Episodes
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I Made Kidney Stones So I Could Destroy Them Forever
S10 E15 - 11m 57s
Alex made some kidney stones at home and tested prevention methods to keep them at bay.
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How Trees Pollute the Air (and Why Your Coworker's Scientific Citations Don't Mean They're Right)
S10 E14 - 10m 38s
We finally got around to checking our email and found a surprisingly interesting question from a subscriber: are trees bad?
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Every other video about color is wrong.
S10 E13 - 21m 33s
The 15 ways that color happens. It's all about the electrons. Well, almost.
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Why is the US buying Canada's trash for $30,000 per gram?
S10 E12 - 12m 7s
Companies around the world are fighting to buy a rare radioactive substance, despite its $30,000-per-gram price tag. This substance powers emergency exit signs that can stay bright for two decades without power, glow-in-the-dark keychains, and might one day unlock the holy grail of clean energy. What is this mystery substance?
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Did fraud lead us to an Alzheimer's breakthrough?
S10 E11 - 9m 53s
In 2022, news broke that a critical, groundbreaking Alzheimer's research paper had allegedly been a fraud. Did fabricated scientific results accidentally set us on the right path towards a breakthrough?
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Don't Drink Raw Milk. But What About Raw Milk Cheese?
S10 E10 - 12m 54s
A lot of people on the internet have been telling our host Alex to drink raw milk. This is a bad idea —, a particularly bad one actually. So she wanted to make a video about why it’s such a bad idea to consume raw milk, then she realized she’s been eating raw milk without even knowing it via cheese. That’s when things got complicated.
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This Video is About Electroadhesion
S10 E9 - 14m 4s
How would you stick a slice of banana to a sheet of copper? Until a few months ago, you couldn’t. But a new discovery called “hard-soft electroadhesion” enables chemists to stick almost any hydrogel to almost any metal.
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Chirality is Just Turtles All the Way Down
S10 E8 - 12m 2s
L-DOPA is the best drug we have for Parkinson’s disease. If you take L-DOPA and reflect it in a mirror, you get a different molecule: D-DOPA, which does absolutely nothing for Parkinson’s and causes potentially deadly side effects. Making just L-DOPA without D-DOPA is surprisingly hard – so hard that the person who finally figured out how to do it won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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This (Edible) Mushroom Could Kill You
S10 E7 - 17m 23s
George and Alex dive into a 2023 case in Montana where 51 people got sick –and 2 died– from eating morel mushrooms.
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Science Doesn't Understand How Ice Forms
S10 E6 - 10m 31s
This video contains incredible macro footage of supercooled water droplets nucleating ice. All George wanted to do was make a crystal-clear ice cube. Instead, he ended up rediscovering dendritic crystal growth, a beautiful phenomenon first described in the 17th century. You’ll never look at your freezer the same way again.
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Is There a Quick Fix for Ocean Acidification?
S10 E5 - 13m 12s
The ocean is getting more and more acidic. Can we solve it by emptying a giant bottle of antacid into the ocean? No… but the idea of lowering the ocean’s acidity in order to decrease global carbon dioxide levels isn’t all bad. Let’s dive into the science behind ocean alkalinization, and how it could be one part of a larger solution to our global climate crisis.
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I Reinvented a 300-Year Old Drink
S10 E4 - 16m 56s
Adding milk to an alcoholic drink and then curdling that milk is a 300-year-old preservation technique that was used by none other than Ben Franklin. Join George as he discovers the chemistry that makes this technique so useful, and learn how to make the best espresso martini you’ll ever taste.
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