We’ve made it through a week of classes so far. I’m very excited about this new approach I’ve adopted for my organic chemistry classes. In the past I never made reading assignments and sort of assumed that most students hadn’t read the book before we talked about things in class. I made these assumptions because I remember how I was as a student and because I have been informed by previous students about their textbook reading habits. I’m aware, however, that my students will need to be better readers in order to be successful as scientists, attorneys, physicians, or other professionals.
My new approach involves assigning reading before class and having students answer questions about the reading before we discuss the issues in class. Actually, I only give them until midnight the night before class so that I have time to review their answers in preparation for class. It’s kept me on my toes generating the questions and then reading all the answers before class meets. The students have responded well, even though Moodle (the learning management system) hasn’t been very responsive.
This weekend we’re changing servers in order to improve Moodle’s performance. So, I decided not to assign any reading questions for my students to answer. One of the students actually requested questions to answer. I’m surprised and delighted to know that he recognizes how much the reading has helped him even after only a couple of classes.
Today we were talking about Diels-Alder reactions. The level of student understanding was so high that we actually spent a fair amount of time discussing frontier molecular orbital theory, something I’ve never had the opportunity to do in teaching second semester organic in my previous 19 years as a faculty member! I am happy that I decided to implement this new teaching strategy.
Like many other Americans, I watched a fireworks display earlier this month when our country celebrated Independence day. The display was impressive, with so many colors and patterns to behold. After I became a chemistry professor I noticed a change in the thoughts running through my mind as I watch the colorful explosions. What combinations of salts, fuels, and oxidizers are used to create the different patterns of flashes and streaks that shoot through the air? I recently read an article in C & E News that helped answer some of my questions on the subject. (As you may notice, the article itself isnt’ recent, but I sometimes get behind on my reading…..)
When I teach general chemistry or chemistry for liberal arts majors, I usually do a demo that I think of as flames with salts. It involves several Petri dishes with different salts in them, into which I pour methyl alcohol. Then I set the methanol on fire. The methanol flames show different colors due to the salts. My favorites are strontium (red), boron (green), and copper (green). I perform this demo when we’re talking about Bohr’s model of the atom, because it was this kind of experimental evidence that Bohr sought to explain with his model.
The C&E News article doesn’t talk about the Bohr model, though. It discusses the pollutants released from fireworks displays and how chemists are trying to make safer chemicals so that we don’t wind up polluting our environment. As it turns out for most once-a-year displays, the trace pollutants don’t add significantly to what is already in the environment (other than the smoke and particulate matter in the air immediately following the display). More significant problems occur when fireworks are used indoors or in places like Disneyland, where the fireworks displays occur on a regular basis. Disneyland’s neighbors in Anaheim complained, and the folks at Disneyland sought advice from Los Alamos National Laboratory. The engineered solution involved using compressed air to shoot the fireworks up, minimizing the need for black powder for that job. Thus, there was less smoke and the neighbors were happy.
I just finished reading Twinkie, Deconstructed by Steve Ettlinger. As a chemist, I found it fascinating to learn so much about all the processes that are used to turn wheat into flour. As a cook, I found it interesting to learn about the different kinds of wheat and hard wheat is better for bread flour while soft wheat is better for cake flour. And I finally understand why cakes and pies made from all purpose flour just don’t taste right!
One process that was particularly interesting to me was how soybean oil is obtained from soybeans. I had imagined it might be similar to the expreller pressing that happens with olives to make olive oil. Instead, the soybean oil is extracted from the beans using a hydrocarbon solvent – kind of like using a Soxhlet extraction! The amazing thing is that they do it on a factory scale, which is particularly dangerous since the extraction solvent is quite flammable. So they have to have special equipment and even tools that don’t create any sparks!
Another process that I found interesting was the synthesis of leavening. Ettlinger explained what is meant by the term “double acting” that I’ve seen on the baking powder containers all my life and wondered about a little. He explained how calcium sulfate is mined in Oklahoma and how monocalcium phosphate is formed. My mom would probably be distressed that the materials that are used for drywall and glass are the same ones that are used in Twinkies. As a chemist, I had already assumed that to be the case. What I didn’t realize is that some salts (sodium carbonate and calcium sulfate) are practically pure when they are mined from the ground.
A few weeks ago I had some trouble with my smart phone, which runs Windows Mobile. It wouldn’t sync with my computers. My attempts to get it to sync to the office computer resulted in the phone losing all of the information in my contacts. I realized the contacts were gone when I was on my way to a lunch meeting and wanted to contact a student about a makeup lab. The numbers were gone – all 1200+ of them. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the numbers that I was worried about. I also keep my grocery list and my calendar on my phone, in addition to all the other to-do list items.
I was devastated, and realized I needed a new system. I spent the better part of two days searching for alternate software that would allow me to sync the phone with the computer. I felt very vulnerable and irritable during those two days, realizing how dependent I am on the organizer features of my phone. Maybe the problems were caused by my insistence on using two different computers and wanting current information on both of them. It doesn’t seem like a unreasonable demand to me. (And it used to work when I was using my Palm Treo.) Finally, I found a solution, thanks to Google and the cloud. I hadn’t been using Google to keep track of all of my contacts or of my calendar. But thank goodness Google Sync will do just that. I used some trial software whose name I don’t remember in order to get the contacts to Google initially. Now my computers and my phone all talk to Google. They do it automatically without me thinking. What would we do without Google? What happens if something changes and we can no longer depend on Google? That’s a scary thought.
