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 […]

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” […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

John Moore’s June 14, 2010, post to this blog described recent changes to the Journal of Chemical Education. The decision was made to discontinue posting items to this blog that were published in JCE, such as the monthly Especially for High School Teachers column, which had previously formed a large part of the content on […]

The National Academies (including the National Academy of Science) in cooperation with several other groups are working on new science education standards that they intend will be adopted by all states. A major goal of such a project is to consolidate the many different sets of state science standards that arose in the wake of […]

Safety in science laboratories, especially chemistry laboratories, should always be a foremost concern. There is always more that can be done to assure that students in science laboratories, both research and teaching, can carry out experiments without accident. This week Chemical & Engineering News, the magazine that goes to all members of the American Chemical […]

How many of you have had students use the ideas of others inappropriately? Plagiarism has become easier on the Web and many people are not aware of what proper behavior is. A nice collection of online tools for detecting plagiarism is available at http://www.guidetoonlineschools.com/online-teaching/plagiarism#q. These will be useful if you have made clear to students […]

. As recently as a few years ago it was popular to regard nanoscience and nanotechnology as fads that would pass. I recall, for example, being chided by some for using the term “nanoscale” in a first-year college chemistry textbook. But this is one fad that is not passing–at least as measured by the rapidly […]