With spring upon us, it is time to experience nature and everything it has to offer. This is exactly what you can do at the UMBC Chemistry Department’s ChemArt Festival on April 31. Exhibits will be set up throughout the chemistry building that allow attendees to get closer and experience the world of chemistry in a way they never have before.
The first and possibly most exciting aspect of the festival is the Smell Tour where participants can smell the various chemicals and compounds around the labs. At the then end of the day a contest will be held for anyone interested to blindly match the correct chemical with their smell.
This is no small contest as the grand prize for the event is the Golden Nose as well as the internationally recognized title of Master Smeller. Being a master smeller comes with many perks as it opens up countless employment opportunities as well as the ability to receive five percent discounts from many food chains across the US and Canada.
An arts and crafts table will also be set up for interested participants. Here, attendees can build and paint their very own organic molecules. For a small donation of five doll hairs, these models can be taken home and hung from a ceiling to be admired all day from the comfort of your very own bed.
A somewhat controversial activity, but one that will nonetheless be offered is the famed taste test. Participants that have signed legally binding waivers expunging UMBC from any liability, will go around the chemistry building to various labs and take a small taste of interesting chemicals.
Like the smell test, a tasting competition will be held at the end of the day and an award will be presented to the person who can identify the most compounds by taste alone. Another award will be given out to anybody who can make it through these tests without seriously injuring themselves, contracting an infectious rash or passing out.
Finally, to wrap up the day, a banquet of chemistry themed foods and speeches will be prepared by various faculty discussing the importance of representing science and chemistry in the arts in addition to various poetry readings and short stories by literature and science minded individuals from across campus. Stories and poems will include: Alone in the Lab: An Erotic Short Story, by Ben Zene; a poetry reading called Drip Drop, the Titration Will Never Stop by an unnamed undergraduate researcher and many more.
The banquet will include many chemistry themed foods such as ball and stick models of organic molecules modeled with fruit to represent atoms, jello, with colors from the visible light spectrum, punch served out of a burette as well as pipette shots for those over 21 years of age.
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