Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are among the most common visualizations used by chemists in both academic and industrial settings, where they serve as both representations of submicroscopic entities and tools that support social discourse. The ability to use words to communicate about features within NMR spectra is thus an essential…

A new undergraduate inorganic chemistry laboratory experiment is presented. An introduction of the spectrochemical series and ligand exchange is explored using the coordination complex dirhodium tetraacetate, Rh[subscript 2](OAc)[subscript 4]. Students have measured the absorption spectra of the Rh[subscript 2] complex in the presence of various…

In selecting from a repertoire of traditional kinetics experiments, an instructor often has to choose among having students gain experience with the graphical method, the method of initial rates, or a temperature-dependent experiment in which students construct an Arrhenius plot. This paper presents an environmentally friendly bleaching reaction…

Low cost, open-source analytical instrumentation has the potential to increase educational outcomes for students and enable large-scale citizen science projects. Many of these instruments rely on smartphones to collect the data, mainly because they can effectively leverage a dramatic price-to-performance ratio of the optical sensors. However,…

Undergraduate educational settings often struggle to provide students with authentic biologically or medically relevant situations and problems that simultaneously improve their understanding of physics. Through exercises and laboratory activities developed in an elective Physics in Biomedicine course for upper-level biology or pre-health majors…

A biophysical-chemistry experiment, based on the reflectance spectroscopy for calculating the absorption and scattering coefficients of leaves is described. The results show that different plants species exhibit different values for both the coefficients because of their different pigment composition.

To help students develop an understanding of the proper use and function of spectrographs and monochromators we describe a student-assembled spectrograph using a "webcam" detector. The apparatus also works well as a low-cost demonstration, helping students make connections between an atomic spectrum observed by eye and a plot of the relative…