What are universities looking for?
An interesting report commissioned by ACS International Schools in partnership with the IB and IBSCA was published earlier this month. It asked university admissions officers what skills they wanted to...
Chemistry question bank now live
The Chemistry question bank (qBank) is now up and running on this site. Information on how to access it can be found in Using student access. It contains brand new multiple choice type questions and...
How precious metals were first formed
In the week when the price of the precious metal palladium reached $1000 per ounce it was interesting to see that the problem as to how precious metals such as gold, silver, platinum and palladium were...
"Diamonds Are Forever"
Chemistry sometimes takes some strange twists and turns. Recently I learned of a rather bizarre connection between the part of sub-topic 4.3 that includes the allotropes of carbon and Option B: Human...
Great timing!
Last month, on the 21st. April 2017 to be precise, the UK experienced the first day since 1882 when all the electricity generated in the country was produced without the use of any coal. This was reported...
Drinking water from sea-water
Back in 2010 I wrote a blog, “Sticky tape and a pencil”, about the award of the Nobel Prize (for Physics) to scientists at Manchester University in the UK for their discovery of graphene. The structure...
Metallic hydrogen
Back in 1989 Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons claimed to have achieved cold fusion. Cold fusion is the fusion of two small nuclei occurring at or near room temperature with the release of energy. Their...
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Carbon atoms can bond to more than four other carbon atoms
“Each carbon atom can only bond to a maximum of four other carbon atoms.” This well known and seemingly incontrovertible axiom of organic chemistry has now been definitely shown not to be true. The idea...
Updated periodic table
Since the IB data booklet for first use in the May 2016 examination session came into existence there have been several updates as mistakes were corrected. The latest version, which can be downloaded...
2,4-dinitrophenylhydrazine (2,4-DNP)
Years ago when I first started teaching at Atlantic College I came across a bottle of picric acid in the store room. It had completely dried out and posed a considerable risk of explosion as friction...