ChemCom Web Scavenger Hunt


North Middlesex Regional High School - Lab Chemistry
Use the following links to answer the web scavenger hunt questions.

Water



http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/qausage.html
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/featured_articles/981111wednesday.html
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/teachers/featured_articles/20020402tuesday.html
http://ma.water.usgs.gov/basins/nashuasfw.htm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/planetearth/ice_melt_010117.html
http://marine.usgs.gov/fact-sheets/fs150-97/
http://www.mwra.state.ma.us/03sewer/html/sew.htm
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/state/kmin.html
http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/qahome.html#HDR8
http://www.dmww.com/empact.asp
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1999/china.50/asian.superpower/three.gorges/
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chemlab/info/resources/qual/soluble.SolubleAppletC.html


1. Suppose you were building a house in Townsend for which a well needed to be dug in order to have a water supply. About how deep would you have to dig before striking water?

2. Why is there a big hole in the ground on the southeastern edge of the Prescott Penninsula at the Quabbin Reservoir?

3. Why does K.J. Nath of the All India Institute of Hygiene and Public Health think that arsenic poisoning of people living in West Bengal, India is "not so serious"?

4. What percent of Townsend, Massachusetts is covered by water?

5. What percent of people in Massachusetts obtained their drinking water from surface water sources in 1990?

6. How many gallons of water fall on a 1,000 acre town (which is slightly larger than Townsend) during a 3.0 inch rainstorm?

7. Name three of the thirteen major cities that are expected to be flooded after the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in China.

8. On what two days in 2001 were the chlorine levels in Maffitt Finished Water tests in Des Moines, Iowa slightly below the levels considered to be safe, 0.3 mg/L?

9. You put on your scuba gear, hop on a boat and head out into Dorchester Bay. Then you jump into the water and descend to the bottom, where you take out your sediment sampling instrument and start to push it into the muck, in order to measure the amount of lead contamination in different layers of sediment. If you wanted to remove a sample that would correspond to the year in which the levels of lead were the highest, how deep, in centimeters, would you have to go for your sediment sample?

10. About how many acres is the Mississippi River Delta losing to the Gulf of Mexico per year?

11. What is the name of the product that Hillside Garden and Supply in Belmont sells that comes from the Deer Island Sewedge Treatment Plant?

12. Go to http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chemlab/info/resources/qual/soluble.SolubleAppletC.html and try to solve the following puzzle: Into an empty test tube you add some 5% thioacetamide, a few drops of concentrated nitric acid, some solid sodium hydrosulfite, a few drops of silver nitrate solution, and a few drops of sodium nitrite solution. Nothing happens. Then you heat the solution and get a black precipitate. Which ingredients combined to give the black precipitate?

13. How much bigger is Antarctica in the winter than it is in the summer?

Resources

http://www-tech.mit.edu/Chemicool
http://innovations.copper.org/how/homepage.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11994794&dopt=Abstract
http://www.usmint.gov/
http://www.newportthisweek.com/news/2001/0419/Front_Page/01.html
http://google.yahoo.com/bin/query?p=newlands+periodic+triads+octave&hc=0&hs=0
http://www.kennecottminerals.com/
http://www.nobel.se/chemistry/laureates/1918/haber-bio.html
http://www.sarusilver.com/
http://www.rifoundation.org/ec_writeups/grnts_conservation_law.htm
http://www.rexresearch.com/adept/aacont~1.htm


1. What % nickel is contained in the alloy NIBRO?

2. In Superboy, Volume 6, how does Superboy test his hypothesis that explains where the mercury flood came from?

3. The German chemist Johann Wolfgang Dobereiner (1780-1849). noted in 1829 that the element bromine, discovered three years earlier by the French chemist Antoine Jerome Balard (1802-1876), seemed just halfway in its properties between chlorine and iodine. (Iodine had been discovered by another French chemist, Bernard Courtois (1777-1838), in 1811.) Not only did chlorine, bromine, and iodine show a smooth gradation in such properties as color and reactivity, but the atomic weight of bromine seemed to lie just midway between those of chlorine and iodine. Dobereiner went on to find two other groups of three elements exhibiting neat gradations of properties: calcium, strontium, and barium; and sulfur, selenium, and tellurium. In both groups the atomic weight of the element in the middle was about midway between those of the other two. Dobereiner called these groups "triads", and searched unsuccessfully for others. The fact that five-sixths of the known elements could not be fitted into any triad arrangement made chemists decide that Dobereiner's findings were merely coincidence. Name three elements in the same group and which are not seperated by other elements that do NOT form a “triad.”

