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Capybara - The World's Largest Rodent
Leaf Cutter Ants in the Peruvian Amazon

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Radioactive Dinner Plate

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This video shows two plates being measured for emission of radiation. The orange Fiesta plate was made using a glaze which contains uranium oxide. Fiesta dinnerware was produced by the Homer Laughlin China Company of West Virginia. Prior to World War II the glazes used natural uranium.  This practice stopped during the war when the US government seized the company's stock of uranium for the Manhattan Project.  In the late 1950's the Atomic Energy Commission relaxed restrictions on uranium and production practices switched to using depleted uranium to produce the red-orange glaze. The US Environmental Protection Agency recommends that dinnerware produced with uranium glaze should not be used for food, drink or food storage.
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The Effect of Concentration on the Rate of a Chemical Reaction

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This video shows a classic lab examining the effect of concentration of reactants on the rate of a chemical reaction.  This video supports NGSS HS-PS1-5 . In this experiment solutions of sodium thiosulfate and hydrochloric acid are combined in a beaker.  The reaction produces a precipitate which eventually makes the liquid turn cloudy.  The reaction beaker is placed over a piece of paper with a letter "X" printed on it.  The reaction is said to have gone to completion when the "X" can no longer be seen through the liquid in the beaker. I have used this video as a warm up or as a flipped lesson which has students make observations, record data about the reaction time for the trials, create a graph and form a conclusion about the effect concentration has on the speed of a chemical reaction. This lab was originally published by Flinn Scientific as a Chem Fax!  Use this link to see the full description of the experiment.
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NGSS HS-PS2-4 :  Use mathematical representations of Newton’s Law of Gravitation and Coulomb’s Law to describe and predict the gravitational and electrostatic forces between objects. Class started by trying to identify Cause and Effect relationships in the video below. Our next activity was an in class demonstration using a balloon, cloth and small pieces of paper.  The goal of the demo was to jump start thinking about how gravity and electrostatic forces can be compared to each other. Students completed a jig-saw activity to compile notes for Newton's Law of Gravitation and Coulomb's Law. I took pictures for each class and will share in their stream on Google Classroom.
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