Baking Soda and Vinegar (volcano)

That went really dark really quickly.

The vinegar and baking soda volcano is a pretty standard elementary school science experiment or demonstration or something.

When the volcano becomes some sort of synecdoche for the world around it, that might be outside of the realm of elementary science.

Source: xkcd

The Mystery of Matter

 

Edit: I'm reposting the videos since PBS took them down. They might or might not stay posted by this account. A short clip is above. I'll put the full episodes after the jump.

How can you not love that fake nose and beard there on Dmitri Mendeleev (as played by Michael Aronov) in PBS's The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements.

The show is a three-episode 'series' exploring seven key events and people in the discovery of the elements that make up the periodic table. In the course of those 180 minutes, the series name checks dozens of legendary chemistry - Glenn Seaborg, Marie and Pierre Curie, Henry Davy, Harry Mosley, Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, Dmitri Mendeleev, and many, many more.

Each event is detailed in a mixture of historic recreations - including dialog taken directly from the historical writings of the scientists involved - and contemporary scientists commenting on the discoveries. The series shows high production values in the historical recreations really selling the stories brilliantly.

In moments, the series is brilliant and engaging, detailing both the human and scientific side of the stories. We hear of the sexism that required Pierre Curie to insist that Marie receive the credit she deserved, the tragedy in the death of Harry Mosley in Turkey during World War I, and the national security concerns of Glenn Seaborg during the discovery of plutonium in 1941. The totality of the series is almost too informative, however, as watching it for more than maybe half an hour at a time leads to information fatigue.

This series will be highly useful in small doses within the classroom, especially the Dmitri Mendeleev excerpt up above (lengthier than embedded above.)

All three episodes can be found on the series website.

Very Fast Death Factor

That's a brilliant name for a chemical.

It's absolutely marvelous, really.

And I want nothing to do with it...ever...

Most Dangerous Chemical?

This is one of the pretty standard questions that I'm guessing most every chemistry or chemistry teacher gets both used to and tired of answering.

I can say that my most dangerous chemical ever handled was dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) - which doesn't come any where close to being nearly as dangerous as the stuff discussed in this video.

I totally have a new respect for SO₃, a compound that I've written and of which I've drawn the bonding probably a few hundred times over the year. Turns out to be pretty nasty stuff.

After the Rainbow

Stop it, stop it, stop it...

Methanol doesn't exactly burn invisibly, but it does burn with a flame that is light blue enough that it is really hard to see in daylight.

There are lots of ways to demonstrate electron transitions without using methanol which is entirely unsafe to use.

Check out more details of the dangers as well as safe alternatives to methanol in an article on Chemical & Engineering News.