots better.

Energy and Recycling