The continued downward spiral of enrollment in physical sciences in the USA and Europe has science educators concerned on both sides of the Atlantic. Physics has been particularly hard-hit, with the percentage of students choosing to major in the subject at the lowest level in decades. University physics has a reputation as a difficult, abstract…

Concerns are growing regarding the availability of sustainable energy sources due to a rapidly growing human population and a better understanding of climate change. In recent years, the United States has focused much attention on developing domestic energy sources, which include coal-bed methane (CBM). There are vast deposits of the natural gas…

We present calculations of ion-atom collisions using a partial-wave expansion of the projectile wavefunction. Most calculations of ion-atom collisions have typically used classical or plane-wave approximations for the projectile wavefunction, since partial-wave expansions are expected to require prohibitively large numbers of terms to converge…

The equations of motion for electromechanical systems are traced back to the fundamental Lagrangian of particles and electromagnetic fields, via the Darwin Lagrangian. When dissipative forces can be neglected the systems are conservative and one can study them in a Hamiltonian formalism. The central concepts of generalized capacitance and…

Chromosomal aneuploidy, a deviation from an exact multiple of an organism's haploid chromosome number, is a difficult concept for students to master. Aneuploidy arising from chromosomal non-disjunction (NDJ) is particularly problematic for students, since it arises in the context of meiosis, itself a challenging subject. Students learning NDJ are…

As an alternative to the "thermodynamics first" or "quantum first" approaches to the physical chemistry curriculum, the statistical definition of entropy and the Boltzmann distribution are introduced in the first days of the course and the entire two-semester curriculum is then developed from these concepts. Once the tools of statistical mechanics…

A simple spreadsheet program is presented that can be used by undergraduate students to calculate the lattice-site distributions in solids. A major strength of the method is the natural way in which the correct number of ions or atoms are present, or absent, at specific lattice distances. The expanding-cube method utilized is straightforward to…

To find the point between two massive spherical bodies at which their gravitational fields cancel is an apparently simple problem usually found in introductory physics textbooks. However, by noting that such a point does not exist when the distance between the spheres is small and one of the masses is much smaller than the other--e.g., between the…

In this paper, a procedure is presented that will allow (i) the power and (ii) the energy of a pulsed and tuneable TEA CO[subscript 2] laser to be optimized. This type of laser represents a significant improvement in performance and portability. Combining a pulse mode with a grating tuning facility, it enables us to scan the working wavelength…

Water is the ideal green solvent for organic reactions. However, most organic molecules are insoluble in it. Herein, we report a laboratory module that takes advantage of this property. The Passerini reaction, a three-component coupling involving an isocyanide, aldehyde, and carboxylic acid, typically requires [similar to] 24 h reaction times in…

During 2007 all Danish university curricula were reformulated to explicitly state course objectives due to the adoption of a new Danish national grading scale which stipulated that grades were to be given based on how well students meet explicit course objectives. The Faculties of Science at University of Aarhus and University of Southern Denmark…

The flight trajectory of a water rocket can be reasonably calculated if the magnitude of the drag coefficient is known. The experimental determination of this coefficient with enough precision is usually quite difficult, but in this paper we propose a simple free-fall experiment for undergraduate students to reasonably estimate the drag…

This new biochemistry laboratory course moves through a progression of experiments that generates a platform for guided inquiry-based experiments. RNase One gene is isolated from prokaryotic genomic DNA, expressed as a tagged protein, affinity purified, and tested for activity and substrate specificity. Student pairs present detailed explanations…

In this experiment, physical science students measured the mass of several soda cans, measured the mass and volume of water displaced when these cans were placed in water, and determined whether these cans sank or floated in water. Then, the students plotted graphs of the mass of displaced water versus the volume of displaced water, the mass of…

A series of experiments involving the synthesis and characterization of a benzene-1,3,5-tricarboxamide derivative and its self-assembly properties are reported. These laboratory experiments combine organic synthesis, self-assembly, and physical characterization and are designed for upper-level undergraduate students to introduce the topic of…