Recently in Labs Category

Lab continues to meet this week as normally scheduled.

Lab lecture on Thursday night, Nov 19, is cancelled.

The only lab operations scheduled for the following week, M-W, Nov 23-25, are wrapping up the acetylferrocene experiment. If students are unable to finish this experiment this week, they can perform any and all operations -- run the reaction, separate the compounds on a column, analyze the results by TLC, measure melting points, or make NMR samples for us -- they can do that next week during the scheduled lab periods.

Special request - my lab assistants will be in the lab starting at 1:10 PM. I will let them leave the lab, however, if no students show up by 1:30 PM. So please come on time. If you need to make up lab work, but can't get to the lab until after 1:30, please send me an email now so that I can pass this info along to my lab assistants. Thanks

As reported in lecture this evening, the lab report for this experiment will be due at the "end" of Monday, Nov 16. FYI "end" means before I arrive on Tuesday morning.

I forgot one vital piece of information concerning the lab report: what information needs to be printed out in your NMR spectrum.

Those of you who check the online lab calendar have probably wondered what is an NMR workshop?

Simple. It's classroom time devoted to studying Loudon, Chapter 13, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy.

The students in each lab session this week will spend 2.5-3 hours working on ChemActivities dealing with Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectroscopy. This will prepare you to print out and interpret your NMR spectrum of isopentyl acetate in the final hour of the lab session. So, in short, we will be doing classroom work and computer work this week, but no wet lab work.

The Monday and Tuesday lab sections will meet in Rm. 105 at 1:10 PM. The Wednesday lab section will meet in Rm. 301 at 1:30 PM (there will be a Chem 101 conference finishing up around that time so we will wait in the hallway until they are finished). After the classroom work, each lab section will move to the computer lab (Rm. 203) during the final hour of the lab.

One or two students may also need to wrap up work on the synthesis of isopentyl acetate this week. I'd appreciate it if these students would remind me of their situation so the instructors and lab assistants can plan accordingly.

I made two marks on each lab. Report indicates whether the written document was prepared properly. In-lab/Models indicates whether you followed directions reasonably well during the two lab periods.

A number of "unsatisfactory" Report grades were issued. Most of these were related to the graphs. Perhaps a graph was missing. Or perhaps the wrong data was plotted on one of the axes. Or sometimes the data table was missing. (There were many other smaller omissions, like missing lab partner name or missing/substandard reference for published value of pKa, but I didn't mark off for these.) If your Report grade was "unsatisfactory", submit a new and improved report to me by Friday, Oct 16, and I will reconsider your grade.

Salicylic acid experiment. You should go into lab on your own and perform the two activities needed to complete this experiment:

1. weigh your product
2. measure its melting "point"

These operations may be performed on any week day (9 AM - 5 PM) between now and the due date for the lab report: Friday, Oct 18, 5 PM. Work outside of these hours, or on weekends, is not permitted because of safety concerns.

Banana oil experiment. We will start, but not complete, the experiment next week. You can expect to get through the work-up and into the early phases of the distillation. Perhaps you can do even more. Most students will complete the distillation and subsequent characterization steps after Fall Break. To prepare for this lab, you should:

1. Do the usual: read background section in lab manual, prepare your lab notebook, print and complete pre-lab activity sheet
   
2. Acquaint yourself with the concepts of workup, extraction, washing, drying, proper use of separatory ("sep") funnels. The MIT video: Workup I (18 minutes) should be watched carefully. There is also helpful material in Padias.
3. Acquaint yourself with the concept of distillation. My slides are here. There is also helpful material in Padias.

Homework. The answers to HW #4 have been posted. My readers will do their best to get through these lengthy assignments asap, but they are both taking the Graduate Record Exams (GREs) this weekend and they need to prepare. I have given them additional time to read your work and this may delay return of your problems sets by 24 hours? We'll see.

The next problem set will be posted sometime tomorrow, but it will not be collected. Answers will be posted next week.

Bring model kit to lecture tomorrow. And please arrive on time since we will be performing a ChemActivity related to Chapter 6.

All kinds of tidbits to share as we enter the first weekend in October:

• Homework page has been updated with answers to #3 and problems for #4
• Several folks turned in lab notebooks with their lab reports. Yikes - I wasn't counting on that. I will try to get those notebooks returned to you during the weekend so that you can prepare them for lab next week. I'll send emails to specific individuals.
• The lab manual continues to need updates and I'm trying to catch up with as time allows. For example, I've spotted a number of references to last year's textbook ("Solomons & Fryhle") that need to be replaced with references to Loudon.
  
