Acids and bases are chemical compounds always present in our daily life. They are important raw materials in manufacturing industries and are necessary for the control of various industrial processes. They participate actively in living organisms’ metabolism and, if improperly disposable they can alter the environmental conditions necessary to the human well-being. Acids have sour taste (e.g. citrus fruits), while bases have astringent flavors (“soap like”). In addition, theses substances are part of cosmetic formulations, food, drinks, pharmaceuticals, cleaning products, toiletries, etc.. The most common way to determine the acidity or alkalinity of an aqueous solution is measuring its pH, but this concept is not as simple as it seems to be.

Keywords
acids, bases, acid-base theories, pH, the concept of pH, pH scale, acidity, alkalinity.

Authors
João Carlos de Andrade
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Química

This program is designed to run on Windows and allows the conversion of data between different units. It is an executable program, easy to use, developed by Josh Madison and can be used freely (freeware).

josh@joshmadison.com

In English

The Brazilian Society of Soil Science launched, in 2009, during the XXXII CBCS meeting, in Fortaleza, the book “Chemistry and Mineralogy of Soil” in two volumes (Part I – Basics, Part II – Applications), totaling 1380 pages. This book covers a large gap for the lack of basic teaching materials for training in undergraduate and courses in the area of Agricultural Sciences. The academic and scientific communities now have basic material that surely will be the demarcation line of a new phase in the improvement of teaching of soils and plant nutrition in Brazil.

Editors
Vander de Freitas Melo
Luís Reynaldo F. Alleoni

The Chemical and physical phenomena and the principles applied in qualitative analysis to identify ions in aqueous solution are the same ones used in quantitative analysis of different samples and are still used in many official reference methods, including instrumental methods or procedures. This shows the importance of knowledge of the fundamentals of qualitative analysis, requiring the teacher to get the students’ attention for their practical applications. Below are some brief descriptions of methods and procedures as suggestions for class discussion.

Keywords
qualitative analytical chemistry, quantitative analytical chemistry, concepts, applications, experiments, learning, testing methods, ASTM, AOAC, RSC.

Authors
João Carlos de Andrade
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Química
Terezinha Ribeiro Alvim
Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais, Departamento de Química – CEFET-MG

Obeying the fundamental law of nature that says, “a physical or chemical system always tends to cause an irreversible change from some state of initial non-equilibrium to a final equilibrium”, chemical reactions can be defined as processes in which different substances interact with each other, with a rearrangement of atoms occurring that completely changes the initial characteristics of the substances involved, tending to an equilibrium. This article shows, in a concise manner, the kinetic and thermodynamic aspects of equilibrium in aqueous solution.

Keywords
equilibrium, electrolytes, activity, activity coefficient, ionic strength, Debye-Hückel, kinetics, thermodynamics.

Author
João Carlos de Andrade
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Química

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In today’s globalization, the competitiveness of each nation appears, increasingly, linked to the creation of a strong and cohesive Science, Technology and Innovation system (S,T&I), that allows cooperative actions and encourages technology transfer.

In the Brazilian context, the government has been carrying on efforts towards strengthening the innovative activities in the country, encouraging, among other things, the funding of projects designed to boost the interaction between public and private sectors, as well as the development of legal mechanisms to boost technology transfer. In this process, the approval of the Innovation Law in December 2004 calls for the national institutions of science and technology (I,S&T) – universities or research institutes to have centers of technological innovation (C,T&I) to manage their policies of innovation. However, the absence of such policies at the I,S&T is seems the first bottleneck that T&I centers will have to overcome to meet their goals properly – among them, “to maintain the institutional policy of fostering the protection of creation, licensing, innovation and other forms of technology transfer. Thus, the implications of the Innovation Law are that I,T&I must have both an Innovation Policy and an Intellectual Property Policy.

However, knowing that Brazil does not have a “culture” of technology transfer and that the T&I centers are dealing with various difficulties to structure their centers for innovation transfer, either due to lack of a more consistent policy designed to sensitize about the institutions about the crucial nature of innovative activity or due to a lack of personnel with expertise to at least take on the basic functions of self-assessment and the creation of strategic planning to achieve excellence in various aspects of the mission of a T&I center, an elaboration development of a policy institutional innovation, intellectual property management and, consequently, implementation of the T&I centers emerge as a necessary startize point.

