H and Cl sitting in a tree

On Valentine's Day (2/14/25) this year, Google's search engine graphic (the one in the top left of the page) was this cute, little bit about hydrogen and chlorine being in love.

I pretty consistently tell my students not to personify atoms and molecules. They don't have hopes and dreams. They don't fall in love. They simply move to more stable arrangements.

...but...

It's very cute to think of H and Cl being in love and holding hands, so I'm going to let Google slide on the cuteness factor alone.

How One Company Secretly Poisoned the Planet

At some point in my material science and chemistry courses, I speak bluntly to my students that most research suggests that man-made polymers are bad for us.

Some are worse than others, but most research on the effects of polymers on humans seems to suggest that there are bad effects from most man-made polymers. Some are minorly bad, but others - like the family of PFAS - are more obviously and persistently bad.

The video above is short and has a direct message: DuPont is bad (or has acted badly).

The longer video below - from Veritasium - is far longer but is much, much more informative.

If this sounds familiar, you might've seen a semi-recent movie about this story, Dark Waters.

CERAMIC COATINGS - How It Works | SCIENCE GARAGE

First off, thanks to Eric Moorman who sent me this video. Mad love for Eric.

Let's go through the material science awesomeness in this video about how to get the most durable, prettiest finish on your car.

• The first four minutes or so are all about the causes of the tiny scratches on car surfaces and how to clean the car before applying a finish coating of either wax or ceramic.
• At 4:10 we get a discussion of wax, and the host even uses the word hydrophobic, explaining how the water beads up because of the hydrophobic nature of the wax.
• At 5:10, we finally get to the ceramics, "a non-metallic solid material making up an inorganic compound of metal and nonmetal (or metalloid) atoms primarily held in ionic and covalent (?) bonds." The host explains that those atoms can be crystalline (in various ways) or even vitrified.
• There's an explanation of the Moh's hardness scale, and a mention that there are other ways to measure hardness like via measuring scratch resistance.
• Heck, he even shows a very simplified version of covalent bonding with shared pairs of electrons.
• We get into using nanotextures to increase the hydrophobic character of a surface, increasing the contact angle between a drop and the surface - with a nice diagram, too - explaining super hydrophobic coatings.

Admittedly, I had no idea such coatings existed for cars.

Dogs Teaching Chemistry

How frickin' cute is that, huh?

I know the dogs aren't exactly staying in place for the entire video. The cuts aren't all that smooth.

Still, though, the dogs are so marvelously well trained - holding the ball and rope evenly, unevenly, tugging on command. It's brilliant.

Let's see if the dogs know about atoms.



Huh, apparently they do.

Atomic Bonding Song

Are those just big light covers from Pier One or something that they're wearing?

If so, they're fairly well turned into atom costumes.

Honestly, if my students understood everything that these two folks were singing about by the end of our bonding chapters, I would be pretty happy.

I don't get, though, how at 4:10 chlorine lets go of an electron.