4. German chemist Fritz Haber (1868–1934) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his work on synthesizing ammonia from its elements. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the world-wide demand for nitrogen based fertilizers exceeded the existing supply. The largest source of the chemicals necessary for fertilizer production was found in a huge guano deposit (essentially sea bird droppings) that was 220 miles in length and five feet thick, located along the coast of Chile. Haber also organized and directed the first large scale release of chlorine gas at Ypres, France on April 22, 1915. Although figures reported vary, somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 Allied troops were wounded or killed that day, with loses among German troops due to the gas, in the hundreds. Later in his career, from 1920 until 1926 Haber experimented on the recovery of gold from sea water, his idea being to enable Germany to meet her war debts from World War 1.
(A) He also tried to produce gold by the transmutation of what element into gold?
(B) What does transmutation mean?
(C) Why did Haber eventually leave Germany?

5. The BHP Copper Metals smelter at San Manuel, Arizona is the largest copper smelter in North America. How many gallons of sulfuric acid are produced there every day?

6. Describe an experiment that you could do to SHOW that cesium reacts with ice even at a temperature of -116oC. Keep in mind that cesium ignites spontaneously in air, producing a brilliant blue flame!

7. How many grams of copper are there in a nickel?

8. There is only one substance that will not turn into a solid even if you lower the temperature down to very near absolute zero, -273 oC, at ordinary pressures, and there is a monument to this element in Amarillo, Texas. What is it?

9. How many KILOGRAMS of gold were mined from the Kennecott Denton-Rawhide site between April 1990 and the end of 2000?

10. (A) About how many pounds of airborne mercury is released from the Brayton Point Power Plant in Somerset, MA every year?
(B) Barry Ketschke, the general manager of the Brayton Point Plant, said that the decline of the flounder population in Mount Hope Bay in Rhode Island could be due to what?

11. In their article entitled "Examination of the contaminants and performance of animals fed and bedded using de-inking paper sludge," (Arch Environ Contam Toxicol 2002 May;42(4):523-8), why did Beauchamp, Boulanger, Matte, and Saint-Laurent do the experiments in which they mixed some de-inking paper sludge into the food that the chickens and pigs ate? (The reason is not mentioned in the abstract; use your common sense.)

Petroleum

http://www.napcor.com/index1.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=11294975&dopt=Abstract
http://www.fe.doe.gov
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov:80/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=10382563&dopt=Abstract
http://www.chemie.uni-muenchen.de/cicum/tutor/mol3D/aspirin.html
http://www.danacarvey.net/carpics.html
http://www.onlineconversion.com/
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/02/19/oil.html
http://www.sigma-aldrich.com
http://www.coaleducation.org/
http://www.md.huji.ac.il/Organic/cem251/nomenclature/ane-211q.htm
http://www.bsc.nodak.edu/power/onlinec/prop235/alkanes.htm


1. How many isomers are there for the compound C14H30?

2. The New York Times ran an editorial in 1875 titled, "Explosive Teeth,” which attempted to assure its readers that their false teeth wouldn’t explode when they drank hot tea. What stuff were the false teeth made of that had New Yorkers so worried?

3. The polyethylene terephthalate bottle was patented in 1973 by a chemist who was the brother of what distinguished American painter?

4. How many moles are there in 110.2 g of diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid alpha,omega-bis(biocytinamide) (CAS # 118896-98-3)?

5. (A) In what two states are the United States Strategic Petroleum Reserves located?
(B) The idea of having a Strategic Petroleum Reserve for the U.S. goes back to 1944, when Interior Secretary Harold Ickes proposed the idea of an emergency crude oil supply during the Roosevelt Administration. Which President signed the legislation that actually got the Strategic Petroleum Reserve off the ground?

