General Safety Rules

1. No laboratory work shall be performed by a student without the direct supervision of the teacher. Under  no circumstances is a student allowed to work in the laboratory alone.

2. You will be instructed at the beginning of each laboratory period, as to the potential dangers that may be encountered and the proper precautions that are required to eliminate or reduce such hazards.

3. You will become familiar with the instructions of laboratory procedure prior to the initiation of any related activity. Read all directions for the experiment at least two times. Ask questions if you don't understand any part of the directions. No changes from the instructions will be allowed without permission from the teacher or instructor.

4. Never perform any activity that is not authorized or supervised by the teacher or instructor.

5. Do not operate equipment without operating instructions or specific permission from the teacher or instructor (i.e. Bunsen burner or centrifuge).

6. No eating, drinking or applications of cosmetics is allowed in the laboratory.

7.    Always wash hands after handling chemicals, plants, animals, or dissection tools.

8. Careless behavior in a laboratory can cause accidents. Horseplay, teasing, loud talking or tossing objects are are not allowed in a laboratory.

10. Each laboratory student will be made aware of the use and location of all safety equipment (i.e. goggles, gloves, apron, fume hood, eyewash, etc.)

11. Never reach over a Bunsen burner, chemical reagents or other laboratory equipment.

12. At the completion of the laboratory period or when an experiment is complete, return all equipment to proper storage and clean the work area.

Crime dramas such as CSI and Waking the Dead may have helped fuel a rise of nearly a third in the number of students taking degree courses in forensic and archaeological science.

The explosion in fictional and documentary screen portrayals of scientific analysis of crime scenes and cold case reviews has coincided with a 32.4% increase in undergraduates, figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency revealed yesterday.

Nearly 5,750 students were following such courses last year, and though this was lower than the 11,045 following chemistry or 9,348 doing physics, the growth dwarfed the 2% and 0.9% rise in these more traditional subjects. Overall numbers of undergraduates in the UK went up 3.3%, with only computer science and astronomy showing big drops.

"We don't know the definite cause," said Brian Emsley, of the Royal Society of Chemistry. "But there is a rise in programmes like Waking the Dead and CSI and there is a sort of glamour involved.

"We don't want to knock it because chemistry is part of it. But it would be useful to know how many jobs there are in forensic science. We point to the number of jobs there are out there for [people on] chemistry courses, not only in science.

Because they have a command of numeracy, mass data handling and analytic skills, they also go into banking, insurance and the City."

But other figures suggest the television gloss of fingerprinting, blood analysis and weapons analysis is wearing off. Applications for forensic courses fell this year by just over 4%, while those for physics and chemistry went up by 12.2% and 11.3%.

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Thin-film solar power

The modernist box that won this year’s Solar Decathlon, a contest for solar-powered houses sponsored by America’s Department of Energy, had solar panels of the conventional, crystalline sort on its roof. But the walls were covered in solar cells made with thin coatings of silicon and other materials in the place of expensive slices of crystal. Thin film, as this technology is known, is still less popular than crystalline cells and its move to the mainstream has been a year or two away for a decade. But its time may have come at last.

There are many exotic ideas involving thin film, from the solar shingles recently unveiled by Dow, a big chemical company, a roof ’s worth costs $27,000, to experimental prototypes of power-generating clothes, roads and cars. However, most thin film comes in the form of panels that resemble crystalline ones. They are roughly half as efficient, meaning that a panel must be twice as big to generate the same amount of power, but a third cheaper, watt for watt. So in places where there is no shortage of space, they are the natural option.

Thin-film cells are also more versatile, since they can be mounted on a variety of materials including flexible plastics and fabrics. Like all solar cells, they are becoming more efficient: the decathletes of Team Germany, who designed the winning house, bragged that its north façade was covered in panels that could convert even indirect sunlight into electricity.

Over the past year or so, thanks to a crash in demand tied to the recession and falling subsidies in big markets, the price of crystalline panels has fallen by 30-40%, undermining thin film’s relative advantage. Nonetheless, thin film’s share of the market has continued to rise: it is now almost half, compared with just 10% in 2004.

The biggest force in the industry is a firm called First Solar, based in Arizona, a sunny American state. Like that of virtually all alternative-energy firms, its share price has suffered in the recession. But it has nonetheless performed considerably better than Standard & Poor’s clean-energy index over the past three years. Its gross margins in the first half of the year were over 50%, on sales of $944m. This month the firm was added to the S&P 500 stock market index of America’s biggest firms.

First Solar looks likely to continue to grow. Last month it signed a memorandum of understanding with China  to  install  two  gigawatts’  worth  of  panels  in  Inner  Mongolia-a  place  with plenty  of  space.  That  is enough to power 3 million homes. Installation is due to begin next year and finish in 2019. That and other projects should consume all its output for several years to come.

First Solar’s rivals are much smaller. But technological advances may yet catapult one to the fore, says Steve Milunovich, an analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. First Solar makes its cells from a chemical called cadmium telluride. But firms such as Nanosolar, which is building factories in California and Germany, believe that a combination of copper, indium, gallium and selenium known as CIGS will prove cheaper to produce on a mass scale. Researchers at the University of California, meanwhile, hold out great hopes for cells made of organic chemicals.

For the moment, however, the cheapest form of solar power is none of these, but the less glamorous solar-thermal power, which involves heating water with sunlight to make steam. Utilities are also keen to use lenses to increase the amount of sunlight hitting solar panels-a technique known as concentrating solar power. They still need subsidies or a high price on carbon emissions to make investments in any sort of solar power profitable. But the gap between solar and conventional power sources is becoming, well, thinner.