Tag Archives: Half-life

Hon Chemistry 12-6-11 Applications of Radioactivity

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HON CHEMISTRY: Hmmmmm…..so what do you do when you forget to upload the day’s lesson to blip.tv? You post an old lecture from another year! This actually might turn out to be a good thing – the beginning of this old lecture has some half-life problems practice that might turn out to be useful for you. As for the rest – it doesn’t have everything, but it does have most of the applications that we talked about today in class.

So it turns out there are some pretty useful applications of radioactivity! Let’s finish talking about fission and fusion tomorrow, okay? Oh, and help session tomorrow morning, 7:15ish A.M.

Hon Chemistry 12-2-11 Half-Life Problems

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HON CHEMISTRY: So what do you figure is the half-life of a banana? But I digress…. Here’s the lecture from Friday on half-life problems. (I’m still not sure what happened to the Power Point!) Keep thinking these problems through and you’ll do great!

Have fun with the half-life simulation lab! The report will go in your lab book – Title, Objective, Procedure, Observations (with data table), Conclusion, and Questions. Don’t forget that your graph needs to be drawn on graph paper, folded in half, and attached in your lab book. It can be stapled or taped.

flickr photo by Caro Wallis

Hon Chemistry 12-1-11 Radioactive Decay

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HON CHEMISTRY: Can you guess what it is?/ It’s a picture of uranium ore under UV light. Cool, huh! Here’s the lecture from Thursday on the properties of radioactive nuclides and the types of radioactive decay. It also includes how to write nuclear equations. Don’t forget to memorize the nuclear symbols for alpha particles, beta particles (electrons), positrons, neutrons, and protons. Not nearly as bad as polyatomic ions, huh?!? 🙂

I thought you might want to get a head start on the half-life simulation lab, so I posted about that earlier. I’m including a copy of the Half-Life Simulation Lab here, but make sure you go back and read that post for detail that you will need. And speaking of half-life, let’s calculate it tomorrow. Calculators ready!