6. Draw the structure of 2,4,6,8,10-pentamethyldodecane.

7. Where would you find the compound methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl?

8. What per-cent of the coal delivered to Massachusetts power plants in the year 2000 came from Kentucky?

9. Draw the structures of the three metabolites of methyl-tert-butyl ether that were quantified in urine in the study by A. Amberg, E. Rosner, and W. Dekant, Toxicol Sci 2001 May;61(1):62-67, Toxicokinetics of Methyl tert-Butyl Ether and Its Metabolites in Humans after Oral Exposure.

10. What do they use thumper trucks for in Prudhoe Bay?

11. Geranial has a very strong lemony odor while neral's odor is less lemony but sweeter. Citral is found as a major component in essential oils of lemongrass, Litsea cubeba, lemon basil, lemon verbena, lemon balm, lemons and orange and in numerous other oils as a minor constituent. What is the molecular formula of geranial, which is one of the mirror-image isomers of the terpene aldehyde citral?

12. What is the minimum number of atoms in a molecule of aspirin that are in the same plane as the ring?

13. (A) How many horsepower hours are contained in one gallon of home heating oil?
(B) Which oil becomes more viscous in going from a temperature of 99oC to -18oC : SAE 5W, SAE 10W, or SAE 20?

Food

http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss4905a1.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=2802896&dopt=Abstract
http://www.twinkiesproject.com/
http://www.consumerfreedom.com/oped_detail.cfm?OPED_ID=138
http://esg-www.mit.edu:8001/esgbio/lm/proteins/aa/aminoacids.html
http://www.nutrasweet.com/infocenter/index.asp
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/starguid.html
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/hbmut.html
http://www.hotel-online.com/Neo/News/2002_Mar_29/k.HOS.1017687857.html
http://environet.policy.net/marine/csb/
http://archives.theconnection.org/archive/2001/02/0207a.shtml
http://www.psrc.usm.edu/macrog/index.htm
http://www.fda.gov/fdac/features/2002/302_itch.html
http://www.envirologix.com/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/jan-june01/fast_food.html
http://lib.benjerry.com/production/index.html
http://cpmcnet.columbia.edu/texts/guide/toc/toc05.html


1. Which amino acid is in amino acid position #9 on the beta chain of hemoglobin from a person with sickle cell anemia?

2. How many grams are there in one mole of the antihistamine diphenhydramine hydrochloride, the active ingredient in Benadryl?

3. Which contains more fiber: 1/2 cup cooked kidney beans, 3 cups of popcorn, one small apple, or 1/2 cup of cooked broccoli?

4. Draw the structure of the tripeptide trp-leu-phe.

5. Contact with this substance is corrosive to the eyes, the skin and the respiratory tract. Inhalation is accompanied by shortness of breath and a sore throat. It is commonly used in refrigerators, including the ones that are used to make Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream. What is it?

6. What percent of Twinkies are air?

7. According to the Center for Disease Control’s “Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance --- United States, 1999,” what percent of Massachusetts high school girls attempted to lose weight in 1999?

8. Aspartame is composed of two amino acids, aspartic acid and the methyl ester of phenylalanine. Through normal pathways, aspartame is completely and quickly metabolized to its two amino acids, aspartic acid and phenylalanine, and what other compound?

9. Olestra has been found to reduce the serum levels of what vitamins?

10. How many hamburgers and fries does the average American eat per week?

11. To what protein present in egg whites does Vitamin H bind?

12. It’s a late Saturday morning, and you’re doing some shopping at the Macrogalleria Mall, Level One, when you decide to stop by the Food Court and have lunch. You order a cheeseburger, a drink, and an order of polymers made up of glucose units linked by beta linkages. Good idea or bad idea, and why?

13. Name three restaurants in Boston that serve Chilean Sea Bass.

14. Suppose that you’re in charge of ordering all of the supplies for a chain of 28 donut shops. Your inventory shows that your stores will need to purchase a total of 3,000 pounds of corn meal next month, but you’ve heard rumors about genetically engineered corn being found in some taco products. You decide to buy a kit to test for the presence of genetically-engineered StarLink corn, and find a company in Maine that sells the test kits you’re looking for.
(A) What is the name of the company?
(B) How much does one kit cost?

