for all you chem fanatics (or people who just know their shit)
 

alright, i need your help again. i have to write a very long paper for the IB program at my school. i chose to write about chemistry, which means that i have to not only write a reasearch paper, but do a lab that corresponds to it.

my topic idea so far has something to do with some sort of organic synthesis process. then i'm hoping to recreate that synthesis in the lab (or a smaller scale of it depending on the substance i choose).

any ideas on an organic substance this could work with. help me out guys!

just talk about building a meth lab. you'll get an A+ for sure.

Word. I can cook crank with my eyes closed.

yeah totally but, i doubt my teacher would be down with making drugs for a school project... haha

I smoked crack in my CP Chem class once. I put the end of the stem to the bunson burner and started poppin'. True story.

Seriously, though. I don't really have any idea, homie. The only chemistry related shit I've ever done is extracting DXM, 1-4 Butanedol, Prophylexedrine, and LSA. All pretty elementary shit.

benzene?

you could dream like kekulé and all

:confused:

then you could apply a match &...

yo !@#$%! did you see what i wrtoe you in the sonic youth thread?

ps- you could maybe synthesize aminoacids? glycine-- and then make msg-- ha

uh? no... let me check...

when i was in undergrad at georgia tech, some chemistry grad students were busted making commercial quantities of PCP out of the school's lab.

the atlanta journal-constitution headline read

"Tech Grad Students Arrested in Drug Manufacturing Scheme"



the student paper headline read

"GA Tech Chem Grads Synthesize Purest PCP the DEA Has Ever Seen"




....why the were making PCP and not LSD i wil never know....

hahah that'ss funny. i hear lsd's pretty difficult to make. but anyways that's not the point...

my cokehead "friends" bought their shit at the university

--
what i mean by "friends" is that they weren't really my friends. and i wasn't a cokehead. but they turned out to be such assholes. like all cokeheads.

the meth idea: you could probably get a few CAS hours for hunting down a meth lab and like, conducting interviews on how their process works.

kidding.

maybe try something involving perfume? i've always thought that was kinda neat.

yeah i've done the perfume thing with esthers in class last year. .

hmm. i loathe chemistry, so i guess i'm not much of a help here :( but i'm sure you'll find something fun.

one word: FLUBBER.





that's where it's at, man.

that'd be sweet as anything

yo, how about the famous miller experiment?

i know it's ambitious but-- holy fuck!

???

i'mnot familiar withthe famous miller experiment

:eek::eek::eek:

GREAT AWESOMENESS

oh my goodness, this is really something. and quite impossible for me to do in a high school lab

aggghhhhhhhhhhhh

gotta love ib!

for serious, though... i've recently been curious about pigment chemistry since i've been painting more.

for example "payne's gray" is a mix of amorphous carbon (lamp black - traditionally soot) and complex sodium alumino-silicate containing sulphur (aka french ultramarine) ... i realized i could get better result by buying the individual paints and mixing them on the canvas than with pre-mixed paints.

the same is true of "yellow ochre" - cheap versions of this color typically contain multiple iron oxides and are cut with titanium oxide. i never really thought it made much difference until i did a side be side comparison, but paints containing a single, more-highly refined iron oxide have noticably more vibrant color and are typically mixed into a cleaner, smoother linseed oil. and in the yellow to white range, where the yellow from the linseed oil starts to compete with the pigments, substituting a safflower oil (clearer but more expensive) can make a huge difference.


and if you want to talk photo-sensetive chemistry... silver print/c-type prints/tmax b&w/c-41 color process/ammonia based blueprints or sepiatone process/.... well yr gonna have to come back when i have more time.

i don't know if any of that relates to what yr trying to do... but hopefully there's a helpful idea somewhere in there...

sounds more like a recipe for a colorful mayo :D

yeah it's not really related to what i'mlooking to do. that's pretty interesting though.

so my teacher had two main suggestions for me today:
i can make sunscreen or aspirin through synthesis.
aspirin is pretty overdone, and it would be easier to test how effective the sunscreen is over the aspirin. i dunno if i'm happy with either of those choices though. i'll have to keep looking...

http://www.teachersdomain.org/resour...oid/index.html

????

woahh cool!
thanks !@#$%!

nice job, teach... wanna grade these papers for me? i'm technically not on the "approved reader" list anyway....give me yr fax number.:D

You can do an experiment on how biofuels are produced. It is a very up-to-date topic, and its not hard to do the experiment. You can make ethanol out of corn, or sugar cane. Or hell, any starch containing substance, I used conkers for my project. If you have the proper materials, it should take only 2-3 days to do this.
http://bioweb.sungrant.org/Technical...on/Default.htm
Check that site out. I can help you out with anything if you decide to do this.

just bumping thisi thread to let all of you who helped know that i'm finishing up writing my paper. i ended up making esters and testing their properties to talk about how their properties differ depending on the alcohol i used during the esterfication process. it's kind of boring, and not acutally what i would like to be doing, but it's getting done. i just wish i had started thinking about it earlier so i could do something i really enjoyed.

thanks a lot for your help