• Portland Greek Festival starts today and runs through Sunday. If you crave, or just want to try, good cheap Greek food, you can't go wrong by heading over there for a study break (eating on a budget? skip the "dinner" and buy a gyros or some baklava). It's an easy trip from campus - just take bus #75 north until you get to the Glisan traffic circle (aka The Joan of Arc Roundabout). Get off at the circle and walk 7 short blocks west to the Greek Orthodox church at the corner of NE 32nd & NE Glisan. If you would like to see the full menu, list of events, and schedule of Greek folk dance performances, follow the link to the official web site.
  

Now that I'm finished reading lab notebooks, I want to share a couple of general observations. The first and most important one is this: the lab notebooks were generally good. Most of them were prepared well, used effectively in lab, and succeeded as records of scientific work. Keeping a good notebook may not seem like much of an achievement, but it took a fair amount of time for you to read all of my instructions, consult the examples in Padias, look up data on compounds, and so on, so you have deservedly earned my praise. Well done.

Of course, I also saw some gaps here and there, but only three deserve special comment (I promise to be brief).

As you know, our morning lectures have moved to the Psych auditorium.

The Psych aud. is already committed to some other campus groups for Thursday evenings, so lab lectures will stay in Eliot 314, 6:10-7:00 Th.

There is a llab lecture tonite featuring Kathleen Fisher, the director of Environmental Health & Safety and important information about next week's lab schedule and safety procedures. See you tonite.

Some helpful safety links (also available from the lab manual's table of contents)

• Chem 201 safety quiz (complete*, bring to lab next week)
• Chemistry safety manual (read, print statement, sign, bring to lab next week)
  
• Environmental Health & Safety
  

The Registrar's Office has reassigned lab and/or conference sections for several students. Please check your class schedule this weekend to see whether it has been affected. If changes were made, they were made for a reason. You must attend your assigned section for now (note: labs do not meet this week), but there is a small chance (described below) that you can change your section again.

This site will be updated periodically during summer '09. You can still look at the entire site, including all of the posts from '08-09, but not much has changed yet. Major changes will get announced by adding to this post. If you have nothing better to do, check back every few days. [last changes posted 8/30/09, see below]

Pre-registration for fall

• You must complete the pre-requisites for Chem 201 before you can pre-register. That means if you took intro chem (the equivalent of Chem 101/102, lecture + lab) at another school this summer, you need to provide evidence of satisfactory completion of these courses to Reed's Registrar's Office before SOLAR will allow you to pre-register for Chem 201. This requirement may create some difficulties for summer students at PSU (and possibly elsewhere) because the PSU summer term ends on Wed, Aug 26 and pre-registration at Reed is Fri, Aug 28. If you bring me a signed note on Th-F, Aug 27-28, from your PSU chemistry instructor (email is also acceptable) that says you have completed PSU Chem 221/222/223 with grades of C- or better, I will allow you to pre-register for Chem 201 by overriding SOLAR. [posted 8/10/09]
  

Changes

• Idiosyncratic study tips updated [posted 8/30/09]
  
• Fast Facts pages have been updated [posted 8/24/09]
• New syllabus [posted 8/24/09]
• New lab schedule. Some (all?) navigation links within the lab manual have been updated. The four pages inside the Lab Info section have been updated and should be read by 201 students before the first lab. [posted 8/15/09]
• New exam schedule [posted 8/12/09]
  
• New homework schedule [posted 8/12/09]
  
• New textbook and study guide/solutions manual [posted 7/6/09]

Summer reading

• "The Promise of a Cure: 20 Years and Counting". The inability of gene therapy to deliver a treatment for cystic fibrosis and the role of conventional (small organic molecule) treatments is reviewed in this interesting, non-technical article (Science, 19 June 2009, 324, 1504-1507, listen to podcast interview with author Jennifer Couzin-Frankel).
• "Antibiotics in Nature: Beyond Biological Warfare". Scientists are challenging the conventional paradigm that fungi and bacteria use antibiotic molecules to kill off microbial competitors. According to these scientists, antibiotics could be used for communication and metabolism (Science, 26 June 2009, 324, 1637-1639).