Describes an educational project primarily aimed at teachers and 15 to 18-year-old students that describes the essential features of a modern high-energy physics experiment. (Author/CCM)

Describes experiments with electrostatics that are convenient for classroom demonstrations or laboratory activities. These experiments use a Kelvin balance and a relatively inexpensive electronic scale with 0.01-g sensitivity and essentially stationary pans. (WRM)

Reports on a study to discover physics student teachers' objectives for practical work in teaching physics. Participants took a course based on a unique perceptional approach. Results indicate that after attending the course, student teachers found that the practical work which they had done was very useful. (Author/MM)

A practical laboratory experiment is described that illustrates the application of fluorescence resonance energy transfer to the study of protein-ligand binding. The affinities of wild-type and mutant human carbonic anhydrase II for dansylamide were determined by monitoring the increase in ligand fluorescence that occurs due to energy transfer…

We report the development of a simplified procedure for restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of mushrooms. We have adapted standard molecular techniques to be amenable to an undergraduate laboratory setting in order to allow students to explore basic questions about fungal diversity and relatedness among mushroom species. The…

The body is probably one of a child's first science experiments. Young children are curious about their own bodies and how they work. They love to explore how they move (and do not move), the sounds they makes, how they look, how different textures feel on their skin, even how it tastes when they suck their thumb. Activities suggested in this…

A laboratory exercise used in the senior biochemistry course at the University of Winnipeg for three years is discussed. It combines liquid chromatography and absorbance spectroscopy and also allows the students to produce a quantitative result within a single three-hour period.

An exciting laboratory environment is activated by the preparation and novel use of magnetic materials to decontaminate water through adsorption and magnetic removal of metals and organics. This uncomplicated technique is also adaptable to the possible application of adsorbents to numerous other environmental substances.

Green chemistry is the utilization of a set of principles that reduces or eliminates the use or generation of hazardous substances in the design, manufacture and application of chemical products. Some of the philosophical questions and practical decisions that have guided the greening of the organic chemistry laboratory at Hendrix College in…

The potassium salt is an easy product to synthesize in an introductory course on inorganic chemistry and the students are required to prepare this product in order to improve their laboratory skills and as an introduction to the synthesis of coordination compounds. The complex potassium tris (oxalato) ferrate (III) is used to illustrate the…

The contemporary world of knowledge, characterized by an explosion of information and ways of communicating it, requires creativity more than ever in handling scientific knowledge. Thus, science education, especially for the gifted, must encourage the development of creativity. But, as creativity is not something that can simply be taught, we must…

One easy way to reduce the number of accidents in the lab is to go "green." Green chemistry, or sustainable chemistry, emerged about a decade ago, but the concept has been practiced for centuries by indigenous people of many continents. The basic principles of green chemistry are that you should use only what you need and recycle what you can.…

Restriction enzymes are basic tools in recombinant DNA technology. To shape the molecular biology experiments, the students must know how to work with these molecular scissors. Here, we describe an integrated set of experiments, introduced in the "Advances in Molecular Biology and Biotechnology" postgraduate course, which covers the important…

It is well established that thought experiments are both scientifically and philosophically significant, and even that they are pedagogically significant. However, the basis and methodology for their pedagogical use is not as well established. Pedagogical thought experiments are defined as mental simulations with special features to isolate…

A three-hour laboratory experiment, designed for an advanced undergraduate course in instrumental analysis that illustrates the application of the gradient chamber flow-injection titration (GCFIT) method with spectrophotometric detection to determine acidity constants is presented. The procedure involves the use of an acid-base indicator to obtain…