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...
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...
