Science at Bangor & in the News
Last week felt a little crazy for me in chemistry. Between the snow day, assembly, and Winterfest Spirit Week, I found myself feeling scrambled. We spent the week learning about solutions and how to measure concentration. This unit lent itself to many food analogies and examples, so I also ended up spending a lot of class being hungry! The end of the week came fast & furious, resulting in a test delay. Our test on chapters 14-16 will be on Wednesday, February 11. These chapters cover onion diagrams & effective nuclear charge (ENC) calculations, trends in the periodic table, chemical bonding, Lewis diagrams, VSEPR structures, solutions, and freezing point depression/boiling point elevation.
I enjoyed being at the school for the entirety of Spirit Week this time around. Due to my class schedule last semester, I had to miss part of the Homecoming Spirit Week. I had a lot of fun coming up with ideas for participating in the dress-up days & of course enjoyed my Saturday rolling in glitter with Ms. Van Dop. If you missed the BHVTV segment on our escapade, here is a link: http://vimeo.com/118708352 . In science news outside of the classroom, scientists at University of California-Irvine discovered a way to un-boil an egg. The scientists first cooked the egg, which makes the proteins in the egg whites unfold, or denature, and form clumps. Then they developed a process to untangle the proteins. If you're wondering why scientists would want to do this, there are many reasons: 1. Many diseases are caused by important proteins getting misfolded, so the scientists hope that they can adapt the method to unfold the proteins that don't fold properly & re-fold them to the correct shape so that the patient can be cured. 2. Some drug treatments, especially for cancer, involve proteins that have to be folded completely correctly. Currently those proteins are produced using a very expensive method, but being able to unfold & refold proteins would allow the drugs to be produced in a cheaper way. Producing the drugs for less money would make the drugs cheaper for patients to buy. 3. Various food industries could adapt the method to make tastier foods or make foods cheaper to produce. If you want to know more, check out the article here.
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Ms. Lyons
Science is amazing, check it out! Archives
May 2016
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