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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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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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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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We Are Made of Star Stuff

S10 E3 / 10m 13s
For years, scientists thought some complex molecules could only be formed on Earth. But what if we found these kinds of molecules out in space after all? In this episode of Reactions, we explore new findings that show complex carbon ring structures can be formed in space, and what that might mean for biology, chemistry and our own chemical history!
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Does Toyota Know Something That We Don’t?

S10 E2 / 12m
*Note:* the model piston we used in this video shows air and fuel entering the cylinder together. This design was prevalent in engines until roughly the 1990s. These days, air and fuel enter separately. The combustion process and piston movement are the same!
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