worried about your mock exam result?

After your Year 12 mock exam results have been given back you may be quite concerned about the grade you received. There are a number of things you can do about this, the first of which will no doubt be to do the appropriate amount of revision over the holidays. You will also benefit from more past paper practise. The problem is that since the syllabus changed this year we have no actual past papers for you to attempt.

However, the old syllabus has many very similar questions which cover mostly the same content and you can download them, along with the answer schemes, here.

AQA unit 1 past papers

You will recognise many of the 2006 and 2007 questions from the yellow homework booklet you have been using, but beware as some content has now been deleted or has moved to the module you will study after christmas, eg. chemistry of group 2 metals. As a general rule, if you've not been taught it, you don't need to know it.

module 4 past paper answers

If you are looking for answers for the orange module 4 booklet you can download them from here, as they are no longer on the AQA website.

Jan 2002

June 2002

Jan 2003

June 2003

the periodic table of videos

I've put an exciting new resource into the Useful Links section down the right hand side of the blog, and also put a link from this post.

Periodic Table of Videos

It's set of short videos, one for each of the elements in the Periodic Table, produced at Nottingham University and featuring some impressive Chemistry.

Keep an eye out for the Professor with the mad grey hair.

year 12 help with formulae and equations

Some of you have been struggling to get to grips with formulae and equations so follow the link below for a downloadable worksheet which will hopefully help to sort out some of your problems.

common ions, formulae and equations

large hadron collider

The biggest, most expensive experiment in history begins this week and is attracting both scientific hyperbole and hysteria. Some say it will reveal the universe's secrets and lead to the elusive Theory of Everything. A few fear that unleashing unimaginable power beneath the Swiss countryside will result in the end of the world. On Wednesday scientists will find out whether the LHC’s £3 billion cost has paid off.

The first beams of particles have already been successfully fired around nearly half of the 17-mile tunnel in Switzerland, where Cern (the European Organisation for Nuclear Research) is based, as part of preliminary testing. If Wednesday’s start-up goes smoothly a second beam will be fired into the machine travelling in the opposite direction, with the two forced to collide. The products of those collisions could give physicists their best insight yet into the structure and origins of the universe.

The Big Bang is what they are trying to recreate. Or rather what happened a trillionth of a second after the universe was created by an explosion, 13.7 billion years ago. For that tiny moment, it is believed everything was molten plasma. This cooled to create everything we see around us. The hope is that by recreating that moment, in miniature, the scientists will be able to see things that are invisible now. Why though?

Well, the problem is that we don't have any real evidence for our theory of why things have mass. In 1964 Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University predicted an unseen particle that provided mass, the Higgs boson. The hope is it will be detected for the first time and its detection may give us a Theory of Everything, the Holy Grail of science. This is a unifying theory providing one explanation for the forces at work in the natural world, from the nucleus of an atom to the movements of the planets. Sounds like alchemy to non-scientists, but some very respectable minds believe it is possible, and that the collider may show the way.

Some scientists, on the other hand, went to the European Court for Human Rights to try to stop the collider being turned on. They fear it may create a black hole, which would certainly violate our rights by sucking the planet into... well we don't really know, but it's probably not good news. Professor Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith of Cern says: "The chance we produce a black hole is minuscule." Which is not all that reassuring. Or as Professor Brian Cox puts it, "anyone who thinks that the LHC is dangerous is a t--- ".

However, is it not entirely possible that a few seconds before the original big bang there may have been a group of eminent scientists stood around in an alternate universe waiting patiently for someone flick a switch and turn a very large particle collider on? In any case, they will only send the protons in one direction this week. The collisions start in October. Until then, at least, we're safe.

large hadron collider guide

official LHC website

scientifically correct LHC rap
I know physicists are excited about it, but a rap?

liquid nitrogen bomb

Liqiud nitrogen boils at a temperature of −196 °C and since the liquid to gas expansion ratio is 1:694 it will very quickly build up enough pressure to make it quite unsafe to seal into an empty plastic bottle.

hydrogen pringles

A pringles tub with a small hole in the top, filled with hydrogen gas and ignited, will burn away quietly until the hydrogen/air mix is just right. Then a small explosion is observed. The second attempt has the mix just right to begin with upon ignition.