Besides buying a box of chocolates for your sweetheart this Valentine’s Day, you might also want to get a few boxes to stash away for yourself. Scientific research has proven that chocolate, in moderation, can be good for your health. Bytesize Science delves into the chemistry of chocolate to explain why this is so.
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Why do ice cubes float? How come some insects can skate across a pond while humans sink to the bottom? Educator Christina Kleinberg says these are both offshoots of polarity, caused by the way that two hydrogen atoms combine with one oxygen atom to form water molecules. She explains in an animated TEDEducation talk.
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Ever hear of the chemist Wilbur O. Atwater? He developed a four-foot by eight-foot chamber in the late 1800s. Called the respiration calorimeter, the chamber was big enough for a person to step inside. Atwater then measured the amount of heat the individual released, the amount of oxygen he consumed and the carbon dioxide given off after eating a variety of foods.
Using the device, Atwater calculated the precise amount of energy in thousands of food items. His discoveries still form the basis for much of what we know about nutrition and what goes into the nutritional labels seen on practically everything we eat.
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Chinese alchemists searching for the elixir of eternal life instead discovered gunfire, creating the world’s first chemical explosion. It took generations for the Chinese to perfect the mixture, which remained a closely guarded state secret for another 400 years. Hank Green presents the full story on gunpowder in this SciShow.
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Is there any factory more colorful and surreal than Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory? How about the DayGlo Color Corp. factory in Cleveland?
That’s where workers grind out the bright, fluorescent pigments used in traffic cones, Hula hoops and black light posters. Bytesize Science goes inside the plant, opened in the 1950s by inventors Bob and Joe Switzer to capitalize on a unique pigment production process they had developed.
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We’ve all been told that no two snowflakes are exactly alike. Think again. This short video from the American Chemical Society explains how snowflakes form, sprouting long, pointy, distinctive branches that vary in shape and size as each flake rises and falls through layers of warmer or colder air. Contrary to common belief, occasionally two snowflakes are identical, but only in the rarest instances. H/T IMAO
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Chemistry is the study of matter — stuff and how it interacts with other stuff. Even though chemistry doesn’t make a lot of news these days, chemists are making discoveries that change lives all the time. If the SciShow‘s Hank Green had to narrow down all of chemistry’s flashes of brilliance into the most awesome experiments in history, he would narrow it down to these three.
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Dmitri Mendeleev, the Russian chemist who created the periodic table, didn’t just organize the known elements. He provided a mechanism to predict many other elements that hadn’t even been discovered at the time. His forecasts proved prescient and accurate, the work of a genius, as Lou Serico relates in this animated TedEd talk.
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