This in-class activity requires that the students read an article in The Atlantic about an interesting (and modern) case of the plague.  The article provides a great platform to showcase the Inorganic side of broad societal themes like evolutionary biology, environmental and hereditary influences on disease, and the collaboration between biology, medicine, and history.  The article itself contains little chemistry, but can be used to guide students into learning about iron in bioinorganic chemistry.

Accompanying article found here:

I modified the Barb Reisner/Joanne Stewart/Maggie Geselbracht First Day TOC activity (https://www.ionicviper.org/class-activity/introducing-inorganic-chemist…) to take advantage of the quarterly list of Top 10 Most Read articles that IC sends out.  This is delivered to me as an email from ACS pubs and I am sure that it is available to anyone who wished to subscribe to the updates.  I have attached a pdf copy of the August 2013 update as an example.

Concept maps are a visual way to organize and represent information. In this literature discussion, we introduce a novel technique for teaching literature analysis to students where concept maps are used for establishing relationships between the key ideas, theories, procedures, and methods of a proposed literature article. Using the article “Compositionally Tunable Cu₂ZnSn(S_1-xSe_x)₄ Nanocrystals: Probing the Effect of Se-Inclusion in Mixed Chalcogenide Thin Films” (Riha, S.C.; Parkinson, B.A.; Prieto, A.L. J. Am. Chem.