Australia's Science Forum

Our school has 550 kids. Our "Mr Filch" (read grumpy janitor for those who aren't Harry Potter fans) takes care of cutting open lockers etc, but the locks are issued through the front office. We have a school set of combination locks now, so when the kids get a lock we record the combinati...

Haines supplies an excellent fake frog dissection for the squeamish. It has a huge plastic frog. When you take the skin off, the organs underneath are in gooey plastic so they feel real, but without the smell! =D> What about a croc skin farm for a baby croc? Sometimes youngsters in the pens can die ...

We use the vacuum rubber tubing, with the 3mm thick walls. The rubber doesn't perish very quickly, and it's much more vandal-proof than the plastic tubing. Mind you, surprising though it may seem, that type of vandalism just doesn't seem to occur in this all-girls school anywhere near as much as oth...

If little cherubs have fiddled with the focussing screws and you have limited time before the microscopes are needed for the next class, try raising the height of the slide by placing a clean clear slide under the sample slide. It gives you a couple of mm's of focus height, and gives you time to adj...

Glycerol and Potassium Permanganate, perhaps? Or drive to Canberra and buy some!

K

Kathryn, Diluted solutions should be OK in their bottles on the shelves. I'm also in a small school with limited stocks of chemicals. Sometimes it's easier to just stick your fingers in your ears and go "LA LA LA" than actually try to solve the problem of how to store everything separately...

We pushed the point this year, and I got around $10,000 dollars - 70% for equipment and 30% consumables. Compared to other parts of the school, this is a very modest budget. By the way, I bought a great portable fume hood, which is obviously WAY more cyclone-proof than upgrading existing fume cupboa...

Jaz, How close are you to rural areas? Lots of Stock and Station agents run "Drum Musters" where they collect old chemical containers from farms etc for disposal. Either that or contact your local dump and ask them what the local protocol is for used chemical containers. They might have a ...

Why is this topic in "biology,Physics"???

I trained as a lab technician over 20 years ago, at TAFE. Although I've had other jobs in my life, this is the job I love the best. The hours suit, and so does the work, and I have the best boss in QLD, so no teacher conflicts.
K

I put a petri dish through my hand, stigmata style, and ended up in A&E at the hospital here, still wearing my lab coat. After I explained what had happened they whisked me straight past the crowds in the waiting room, and I got red carpet treatment all the way. It was only when one of the regis...

The trick to making U-bends is patience and time. You have to roll the tubing in the flame so it heats up all the way around fairly evenly, and then just bend it a little bit. Allow it to cool and heat up a spot about 2cm away from the first bend, and when it is hot there, then bend that bit. Cool a...

We have a brief window of opportunity to use ours, somewhere around July. The rest of the time it's just too humid!

I'd love to see an example of some of the on-line RA forms. Maybe I could get something like that going here. QLD is about to introduce some major curriculum changes, so I'm in wait and see mode when it comes to filing regular pracs. I just don't know how big or little the changes will be (or how cl...

I have heard about recipes where you add Nitric to the sludgy Silver to recoup it, but my chem teachers here say that you have the problem of the silver not being pure, and not being able to accurately determine what mass of silver you have - given that it's usually wet and sludgy - and therefore yo...

Yes, but will it work on the Voltameter tap?

Maree, I'm with you. I inherited an atmosphere of "them v. me" from my predecessor, where the HOD had resorted to putting every comment/request in a notebook, which went into the lab tech's pigeonhole. I absolutely refused to communicate in any other way except verbal face-to-face human in...

Our seniors use Vit C tablets to make a standard solution. If you use a 1000mg Vit C tablet, crush it and make a 100mL solution, then this can become your standard. Then you can test, for example, 10mL of the standard and compare 10mL of other juices, by counting how many drops/mLs it takes to chang...

You can google "Elephant's toothpaste" to get other recipes for this one. We use it to demonstrate rates of reaction. Get 100ml of 30% H2O2 and warm it in a microwave (presuming you store your peroxide in the fridge, it will be cold, so try 2 mins in microwave), and pour into a large measu...

We generate Hydrogen in a conical flask (Zn in HCl) and use a fairly narrow piece of tubing to bubble the H2 into a large measuring cylinder with water and a big squirt of dishwashing detergent. Then you can light the bubbles as they rise to the surface. With practise, you can get a perpetual "...