Nuclear

http://www.ccnr.org/usgs.html
http://www.bullatomsci.org/research/qanda/qandatoc.html
http://www.sapl.org/practices.htm
http://www4.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/query?uid=3989606&form=6&db=m&Dopt=b
http://www.safety.ubc.ca/rad/calc/calcframe.htm
http://www.journey.sunysb.edu/ProjectJava/Radiation/
http://www.rw.doe.gov/homejava/homejava.htm
http://www.bullatomsci.org/issues/2001/jf01/jf01geerhart.html
http://www.genderequity.org/massmods/mods45/cmontagna.html
http://www.office.com/global/0,2724,61-13728,FF.html
http://www.NRC.gov/”>http://www.NRC.gov/
http://www.toxicsaction.org/eday99/towns.html



1. What is the half-life of Pb-203?

2. What did Melvin and Maria Mininson receive from Bomb Shelters, Inc. in 1959 in exchange for spending the first two weeks of their marriage in a fallout shelter?

3. Why is Y-90 used for radiotherapy rather than for radiodiagnosis?

4. Name three states have six or more nuclear power plants.

5. How long does it take to go through the training program in Nuclear Medicine at Springfield Technical Community College?

6. How do some people living with ten miles of the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant cope with their concerns about the possibility of Sr-90 contaminating in their surroundings?

7. How many underground nuclear tests has the United States conducted?

8. When does the U.S. Department of Energy project that radioactive waste will begin being deposited at Yucca Mountain in Nevada?

9. Ten million years from now, which isotope will be most hazardous to drinking water supplies: Pu-239, Ra-226, U-233, or Th-229?

10. How long will it take for a sample of Sr-90 containing 6,000 microcuries of activity to decay down to 1 microcurie?

11. Who was Radioactive Man’s trusty sidekick, and who was he played by?

12. Go to http://www.journey.sunysb.edu/ProjectJava/Radiation/ and answer the following questions:
Study the decay of Pu-241 (half-life = 10.0 years) by clicking on “animate.” Starting with 1 X 1010 atoms of Pu-241, how many atoms of Pa-233 will be formed after 50 years?

How many atoms of Bi-209 will be present after 5,000 years?

Air

http://www.rainforest-alliance.org/about/report/index.html
http://chem.salve.edu/chemistry/diffusion.asp
http://www.epa.gov/students/global_warming_us.htm
http://www.aaas.org/international/atlas/contents/pages/eco09.html
http://www.poprockscandy.com/
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/hole/holecomp.html
http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/tovsto/archive/sp/
http://www.aqmd.gov/smog/97aqrmain.html
http://www.epa.gov/ozone/science/hole/holecomp.html
http://www.eps.org/aps/public_affairs/popa/helium.html

1. What General Mills research scientist invented Pop Rocks in 1956?

2. On what day in 1998 did there first appear a sizable area over Antarctica in which the ozone layer was less than 120 DU in thickness?

3. How many acres of tropical forest did Brazil lose between 1980 - 1990?

4. How many years does one molecule of monochloropentafluoroethane released into the atmosphere survive and go on to do damage to the ozone layer?

5. What was the pH of the water 3.5 meters deep in Loring Pond in Minneapolis, MN on June 30, 1997?

6. In the year 1992, about how many days were there in which the measured amount of carbon monoxide in the air in the Los Angeles Basin exceeded the existing Federal Standard?

7. Why doesn’t it make sense to obtain helium from the atmosphere?

8. What is the boiling point of liquid air?

9. Go to the gas diffusion applet at
http://chem.salve.edu/chemistry/diffusion.asp
Which four gases in the drop-down menu of gases diffuse through the tube faster than neon?

10. According to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency 1995 report on global warming and sea level rise, there is a 50% chance that in the year 2200, sea level at Woods Hole will be about how many inches higher than it is today?

11. What is the most potent greenhouse gas found so far by researchers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?

12. (A) How many tons of carbon are dissolved in the ocean as carbon dioxide?
(B) Approximately how much of the carbon dioxide that is produced by the burning of fossil fuels is currently being absorbed by the ocean?

