Crystal Lab

The crystal lab is a complicated and unique process you've probably never heard of.  Like that underground band; Ink Metric.

Actually, the crystal lab is simple and kind of fun.  All you need for this lab is:

Distilled water, (hopefully from an old tank reminiscent of armageddon)  Aluminum Potassium Sulfate
A few beakers
Hot plate
String and stick
and some optional food coloring for fun

There is no real measuring to this lab.  Just add the sulfate to around 50-100ml of distilled water in a beaker and stir on the hot plate.  What I did was turn the hot plate all the way up and completely dissolve the sulfate in the hot water and then add a bit more.  I stopped when I could see the sulfate moving at the bottom of the beaker, like that clear medicine you have to put in fish tanks sometimes.
I let my super saturated solution cool for a few minutes before I added some red food coloring, just because.  Then, I left it alone over night and came out with a single, really cool, really big, seed crystal.

Then, I took the seed crystal and tied it to a stick.  I repeated the distilled water and sulfate process in a much bigger beaker and used a lot more sulfate.  Then, I suspended the seed crystal inside the water to let the sulfate cling to it and crystalize over it as the solution cooled and the sulfate crystalized.  I ended up with a few more perfect seed crystals at the bottom of my beaker and left them around for my classmates to use if they didn't want to wait for a seed crystal or were unable to form a good one to use.  They're blue because I added blue coloring to the red to try to make purple.

This is the crystal my solution produced.  I'm so proud.  It has such nice, even angles.  The crystal for mine ended up forming in triangles.  The entire thing looks like it was put together by Zelda.  I put this crystal up on the ceiling with the other awesome crystals and made another one from another of my seed crystals to take home.

Hopefully you can reproduce this on your own at home.  You could try using substances like sugar and salt to make crystals.  Then, you could eat your crystal and it'd be okay to lick it. >.>

Radioactive Decay Article Summary

Image found here.

According to Brian Thomas' article, radioactive elements do not decay at steady, predictable rates.  Several laboratories and universities found that some decay rates, specifically of silicon-32, altered with the seasons.  After the matter was looked into more in depth it was found that solar neutrinos from the sun are the most probable cause for this fluctuating decay rate.  Though little else is known about the why's and how's of this new puzzle it's a certain fact that this discovery rather shakes the foundations of rock dating.  If the decay rates of these radioactive isotopes can be effected by solar flares how are we able to tell just exactly how old something is?  Food for thought.



P.S. I've made an entire prezi and tumblr post for radioactive decay.  Go check it out!

Evaporation Lab

Evaporation Lab

Armed with but a couple of temperature probes and some suspicious clear carbon compounds we ventured into the world of the unknown.  We took two probes and wrapped the ends in filter paper to soak up the chemicals we were testing.  We tested two substances at a time and dipped them in first the methanol and ethanol, then the propanol and butanol, and finally the hexane and heptane.  We taped the two probes over the edge of the counter so they could evaporate freely and without interference.  Once they were completely evaporated we recorded the readings.  After the initial readings of the methanol and ethanol and based on the number of carbons we guessed that the temperatures of the next four would be higher because of the greater number of carbons.  We were fairly right to assume this.

 This pre-lab chart shows the formulas of the substances we used and is what we based our estimations on.  Because we were able to count how many carbons were in each substance we were able to determine whether the temperature went up or down with the number of carbons and whether or not the presence of a hydrogen bond had any effect on the temperatures.

This is the table of our actual and predicted measurements of the probes.  As you can see our guesses were pretty close because we had already determined that the temperature rose from methanol to ethanol.  The last two are much more off because we hadn't determined quite what sort of effect the hydrogen bond had.  Apparently, the lack of a hydrogen bond sort of starts the pattern over.

In this image the green line represents the methanol and the red line represents the ethanol.  According to this, the more carbons present in the compound, the quicker the temperature change is.

In this image Propanol is the red line and butanol is the green one.  While they're pretty close the higher carbon wins out again and creates the most dramatic change.

Here, hextane is the red line and heptane is the green line.  Once again the greater carbon had a more dramatic change. Don't be alarmed by the rise in the temperature of the probe with the heptane.  It just took hextane a lot longer to level out than heptane.  We believe this was simply because they aren't as close together as the previous ones were carbon-wise as our teacher was out of the substance we were originally supposed to use.

Whoops, I misread my own tables the first time I wrote this conclusion.  I'll try again.  As my table at the top shows, the shift in temperature becomes smaller as the amount of carbons in the molecular sequences increases.  However, when there is no hydrogen bond as with heptane and hextane, the temperature shift grows with the amount of carbons.  But, fewer carbons tends to mean a greater shift in temperature from the beginning to completion of evaporation.