Periodic Table Trends by Ella

What is Atomic Radii?

             By definition atomic Radii something that looks like the radius of a circle, where the center of the circle is the nucleus and the out side of the circle is the electron. As you begin to move across or down the periodic table, trends begging to blend together that help explain how atomic radii change.

This is a representation, since Li (lithium) is closer to the nucleus the atomic Radiis are bigger than the Ne (neon) that is in farther then the nucleus.

 What is an Ionic Radii?

                Ionic radius, is the radius of an atom's ion. Neither of this atoms or ions have specific boundaries, they are sometimes treated as if they were hard spheres with radii such that the total of the ionic radii of the cation (+) and anion (-)  gives the distance between the ions on the nucleus.  

*Note- Ella is one of our foreign exchange students, so she is doubly impressive for creating a blog post in English.

Motors by Jayden

Anyway we learned about motors and we also built some them ourselves. We also built solar water heaters, but as of writing this blog post most of my classmates including me haven’t started yet…so yea.

            So this is going be more of a story than a description on building a motor, so prepare. I started to look at YouTube videos on building a motor, but I ended up using the first result. It first told me what stuff I needed and after the first two days I had everything except for cable clips, which is where it gets a bit more interesting. I decided to use my dad’s cable clips which what I didn’t know until he took them to school for me, was they were at least three times bigger than what the person on the video had.

            Of course they ended up being too big, I tried and tried to get them to work, but to no avail. Santi, my friend and classmate took some to school a day later, and they were smaller, but still were to big. Then I gave up and took the easy way out, which has another story. Ian, discovered this easy way out, It was a way to create a motor really fast. First you get a D-cell battery, about one foot of copper wire and two disc magnets. All you do is connect the two magnets on the positive side of the battery, then shape the copper into a rectangle and create a point pointing down. Then place the battery, magnets down on a table and put the point touching the negative and the other side of the rectangle laying against the magnets. This will get the copper wire spinning.

China is Addicted to Disposable Chopsticks? by Robey

China has quite the addiction. No it is not anything harmful right at this moment, but in the near future it could be fatal. China is addicted to disposable chopsticks. They cut up to 1.18 million square acres of trees a year. That is a ton of trees on that piece of land. Each tree can produce about 4,000 chopsticks, totally out to be about 80 billions chopsticks a year, being produced. 80 billions chopsticks is a massive amount of chopsticks, it is almost unreal. The people of China have started a program to reuse the disposable chopsticks and turn them into chopstick trees that they put up around their towns.

 The government has also had their own plan of stopping the companies that make the chopsticks. They put a massive ta on chopsticks and wooden floorboards, both of which destroy lots and lots of the local forests.  This is kind of working but it is effecting the population negatively, because the price of the chopsticks is going up. There forest in is a lot of danger because of this wood consumption needed to make the chopsticks and wooden floorboards.

          How would you go about fixing the tree problems?

          Is there any way to replace the disposable chopsticks and floorboards?

          How long do you think it will take before China is out of forests and trees?

Ionic Compounds by Summer

This week in chemistry we were working with ionic compounds and how to identify elements with cations and anions. Ionic compound is a chemical compound in which ions are held together in a structure by electrostatic forces. They call it ionic bonding. This compound is neutral overall but consists of positively charges ions and negatively charged ions, which are called Cations and Anions. Ionic compounds can only consist of a metal and a nonmetal. We also learned how to say the proper names of ionic substances and that we have to use the actual name of the elements instead of the symbols.

In this picture it shows the cations, anions, and the compound it forms. In order to find what compound it makes you have to balance out the electrons. When you are balancing the electrons, you need to know what the charge is.

You also need to know the traditional name of the compound. YOu figure them out by knowing whether or not they form one or two ions. For example, NaCl is Sodium Chloride, since it only has one ion. An example of metals that form multiple ions are CuO, Cupric Oxide. It only matters on how many Ions it can form.

Questions;

What are Anions?

What are Cations? 

Griffith Experiment by A.J.

 Frederick Griffith was a microbiologist in 1928. He experimented with pathogenic bacteria. He experimented with mice and infected them with Streptococcus pneumoniae bacteria and began to notice that the mice were dying of blood poisoning. Next he infected similar mice with a different a mutant form of the bacteria, S. pneumoniae. This bacteria did not have the harmful strain’s polysaccharide capsule. These mice showed no symptoms of illness.

This showed Griffith that the polysaccharide capsule was needed for infection. The form of poison that Griffith used on the first set of mice is the S. form because it is normal and non mutant. The poison used on the second set of mice was the R. form which is a mutant form of S. Later in his experiment the mice infected with the R. bacteria started to form disease symptoms and some of them died. The R. bacteria became live while it was in the mice which turned it into the S. form bacteria. I found this topic interesting because of the way changing one very small part of a bacteria cell can either make it deadly or not dangerous at all.

Questions:

Why did Griffith test mice in his experiment?

How dangerous is the Streptococcus pneumoniae?

How does the S. bacteria cause blood poisoning?

Sugar by Nick

What do we use sugar for?  What do you mostly think of when you see sugar?  How much sugar does a single person use in a year?  These are questions that many of us do not think of and we use sugar daily.

Sugar is basically in everything we eat and consume. the sugars in the scientific name are monosaccharides. sugars are also made with carbohydrates to make sure to have a positive outcome if there wasn’t too much consumed by someone to increase the fats in their body. sugars are just used in breads to feed the yeast to raise the dough in the bread.

Sugars help in baking with the flavor in foods to make sure they are not sour while eating.

The sugars are also beneficial because they can contain the nutrients for necessary nutrients in the body.

If you eat too much sugar the calories can make us unhealthy by creating extra fat.

     Many types of sugars can help with making our taste buds not overreact with something sour. 

     If you eat too much sugar then you may gain fat and have health problems for the rest of your life which isn’t a very good idea to have problems with the fat. 

I have the best students

I really do. They are bright, curious, and funny. They are also kind, helpful and caring.

Yesterday I asked my physical science class to write down their "What if" questions, and I got a bunch of amazing, far out, crazy questions. This one, however, got everyone in the class to pause, think, and go "huh." Here is the question:

If the entire world was white- people, trees, everything- and everyone had crayons, how long would it take to color the entire world?