Chem 201 Archive – Alan Shusterman

Category: Labs

  • Download new HW & experience the Greek Festival

    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.

  • Feedback about lab notebooks

    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).
    (more…)

  • Where is tonight's LAB lecture?

    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)

  • Did You Lose Your Section?

    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. (more…)

  • What's on deck for Fall '09?

    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

    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).

  • Supersized ferrocene impossible?

    Ferrocene and acetylferrocene, the compounds featured in our current lab experiment, are examples of sandwich compounds or metallocenes. A metallocene of some sort has been made with every transition metal in existence, but double metallocenes in which two organic rings are fused together (see figure) have proved more elusive. The first ones were made in the 1970s, but chemists couldn’t figure out how to fit very many metals into the double metallocene structure.

    A recent article in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (J. Am. Chem. Soc., 2008, 130 (46), pp 15662-15677, web publication Oct 22, 2008) describes how chemists have solved these problems to make double metallocenes of V, Cr, Mn, Co, and Ni. Some of these complexes (V, Mn) seem to contain direct metal-metal bonds, while others (Cr, Co, Ni) do not.

    double metallocenes 8644scon_1.gif

    C&E News, Nov 3, 2008, p. 22

    Curiously, all attempts to make a double ferrocene were unsuccessful, so while ferrocene occupies a privileged place as the first metallocene to be made, double ferrocene may prove to be an impossible target. But who knows? Chemists love a challenge.