Chemistry Life Hacks Web Series Makes Your Life Sweeter With 100% Fewer Brown Bananas

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old


As the Internet has made clear in the last few years, people are to blame for their own sad existences if they aren’t finding ways of hacking their way through life. (Not the fast-fingers kind of hacking.) We’re talking about taking an extra few seconds of your day to make an otherwise slightly negative experience that much better, and in this case, it’s science saving the day. The American Chemical Society recently released the first episode in its (hopefully long-lasting) web series Reactions, which will serve as a fine complement to their informative and well-established Bytesize Science series.

Though the advice this three-minute video dispenses can clearly be conveyed in a handful of sentences, this is a fast-paced video that chains itself to the attention span with big text, big images, and and engaging sound design. What’s more, the tips they’re giving are top notch, trading in old wives’ tales for spelled-out science. Science!

If you’re reading this in the morning, there’s a good chance you’re also having a cup of coffee. If that coffee happens to be too bitter, it’s because your coffee maker is probably heating the water up too much, which extracts more of the bitterness out of the coffee beans or grounds. But instead of just tossing the whole pot out the window and potentially harming whoever happens to be lurking outside your house — it isn’t me — all you have to do is add a pinch of salt to your cup, which will counteract the bitterness with sodium.

The rest of the tips are simple and apparently effective as well, and tell you how to keep your bananas from browning, how to keep your cookies from hardening, and how to de-rust your pans with little effort. I kind of want to hire these guys as a collective life coach where I can just call them up anytime I have a problem with too many mosquitoes or getting permanent marker out of a couch cushion.

There’s no set schedule on how often the videos would come out, and given Bytesize‘s irregular release process, we’re not making any guesses. Be sure and visit their page if you’ve never been, as it’s full of brainy takes on everything from the stench of asparagus pee to the science of dyeing an egg. Here’s a video about the chemistry of snowflakes.

And because I’ll still be mourning the loss of Breaking Bad for at least another three months, here’s their take on the series’ sometimes silly uses of chemistry.

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