Yet another great reason to know and understand the Periodic Table…

U.S. Discovers Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan – NYTimes.com: “The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.”

Wow.

The section on Tony Stark’s homemade particle accelerator is particularly interesting…

Iron Man 2’s Science & Tech Are Grounded in Reality—Mostly | 80beats | Discover Magazine: “Like a lot of summer blockbusters, this sequel stretches the laws of physics and the capabilities of modern technology. But, admirably, a lot of the tech in Iron Man 2 is grounded in fact.”

BIG news…

The Great Beyond: New element ‘ununseptium’ plugs hole in periodic table: “Chemists have managed to create a new massively heavy element by smashing together atoms of calcium and berkelium.

A new paper by Yuri Oganessian of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia has been accepted by Physical Review Letters. It announces ‘the discovery of a new chemical element with atomic number Z=117’.”

We’ve been searching for 117 for a long while.

It will have a new name in the next 10 years or so (it’s a long process), but it’s great to have ununseptium on the chart now.

Fascinating how relevant our studies of isotopes can be to “everyday life”…

Shortage Slows a Program to Detect Nuclear Bombs – NYTimes.com: “WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security has spent $230 million to develop better technology for detecting smuggled nuclear bombs but has had to stop deploying the new machines because the United States has run out of a crucial raw material, experts say.

The ingredient is helium 3, an unusual form of the element that is formed when tritium, an ingredient of hydrogen bombs, decays. But the government mostly stopped making tritium in 1989. “

If you are in Robotics this semester, we briefly discussed this on Friday…

New Clues Discovered to Detect Alien Worlds (A Weekend Feature): “The key is lithium.  A stellar spectography survey of over five hundred stars reveals that known-planet-bearers, including our own Sun, have less than a hundredth of the lithium of ‘barren’ stars.  Stars don’t produce much lithium in their fusion reactions, so most share the same proportion of the element, which was created at the beginning of the universe.  But some stars seem to destroy their stock, fusing it into other elements, and a European team have found that they all have one thing in common: planets.”

I love lithium.

Check out the assignments calendar and you’ll see that the Journal Article due date has been moved to Friday December 4, 2009 and will count as part of your exam grade.

That is due to the web being down at school today and the possibility that it will be down more this week.

In the meantime, we’ll be working on our intro to energy (which is a bridge to what we are studying in the Spring).

See you tomorrow!

Here are the 10 problems we started on today (click).

Additionally, you can try your hand on the interactive balancing activity site here:

Element Balancing Activity

Let me know if you have any questions!

Today we continued our studies of Antoine Lavoisier and his importance to chemistry (and many other areas).

Here is a link to the reading that we covered in class on the life of Lavoisier.

Additionally, here’s a link to the Wikipedia article we discussed which has a couple of fantastic pictures relating to Mr. Lavoisier and his experiments.

Remember, your homework is due tomorrow. In case you forgot…

Your Homework:
Find 10 important points about Lavoisier from our conversation in class or from your own readings of their linked texts.

Write/type/blog those points and your responses to them in complete sentences.

(Your points should not just regurgitate what others have said but include your own insights).

See you tomorrow!

Here are the notes we started covering in class on Tuesday and will finish up on Wednesday (your homework is on the last slide):

If you have trouble finding points for your homework, try clicking on Antoine Lavoisier’s and Dmitri Mendeleyev’s names at the top of slides 9 and 10. Those links will take you to the texts of their respective books.

Check this out:

I wonder if your cars will be powered by hydrogen combustion someday? I hope so.