Chemistry in Everyday Life

Roads are one of the defining features of modern civilizations, believe it or not. To me and I think most others, the state of the roads in a country gives an idea of the level of development. It does not surprise then that chemistry features quite heavily in how we make roads.

A request from a listener, I explore in this episode the chemistry of bitumen and the physical properties needed for a good road.

It takes a little bit more than 100mg of cyanide to kill a 75 kg human being. A little more than 100mg and the unfortunate victim will show the telltale signs of “bluish tones of oxygen deprivation mottle the skin.“

Cyanide Poisoning is as old as the usage of chemical compounds containing cyanide and this episode looks at the chemistry that happens in the body during a poisoning.

“This will be the last episode of Chemistry in Everyday Life for now. It was a huge amount of fun, but for the usual reasons, I have to suspend this beloved hobby project for an indefinite period of time. I would like to thank you all for listening. I enjoyed this experience immensely and I am proud of what I achieved. Take care everyone 😊”

The Podcast will remain online for the time being, but I will not add any new content.

Sources

Historical Background

· The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, Chapter 3, 2010, D. Blum ISBN: 978-1594202438

Cyanide Poisoning and Cyanide Chemistry

Both starch and cellulose are made of glucose, one of the main sources of energy for the human body. Yet... we can digest starch that we find in things like potatoes or flour, but we cannot digest cellulose, a compound that is found in virtually every plant... Why?!?

Dear Chemistry in Everyday Life Fans, I am off this month and as a consequence, we are looking back on past episodes over the summer. Today’s re-run is one of the first episodes that I ever recorded by the name of “Protection from the Sun Pt. 1 – The Ozone Layer”.

Dear Chemistry in Everyday Life Fans, I am off this month and as a consequence, we are looking back on past episodes over the summer. I asked you what is your favourite episode and the result said it was the episode "Breathe in, Breathe Out - Oxygen Transfer in the Blood".

Have you ever wondered how all these scientists come up with their findings in forensics, environmental science, pharmaceuticals, … cooking, cosmetics, and in soooo many more? Chemical purification and analysis lies at the heart of this question and I give you hereby my attempt at answering it. This is Part 2 of this 2-Part series looking at analysis.

Have you ever wondered how all these scientists come up with their findings in forensics, environmental science, pharmaceuticals, … cooking, cosmetics, and in soooo many more? Chemical purification and analysis lies at the heart of this question and I give you hereby my attempt at answering it. This is Part 1 of this 2-Part series looking at purification techniques.

After talking about red blood cells two episodes ago, this episode looks at a different bodily fluid. One that helps in the digestion of fats. We are talking about bile. A liquid associated with bad experiences, but is essential to our survival.

In this episode I confront the horrible memory of my one and only bad car crash. I only remember fragments, but the airbag was a big part of the memory. If you want to know how explosions save lives everyday on the road, then tune in.

Oxygen in, Carbon Dioxide out. We learn this basic paradigm about breathing from a very early age on. But how does it work? From a chemical viewpoint this is a lot of fun! So let’s look into it 😊

Why does iron rust? Why does this not happen for stainless steel? How else can we protect materials from corrosion? If you want to know, listen to this episode 😉

I always found the concept of energy in the human body very intriguing… or in any organism for that matter. The term energy is very abstract to me. For example, there is a difference to “having the energy to go for a walk” or “the energy to power the oven”. One phrase clearly describes energy as electricity and the other is the energy needed for an activity that we humans undertake. So what is energy in a human being or an animal?

Space. The Final frontier… a friend of mine asked me if there is chemistry in space and how it is different from the chemistry, we observe here on Earth. This is an exciting topic. So exciting that I had to make a podcast episode about it.

I always tried to avoid making an episode about making alcoholic beverages, because there is already so much great content about it and I did not see the extra value in talking about it. For this episode, I shall break this taboo, by talking about distillation. A technique that is used for making spirits, but also for so much more, which is why I only mention spirits at the end as a side note. I hope you enjoy listening to it.

Batteries are ubiquitous in daily life and I took them for granted for such a long time that I felt obliged to write an episode about them. Especially since they work thanks to a very basic concept called Redox Reactions.

From winter gloves and people with inverted organs to the effects of molecular mirror images. Chirality can be found everywhere, so it is high time to talk about it.

We talked about Glow Sticks, we talked about Fireworks. Now it feels like the right time to look at another big factor in color of compounds, the conjugated systems.

