This Molecule Has Saved Billions of Lives, How Do We Make It Without Killing Ourselves?

Fritz Haber was brilliant. His discovery of the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from the air was a miracle, allowing for the vast production of fertilizer which lead to our ability to feed the billions of people on our planet, rightfully earning Haber an Nobel Prize.

Yet, he also produced chlorine gas and conducted experiments that eventually lead to the development of pesticide gases such as Zyklon B, used to kill millions of Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps. I'm not sure where Haber would have fallen when his soul was weighed upon his passing from this Earth, but I know we couldn't feed as many as we feed without the Haber-Bosch process.

Today's SciShow video explains how the Haber-Bosch process produces carbon dioxide and some of the alternative processes that chemists are exploring that wouldn't produce carbon dioxide along the way.

Catalytic converters are simple, but getting them to work is not

I've never known what the inside of a catalytic converter looked like before. Admittedly, I had to replace my converter at one point and told the mechanic that I wanted to old one to take in to school and show my students - with some idea that I'd ask the old technology (shop) department to cut it in half for me long, long ago - but I eventually just threw the thing out without doing anything with it.

The best laid plans of mice and men often go astray when confronted with laziness, eh?

Clearly, the catalytic converter isn't lazy at all, however, and the technology used to keep the catalytic converter converting is insanely complicated. 

The simple version is that the catalytic converter combusts any unburned hydrocarbon and nitrogen oxide byproducts from the combustion happening within the pistons every second of a car's functioning. 

...but to make that secondary combustion take place efficiently requires a whole lot of oxygen sensing to and adjusting along the way of that car functioning.

This 200-Year-Old Lighter Ignites Without a Spark

I understand that the act of creating fire at this point in our lives is trivial. 

I have a couple of piezoelectric grill lighters and a flint-based lighter in the a drawer in my kitchen. The 'pilot lights' in my gas stove, hot water heater, and furnace are all piezoelectric. If I need fire, I can have it in about two seconds.

That hasn't always been the case, of course. From prehistoric times when fire meant warmth and digestible food, the act of fire creation was miraculous and to be protected.

So the development of a 'safe' lighter that could create fire at the whims of the lighter's owner was an important step toward taming that fire.

But I certainly wouldn't want to carry around Steve Mould's Döbereiner's lamp (yes, the same Döbreiner as the periodic triads) in my pocket.

The Engineer Comedian - Don McMillan comedy (due to request)

Just let the comedy wash over you.

They're all funny, but I really enjoy the third joke. I'm in the really small overlap area, apparently.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos

I know, a rare Sunday post.

I figured it wasn't worth posting this explanation of this past week's Nobel Prize in Chemistry in January when I next had an open spot in the queue of scheduled videos.

So check this out. It's one of the better explanations of why asymetric organocatalysts are Nobel-worthy.

Is It Actually Possible To Cut Glass With Scissors Underwater?

Maybe I need to change my mind about The Action Lab.

I initially clicked on this video fully prepared to be snarky about the clickbait title. "Yes, obviously it's possible. Otherwise you wouldn't have made a video about it."

And then we got to the bonding explanation of why it's possible at 3:35 in the video.

On a whiteboard, the host - whose name I should probably look up - shows how the bonding in the silicon dioxide covalent network of the glass is broken as the glass preferentially bonds (or adsorbs as the host says) to the water molecules accelerating the crack growth. This apparently 'lowers the energy needed to break the silic[a] by a factor of 20', and that's all about activation energy and heterogeneous catalysis.

Turns out that video was way more educational than it had any business to be.

I wonder if this has anything to do with grozing pliers.