Science at Bangor & in the News
This week in chemistry, we entered the world of moles. Moles in chemistry are a unit of particles, kind of like a dozen, not the rodent who ruins your yard. After spending a couple of days working on converting between mass, moles, & number of particles, we used the end of the week to put those skills to the test. Everyone got paired up and had to figure out how much mass was in a certain number of particles (or moles) of salt, water, and aluminum foil. The pairs also got samples of copper & had to figure out how many particles were in the sample. I think it was good for everyone to see how much (or how little) of an actual sample were in the very large numbers we were dealing with. In Science 9, we spent the weak learning about chemical reactions. We used cubes to represent different compounds and then modeled what happened when those compounds either changed from liquid to gas or had something happen that caused the atoms to be rearranged. We used these changes as a starting point to compare and contrast physical changes and chemical changes. We ended the week talking about why we need to write balanced equations and how to balance equations. This is our last topic in the unit & after this unit we will move on to an introduction to physics. You may have seen something about gravitational waves in the news this week. Gravitational waves are distortions in time and space that were first proposed to exist by Albert Einstein in 1915 when he published his theory on general relativity. Many scientists working together for many years were finally able to detect these waves in September of 2015. The distortion the laser detected is 1000 times smaller than the width of a proton! You can read about how the waves were detected here. To learn more about what gravitational waves are, go here.
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Ms. Lyons
Science is amazing, check it out! Archives
May 2016
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