Our 2020 new year’s celebration had to look quite different this year. The Belgian government had to restrict contact, so no extended family, and no fireworks this year. All for very good, Corona-related reasons. This meant for us that we had to find an alternative, so that we could still give our 3-year old daughter a little spectacle. With glow sticks and chemiluminescence in our back packs, we then went on to celebrate a very special and very different new year. This podcast we shall use to understand chemiluminescence, the phenomenon that allowed for us to have a nice evening 😊

So it was time again to add a little Diesel Exhaust Fluid, also known as AdBlue, to the gas tank of my car. So I stood there in the cold winter temperatures, freezing my, you name it off, and just wished that it would add quicker! Inevitably, one thought popped into my headed: “Why, oh why on earth am I doing this anyways?!” This episode is the final product of my investigations…

This episode is inspired by my wife's recent experience at the dentist where she needed to get a filling done. It was her first and it reminded me of my first (and so far only) dental filling that I needed to get done a couple of years ago. Our discussion about what the dentist did to fill the dental cavity led to this episode. I hope you enjoy it :).

After discussing for 3 episodes the cutting edge technology that led to a Nobel Prize, I would like to return back to more mundane things and there are not many things more mundane than eating bread :-D

This episode will look at the reason why bland bread starts to taste sweet after chewing it for a while. I hope you will enjoy it :)

Welcome back to the last episode of this Nobel Prize series during which I discuss the technology for which the two research groups around Prof. emmanuelle Charpentier and Prof. Doudna received the joint Nobel Prize for chemistry. This episode will put all the pieces that we encountered over the course of the last two episodes together and finally will explain, how the so-called gene scissors, CRIPS/CAS9, work.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and  Jennifer Doudna for "for the development of a method for genome  editing”. Their work has markedly added to the toolbox available to  researchers in the life sciences and in my humble opinion, it is worth  talking about. To understand why this work is so important, we will need  to have some introductory episodes first and this here is part number II, where we will discuss how genetic information stored in DNA is transformed into biological functions and traits.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for "for the development of a method for genome editing”. Their work has markedly added to the toolbox available to researchers in the life sciences and in my humble opinion, it is worth talking about. To understand why this work is so important, we will need to have some introductory episodes first and this here is part number I, where we will discuss the structure of DNA.

In this episode, I discuss a special group of materials called hydrogels. For something that is hardly ever mentioned publically, it has a surprising amount of uses in the world...

We all know that statues in the cities are green, like for example the statue of liberty. But do you all know why they are green? This episode looks at this question.

Why do our eyes burn and tear when we cut onions? This listener question will be discussed in this episode.

Water is all around us and we kind of take it for granted. It is an accepted basis for life and makes our planet inhabitable. Have you guys ever wondered why that is?

Well, water is also a very special liquid. This episode revolves around a specific feature that water has, namely hydrogen bonds, how they function and why they change the way water behaves in comparison to other compounds.

This episode is based on a discussion I had with an acquaintance at a barbecue. He, being the smarty pants that he is, asked "Do you know the difference between diesel and heating fuel?"... I didn't... I, being the smarty pants that I am, was annoyed by that. With a wry smile he suggested: "Better look it up then." And I did! The result is a not too shabby podcast episode on the difference between the two.

If you want to know why it is a bad idea to use heating fuel in your diesel engine, tune in!

Sources

When talking about chemistry, one of the first topics to breach is the chemistry of soap. In the time of a global pandemic, washing our hands has become second nature and at some point at the beginning the stockpiling of soap even led to shortages in some areas.

So let's talk about soap and how it does its job.

Sources

I love fireworks, folks. I don't see the spectacle often, but when I do , it is an absolute beauty to behold, especially when it is an entire choreography. I sometimes cannot believe that there are people whose job it is to "make" fireworks. Especially, the development of new ones must be a blast!... in more ways than one :-P.

This episode looks at how fireworks create colour at the sky. I hope you enjoy it.

Virtually every time before I record an episode of my podcast, I open a can of coke. That little 'fizz' sound heralds the beginning of my late evening, I take a brief sip and then I start recording. I do this with such regularity that I dedided to make the fizz the topic of today's conversation. How do we make carbonated drinks? If you want to find out, this is episode to listen to.

After we discussed the concept of catalysis in our last episode, it is only fitting to look at a specific example. If you are interested in knowing how nature uses catalysis to run the show in our bodies, then tune in to learn about Enzymes, nature's catalysts.

Catalysis is a word that is rarely used in daily life, yet it influences many facets of it. If you are interested to know how catalysis changed the way car engines run or how margerine is made, then listen in.

References

When you immerse an egg in vinegar the shell will slowly disappear, leaving a flexible and bouncy egg. Bread dough leavens when you use baking soda.

Find out in this episode the reasons for these phenomena.

References

On the surface, a diamond and a pencil have nothing in common. One is one of the hardest and valuable materials known to man and the other is a pencil, an everyday object that many people use on a daily basis to write, draw or the medium between the two: scribble. But once we leave the surface behind us and look closer on a chemical level the differences between a diamond and a pencil are actually not that big.

Interested? Listen in and found out more!

Useful Links