In today's global economy, the origin of the food we eat is becoming more and more difficult to identify. Verifying the authenticity of products to protect supply chains is a complicated problem that requires a multidisciplinary approach. Chemical authentication of foodstuffs often includes a mass spectrometer detector; however, they are costly…

Solution equilibria diagrams are excellent tools for understanding chemical speciation in multireaction chemical systems. They are usually plotted using software packages that efficiently perform advanced calculations, giving the possibility to graphically visualize thermodynamic and composition information. However, this approach frequently…

Computational thinking in physics has many different forms, definitions, and implementations depending on the level of physics or the institution it is presented in. To better integrate computational thinking in introductory physics, we need to understand what physicists find important about computational thinking in introductory physics. We…

Data-handling, processing, and analysis skills are an integral part of a chemist's skill set and, more generally, are highly sought by employers. We report a self-directed workshop to develop and advance these key skills using the popular spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel. Making use of its accessible user interface, various contextualized…

This paper presents the usage of an Excel spreadsheet for studying charged particle dynamics in the presence of uniform electric and magnetic fields. The equation of motion of the charged particle is developed under different conditions and the data is obtained in an Excel spreadsheet under variation of parameters such as the velocity of charged…

A bachelor's degree program in chemistry typically starts with basic concepts in mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Those principles are very important because they pave the ground for future advanced studies and, therefore, one needs to present them in a clear but rigorous way. One example is provided by the mathematical notion of an iterative…

A Microsoft Excel workbook has been developed to simplify the quantitative analysis of experimentally measured titration curves for diprotic and triprotic amino acids such as glycine, arginine, histidine, and glutamate. Students perform the titration, enter the data into the worksheet, and manually adjust the resulting pK[subscript a] values to…

In this work we discuss the intricacies of a simulation using the MS Excel spreadsheet that allows to study in detail the process of heat transfer between two reservoirs at different temperatures through a conducting rod when heat losses are neglected. The proposed physical model computes the time dependence of the reservoir temperatures and…

Harmonics arise naturally from the resonances in strings and pipes. A video demonstration (Ruiz 2016 "YouTube: Tuba Harmonics" (https://youtu.be/souhEzOP9c4)) is provided where a tubist (coauthor Holmes) produces a phenomenal 24 harmonics using a single tuba pipe length by controlling the buzz of his lips. The frequencies of the…

GRANTISM (GReenland and ANTarctic Ice Sheet Model) is an educational Excel™ model introduced by Pattyn (2006). Here, GRANTISM is amended to simulate the Svalbard-Barents-Sea Ice Sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum, an analogue for the contemporary West Antarctic Ice Sheet. A new name, "GRANTSISM," is suggested; the added S represents…

A fun activity is presented using singing wine glasses for introductory physics students. Students tune a white wine glass and a red wine glass to as many semitones as possible by filling the glasses with the appropriate amounts of water. A smart phone app is used to measure the frequencies of equal-temperament tones. Then plots of frequency…

A general systematic approach including ionic strength effects is proposed for the numerical calculation of concentrations of chemical species in multiequilibrium problems. This approach extends the versatility of the approach presented in a previous article and is applied using the Solver option of the Excel spreadsheet to solve real problems…

In enzyme kinetic studies, linear transformations of the Michaelis-Menten equation, such as the Lineweaver-Burk double-reciprocal transformation, present some constraints. The linear transformation distorts the experimental error and the relationship between "x" and "y" axes; consequently, linear regression of transformed data…

Higher education institutions are charged with creating one million more STEM professionals over the next decade, a 34% increase in undergraduate STEM degrees annually (PCAST 2012). Examining why college STEM courses manifest high attrition rates, interdependencies emerge that begin in early childhood education. Those of us in higher education…

In the teaching of physics at upper secondary school level (K10-K12), the students are generally taught to solve problems analytically, i.e. using the dynamics describing a system (typically in the form of differential equations) to compute its evolution in time, e.g. the motion of a body along a straight line or in a plane. This reduces the scope…