Choices

http://www.americansun.org/pages/sunscreen.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/Entrez/wwwudv.cgi?gi=178144&db=Nucleotide&from=1&to=420&msize=1000&cbl=60
http://www.historyoftheuniverse.com/atp.html
http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/tips_4_youth/quiz.htm
http://vitamind.ucr.edu/
http://www.bristol.ac.uk/Depts/Chemistry/MOTM/atp/atp1.htm
http://www.people.virginia.edu/~rjh9u/lactase.html
http://www.bayeraspirin.com/
http://www.uspto.gov/
http://www.runet.edu/~kcastleb/text.html
http://www.geocities.com/HotSprings/4266/perm.html
http://www.molecules.org/experiments/Wigal/Wigal2.html


1. What is the molecular weight of 2-ethylhexylsalicylate?

2. What sodium salt is used during a hair permanent to oxidize cysteine bonds back into cystine bonds?

3. About how much money does the average male college student spend on alcohol?

4. Name the California general practitioner who noticed in 1948 that the 400 men he prescribed aspirin to hadn’t suffered any heart attacks.

5. How is the iminodisuccinate manufactured by Bayer Corporation made?

6. Eating what kind of beans can trigger acute hemolytic anemia in persons of Mediterranean descent who have erythrocytes deficient in the enzyme glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase?

7. How many amino acids are there in the enzyme ATP synthase?

8. How many acres of forest are destroyed each year to provide trees to cure tobacco?

9. What sunscreen ingredient absorbs significant amounts of UVA?

10. Only 5 percent of teen smokers think they will definitely be smoking in 5 years. What percent of teen smokers actually end up still smoking 7-9 years later?

11. Vitamin D3 is the naturally occurring form of the vitamin. It is produced from 7-dehydrocholesterol, which is present in the skin, by the action of sunlight. Vitamin D2 (which is equivalently potent to vitamin D3 in humans and many mammals, but not birds) is produced commercially by the irradiation of the plant sterol ergosterol with ultraviolet light. How do the structures of Vitamin D3 and Vitamin D2 differ?

12. What peculiar properties related to the consumption of alcohol do the flavoring compounds described in U.S. Patent # 6,203,839 have?

Industry

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/htbin-post/Entrez/query?uid=9472320&form=6&db=m&Dopt=b
http://www.epa.state.oh.us/dsiwm/front_pg/fact_out.html
http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/bnf/chapter1.html
http://www.ppi-far.org/
http://chassels.net/organic/project1/hanson.htm
http://www.tms.org/Meetings/Annual-97/Program/Sessions/WP232B.html
http://maine.maine.edu/~io30634/TNT/tnt_map.htm
http://www.duracell.com/Fun_Learning/index.html
http://www.fertilizer.com/fertilizer/all_about_fert/index.html


1. How many pounds of sulfur are needed per 1000 square feet of clay-type soil to lower the pH of the soil from 8.0 to 6.5?

2. What Illinois farmer set the all-time record for North American corn production in 1985 by producing 370 bushels of corn per acre on his farm?

3. How many metric tons of nitrogen is fixed annually by biologic processes?

4. How many metric tons of nitrogen was fixed in 1960 by industrial processed like the Haber- Bosch process?

5. How much coal would it require to industrially fix 160 million tons of nitrogen?

6. TNT is more stable than nitroglycerine. Why is an argument based on the molecular weights of the two compounds not convincing in terms of explaining the differences in the explosive characteristics of these two substances?

7. What is a potential environmental application of reed canary grass?

8. What enzyme catalyzes the reduction of TNT to 4-amino-2,6-dinitrotoluene?

9. In some battery-operated devices, the batteries are arranged head-to head; in others, the batteries are arranged side-by-side. Which arrangement provides a longer lifetime for batteries, head-to-head or side-to-side?

10. An estimated 138,000 tons, or 65 percent, of the lead found in the municipal solid waste stream comes from lead-acid batteries. About how many individual batteries does this represent?

11. In their paper "Closed-Loop Nitrogen-Chlorine Degassing/Fluxing of Liquid Aluminum Alloys," L.S. Fan and Robert A. Rapp of Ohio State University used what compound to remove hydrochloric acid and chlorine from the closed-loop system so that they would not be released out into the environment?


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last updated 7/29/02