In elementary and secondary classrooms, educators use plants for various reasons. Plants are often used during learning activities and science experiments. Also, educators frequently decorate their classrooms with plants to make the room more inviting and comfortable. Few new educators have been informed of the potential hazards of commonly known…

A take-home experiment kit has been developed to reinforce the concepts in a first year physics course that both on and off campus students from a variety of educational backgrounds can successfully use. The kit is inexpensive and is composed of easy to obtain items. The experiments conducted with the kit are directed experiments that require…

In this paper, we discuss a simple apparatus and accompanying class activity that we have developed to illustrate the Biot-Savart law. Since students in introductory electricity and magnetism courses often find this law a mathematical mystery, we feel that a simple experiment such as this will provide the students a better understanding of the…

This short article describes some useful and quick applications of a cooking electronic balance. Newton's third law, Archimedes buoyancy and an estimate of relative density are accomplished in a very simple way. (Contains 1 figure.)

We have developed a multistep inorganic synthesis experiment for our second-year undergraduate teaching laboratory that introduces students to modern organometallic chemistry. The ligands are prepared in two simple steps and the preparation of an air-stable silver carbene complex is accomplished in the third step. The students are introduced to…

A classroom demonstration detailing the procedure for the separation of a ternary mixture consisting of intensely colored compounds using silica gel column chromatography is described. The audience can follow the compounds during their passage through the column as individual, colored bands while learning about different tools and techniques used…

An experiment for the undergraduate organic chemistry laboratory is described in which students synthesize the commercial antidepressant drug moclobemide, marketed under the trade name Manerix. This one-step synthesis starts from commercially available material and produces moclobemide in high yield. The product is initially isolated as its…

A four-part experiment that leads to the synthesis of a cyclopentadienyl chloro-nickel(II) complex bearing a N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC) ligand is presented. In the first part, the preparation of 1,3-bis-(2,4,6-trimethylphenyl)imidazolium chloride (IMes[middle dot]HCl) in a one-pot procedure by reaction of 2,4,6-trimethylaniline with…

Green chemistry has become an important area of concern for all chemists from practitioners in the pharmaceutical industry to professors and the students they teach and is now being incorporated into lectures of general and organic chemistry courses. However, there are relatively few green chemistry experiments that are easily incorporated into…

In this laboratory activity, students are introduced to the synthesis of an albendazole metabolite obtained by a sulfide oxidation reaction. Albendazole as well as its metabolite, albendazole sulfoxide, are used as anthelmintic drugs. The oxidation reagent is H[subscript 2]O[subscript 2] in acetic acid. The reaction is environmental friendly,…

The acylation of ferrocene is a common reaction used in organic laboratories to demonstrate Friedel-Crafts acylation and the purification of compounds using column chromatography. This article describes an acylation of ferrocene experiment that is more eco-friendly than the conventional acylation experiment. The traditional experiment was modified…

This article presents a lab experience to study detergency from a physicochemical point of view intended for undergraduate students. By means of a simple experimental device, we analyze the influence of the surfactant concentration in both distilled water and tap water. Our method is based on the measurement of diffuse reflectances of polyester…

Many physical chemistry lab courses include an experiment in which students measure surface tension as a function of surfactant concentration. In the traditional experiment, the data are fit to the Gibbs isotherm to determine the molar area for the surfactant, and the critical micelle concentration is used to calculate the Gibbs energy of micelle…

The cryophorus dramatically demonstrates the cooling effect of evaporation. This article describes some simple and easy-to-make cryophoruses, ideal for demonstrating evaporative cooling to students at all levels. The most dramatic effects occurred with cyclohexane and benzene, with water generally freezing more slowly. (Contains 4 notes, 2 tables,…

In this lab experiment, screen-printed electrode strips are used to illustrate the essential concepts of electrochemistry, giving students an opportunity to explore metal electrodeposition processes. In the past, metal electrodeposition experiments were seldom included in general chemistry labs because of the difficulty of maintaining separate…