Resumen de ConfChem Conference on A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiatives in Global Chemical Education: The IUPAC Periodic Table of Isotopes for the Educational Community
Norman E. Holden, Tyler B. Coplen
The IUPAC Periodic Table of the Isotopes (www.ciaaw.org) was prepared as an educational outreach effort to expose teachers, students, and the general public to the existence of both stable and radioactive isotopes of the chemical elements. This Table provides information on the isotopes of each element, including the mass number and fraction of each isotope in a stable or a long-lived radioactive chemical element. These data allow scientists to determine the atomic weight of each element, which connects the microscopic and the macroscopic worlds. For many elements, there is a variation in the fraction of an element’s isotopes in naturally occurring substances. The atomic weight is variable beyond its measurement uncertainty and the upper and lower bounds of the standard atomic weight are presented as an interval, rather than as a value with uncertainty, for 10 elements. The Table provides examples of the importance of both the stable and radioactive isotopes in our everyday world because of the variability of the stable isotope ratios or the radioactive decay of the unstable isotopes. There are 440 examples of applications to our everyday life. Applications, such as medical, industrial, geo-chronological, earth and planetary science, biological and forensic science, and anthropological are shown. Readers of the conference paper responded with questions, and the answers to the questions are included. This communication summarizes one of the invited papers to the ConfChem online conference A Virtual Colloquium to Sustain and Celebrate IYC 2011 Initiates in Global Chemistry Education held from May 18 to June 28, 2012, and jointly hosted by the ACS DivCHED Committee on Computers in Chemical Education and the IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education.
