Today I will be taking us on the stress involved in school practicals.
Being a science student in Nigeria is faced with a lot of challenges aside the difficulties in assimilating most unrelatable terms used in scientific explanations.
Other difficults are mostly faced during science practicals and on this post, I will be showing us what I mean by that.
I am currently in the lab and due to the challenges we are encountering, I have decided to make this post.
We are currently working on extracting keratin from chicken feathers and below are what we are currently working on.
Dissolving the chicken feathers using a mixture of Hydrogen sulphide and Soduim hydroxide which act as reducing agents.
- See below
The above photo shows the dissolving of the chicken feather in other to extract keratin from them.
This process is challenging for us because we need a constant light in other for the stirrer to be heated throughout the stirring process.
Another challenge we are encountering here is the fact that we need to keep stirring manually for 6 hrs which is very tiring.
Filtering the already dissolved chicken feathers in other to extract the keratin.
- See below
The above is the process of filtering the already dissolved chicken feathers using an ashed filter paper.
The challenge we are encountering here is the fact that the process is very slow as there are no available method of faster filtration.
The effect of above challenges is that it left some of us sleeping, some watching movies on laptops while some where pressing their phones.
- See photo
One of the major challenge we are experiencing is lack of light therefor a standby generator at least will help us in managing the situation.
Another issue is the fact that the extraction process takes time because of the small ashless filter paper we are using.
If the management can provide us with advanced filtration method such as pressured filtration, it will hasten the extraction process thereby allowing us to proceed with other aspect of the project.
NOTE: All pictures were taken with my phone camera
Thanks for reading