If you’re reading this (and obviously you must be) then you are on the “old” site. LFCDS Science 8 has migrated to new servers on campus – whoo hoo!  This site will no longer be updated as of today – questions should all be posted to the new site and all notes, posts, and such will all be on the new site from now on.

It won’t look that much different at the moment … but it will soon be a blog of a different beast!

You can now access the blog from directly in your LFCDS Portal or just use this address science8.lfcds.org

Okay so a little bit of fun … Cut The Rope is an app for the iPad and for iPhone.  It’s a simple game where you need to manipulate objects to cut the rope and let the prize fall to the little animal(?).  Simple enough, but it gets harder and a bit crazier.

Why the heck would I include this?  Well it does follow some basic physics rules (most games actually do) and will give an insight into how physics governs movement.  Does that make the game sound dull?  Try it – you’ll be surprised and forget all that stuff I just wrote!  Enjoy!

You can get it at the App Store (yes it’s ubiquitous now)

In a new version of the periodic table, the atomic weights of elements with more than one stable form, such as chlorine, are shown as a range, while elements with one stable form, like arsenic, have an exact weight.

Changes are afoot in the Periodic Table (and just in time for our studying of it). The decision to change the Periodic Table is not one that is done easily. Anything like changes to the Periodic Table have to be done deliberately and with a large amount of agreement since it is used the world over by students, lay people, and scientists alike.

The Periodic Table is managed by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry [IUPAC] – you will hear more and more about them as the semester continues.  The deal with not only the make-up of the table (how it appears) but also what the little “cells” in the table contain and the names of the elements.

The current changes were done to address the fact that isotopes of the different atoms (you’ll learn more about them but essentially isotopes are the same element but contain different numbers of neutrons – funky!) aren’t given credit in the table.  In today’s world where we are using different isotopes more and more often, it’s become necessary to show this information on the table.  To quote directly from the article, “Just as the weight listed on your driver’s license doesn’t necessarily reflect your actual poundage, the official atomic weights of most chemical elements are actually more like ballpark estimates than precise constants. In acknowledgment of this natural variation, the official weights of 10 chemical elements will no longer be expressed as single numbers, but as ranges.”  You can read the whole article HERE and read the original news release from the IUPAC HERE.