Why Lithium Is Dangerous But PERFECT For Batteries

Our chemistry book has a diagram of a battery in the electrochemistry chapter, and I discuss that battery for a bit before explaining to my students that the basics of ACME (anode, cathode, metallic path, electrolyte) hold for every battery but that the engineering of modern lithium-ion batteries is far different from the diagram in the book.

This video - again leaning into the algorithm-rewarded longer and longer format - explains some battery basics involving the activity series, the history of the development of the lithium-ion battery, and the methods of fiery failure when the battery overheats.

This is, as Dr Derek says, a technology that has allowed our modern, battery-dependent world.

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.

Units matter

Source - Reddit

There is a significant problem with this question.

It's similar to one that Steve Mould brought up in a video I previously posted on the blog.

To say that the temperature is tripled is incredibly vague. As I teach in the unit of gas laws, to discuss temperature tripling (or doubling or whatever) we have to consider things in their absolute temperature. 

Doubling a temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit would just double the portion above an arbitrary zero (freezing water for Celsius or the freezing point of a water/ice/ammonium chloride solution for Fahrenheit). That wouldn't really double the thermal energy or the average kinetic energy of the object because there's a whole bunch of that below the arbitrary zero.

To actually double the thermal energy or average kinetic energy, you would have to double the absolute temperature, something measured in either Kelvin or Rankine scales.

So it looks like Duolingo doesn't understand that aspect of temperature.

Where is he? We'll never know.

 

Source - Brewster Rockit

See, it's funny because it's a reference to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in which - in a very simplified format - we can know the momentum or position of a particle but never both. 

I warn you, the uncertainty principle is a whole lot more complicated in its real form, but unless you're really into quantum mechanics, I recommend that you take the simple version instead.

With larger objects - say a person or a baseball - we can know the two quantities about the object almost perfectly, but as the object gets smaller - like atoms and protons and electrons or a shrunken Brewster Rockit - we can know less and less about the combination of the two quantities.

I get it. It takes some subtlety and understanding of the world of quantum mechanics to get the joke.

Luckily, I get the joke...like I got this other, similar one.

That's hydride.

Source - SMBC

See, it's funny because...well, honestly I don't necessarily understand why it's funny in a scientific sense.

I get that - as is often the case in many genie stories - the genie fulfills the wish as spoken but not necessarily as the person intended it to be fulfilled. It's a fairly common trope, donchaknow.

But there are hydrogen atoms with two electrons or at least hydrogen ions that have two electrons. I guess changing every hydrogen atom to hydride ions (hydrogen with two electrons) would cause some problems, but I don't necessarily know that all of that would lead to immediate explosions.