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.

Marbling Paper with Oil Paints | Teaching Chemistry (and more)

Man, how pretty is that?

I'm talking about the first half of the above video, during which Chris Rowlatt shows us how he produces marbled papers for eventual book binding. The marbling involves putting a nonpolar ink (or maybe dye, I'm not sure the technical distinction there) onto polar water. The two materials don't mix, so the nonpolar ink can be lifted from the surface of the water with paper.

The end product is gorgeous.

And it's been done in all sorts of places.