A few weeks ago I toured the Maker’s Mark distillery. It was interesting to learn how they make bourbon. The tour guide referred to the liquid formed in the first step of the production as beer. I had never thought about how closely related beer is to distilled spirits. During the making of bourbon, the mixture of grains is fermented, along with added yeast and remnants of the previous batch that are left in the container, kind of like with sourdough bread. After fermentation, they distill the liquid to increase the alcohol content. At Labrot & Graham they distil it three separate times. (Their stills are made of copper, so they don’t exactly resemble the stills we build from glassware with ground glass joints in organic lab.) Finally the colorless alcohol is transferred to oak barrels that have been charred on the inside, where it’s aged for years. The aging in those charred barrels is what turns the liquid from something like vodka into the amber colored bourbon.
Along a similar line, I recently read a blurb in C & E News about how they make gin. I had learned in previous conversations with chemists that you can make gin by distilling ethanol with juniper berries. I guess they put the juniper berries in the still pot – I haven’t ever seen it done. Or maybe they let the alcohol steep over the berries for awhile to extract the essential oils. The article I read said that they added juniper berries plus several things to give the gin its flavor. What I found most interesting is that the gin quality is improved by carrying out the distillation under vacuum. As any junior chemistry major can tell you, vacuum distillations occur at a lower temperature than those carried out at atmospheric pressure. This lower temperature keeps the essential oils from decomposing into monoterpenes like alpha pinene, which apparently is not consistent with high quality gin.
Yesterday I learned that somebody close to me is a victim of identity theft. I’m sad about the hassles she’ll be enduring while she deals with the mess, because nobody needs extra stress. At the same time, I’m taking steps to minimize the chances it might happen to me. Step one was to enroll with Opt-out Prescreen, which stops those annoying pre-authorized credit card offers. Identity thieves who manage to swipe one of these from your mail can easily sign you up for another credit card. Step two is to freeze the credit reports. State Security Freeze Laws describes the state laws governing freezes on individual credit reports. If you’re not the victim of identity theft, you’ll probably have to pay in order to have your credit report frozen. But with a frozen credit report, it will be tougher for somebody to sign up for a new credit card in your name. I think the cost is worth it. In order to freeze your credit report, you’ll have to send letters to the three big credit reporting agencies. Again, I think the effort is worth it for the additional peace of mind.
I’ve been reading a lot about the cool new technological advances that might be used in education recently. Wikis, Blogs, Distance Learning, Google Docs, Facebook – the options can be a little intimidating. I’ve been renewing lots of old acquaintances using Facebook and thinking about a wide variety of issues by reading blogs. Today I read an extremely interesting post from the IU Chemical Informatics Journal Club. First of all, I think it’s awfully cool for a journal club to have its own blog. I remember those Tuesday evenings in grad school when we had journal club meetings. The purpose of the whole thing seemed to be to encourage us as grad students to read the literature carefully and to give us practice presenting in front of a friendly audience. As a faculty member, I have a different perspective on the journal clubs because I now have the energy to be curious about new things. Teaching at a small liberal arts college means I’m not likely to encounter a journal club devoted to the niche of my current research interests (or maybe no journal clubs at all…..). So I really appreciated seeing this journal club on Chemical Blogspace. Today I read a post about userscripts, published by some of the folks involved in the Blue Obelisk project. A userscript is a browser plug-in that allows the browser user to add specific additional information to the page that she is viewing. One of the examples given in the article is Amazon searches that provide prices of a book from competing retailers. What a cool idea! I’m going to need to spend some time exploring this idea further…..
While I love to read, I don’t usually choose biographies. My mom gave me Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson, so I thought I’d give it a chance. I’ve seen things recently suggesting that Einstein had Asperger Syndrome, and that probably contributed to my interest. As a chemist and a teacher, I figure I should know more about scientists – their lives, their science, their roles in society. I enjoyed the book immensely. I can’t really compare it to other biographies, because I’m afraid I might not have ever read one unless you count school assignments. What was nice about it was that it didn’t only talk about Einstein’s life – it talked about his science. And the really cool part of the discussions of his science was that Isaacson took the time to show the process of science. It’s slow and there are a lot of dead ends, followed paths that don’t lead anywhere. It’s nice to know that those bunny trails in science happen to even the best scientists.
C&EN’s What’s That Stuff? column always has interesting articles. Or maybe it’s that, as a chemist, I like knowing about the chemicals found in materials that I use every day. Their article on Oil Paints was enlightening for me, particularly since I have several relatives who are artists. It sounds like the artists of previous generations were also chemists, mixing their own paints by combining pigments with the oils to suspend them. Then they changed the texture of the paint by adding soaps or waxes. Some pigments (phthalocyanine blue and green) are less soluble in oil, so the paints can be thinner and more difficult to use. Luckily for artists of today, paint factories can add materials to stabilize the paints using those difficult pigments. All this thinking about painting reminds me of a young chemist I know who wants to go into art restoration. It sounds like a fascinating field.
Science Daily reports that Disinfectants Can Make Bacteria Resistant to Treatment. Using soaps and other household products that contain triclosan and other biocides creates environments that favor the individual bacteria that are already resistant. Those bacteria are the only ones that manage to survive and reproduce. The result is that all the remaining bacteria are resistant to the biocide. Many of those biocides are similar to antibiotics that humans take when they suffer from infections. Bacteria often carry these genes in plasmids, where they can be easily exchanged with other bacteria they encounter. The result is that the environment is teeming with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics. Perhaps the scariest part is that multiple resistance genes are found on the same plasmid, so that bacteria can be resistant to antibiotics that they have never encountered. The widespread use of antibacterial dish soaps, hand soaps, toothpastes, etc. has led to the rise of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics in our environment. Another source of resistant bacteria is the agricultural use of antibiotics as growth promoters in animal feed. It’s enough to make me think about becoming vegetarian.