I recently wrote a post listing five bits of chemistry you (probably) do every day.  It was surprisingly popular and so, just like the big movie companies, here’s the sequel!

1.  Make fresh coffee (or at least drink one someone else made)
Espresso (the basis of most coffee drinks) is made by forcing a small amount of very-nearly boiling water through ground coffee beans.  This handily extracts a number of chemicals including all the ones that produce the lovely coffee flavours and aromas but also, crucially, our friend caffeine, without which many of us simply wouldn’t function on a daily basis.  What you (or your favourite barista) have done here is a form of chemical extraction.  Extraction techniques are extremely important in chemistry, because nature has an annoying habit of stirring up the stuff we want with lots of other things.  Chemists, especially the organic ones (produced with all-natural fertilisers) spend most of their lives carefully and painstakingly extracting things from other things. Some of them probably earn less than baristas, too.

2.  Make toast
You know when you make the perfect slice, and it goes that lovely brown colour, just before black?  That’s the Maillard reaction in action.  It’s the same thing that happens when you brown meat, chips, onions or, well, anything else that goes brown when you cook it.  It’s a reaction between amino acids (the stuff proteins are made of) and sugars.  It’s also responsible for those lovely toasted-biscuity smells and favours.  The surface of the food has to be in contact with dry heat for this reaction to happen, which is why boiled and microwaved food doesn’t brown.  And alkaline conditions help it along, which is the main reason lye is traditionally used on the surface of pretzels and other German breads (that’s always made me a bit nervous).

3.  Breathe
I mentioned respiration in my previous post but as any 13 year-old pupil will tell you, and most adults have long since forgotten, respiration is not the same as breathing.  Here I’m actually thinking of oxygen exchange (which is also not, technically, the breathing bit but bear with me).  You’re probably aware that you blood has iron in it: in fact that iron is tied up in rather beautifully complicated haemoglobin molecules.  Oxygen molecules bond to four iron atoms in the haemoglobin with something called coordinate, or dative covalent, bonds.  If it weren’t for this nifty bit of chemical bonding, there’s no way our blood could carry enough oxygen around our bodies, delivering it safely to our cells, to keep us going from one minute to the next.

4.  Neutralised some excess acid
Taken an indigestion tablet recently?  Did you realise you were doing a chemistry experiment in your very own stomach?  Well you were!  Indigestion tablets contain a variety of substances, but some of the most common ingredients are magnesium hydroxide (also known, when suspended in water, as ‘milk of magnesia’), calcium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate and magnesium carbonate.  These are all bases: they react with acids to form a salt and water and, in the case of the carbonates, carbon dioxide as well.  The acid in your stomach is hydrochloric acid, so for example:

sodium bicarbonate + hydrochloric acid –> sodium chloride + water + carbon dioxide

Now, is that Rennie advert that claims to “turn acid into water and other natural substances” starting to make sense?  They don’t want to use the word salt for some reason…

5.  Used drain cleaner
This is one of my favouritist little bits of chemistry.  Really.  It’s lovely.  Well apart from the horribly caustic chemicals involved obviously.  Drain cleaner is dangerous concoction nasty stuff but it’s main ingredient is often a strong alkali, like sodium hydroxide (there are also acidic drain cleaners; it’s quite important that you don’t mix them).  The stuff that blocks up your plughole is, largely, protein (hair, skin cells, yuck) and and oily dirt.  The strong alkali reacts with these things in a reaction called hydrolysis.  Now this is clever, because soap is made by (virtually) the exact same reaction.  Soap is produced by saponification, where fats are mixed with a strong alkali.  So what are you doing when you put drain cleaner in your stuffed-up plug hole?  You’re not only breaking down the gunk, you’re also effectively making soap in situ, which helps to wash away the remaining dirt.  How brilliant is that?

With thanks to Andrew (@_byronmiller) for his suggestions.