Enzymes are nature's catalysts, mediating chemical processes in living systems. The study of enzyme function and mechanism includes defining the maximum catalytic rate and affinity for substrate/s (among other factors), referred to as enzyme kinetics. Enzyme kinetics is a staple of biochemistry curricula and other disciplines, from molecular and…

Theoretical and practical foundations of basic electrochemical concepts of heterogeneous charge transfer reactions that underline electrochemical processes are presented for their detailed study by undergraduate and postgraduate students. Several simple methods for calculating key variables, such as the half-wave potential, limiting current, and…

Alpha-particle sources are widely used in industrial and medical applications. Such applications include smoke detectors, static charge eliminators, and radiation therapy. This paper is concerned with the detection of alpha particles. A number of techniques are known for the detection of alpha particles. Those techniques include the Geiger-Müller…

The drive in computational methods and more intuitive software has seen a rise in the number of publications in this area in recent years. Computational simulations can be found in many areas of science from computational biology and chemistry to fundamental physics. These may help synthetic chemists in their drug discovery endeavors and…

The reaction rate and rate law are chemical kinetics concepts that undergraduate students have difficulty understanding and applying in real life. A further challenge is the overall reaction rate of consecutive reactions. Herein we present a creative teaching practice using the analogy-based approach to exploit the similarities between the…

Student-centered teaching has become increasingly common in higher education as researchers have demonstrated its efficacy in recent decades. Herein, we hope to establish an efficient problem-based learning (PBL) method, which can help upper-division students learn organic chemistry content by combining teaching materials, experimental literature,…

A novel method of measuring the coefficients of kinetic and rolling friction is proposed. The method is simple to implement and reliable. Samples of measurements and calculations are presented.

We propose the use of a smartphone based time-lapse and slow-motion video techniques together with tracking analysis as valuable tools for investigating thermal processes such as the response time of a thermometer. The two simple experimental activities presented here, suitable also for high school and undergraduate students, allow one to measure…

This simple experiment uses an unusual graph straightening exercise to confirm the parallel axis theorem for an irregular object. Along the way, it estimates experimental values for g and the moment of inertia of a tennis racket. We use Excel to find a 95% confidence interval for the true values.

This paper describes how a microphone plugged in to a normal computer can be used to record the impacts of a ball bouncing on a table. The intervals between these impacts represent the "time of flight" of the ball. Since some energy is lost in each rebound, the time intervals get progressively smaller. Through calculation it is possible…

A basketball player attempting a free throw has two parameters under his or her control: the angle of elevation and the force with which the ball is thrown. We compute upper and lower bounds for the initial velocity for suitable values of the angle of elevation, generating a subset of the configuration space of all successful free throws. A…

A three-part project for students in physical chemistry, computational chemistry, or independent study is described in which they explore applications of valence bond (VB) and molecular orbital-configuration interaction (MO-CI) treatments of H[subscript 2]. Using a scientific spreadsheet, students construct potential-energy (PE) curves for several…

In enzyme kinetic studies, linear transformations of the Michaelis-Menten equation, such as the Lineweaver-Burk double-reciprocal transformation, present some constraints. The linear transformation distorts the experimental error and the relationship between "x" and "y" axes; consequently, linear regression of transformed data…

I will propose here a kinematic approach for measuring the drag coefficient of rotational symmetric objects falling through liquids. For this, I will show that one can obtain a measurement of the drag coefficient of a rotational symmetric object by numerically solving the equation of motion describing its fall through a known liquid contained in a…

In this article, the author reports results in their efforts to model sublimation of carbon dioxide and the associated kinetics order and parameter estimation issues in their model. They have offered the reader two sets of data and several approaches to determine the rate of sublimation of a piece of solid dry ice. They presented several models…