Hola mis amigos!

So my semiconductor of the week is...
Silicon is the chemical element that has the symbol Si and atomic number 14. A tetravalent metalloid, silicon is less reactive than its chemical analog carbon. As the eighth most common element in the universe by mass, silicon occasionally occurs as the pure free element in nature, but is more widely distributed in dusts, planetoids and planets as various forms of silicon dioxide or silicate. On Earth, silicon is the second most abundant element (after oxygen) in the crust, making up 25.7% of the crust by mass.
Silicon has many industrial uses. Elemental silicon is the principal component of most semiconductor devices, most importantly integrated circuits or microchips. Silicon is widely used in semiconductors because it remains a semiconductor at higher temperatures than the semiconductor germanium and because its native oxide is easily grown in a furnace and forms a better semiconductor/dielectric interface than almost all other material combinations.
In the form of silica and silicates, silicon forms useful glasses, cements, and ceramics. It is also a component of silicones, a class-name for various synthetic plastic substances made of silicon, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen, often confused with silicon itself.
Silicon is an essential element in biology, although only tiny traces of it appear to be required by animals. It is much more important to the metabolism of plants, particularly many grasses, and silicic acid (a type of silica) forms the basis of the striking array of protective shells of the microscopic diatoms.


About the Web Sites:

I could not figure out the first site, so I kept scanning throught the others. I really had fun with the one where you had to plug in numbers to balance the equations. I even got my boyfriend involved becasue I was having a good time trying to solve them. I'd kind of like a book of chemistry equations for my plane flight--it's like doing Su-Doku. The first food web-site would not open, but the second one did. It was the same as the article we read in class, it seemed. It was interesting to read about quitting caffeine/coffee. I read it outloud to some friends. Seems they didn't really want to talk about it. Old habits die hard.

catching up

Hi dee ho! Tessa needs to catch up on a couple assignments. Sorry it has taken me so long! Let's cut to the chase, then.

My Alkali Earth Metal of the Week:

Francium (pronounced /ˈfrænsiəm/), formerly known as eka-caesium and actinium K,[1] is a chemical element that has the symbol Fr and atomic number 87. It has the lowest known electronegativity of all known elements, and is the second rarest naturally occurring element (after astatine). Francium is a highly radioactive metal that decays into astatine, radium, and radon. As an alkali metal, it has one valence electron.
Marguerite Perey discovered francium in France (from which the element's name comes) in 1939. It was the last element discovered in nature, rather than synthesized.[2] Outside the laboratory, francium is extremely rare, with trace amounts found in uranium and thorium ores, where the isotope francium-223 continually forms and decays. As little as 30 g (one ounce) exists at any given time throughout the Earth's crust; the other isotopes are entirely synthetic. The largest amount ever collected of any isotope was a cluster of 10,000 atoms (of francium-210) created as an ultracold gas at Stony Brook in 1997.[3]

The Color of Foods in My Kitchen:

(And here is the part of my life that really needs some work. Just got into a discussion with some girlfriends about how I don't really cook. How sad and embarrassing! I think this is going to be my new year's resolution: to take chargeof my gu qi and start healthy foods for myself.) That being said...
I have red apples, yellow lemons, green sparagus, red cranberry sauce, oranges, orange goldfish crackers (hee hee), green lettuce, eggs, white cheese, bagels .....and we are getting into the beige family. My kitchen needs food makeover. Seriously, I am making some changes.

About the websites:

I really enjoyed checking out all the colors of the minerals. There's a really cool crystal store right down the street from me. I think I'd like to research some of the properties of different minerals, figure out which colors might best benefit different friends, and then buy them some holiday mineral gifts! I will definitely refer back to this site. So interesting how the colors range so widely! hallelulujah color!

The site about flames didn't work for my computer right. I couldn't view the movies. But I did figure out how to do the step by step of pictures and saw the colors of flames change over each slide. Pretty cool.