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Asked by Joe to Rebecca, Laura, Francesca, Andrew on 11 Nov 2014.
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Laura Schofield answered on 11 Nov 2014:
Well, each year my department has a Summer party that pis organised by the professors! This year we had a barbecue, quiz and tug of war competition and my team won the tug of war! That’s the trophy that I’m holding in my display picture.
We also get interrupted quite a lot by my supervisor, Martyn Poliakoff who is the star of The Periodic Videos on YouTube, when he is looking for something to use in the next video! In fact, he used my rig once to explain how high pressure effects water when it is heated. http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sCh2T9axLyY that’s me pouring at 7.40! Somewhere buried in the depths of YouTube, I’m the star of one of the videos! I think that is pretty cool!
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Andrew McKinley answered on 11 Nov 2014:
I’m not sure everyone will find this as interesting as I do… Anyway, here goes…
I had a call last week from the teaching lab. It was one of my third year students, who sheepishly said “Hi Andrew? Um, we broke it…” Broke what? “Science… We broke science”.
I have no idea what they did, but their result is seriously cool…
They were making “quantum dots” (tiny clusters containing no more than around 150 atoms, and around 10 nanometres across). Because they are so small, they interact strongly with light and we observe this as colour. Essentially they mix two reactants together; some cadmium and some selenium, and these ‘dots’ (nanocrystals) grow from the dissolved reactants. (the growth stops at the nanocrystal size using a surfactant – essentially a soap). The bigger they get, the redder the solution gets until the solution goes colourless.Except it didn’t go colourless. It went yellow.
What they had done is create a solution with two distinctly different sizes of nanoparticles! We have not done that ourselves – you usually only get a single size distribution, but no, they came up with two different sizes of nanoparticles.
Still have no idea how they did it, but quite cool! Sometimes some things cannot easily be explained to the students, but it is an interesting result.
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Francesca Palombo answered on 11 Nov 2014:
OK – there is an interesting competition between my tutorial groups: which of them I like the most! Funny, I don’t like being asked to compare people, in this case students. But apparently my tutees love that: they absolutely want to know which group I prefer! My answer: they will never extort this info from me – I want each of them to be the best they can possibly be in their course, personality is something else! I find this hilarious!
Comments
Joe commented on :
@Laura I’ll be sure to like and subscribe!
Joe commented on :
@Andre Did the solutions mix properly? Are they different densities?
Laura commented on :
That’s great to hear Joe! They’re great videos (even the ones I don’t appear in!) and some of them are just brilliant! I think my favourite one is the pumpkin video from a few years ago! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2799XSIlZM
Andrew commented on :
@Joe Mixing is almost certainly the issue, but it is difficult to guarantee “proper” mixing. They were both aqueous (i.e. water based), so should mix fairly well – they are also constantly stirred over a period of about 30 minutes. Plus, the reaction hasn’t normally behaved like this in the past (it is fairly reliable). Anyway – it’s interesting none-the-less!