“Good Chemistry” Explains Chemical Bonds with Cutout Animation and Teenage Romance

Love, or the promise of it, sells clothes, cologne and many a com­pact disc—but who’d think love could sell chem­istry? Six­teen-year-old Eli Ciri­no did, and was he ever right. The tenth grad­er sub­mit­ted an extra cred­it video for his chem­istry class and what he got was prob­a­bly way more than he bar­gained for. Good Chem­istry explains chem­i­cal bonds using con­struc­tion paper ani­ma­tion of pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive ions and cova­lent bonds set against an orig­i­nal song sung by Ciri­no. It’s all edit­ed togeth­er with images of a cute cou­ple reach­ing out and clasp­ing hands. A sam­ple of Cirino’s lyrics: “We always on the look­out for a part­ner­ship, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive you get the drift.” It’s catchy and sweet, to the tune of more than 290,000 views on YouTube by the end of the day Wednes­day. Extra cred­it for Ciri­no for bring­ing the video in at pi-time: three min­utes, four­teen sec­onds.

Kate Rix is an Oak­land-based free­lancer. Find more of her work at .

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Chemistry on YouTube: “Periodic Table of Videos” Wins SPORE Prize

A few years ago, we post­ed about an ambi­tious project out of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Not­ting­ham called The Peri­od­ic Table of Videos. The project is pret­ty much exact­ly what it sounds like – an online peri­od­ic table in which each and every ele­ment gets its own brief intro­duc­to­ry video, “star­ring” the researchers and fac­ul­ty of the uni­ver­si­ty’s chem­istry depart­ment. Video jour­nal­ist Brady Haran has kept each episode loose and unscript­ed, and the sci­en­tists’ enthu­si­asm for their sub­ject is infec­tious, even — or per­haps espe­cial­ly — when their exper­i­ments go awry (Keep an eye out espe­cial­ly for the won­der­ful­ly wooly Pro­fes­sor Poli­akoff, whose hair alone should earn him first billing).

We were delight­ed to learn that the PTOV has just been award­ed a very well-deserved Sci­ence Prize for Online Resources by the Amer­i­can Asso­ci­a­tion for the Advance­ment of Sci­ence. In fact, the project has proven so suc­cess­ful over­all that Haran has embarked on a sim­i­lar col­lab­o­ra­tion with the uni­ver­si­ty’s physics depart­ment, and he’s also brought the chemists back for a new series about mol­e­cules. The most pop­u­lar video from that series, which we’ve post­ed above, address­es a ques­tion that has kept us all up till dawn at least once in our lives: What hap­pens when a cheese­burg­er is dunked in hydrochlo­ric acid?

Don’t miss the free chem­istry cours­es list­ed in our col­lec­tion of 380 Free Online Cours­es.

via ArsTech­ni­ca

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly

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