I'll admit to having long-term skepticism about the use of artificial sweeteners, dyes, preservatives, and a lot of other things in our world.
But I also admit that artificial blues are way more vibrant and pretty on M&Ms than the spirulina-based candies.
I know that Aldi's private label goods have eliminated products with artificial dyes, I wonder if they sell any blue candies.
This video is ridiculously long, like longer than a lot of movies long, like 106 minutes long, like as long as The Graduate.
That's a result of the commodification of our time and the values of the YouTube algorithm, but that's a story for another day.
This video shows what it takes to refuel a nuclear reactor, and Destin does an amazing job of being our stand-in character. He does a brilliant job every step of the way.
...and in spite of the multiple security steps and procedural double- and triple-checks every step along the way, I'm still nervous about nuclear power.
Apparently the steps involved in making the videos has made Destin more trusting about nuclear power, however. The video title below even says as much.
I have the bottle on which this video is based in my classroom. It's a product available from Educational Innovations (a subsidiary of Flinn Scientific).
I've posted about the bottle before, but this video's from the Action Lab and does a neat extension involving the ink from a permanent marker. I've done something similar using faceted acrylic beads that have a pigment that dissolves off of the beads and into the alcohol-rich phase of the bottle, leaving the beads white (and after a time, inconveniently distorted, sticky, and gushy). That addition is thanks to Bernoli Baello, with whom I was lucky enough to teach our summer camp once.
Last week's video looked at whether Mexican Coke contained any glucose or sucrose or fructose.
This week's video follows up on that with a whole lot more accuracy and precision in a college chemistry research lab at Shippensburg University.
The lab student then tested a much fresher, sucrose-sweetened Sarsaparilla soft drink from a local, Pennsylvania bottler.
then...Then...THEN, they test an American Coke flavored by cane sugar, something the video host said he didn't think existed in the past bunch of decades.
...and visited NPR studios.
It's been a whole lot of years since I've done a Benedicts Test, so I'm going to trust that our YouTube host from Reactions (a channel from the American Chemical Society - ACS).
Luckily he used a second test, a glucose monitor, to back up the results.
Fascinatingly, the video goes on to possibly debunk the idea that Mexican Coke doesn't contain any actual sucrose - which it should if it was made with cane sugar as it claims to be.
See, the video started with trying to recreate those results - that Mexican Coke doesn't contain any sucrose - from a journal article, but the video ends with a deeper understanding: that sucrose undergoes an "acid-catalyzed sucrose inversion to free fructose and glucor...in the low-pH environment of most carbonated beverages."
So the presence of glucose in the Mexican Coke doesn't mean that Coke is lying to us but perhaps that it's just more complicated.
I am consistently amazed that we have had so many nuclear / radioactive material accidents in such a little time since we discovered how to harness it in the mid 20th century.
There are a bunch of nuclear weapons that we've lost, aka broken arrows, some of which we've never found...
...close calls where we've almost set off nuclear weapons...
...military accidents that lead to near criticality or releases of radioactive material...
...civilian accidents that released radioactive material...
...and one solo civilian who nearly joined the nuclear fraternity himself...
That doesn't even include the time John Lithgow almost killed us all by letting a high school kid build a nuclear bomb for his science project.
The above video details how an accidental replacement of one letter in somebody's hand-written notes -
"use inorganic absorbent" changed into "use an organic absorbent" - lead to a release of radioactive material from a storage facility in New Mexico.
I'm starting to think that nuclear power and weapons might not be worth the risk.
Biology is freaky weird.
The bombardier beetle is terrifying. It's got three chemicals that are kept separate within its body until it mixes them which releases a ton of energy, heating and pressurizing the mixture into a boiling liquid that the beetle can squirt out of its...um...probably not its butt, but I'm not an entomologist
