We don’t often think about the hidden beauty that nature provides if we carefully (really carefully) look into things. This is not the case with Beautiful Chemical Reactions, they provide us with a very careful look into what happens during those magical moments of chemical reaction.
The movie is the love child of Tsinghua University Press and University of Science and Technology of China. The reactions used are explain on their site. The metal displacement for example is done like this:
We dropped zinc metal in silver nitrate (AgNO3), copper sulfate (CuSO4), and lead nitrate (Pb(NO3)2) solutions, and recorded the emergence of silver, copper, and lead metals with beautiful structure. To preserve the fragile structure of lead metal, we also added sodium silicate (Na2SiO3) and acetic acid (CH3COOH) to the solution to make it gelatinize
Even in English it sounds like Chinese, but hey, this is what makes science so awesome!
The folks over at IO9, did a few animated gifs to show the highlight of each reaction. Here are a few and there are more on IO9 and on beautiful chemistry.
[Beautiful Chemical Reactions via io9 | beautiful chemistry]
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