From Fall to Spring, the Sacramento City Chemistry Club has continued its tradition of bringing together students who love science through events and experiments. The club hosts bi-weekly meetings where the team comes together to talk chemistry and hold demo experiments, like the Black Snake at the end of each meeting.
Early October 2016 many club members and chemistry students volunteered at an ACS Flavors of Chemistry event that had two presentations on the chemistry behind wine by UCD ProfessorAndrew Waterhouse and cheese from UCD ProfessorMoshe Rosenberg. Event goers were able to try several wine and cheese pairings while learning about the subtle science behind the arts of wine and cheese. Members helped out behind the scenes preparing the pairings and handing them out while getting to try some samples themselves!
After a successful fall semester, the club ended finals week in December with a tour of the Sac County District Attorney’s Crime Lab to see what real life forensic analysis looks like. The lab focuses on recognition, collection, preservation, scientific analysis, and interpretation of physical evidence. Getting to see all of the equipment felt like jumping into a real life crime movie.
Club Day at the SCC Davis Center
SCC Club Day
Kicking off the new Spring Semester, SCC Chemistry Club attended Welcome Day Picnic at the Davis Center in February, and Club Day at the main campus in March. SCC Chemistry Club is always trying to find way to show people how fun chemistry can be and to bring in new members with things like interactive demos. This semester we showcased experiments such as Blobs in an Erlenmeyer where we made a lava lamp type solution to show how intermolecular forces at work, a mini version of the classic Elephant Toothpaste showing an example of a catalyst for an exothermic reaction, and also a fun DIY slime that people got to take home.
Hitachi at UC Davis
The SCC ACS Chemistry Club members were given the opportunity to attend the Hitachi Workshop at UC Davis, hosted by Hitachi and Gang-yu Liu, to learn about some of the new technologies they work with such as Hitachi spectroscopy and watch how they work.
The club expects to stay busy for the remainder of the spring semester with many events coming up including The UCD Nuclear reactor tour at the McClellan Nuclear Research center where they will learn about one of the newest research reactors in the US and the Advanced Light Source (ALS) tour at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab which the lab reports will be Department of Energy-funded synchrotron facility that provides users from around the world access to the brightest beams of soft x-rays, together with hard x-ray and infrared light, for scientific research and technology development in a wide range of disciplines. With many more fun trips and demos to come, this is shaping out to be another excellent semester for this chemistry club!
by Mono Lotto and Ifrah Qureshi
