Climbing stairs and recurrence relations
Chapter 1: The Problem Climbing up flights of stairs is an activity we do every day. How many steps can you climb up at one time? Most people can climb up two steps at a time; or maybe even three…
Category StemCo Curious Reads
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Future-proofing for an STEM future
I am sure you have heard that “the future is in STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Indeed, the statistics back this up; STEM occupations have grown in number by close to 80% since 1990, and is projected to grow at…
Harmonious Rational and Irrational Numbers
Chapter 1: Exposition When you hear a beautiful work of music, what makes it pleasing? How do the different frequencies of music combine to create the overall harmony? Musical notes, like all other sounds, are vibrations of molecules in the…
Wormholes and black holes
Time travel has always captured the popular imagination. In the bestselling book “A Brief History of Time” by the late Stephen Hawking, three means of time travel were proposed, firstly in a universe where space-time is sufficiently warped, secondly if…
Stainless Steel: Cutlery, Corrosion and an Ancient Sword
Stainless steel is one of the most commonly found metals in our lives today, and we encounter this metal throughout every single day, in cutlery, furniture, electrical appliances… it is so common, that we often don’t realise how amazing this…
Why wood doesn’t actually burn with a flame
In primary school, we all learnt that wood is a good fuel, being used in applications such as barbeque and traditional cooking, and learnt that chemical energy in wood is converted to heat energy and light energy of the flame. We…
Is your child excelling in STEM?
Many have talked about the large leap in mathematics and the science subjects from lower secondary to upper secondary, and from upper secondary to the junior college level. I am sure that you have heard of people talking about this,…
How do other animals pee?
Humans pee. Do birds pee? Do fish pee?? Have you seen a bird pee? You shouldn’t have. However, I am sure you have seen a bird pooping. Animals excrete nitrogenous waste in three main forms: ammonia, urea, and uric acid.…
AI and Synthetic Organic Chemistry
Artificial intelligence (AI), also known as machine learning, has been a hot topic of discussion in recent years, with much excitement over the application of AI technology in big data analysis for the creation of “smart” homes and even “smart”…
Does delocalisation always lead to molecular stabilisation?
Most bonds we are familiar with still have a localised nature, with the highest electron density occurring within the internuclei region, and negligible electron density far away from the internuclear region. And yet, such is the beauty of chemistry, that…