It is with respect to this point that this book provides an original contribution, by presenting to the reader a set of items that work on issues of great relevance for structuring centers of technological innovation within the I,S&T, at just the moment of strong institutional changes, in which private initiative continues to be called to incorporate their investments in science and technology, proper structuring of T&I centers, even more fundamental so as to effectively consolidate an environment focused on innovation throughout the country. The different themes in the work – “Panorama of the T&I centers in Brazil”, “Institutionalizing the Centers for Technological Innovation”, “Managing Intellectual Property”, “Transfer and Commercialization of Technology” and “Entrepreneurship and Pre-Incubation” – enable reflection about the methods and instruments for institutional management of innovative activity and the structure of innovation clusters.

The results presented in this book – both as regards the reporting of good practices for technology management and in dealing with the articulation of separate subjects in theory, but interdependent on the daily activities of a T&I center – challenge those responsible for the formation of innovation policies at T&I centers and all those involved with the issues of intellectual property and development of innovation providing an opportunity for expanding their understanding of the context surrounding the implementation of the T&I centers in Brazil, as well as to demystify some of the obstacles involved in the process of technology transfer between the public and private sectors.

Good reading!

Published with permission of INOVA

INOVA – Agência de Inovação da Unicamp

The content of Inorganic Qualitative Analytical Chemistry usually used by Brazilian Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) covers the theory of chemical equilibrium in aqueous solution and, in the laboratory, the separation and identification of cations and anions in solution or solid samples, using classical methods. As there are still opinions both fory and against the maintenance of classic Qualitative Analytical Chemistry in the curriculum of Brazilian higher education in chemistry, this section intends to provide evidence demonstrating of the importance of teaching about research of cations and anions in the formation of chemists in Brazil, as a fundamental basis for the teaching of Quantitative Analysis and Instrumental Analysis.

Keywords
Qualitative Analytical Chemistry, data collection, formation of chemists, cation separation reactions, cation identification reactions, anion identification reactions, analytical steps, reaction medium, operational care, Pedagogy.

Authos
João Carlos de Andrade
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Química
Terezinha Ribeiro Alvim
Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais, Departamento de Química – CEFET-MG

History shows that nothing is totally new and therefore the old should not be discarded, but known so that new knowledge can be constructed. Thus, when interviewed by Rudy M. Baum, Henry Taube, Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1983, said that the disappearance of qualitative analysis from the curriculum of American universities was a mistake, because that was a way to introduce descriptive chemistry and motivate students to study chemical reactions that, in his opinion, “are the heart of chemistry” [1]. In view of this controversy and of the possible options for the use of the discipline of Qualitative Analytical Chemistry as a tool for the education of chemical equilibrium in aqueous solution, a critical view of the historical sequence of the procedures for qualitative analysis development is presented below.

Keywords
classical analysis, Qualitative Analytical Chemistry, education, history, applications.

Authors
João Carlos de Andrade
Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Química
Terezinha Ribeiro Alvim
Centro Federal de Educação Tecnológica de Minas Gerais, Departamento de Química – CEFET-MG

There is substantial evidence of the complexity of selenium speciation in living organisms and of the importance of the selective determination of the particular species of this element in order to understand its metabolism and biological significance in clinical chemistry, biology, toxicology, and nutrition.
The state-of-the-art of analytical techniques available for this purpose is critically evaluated with particular emphasis on the element-selective detection and identification of the detected selenium compounds. Whereas there are a number of techniques available that are able to detect various selenium species in living organisms selectively, few techniques exist that are able to identify and to characterize the species detected.

Pure Appl. Chem., Vol. 72, No. 3, pp. 447–461, 2000.
IUPAC Technical Report
© 2000 IUPAC
IUPAC permission is acknowledged

Notes:
1. The interactive programs are marked with an asterisk.
2. On downloading you will receive the file extension *.zip which, when unpacked, will result in another set of zipped files, that will generate the executable *. exe programs (for the completion of the calculations) and a tutorial with the extension *.doc. Note that the tutorials for the programs ENTRADA / EDITAR and  MODEREG / MIXREG are presented together.