A Rainbow of Flames

On Tuesday we did a super cool lab wif FIREEEE!! There were so many different colors and they all looked really pretty. My favorite was the pinkish peach one because pink is my favorite color. Jessica and Chantel were in my group and we took turns doing the experiment. There were little bottles of different compounds and we used a wooden stick with a metal loop at the end and stuck it in the bottle so some of the compound got on the stick. Then, we put it in the fire that was coming from the Bunsen burner and it made pretty colors! There was red, orange, yellow, green, and pink!! It was the coolest lab we've done so far and my FAVORITEEEE =)

More Radiation!

Yaaaaaay we did some more work on radioation this week. Every class, we watched a video on different people who contributed to science, like Michael Faraday, Lise Meitner, and Emilie du Chatelet. I thought it was really cool how there were videos for women in science. We had to do two worksheets for homework. They were sorta hard, buttttttt I managed through them. We also got a powerpoint presentation printout. Now I know gamma radiation is the highest radiation there is and can go through hard surfaces, but alpha radiation and beta radiation can't. E=mc^2 is Einstein's formula where E is energy, m is mass, and C is speed.

Albert Einstein and Half-LIves

This week I missed Tuesday because I had to go to a meet so I didn't get to do the half-life simulation lab. =( On Thursday, we watched a video on how Albert Einstein came up with the equaton E=mc^2 with the help of research from earlier scientists. It was a very interesting video and I learned a lot. For homework we had to do a worksheet that helped me practice alpha and beta decay. Right now, I'm in the computer lab and I made my spreadsheet and graph. Now I'm finishing up my blog entry...and now I'm done!

Radioactivity

This week in chemistry, we focused on radioactivity. Radioactivity occurs when atoms decay and become unstable. They then turn into stable elements I learned about alpha and beta decay and gamma rays. In alpha decay, a He-4 atom is added to the unstable element, causing it to lose 2 neutrons and 2 protons. In beta decay, an electron is added, causing the mass number to stay the same, but a electron is lost, adding a proton to the atomic number. Sometimes, radioactivity produces gamma rays, which have high amounts of energy. Carbon-14 is used to date ancient artifacts.