2016/10/17 (Mon) ~ 21 (Fri)

by Gigi Wu and Tun-Cheng Chien

The 2016 Chemistry Week at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) was organized by the Student Association of Department of Chemistry, NTNU and sponsored by Departments of Chemistry, NTNU and the ACS Taiwan Chapter. The objective of the Chemistry Week was to build awareness of chemistry and promote the value of chemistry in everyday life. The event was supervised by Professor Yi-Hsin Liu (Dept of Chemistry, NTNU) and was projected to demonstrate interesting chemical reactions and provide fundamental chemistry knowledge to gather the science en thusiasts, especially non-science majored students, on campus.

The main theme of the 2016 Chemistry Week was Chemistry Secrete Investigation and was held in the week of 2016/10/17 (Mon)~21 (Fri) at the atrium of Cheng Zheng building at the main campus of NTNU. 25 chemistry-majored students (fresh- man and sophomore years) participated as volunteered staffs to help organize the event and prepare the demonstration and approximately 200 students have stopped by and visited our booth during the week.

Personnel allocation:

Five simple experiments were demonstrated in the event. The experiments are summarized below:

I.DIY Fingerprint developer

Ninhydrin is often used as a stain for developing TLC in the organic laboratory to identify primary and secondary amines. Since it was first used for developing latent fingerprints in 1954, ninhydrin has also become the most common method used to reveal prints on porous surfaces. Nearly all forensics labs use ninhydrin for this purpose. Ninhydrin is cheap, sensitive, and commercially available in disposable spray cans. The developed print is high-contrast purple that is readily visible on most paper backgrounds.         This experiment usually takes about 30 minutes for color development. The procedures include:

1. Fill sprayer with 10% Ninhydrin alcohol solution.
2. Leave fingerprint on a piece of paper.
3. Spray Ninhydrin alcohol solution on the fingerprint.
4. Stick the tape onto the position of fingerprint.
5. Wait for minutes, and the fingerprint appears.

The chemistry behind the experiment can be summarized as the following reactions:

The visitors pressed their fingerprints on paper, and then used ninhydrin to get their own fingerprint development. This reaction really surprised a lot of visitors. Hence, we have the opportunities to introduce this interesting experiment and the principle to more people.

Ninhydrin solution can react with primary and secondary amines. After touching the solution, the fingertips turned purple.

II. Redox Indicator

Redox indicators change their colors at specific potential differences. Indicator compounds must have a reduced and oxidized form with different colors, and the redox process must be reversible.

In experiment A, a ‘blue bottle’ experiment was demonstrated. An alkaline solution of glucose acts as a reducing agent and reduces added methylene blue from a blue to a colorless form. Shaking the solution raises the concentration of oxygen in the mixture and this oxidizes the methylene blue back to its blue form. When the dissolved oxygen has been consumed, the methylene blue is slowly reduced back to its colorless form by the remaining glucose, and the cycle can be repeated many times by further shaking. The cycle can be repeated many times.

In experiment B, indigo carmine was used to replace methylene blue in experiment A. Indigo carmine is very cheap, safe, easily obtained and produces a range of stunning colors. The basic principle is the same as experiment A. However, indigo carmine changes colour from yellow to red, and then to green. These demonstrations can be used to support teaching of redox chemistry, and illustrating aspects of color chemistry.

These experiments take approximately 10-15 minutes. We took the opportunity to explain the roles of oxygen and glucose in the experiments, in which glucose serves as a reducing agent, and oxygen serves as an oxidizing agent.

Blue bottle reaction:

Figure 2. From left to right: Blue bottles: oxidized form and reduced form of methylene blue solution; Traffic Lights: reduced form, the first oxidized form and the second oxidized form of indigo carmine solution

III. Acid-base indicator

Red cabbage contains pigments called anthocyanins which display the purplish color of the red cabbage and become a perfect nature indicator for acid and base. In this experiment, we applied the red cabbage extract as the acid-base indicator in various solutions in different pH, and then observed the changes of color.

Reference:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/chemsea/experiments.php?exp_n=1

IV. DIY Slime

A solution of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) can be made into slime by adding borax solution, which creates crosslinks between polymer chains. In this activity, some interesting properties of the slime are investigated. Visitors were delighted to make the slime in different ratio of borax and polyvinyl alcohol by themselves and glad to understand what happened about this malleable and elastic plaything.

Reference:

http://www.rsc.org/learn-chemistry/resource/res00000756/pva-polymer-slime

Summary and future perspectives

With the assistance from department faculty and senior students, the staffs were able to conduct the activities successfully. Students in the NTNU main campus are non-Science majored students, mostly from the area of Literature, Social Sciences, Education and Business Management. It is a great opportunity for us to promote the awareness and the knowledge of Chemistry in this special circumstance. Both visitors and the staffs learned lessons from this activity. Especially, the visitors can get hang-on experiences and saw demonstration and explanation of the background knowledge. For us, the staffs, we learned about not only how to cooperate with each other but how to represent clear demonstration. People willing to become teachers in the future can improve their teaching and experimental skills at the same time. We look forward to the same activity next year. All the experience gained in this year would be great beneficial to improve the activity next time.

