Back to school – Chemistry edition

I don’t know whether you, dear reader, ever enjoyed learning about Chemistry; I did, but not enough to take it to A-Level, Physics and Biology were more my thing.

Science isn’t for everyone, I’ve always enjoyed it – but for every geek like me who couldn’t get a handle on the arts, there are ten arts students who don’t get science. Surely, however, we all loved the weird experiments that the teachers used to perform to bring the sciences to life.

Since the internet has become easily accessible by the general public in the last ten years or so, many universities have been making their course material available for free to anyone who wants it over the web. This trend was started, as far as I know, by the MIT in the US. This concept would have astonished people twenty years ago. I find it amazing, how quickly the web has changed things, and how quickly we adapt to them and take things like this for granted.

In 1969 the UK government decided that an university education should be available for all, and in the absence of the internet, they gave us the Open University whose main medium was the television.

So why am I rambling on about the OU, Chemistry and the web? Because recently the University of Nottingham’s Chemistry faculty have decided to do their own little bit of public education over the web, and I implore you to view it. It has a combination of a loveable chemistry professor, who gets a warm feeling about Sodium every time he sees it in a chemical formula (because its symbol: Na, was a nick-name for his mother) and some amusing lab technicians who revel in conducting experiments which often have explosive results (e.g. when a chunk of sodium lands on the cameraman’s camera.)

Watch the videos, and maybe learn something, or remember something that you’d forgotten. For example: anyone who has done Biology to any level knows that oxygen is transported around the body via Haemoglobin, which contains a lot of iron, and thus causes the blood to appear red. Did you know however, that crabs use a compound, which instead of iron, uses cobalt to transport oxygen – so their blood is green. Perhaps you didn’t know that Niels Bohr was given a house by Carlsberg next to their brewery which had a tap which ran from said brewery and provided him with free beer whenever he desired it.

Enough spoilers – Enjoy: http://www.periodicvideos.com/

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