Ask yourself this question, as an individual human being, are you as whole organism, a compound? element? or mixture?

Guess the answer is fairly obvious, yes we are mixtures! Our body is a big soup of blood, body fluids, organs, tissues and cells that are also mixtures of their own.

Most things in this world are mixtures of various compounds and elements.

This concept of elements, compounds and mixture is a topic usually handled at lower secondary level science in the schools. Students often are not so ready to be able to tell how the various substances around them are classified. 

Mixtures are material systems that consist of 2 or more different type of substances blended into each other. The components are not chemically combined. aka no chemical reaction was involved to lead to the formation of the mixture.

Compounds are strictly speaking molecules that is made up of 2 or more types of elements chemically combined. You can write chemical formula to them. There are much stricter rules associated to the formation of compounds, such as the percentage composition by mass.

Elements, well are all the names you see on a Periodic Table. They are the basic chemical units of matter.

Why bother to classify this anyway?

There is a point in doing this, people want to work with the materials they get and make new things. In order to do so, people often need to know the nature of the materials and how it works. This in a sense led to the beginnings of chemistry where people start to discover that not all things around us as easily separated into its parts.

Some stuff need to be purified from their original source form which can be mixed or chemically combined. Different techniques are required to obtain the components.

Mixtures only need physical separation techniques to get separated. We need to get pure salt from the sea. Singapore also depends partly on reverse osmosis for clean water.

Compounds need to be separated using chemical techniques. We need to get pure iron from iron ore. 

This is actually so important in chemistry application that this has to be taught in both lower secondary science and upper secondary chemistry.

Hoho that’s me together with RSS Conqueror.

I believe this is one (i think 1st thus the oldest) of the 4 Sjoormen class submarines Singapore bought from Sweden. It uses four 533mm torpedo tubes and 2 400mm torpedo tubes. It can carry 23 crew. 

Yes, i went to the recent Singapore Navy Open House. Had a lot of fun walking around looking at various warships that has names as homely as “RSS Katong” (which i went on deck hehe), then i came across this fellow, RSS CONQUEROR! Wow, a more majestic name. Unfortunately we don’t get to go inside the submarine. I wanna sink into the depths of the ocean with it and spy through the periscope! ahaha

So how does submarines sink or float?

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[CAUTION! potential spoilers]

in the movie Ironman 2, Tony Stark was able to make a new element using a homemade particle accelerator.

omg quite impressive? or rather cute.

1. his new element came up to a size of a small triangle that can fit on his chest.new super heavy elements that were synthesized thus far lasted less than a millisecond after detection. they did not even last long enough to form a size of a speck of dust. these elements radioactively decay (aka disappear) too fast. wah, Ironman’s homemade element maybe bigger than our ezlink card!

2. in order to create new element, you have to bombard small size atoms such as calcium 10, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000, 000 times onto some huge atom just to hope that it can form a new element. how long that can take? Ironman did that in 1 afternoon? 

3. the recent hadron collider (a kind of particle accelerator) built by CERN is about 27km round of tubes that can almost fill Singapore. Ironman’s particle accelerator fit his living room. sure or not? this kind of small size particle accelerator can reach how many electronvolts? maybe can demo some simple isotopes existence nia? can create new element? maybe “tan gu gu”…….

Nevertheless, the movie itself other that the new element creating part was super entertaining. everyone in the cinema was laughing like crazy. I enjoy it very much too.

But sadly, the way some movies out there belittles scientific research can be disturbing.

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.  ~Edwin Powell Hubble, The Nature of Science, 1954