Why pickles make great light bulbs

I hope this goes without saying, but do not try this at home.

It's been a few years since I've done the electric pickle demonstration. Maybe I should do that again next year.

In all honesty, I sometimes forget how cool some of the demos that I've done through the years are. It's so easy to forget which demos go where and to just accidentally let them slide into forgetfulness.

Let's light a pickle next year, folks.

And, yes, I'm rethinking my dislike for The Action Lab.

Is It Actually Possible To Cut Glass With Scissors Underwater?

Maybe I need to change my mind about The Action Lab.

I initially clicked on this video fully prepared to be snarky about the clickbait title. "Yes, obviously it's possible. Otherwise you wouldn't have made a video about it."

And then we got to the bonding explanation of why it's possible at 3:35 in the video.

On a whiteboard, the host - whose name I should probably look up - shows how the bonding in the silicon dioxide covalent network of the glass is broken as the glass preferentially bonds (or adsorbs as the host says) to the water molecules accelerating the crack growth. This apparently 'lowers the energy needed to break the silic[a] by a factor of 20', and that's all about activation energy and heterogeneous catalysis.

Turns out that video was way more educational than it had any business to be.

I wonder if this has anything to do with grozing pliers.

Playing with superhydrophobicity

I don't always dig the videos from The Action Lab. I'll admit to that right off the bat. 

The host's voice has an odd cadence and tone that grates on me. The experiments are often interesting and creative, and his science explanations tend to be pretty good. Occasionally it's "I painted a room with the blackest paint" or "...the whitest paint" or "...with mirrors" - all of which are lame, but many of his videos are okay. I just generally don't like them.

But I'm kind of digging his second channel, Action Lab Shorts. The videos are - as the title says - shorter, quicker little hits of interesting science content.

Today I'm going to post five videos, three from his short channel and - after the jump - two from his full channel. You make the call...

All of them show superhydrophobicity.

Why Molybdenum is named after Lead - Periodic Table of Videos

The Professor is back, and he's bringing a solid lesson in etymology.

As you'll find in this video, many elements are named for other elements.

Nickel, for example, comes from kupfernickel in German, meaning that the element nickel was 'demon's copper' or the metal that was placed beside copper by demons making the copper harder to mine.

Ok, actually I can only find two elements named after other elements: molybdenum and nickel.

But still...you should go learn what some of the element's name origins.

Tentacled droplets swim with stored heat energy

Okay, I will readily admit right off the bat that I have no clue what is happening here.

I can describe it using the words of the ChemistryWorld.com article from which this video comes...

Beginning as innocuous oily droplets about 20–40μm across floating in water, these structures take on faceted, crystal-like shapes when cooled to around 2-8°C – even though they aren’t frozen. Then things get really weird. 

Some of the particles’ facets grow while other shrink, producing a variety of geometrical forms such as kites, isosceles triangles and spiked tetrahedra. Then, from some of the sharp corners emerge tentacle-like strands, as if being extruded from a nozzle. As they grow, the strands bend into undulating shapes – and the droplets start to swim, propelled through the fluid by the tentacles’ extension.

What the heck? The tentacles appear as the microdroplets are cooled, propelling the microdroplet forward. Then, as the droplet is warmed again, the tentacles retreat back into the droplet? That's weird.

Luckily, I'm not the only one stumped as to what's happening here. " ‘I have really no idea what is going on,’ [McLeish] admits. "

The world is strange. 

Let's try to keep it that way.

Piezoelectricity - why hitting crystals makes electricity

Heya, Steve. Good to see you back again.

The part of this video that I think I most appreciate is the actual look at the guts of a piezo electric safety lighter. I've used them for a long time and never quite been sure how they work on the inside.

I also appreciate Steve's comments on quarts 'healing crystals' around 1:40. "Don't know if you take it orally or..."

And then we get into the fact that piezoelectricity is dependent on the electronegativity differences in a quart crystal (admittedly simplified in Steve's peanut-butter-jar model). I'm totally duplicating this post for my material science blog because of that explanation.