Laboratory Exercises in General Chemistry

Laboratory Exercises in Physical Chemistry

Using home-laboratory kits to teach general chemistry

University-level chemistry courses that contain a substantial laboratory component have always been a challenge to deliver effectively through distance education. One potential solution is to enable students to carry out real experiments in the home environment. This not only raises issues of logistics and safety, but also the fundamental question of whether an equivalent learning experience co...

Instrumentation for Laboratory Exercises in Basic Electrophysiology *

The apparatus described below was used during the past year to provide first-year medical and graduate students with an opportunity to observe and study for themselves basic phenomena characteristic of the excitable tissues in general and nerve in particular. The apparatus represents the culmination of numerous attempts on our part to design and develop an arrangement that would be relatively s...

Novel Laboratory Exercises in Plant Tissue Culture

Orchardgrass is a member of the Poaceae, a family characterized by monocotyledonous-type embryos. This species is unique in that somatic embryogenesis can be induced from the cultured leaves of potted plants, which can be maintained conveniently in the greenhouse. Both embryogenic callus and isolated somatic embryos develop directly from cultured leaf sections. Embryogenic callus can be maintai...

Organic Chemistry I Laboratory

For many years the dehydration of 2-methylcyclohexanol to a mixture of alkenes has been carried out in college organic chemistry labs to demonstrate the application of Zaitzev’s rule and the occurrence of the E1 reaction mechanism in alcohol dehydration reactions. In 1994 David Todd, then a chemistry professor at Pomona College, was distilling the product alkenes out of the reaction mixture whe...