The weird ways the elements got their names

I'll admit that I knew most of the name origins of the elements in this video. 

There were a couple of that I'd either forgotten or hadn't known. Tellurium, antimony, argon, and a few others on the list at 13:25 surprised me.

In the end, I don't know that's it's the most helpful thing to know the origin of an element's name. It's historically interesting and might tell you something about the element, but it's also possibly a misnomer, oxygen, for example doesn't necessarily for acids, but its name suggests that it does.

Why is glass transparent? - Mark Miodownik

Mark Miodownik is the author of one of the better materials science books written for a popular audience, Stuff Matters. 

In that book he takes a chapter to explore each of the various material categories and some of that category's most common exemplars.

Here, however, Miodownik looks at glass to see why light can pass through it. Turns out it's all about electron transitions.

The life and achievements of chemist Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar

Stephanie Kwolek absolutely belongs in the inventors hall of fame, in the women's hall of fame, on the American Chemical Society's website, and on lots of other lists of honorees.

Stephanie Kwolek, you see, invented Kevlar at DuPont in 1965.

Paraffin Wax Autoignition

I've posted a couple of videos of this demonstration before, but this one does a better job explaining how to do the demo than those others did.

As always, let's be careful out there, folks.

What Do Baking Soda and Baking Powder Do? | Kenji's Cooking Show

I've posted before about the importance of pH on food preparation, but the increase in browning is one of the easiest ones for home cooks to exploit.

Want something to brown better without having to increase the heat? Increase its pH.

With that being said, I personally can't stand big, fluffy pancakes. Give me thin pancakes any day of the week.

If you're interested in food chemistry, check out On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, How to Read a French Fry by Russ Parsons, or The Food Lab by J Kenji Lopez-Alt. I own them all and have read through and cooked out of some of each of them.

You can mix 10 marbles until they sort themselves. Why not 100?

This Monday's post was a little light on the science, so I thought I'd add in a heavily-sciencey video to make up for it.

The concept of entropy is a big, dang deal, but it's often reduced - at a high school level, at least - to being defined as 'disorder' or 'randomness'. I try to explain to my students a slight bit of the subtlety, but I'm not entirely sure how much sinks in for them.

Thankfully, AlphaPohenix has a video explaining entropy really well. 

What’s the most expensive piece of glassware you ever broke?

My son texted me a bit upset this morning because he broke a beaker in his high school chemistry lab and brother can all we chemists tell him some stories

What’s the biggest / most expensive piece of glassware you’ve ever broken? pic.twitter.com/tIujO4qGCm

— Keith Hornberger (@KRHornberger) March 6, 2024

Source - Buchi

And from there the chemists happily obliged, telling tales of broken 20L flasks (like the one shown to the right from Buchi which doesn't look like much until you realize that it's 20 liters (or about 9 gallons) in size and costs about $1500.)

I don't have anything remotely approaching that in my career, but I also didn't do that much lab work beyond undergrad at Wabash. During that time, the biggest break I had was probably a pyrex (note, not Pyrex) casserole that was being used as a sand bath for heating a round-bottom flask at the time.

What happens if you don’t put your phone in airplane mode? - Lindsay DeMarchi

No, you're not going to cause the plane to crash, but you might screw up the cell reception for some folks on the ground as you pass by.

...and your phone's battery is going to die a whole lot faster, so be a gallant not a goofus, ok?

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

That is amazing...and gross...and sad...and a marvelous encapsulation of our world.

I had no idea that the stuff grandpa used to put on some of his wordworks - or at least the etymological origin of what he called what was probably varnish or polyurethane by then - had its origins in bug secretions meant to protect them while they nibbled on trees.