University of Alberta General Chemistry Laboratories

Other Chemical Links

This listing is not meant to be comprehensive (see "extensive index sites" below). Rather they serve to introduce Chem 10X students at the University of Alberta to the range of topics on the WWW. Examples of sites that might be of interest on the Web include

• general interest items like (see also other index sites and miscellaneous below)
  • a site devoted to drugs obtained from tropical rain forest plants by D.E. Bierer, T.J. Carlson, and S.R. King of Shaman Pharmaceuticals.

  • the chemistry of coffee by R.J. Lancaster at the University of West Indies Mona , Jamaica (warning - the transfer of color graphics is slow).

  • atomic level images obtained by scanning tunnelling microscopy at the IBM Almaden Research Centre.

  • the calculated s, p, d, f and g orbitals by Jim Holler at the University of Kentucky.

• tutorial/help sites such as
  • "An Engineering Student Survival Guide" (likely useful regardless of your program) by Prof. Richard Felder of North Carolina State University.

  • the Virtual Chemistry Lab at Oxford University where you can do the following interactive experiments. This site is best viewed with a color monitor. Since this is an UK site, the video portion is slow; however the quiz frames can be answered without waiting for the video to download.
    • complex ions in aqueous solution
    • superconductor preparation
    • organo-transition metal chemistry
    • nickel(II) complexes
    • simple inorganic solids
    • a molecule of the month
  • Frederick Senese. Lots of answers to common questions, and quizzes.

  • a site with extensive (chemical) instructional resources by Prof. Steve Lower of Simon Fraser University.

  • an excellent discussion of the second law of thermodynamics at secondlaw.oxy.edu/index.html and "Entropy and the second lax of thermodynamics" at www.2ndlaw.com/entropy.html

• professional sites such as
  • What's New in Chemical Education at the American Chemical Society.

  • the legal recognition of the practice of chemistry as a profession in Alberta (see the Association of the Chemical Profession of Alberta) .

• extensive index sites such as
  • Links for Chemists at the University of Liverpool (suggested by Michael Barker).

  • a collection of Curiosities maintained by Knut Irgum ( Analytical Chemistry, Umeå University, S-901 87 Umeå, Sweden ) including pointers to topics such as
    • an "Intro to Alchemy".
      
    • the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine "which investigates claims by scientists, pseudoscientists, and pseudohistorians on a wide variety of theories and conjectures".
    • the T.W.I.N.K.I.E.S. Project, a series of experiments "conducted to determine
      the properties of that incredible food, the Twinkie" (best viewed with a color monitor).
    • a patented cure for the Common Cold.

  • the "Chemistry Index" by Rolf Claessen.

• on-line references such as
  • Scientific American.

  • Elemental Discoveries which contains excellent general articles such as Happiness and Dopamine. This is an on-line journal by David Bradley.

  • the Journal of Scientific Exploration which was established in 1987 to provide a peer-reviewed forum for "scholarly discussion of anomalies and topics outside the established disciplines of mainstream science, such as psychic phenomena, UFO's, etc. Evidence both for and against is presented." A recent article in the on-line journal is "Some Bodily Malformations Attributed to Previous Lives".

• miscellaneous items such as
  • on-line newspapers from all over the world.

  • the naming of elements by IUPAC.

  • three free software items for the drawing of chemical structures available as FREEWARE
    from Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc.:
    1. ChemSketch 3.5, a structure drawing package.
    2. 3D Viewer as ISIS/Base and ISIS/Draw Add-in.
    3. customization tool set (ChemBasic 3.5 beta).

  • a molecular viewer Rasmol developed at the University of Edinburgh's Biocomputing Research Unit and the Biomolecular Structures Group at Glaxo Research and Development, Greenford, UK is available as FREEWARE. With RASMOL you can access an incredible number of molecular structures. A (relatively) local starting point is maintained at the UMass Amherst.

    Things to avoid are covered at these two sites: (a) Top Ten Mistakes in Web and (b) Art and the Zen of Web Pages. Some guidelines that were followed for Chem 10X Lab pages are:

    • "Try holding your breath for as long as it takes your home page to load."
      Henri de Toulouse-LaTech

    • "Use the defaults, Luke. Use the defaults."
      Obi-Web Kenobi

    • "Before you put a really dark background on your web page, ask yourself this:
      Why is it so much harder to drive at night than in the daytime?"
      Vincent van Gui

    • "I have yet to see a web site that was made easier to understand, easier to navigate, or had a better presentation of its content because of the use of frames. In most cases, it made things worse."
      L' Architecte Karp

    A good source of help for Web stuff (lots of tutorials) is Dr. Joe Burns's HTML Goodies web page (site URL compliments of Melissa Armstrong, Gaston College, Dallas NC).

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Comments and questions concerning this page may be directed to Norman Gee .
Last revised Oct 4, 2011.

Links checked Oct 4, 2011.

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