Photo Gallery

by Tun-Cheng Chien

After the successful student conference last year, 2017 The Second ACS Taiwan Chapter Graduate Student Conference was continued as a tradition of the ACS Tai- wan chapter and was co-organized by Chemical Society Located in Taipei (CSLT), and Departments of Chemistry of both National Taiwan University (NTU) and National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU). The organizing committee was headed by Chair- person  Professor  Jye-Shane  Yang  (NTU)  and  composed  by  Professors  Tun-Cheng Chien (NTNU), Tsung‐Shing A. Wang (NTU, coordinator for org. chem.), Yi‐Hsin Liu (NTNU, coordinator for inorg. chem.), I‐Ren Lee (NTNU, coordinator for phys. chem.) and Wei‐Ssu Liao (NTU, coordinator for anal. chem.). The conference was held at Department of Chemistry, NTU in Taipei on Sunday May 7, 2017.

The conference was hosted and organized by junior faculty volunteers who also offered the opportunity as scientific mentors and carrier counselors for student participants. The objective of the conference was to provide a forum to bring together outstanding young scholars to practice scientific writing and presentation skills, to promote chemistry research in related areas, and to enhance collaboration. The participants were limited to graduate students from chemical science-related departments or institutes in Taiwan. A total numbers of forty two students submitted the abstracts to participate oral and poster presentations and student volunteers and audiences from NTU and NTNU registered to attend the conference. In addition, the organizing committee invited 12 enthusiastic young scholars/professors to serve as referees and commentators for the students’ presentations to invigorate the conference.

The student conference started with the opening remarks delivered by Prof. J.-S. Yang to welcome all the participants and addressed the establishment and mission of the ACS Taiwan Chapter. Prof. T.-C. Chien introduced all the referees to the audience and explained the guidelines for all the presenters. The conference was held in three parallel sections. Nevertheless, a wide diversity of scientific contents of the interdis- ciplinary chemistry was involved in the conference.

The oral presentations were limited to 15 minutes with additional 3 minutes for taking questions and answering. Twenty five students participated the oral presentation to deliver the speeches in English. Meanwhile, all the poster presenters were requested to make a one-minute quick talk in English with non-stop slideshow to briefly describe the poster contents. Afterwards, the poster section was held in the atrium and seventeen posters were displayed with heated discussions lasted till the end of the session.

Prior to the poster section/coffee break, an industrial section was sponsored by Everlight Chemical Industrial Corp. and was presented by Dr. Wen-Jeng Chen, Head of R&D Center. Everlight Chemical is the leading industrial manufacturer specialized in color/dye chemicals in Taiwan. Meanwhile, they have broad product lines in various specialty chemicals including pharmaceutical and electronic materials. Dr. Chen in- troduced the general situation and prospect of the company and his precious expe- rience in the industrial R&D to the students. The industrial presentation received broad attention from student audience.

After the scientific program completed, all the participants were invited to at- tend two special talks before the award ceremony. The first invited talk was the key- note speech sponsored by iGroup Taiwan and was delivered by Dr. Wei-Yan Miguel Li, Director of Academic Writing Education Center, NTU. The title of Dr. Li’s speech was “Present Your Academic Research Creatively”. She summarized the common mistakes and provided general strategies in scientific presentation based on her teaching ex- perience with Science-majored students. Dr. Li prepared a handout for the students and kindly offered her powerpoint file to the participants. The non-scientific presen- tation has successfully attracted the students’ interest and was great helpful to all the participants.

The conference organized a special lecture given by the recipient of 2016 Excel- lent Oral Presentation Award, Mr. Wei-Chun Liu. Mr. Liu is currently a M.S. student in the Department of Chemistry, National Taiwan University, Taipei. He shared his first attendance to the ACS national meeting with vivid slide shows. His trip to San Fran- cisco meeting was partially sponsored by ACS Taiwan Chapter.

The award ceremony was scheduled at the end of the conference day. A total number of 15 oral presenters were selected for Excellent Oral Presentation and 5 poster presenters were selected for Excellent Poster Presentations. All the awardees received the Award Certificates and gift vouchers sponsored by ACS Taiwan. Finally, Prof. Yang gave the closing remarks to conclude the successful conference.

The ACS Taiwan Chapter initiated the student conference for the students to experience the English-speaking scientific program. The one-day conference was overall successful and will be continuously held annually. The next conference is pro- jected to be held in the first weekend of May, 2018 and we look forward to more graduate students and faculty to participate the event.

Acknowledgment

The organizing committee would like to acknowledge the generous financial supports from ACS Committee on International Activities, ACS Chemical Abstracts Service, Everlight Chemical Industrial Co., iGroup Taiwan, and Bruker Taiwan Co., Ltd., as well as the continuous assistance and support from CSLT, NTU and NTNU.