How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet

At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.

Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.

The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).

The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.

If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.

Hazardous Turkey Cookery Part 2

Let's be honest. That was predictably dumb.

Sugar glass

"All you need to do is melt some sugar."

Yeah, there's a lot more than that involved in making sugar glass.

You need to make sure the 'glass' remains amorphous so it stays translucent - which is is a little tougher than it seems. 

And the sugar shouldn't actually be sucrose but rather isomalt.

...and the stuff you make isn't exactly safe to break across a friend's head.

Not a lot of science presented in that first video, so let's try another one.

Inside London's 'zero waste' restaurant | FT Food Revolution

We produce a great deal of waste. That's not a very debatable statement.

This video visits a London restaurant that is attempting to have zero waste from his restaurant.

From making the pendant shades out of waste seaweed to forming their own pottery on site and glazing that pottery with ground up waste wine bottles, the restaurant attempts to have nothing thrown away from day to day.

They ferment much of their food scraps that would normally be wasted and thrown away.

They upcycle their plastic bags into serving plates.

Somehow the ice cream is made from waste bread.

All in all, it's a place that I would love to study more but that I'm not sure I would actually enjoy. Some of the cuisine seems to be awfully fancy, and I'm not sure that my tastes are in line with.

Check out Silo if you're ever in London - and if you can actually get a reservation.

A Failure of the Imagination from ENGLAND your ENGLAND on Vimeo.

Why Melted Bugs On Candy And Lemons Fuel A $167 Million Industry | Big Business | Business Insider

The process of making shellac is scientifically fascinating, ridiculously complicated, economically important, and ethically questionable.

Like so many products that are 'natural', shellac amazes me because I have absolutely no idea how anyone would have thought to go through this process to turn bug secretions into a furniture sealant, a citrus fruit polish, a candy coating, and so much more.

The Magic of Chocolate

I'd eat that for a dollar!

The idea that we can create structural color - akin to that found on the wings of butterflies - using a diffraction grating and some tempered chocolate is pretty amazing.

Diffraction grating isn't too expensive, and chocolate is pretty cheap.

Looks like a fun summer project.

(Or you could just buy yourself some holographic chocolate directly.)

How to make salt

Today you get a whole bunch of videos about making salt (all different from previous salt making videos.)

It seems like such a simple thing - talk salt water from the ocean and boil it down - but there's a lot more to the science of making salt including removing the calcium and magnesium impurities, allowing the crystals to grow to the desired size, and sorting those different crystal sizes.

Who knew that the rate of crystal growth would affect the size of the crystals?

More after the jump...

Why salt crystals grow as pyramids (sometimes)

Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.

I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.

And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.

If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...

The Science of Tempered Chocolate

The above video is a very quick, fairly vague explanation of the difference between tempered and untempered chocolate. 

Dan Souza, the editor of Cooks Illustrated magazine, illustrates tempered chocolate as a rigid, highly structured stacking of kitchen chairs as compared to an 'untempered', random arrangement of the same chairs.

I would appreciate a little more detail, maybe a micrograph or two, but what you see above is all Dan's giving us this time. Dan has, however, given a little more detail about chocolate in the video after the jump which includes a recipe for millionaire shortbread that requires tempering of the chocolate topping, something Dan shows how to do using a microwave.

The Hidden World of Chocolate

That doesn't look like anything I would want to eat. No matter how tempered it is, I'm not tempted.

The post where I found this is from PopSci, but the original video is from Johns Hopkins. It's kind of interesting to see chocolate under the scanning electron microscope, especially since chocolate has a whole bunch of crystal structures.

"Material science literally is studying stuff. Anything that you can feel, anything that you can use, we can make it stronger. We can make it lighter."

Yeah, that's about right.

Raw Craft with Anthony Bourdain - Episode Four: Bob Kramer

Well, yeah, who doesn't turn a meteorite into a chef's knife in their spare time?

Bourdain visits with Bob Kramer, a master chef's knife maker who goes through the smelting, forging, and heat treating of some pretty spectacular knives.

At about 5:38 (explanation starts) then at 6:18 (actual visual) is one of the - if correctly described - most stunning things I've ever seen in material science. Kramer explains that there is a 'shadow' that moves through the steel as it - as I understand - undergoes the phase change from FCC to BCC, squeezing the carbon into the harder, BCC form of iron.

I am currently looking for confirmation from a second source, however, that what we see is actually what Kramer says it's showing.

The Polymorphs of Chocolate

I have to admit that I have not much experience with the various crystal structures (or, as named, here polymorphs) of chocolate. In my world there's the form of chocolate that hasn't been opened yet and the form that's in my belly. Most of my research happens on the tongue .

Here Compound Interest goes through the six different structures of chocolate and how temperature affects the stability of each one, something that can be highly relateable to some of the alloys that we cover in our summer teacher camps.

Compound Interest is a British blog through which Andy Brunning, a chemistry teacher with a flair for graphic design, posts outstanding chemistry-themed infographics.

Why is ketchup so hard to pour? - George Zaidan

This is such a cute video The animation is entertaining, and the personification of ketchup is endearing.

I wonder if the 'squished into little ellipses' analogy is at all correct.

Liquids are totally weird, man.

Chemistry of Ice Cream

We're edging toward food science entirely here, but there's still some serious concerns regarding the rate of (ice) crystal growth in ice cream production.

Hard Candy Chemistry!

It can be daunting to do glass batching. You need a kiln, DFCs crucibles, and a fair bit of confidence. Sometimes it's easier to purchase the DFCs than it is to build up the confidence.

Working with candy, however, takes a lot less confidence because the worst that can usually happen is a nasty, blackened pot, and there's a lot that can be learned about glass by using candy as an analogue.

Plus, if you do it right, you get a sweet reward at the end.