Need ideas for my chemistry assignment?

My assignment is to present a presentation a topic of my choice (within the field of chemistry). anyone got some good or interest topic for me to do? because so far I can only think of doing catalyst. any ideas would be appreciated!
thanks in advance.

Make potential aphrodisiacs and give me several vials of it.

You can´t say a lot about catalysts without delving into very difficult chemistry. My high school teacher never taught us much about it, so yeah.

Maybe something environmental? You could set up an experiment to determine the amount of toxins in the air, or something.

How complex of an assignment are you able to do?

Do something that has to do with quantum chemistry. Even if you don't understand anything, the large words and complex theories always makes you look smart in front of your peers.

I always find it awesome. For example, my mind was blew the first time I found out why transitional haves have different oxidation states. Yes, I'm a nerd.

Do something colourful using displacement reactions with compound ions. Or if you have enough money, you can do a re-enactment of what fake alchemists did by converting lead/iron into gold via dissolving the outer coating. Those are the only interesting things I can think of but they might be too simple for your level of course. Most of my chemistry labs were relatively boring.

^This.

^this is interesting and easy to learn.

Lol, do cryogenics/cryonics, like me?

Yeah, but the chemistry part of that is so boring. I'm pretty sure you're not gonna be talking much about genetics in chemistry, which means the interesting stuff about DNA and protein synthesis is gone.

No one wants to hear stuff like this:

"Oh look, DNA strands are joined together by hydrogen bonds, blah blah blah..."

Speaking of this, did anyone else crushed strawberries in high school to extract their DNA? That was always fun.

D: Still easy and interesting to me.

You can mention the genetics functions and especiffy the chemical part.

DNA consists of two long polymers of simple units called nucleotides, with backbones made of sugars and phosphate groups joined by ester bonds. These two strands run in opposite directions to each other and are therefore anti-parallel. Attached to each sugar is one of four types of molecules called nucleobases (informally, bases). It is the sequence of these four nucleobases along the backbone that encodes information. This information is read using the genetic code, which specifies the sequence of the amino acids within proteins. The code is read by copying stretches of DNA into the related nucleic acid RNA in a process called transcription.

Derp. Wikipedia.

Seems to be you did fun experimets. Most exiting thing at my chemestry class: Making soap.

This sounds more like genetics if anything, but it does involve chemistry. Why not also do something with the variable states of solids? Like ductility, malleability, and what not. This can be easily done and presented.

1. How advanced is the level?

2. Anything that actually interest you in chemistry?

3. Anything outside of chemistry that interest you?

4. What is the context of this assignment and who are the audiences? (high school chemistry, university classes etc.)

I am hesitant to suggest anything until some kind of context is established. My main idea is to take a simple topic and delve deep into it (e.g. if you have done simple organic chemistry then maybe presentation on reaction mechanisms).

Mix bleach and amonia.

Good times~~~

I don't know what kind of chemicals you have access to, but you could redo the first artificial production of an organic compound from solely inorganic ingredients. This was pretty big when it was first done in 1828 by Frederick Wohler.

AgNCO + NH4Cl → (NH2)2CO + AgCl

So you'll need silver isocyanate and ammonium chloride. You'll make urea and silver chloride, which has an added cool effect, since AgCl will precipitate and basically glaze the inside of the reaction vessel silvery.

1. The level of this has to be university degree standards.

2. not really sure about this, although chemistry in highschool, I was interested in electrochemical series, hyrogen fuel and transistion metals but I'm not interested in any bio-chemistry.

3. out side of chemistry, I'm interested in nanotechology, material science, nuclear phyiscs and lasers

4. context: Students will develop a short (5 minute) verbal presentation based on the importance of chemistry to their chosen field of study. The presentation will be followed by a short question and answer session which will be used to assess the student’s understanding of the topic and related issues. My audience are my fellow peers and the lecture.

Thank you for all the ideas and responds so far, I appreciate them.

3.