Reactions

Forever Chemicals, also known as PFAS, are extremely useful industrial chemicals, but they can also leak into the environment, your drinking water, and your blood. And they last (practically) forever. But now chemists have a new way to destroy them: burning them with water.

Concrete is the most important building material on Earth – and it’s also responsible for a MASSIVE chunk of global carbon emissions. Join George as he discovers how a surprising discovery in 1973 could dramatically change how we make concrete forever.

If you feel like mosquitos flock to you over everyone else at the barbecue… you’re not imagining it. Some of us really do attract mosquitos more than others, based on the chemicals exuded from our skin. What are they, how did scientists figure it out, and how can you outsmart them anyways?

Billions of people rely on a single, hundred-year-old chemical reaction every day: the Haber-Bosch process. This simple, short reaction consumes 1% of the world’s energy supply and releases 2% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Chemists have been trying to come up with a fundamentally better way to fix nitrogen for over a century. Have they finally succeeded?

This episode of Reactions dives into something truly out-of-this-world: amorphous ice. While ice here on Earth is typically regular and crystalline, ice out in space is a whole lot more interesting. The amorphous ice found on distant moons and comets can tell us about the history of our solar system and shed light on how to make new electronics. It’s also, literally, cool.

Beyond “burgers.” Impossible “meat.” A huge meatball (supposedly) made from wooly mammoth. Chemistry is changing how we think about meat, and as technology advances, things are only going to get more confusing…

We all know about the greenhouse effect, but how many of us actually understand it? Turns out, CO2 is not a “blanket,” and saying it “absorbs” heat is barely half the story. In today’s episode we figure out what’s so special about this one molecule that allows 0.04% of it to change our entire planet.

Recently, a handful of tattoo inks have been banned by the European Union for safety reasons. Blue 15:3 and Green 7 made its way onto the banned list and tattoo artists are having a difficult time finding replacements for these two colors. Here’s what chemistry has to say about these precarious pigments.

Want to make the fluffiest bread possible? Then you need starch gelatinization. Based on Chinese tangzhong and Japanese yudane methods to break down starch’s symmetry, pushing water between amylose and amylopectin molecules, and using high temperature to gelatinize the starch before making it into dough. But don’t just take our word for it, we made 3 loaves of bread to put the science to the test.

Electric vehicles don’t catch fire often, but when they do, things get spicy. How do these fires start? And why are they so hard to put out? There are scientists trying to solve this problem, but there are also scientists still trying to figure out what's actually happening when a lithium battery catches fire. Can we solve this problem without fully understanding what’s going on?

George has never eaten a tortilla made from scratch — and you probably haven’t either. Join George (and, occasionally, Andrew) as they chart corn’s epic chemical journey from field to plate.

There are somewhere between 20 and 74,963 kinds of ice. Water can do all kinds of weird stuff when it freezes. So far scientists have experimentally shown crystal structures for 19 kinds of ice. Or maybe 20, depending on who you ask. We’re going to charge through as many as we can in ten minutes or so.