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Friday 2 November 2012

Waiting for the weekend

Listening to: Nothing
Feeling: Bored
October has come and gone. The other day's chemistry class was a pretty awesome treat in terms of science. I guess it was because it was Halloween that our prof decided that we deserved break, not to mention that the stuff we were learning was pretty dry. So he showed off a lot of cool experiments, some that we've seen before and some new ones. Like he did in the first chemistry class of the semester, he lit some balloons on fire, which they exploded. Other ones included dipping some flowers into liquid nitrogen and letting a volunteer crumble them into pieces, making a cannon with methanol and my favorite: showing us how the three main sciences differ by breaking eggs.

With physics, he requested a volunteer that was approximately his height (he's pretty tall) and then he got them to stand on a table. Once given the egg, the volunteer was asking to let go and drop it into the trash can. Of course, the egg missed and everyone laughed.

For biology, our prof made a "nest" consisting of tissues and a rubber duck which sat on the egg. Then he turned on the overhead projector to warm it up.

Lastly, for chemistry, he cut holes into dry ice, filled the holes with magnesium, fired it with torchfires, placed an egg inside and covered it with more dry ice. The effect was pretty great; there was a lot of colour coming from inside the dry ice and there was quite a bit of smoke. It was kind of like watching a very small firework going off. Needless to say, it was a lot better than learning about NMR spectrometry.

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