How Do Color Changing Oreos Work (Spider-Man & Captain America)

I'm a sucker for novelty flavors - particularly novelty flavors of Oreos.

So I bought the Doctor Doom, color-changing Oreos and didn't notice any color change happening.

Admittedly, I wasn't dunking the cookies in milk. I was just eating them and noticed maybe a slight greenness to my teeth and tongue, but the green was dominated by the standard brown of Oreo crumbs and the dark brown, 'toasted marshmallow' cream.

So I went hunting and found that the color change is accomplished by encapsulated dye within water-soluble capsules. When the capsules come into contact with water (or milk which is, of course, water-based), the capsules release their dye.

Thankfully the cream is primarily oil-based, so the capsule don't dissolve until they're in milk...or water...or saliva.

Strawberries make surprisingly GIANT bubbles (Best DIY Bubble Recipes)

I appreciate that Ben aka NightHawkInLight now shows his face in his videos. It's a little less creepy than having his videos narrated.

This video shows his findings to make the most durable, long-lasting giant bubbles out of Dawn dish soap, water, salt, baking soda, and J Lube. The titular comment about strawberries is because strawberry DNA is surprisingly easy to extract and highly prevalent within strawberry cells. 

Much of the video - from about 4:15-13:00 - is about Ben's attempts to extract the DNA from strawberries. It's a recreation of a fairly simple and common first year high school biology lab. 

From there, Ben tests his solutions with and without three different polymers - J Lube, strawberry DNA, PEO (polyethylene oxide, poly ox), and no polymer addition.

Then Ben re-tests solutions with an even larger bubble wand made of fishing poles. He does manage to make a few really gorgeous, colossal bubbles - some under lower humidity conditions and again when the humidity is approaching 100%. 

Along the way we do get a whole lot of Ben chuckles, so be prepared for that. 

If ever I want to make huge bubbles, the J Lube would be the recipe I'm looking to use. 

What Do You Call A Left-Handed Lemon? QI

QI is a high-intelligence television show in Britain, formerly hosted by Stephen Fry and now hosted by Sandi Toksvig.

In this clip, the QI panelists are asked, 'what do you call a left-handed lemon' and subsequently learn that the molecule that produces the distinct smell of a lemon is a chiral molecule meaning that it has a mirror image that cannot be superimposed upon the original molecule and that the mirror image molecule produces the smell of an orange instead. 

Source - wikipedia

Chirality is real and present in any molecule where a central carbon atom has four unique substituent groups off of the same center. Think of the molecules as being similar like your left and right hands. They look identical but can't be rotated in any way to make them overlap identically. Instead, they would have to be 'mirrored' to allow for the overlap.

Interestingly, I read an awful Fantastic Four comic a few years back based on this idea of chirality, but I digress.

Sadly, even though limonene is, indeed, chiral with mirror images of the compound existing, those mirror images aren't really the reason for the difference in the smells of lemons and oranges. According to the American Chemical Society, that's a myth.

Actually, both oranges and lemons contain mostly (R)-limonene. Only 1-4% of the limonene in either fruit is in the (S) configuration. As for what these enantiomers actually smell like, (R)-limonene does have a pleasant, citrusy aroma, but does not smell like oranges. Instead, various other, fragrant molecules found in orange oil carry the odor. At high purity, (S)-limonene carries notes of turpentine and lemon. However, this enantiomer is barely present in lemons and is unlikely to contribute much to their aroma. As with orange odor, a number of different molecules in lemon oil contribute to lemons’ fresh scent.

Bath Bombs - Periodic Table of Videos

Bath bombs are just glorified, perfumed alka seltzer tablets. They're primarily made of sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and citric acid that result in this reaction...

3 NaHCO₃ (s) + H₃C₆H₅O_{7 (s)} --> Na₃C₆H₅O_{7 (aq)} + 3 H₂O _(l) + 3 CO_{2 (g)}

The cuteness of the dissolving, reacting Mad Scientist bath bomb is fun to watch, but there isn't too much really exciting in this video other than some chemistry folks playing around with the bath bombs - adding them to water, using a thermal camera to check the endothermicity of the reaction, checking the dyes under UV light, adding concentrated sulfuric acid to the bomb (oof), and finally trying to set the poor bath bomb on fire.

Feels a bit like the Nottingham folks are reaching a bit for content here.

How do I tell my teacher the fluorine cation doesn't exist?

From reddit

See, it's funny because the teacher gave the student an F+ on his or her (possibly AI-generated) book report, but the student is claiming not to know that the F+ is meant to be a grade and not a chemical notation for a fluorine atom that has lost an electron. 

Fluorine atoms, being the most electronegative atoms on the planet, are incredibly unlikely to lose an electron rather than to gain an electron.

See, it's funny because of periodic trends!
 

What happens if you eat a silica get packet? - Vivian Jiang

Do not eat.

It's such a simple instruction that we've all read a hundred times or more on the tiny silica gel packets that come in sneaker boxes, shirts shipped from warehouses, and many more fabric and leather goods.

But why shouldn't you eat silica gel? If it's just silica, then it's the same as sand. While eating sand might be unpleasant, it's not necessarily unsafe if it's clean sand.

The increased surface area of the silica gel - one gram of silica gel has more than 700 square meters of surface area according to the video - is the issue. That surface area and its attractiveness toward polar molecules - water, ammonia, and other small molecules - cause it to absorb 40% its weight in water, making it a spectacular desiccant. 

In general, the silica gel wouldn't do too much harmful to your body unless it had a cobalt chloride coating.