Can you GROW an Opal?

Opals are pretty.

Full stop

And they are incredibly rare and labor intensive to mine.

So why not just make them at home?

All it takes is seven or so months, a fume hood, some ethyl alcohol (purer is better), tetraethyl orthosilicate, ammonium hydroxide, a stirrer, water bath, hot plate, resin, a vacuum chamber, and apparently infinite patience.

I looked into buying them, and even the synthetic ones aren't terribly cheap.

Scientific Glassblowing

One of the things that I always try to convey to my chemistry students is that there are more jobs in - or just adjacent to - chemistry other than chemist or chemical engineer, and most of them need a good grounding in chemistry to be able to do the job well.

Whether you're the chemistry lab manager, the salesperson at a chemical company, the quality control technician at a steel mill, or a glassblower for a chemistry department, you need to know something about the chemicals that you're working with or the chemistry labs for which your product will be used.

Today we'll look at a few scientific glassblowers. I picked some of the best ones I could find on YouTube, but there are dozens and dozens more profiles of the scientific glassblowers at various universities around the world.

Water and Solutions -- for Dirty Laundry: Crash Course Chemistry #7

Thank you, John Green.

This thirteen-and-a-half-minute-long video covers enough chemistry about water that if my students understood the entire video by the end of my year of chemistry, I would be pretty happy.

Because it's that saturated with knowledge, I don't know that I'd necessarily show it in one sitting in the classroom. It's dense, man, but it does a spectacular job explaining (and showing via animation) a whole lot of ideas about the chemistry of water. I'll list some of them...

• oxidizing (like bleach and hydrogen peroxide do)
• solutions (aqueous ones)
• solute
• solvent
• polar molecules
• polar and nonpolar molecules dissolving each other
• water dissolving ionic compounds
• electrolytes
• strong, weak, and non-
• moles
• concentration
• molarity
• molality 
• diluting

How a lead-acid battery works

Batteries are just so freakin' cool.

I had no idea the specific chemistry inside a lead-acid battery. Lead plus lead oxide making lead sulfate in each case...brilliant.

The comment at 3:00 - "with most engineered objects, there are going to be trade-offs, giving away the characteristics you want to gain others you must have" - is a marvelous summary of much of our design challenges.

Water is a pretty awful material for building. Yes, it's abundant and cheap. Yes, it can be made opaque or translucent or even pretty transparent. Yes, you can use it to make buildings (like in that totally awesome James Bond movie), but there are a few drawbacks.

It's slightly unstable in the warmer climates. It's vulnerable to destruction from dogs marking the walls. Ice chairs make your hiney all cold.

So this video isn't really about materials, but it is a great background video on the chemistry of water, something that most of our materials run into from time to time.

The chemistry explanations are fairly in-depth (electrolytes, polarity, moles, molarity, anions, and such), so this may not be for all of your students, but it's a great bit if chemistry.