It’s officially time to put 2020 in the bin! Hurrah! And that means it’s time for a round-up of everything on this blog from the last twelve months. It’s not all COVID-19 related, I promise…
Mystery purple crystals
January began with a mystery, about some strange, blueish-purple crystals that were found under a sink. What were they? Well, if you missed it, or you’ve just forgotten, the answer is here…
I had no idea at the time, but February was the calm before the storm. I was cheerfully talking about the Pocket Chemist. Have you got one? The post has a discount code, and they’re amazingly useful things. Especially if you’re studying from home…
Everything kicked off in March, and back in those early days everyone was all about the hand-washing. It may not be the burniest or the flashiest, but soap chemistry is some of the oldest chemistry we know. Oh, yes, and wash your hands. Properly.
We were all home learning in April. Or trying to, at least. Lots of chemists started messing about with stuff at home — in particular, @CrocodileChemist (aka Isobel Everest — give her a follow) created some gorgeous art with home-made indicators. I wrote all about an easy version, made with the classic: red cabbage.
Red cabbage indicator with various household substances
May featured pyrotechnics. Well, everything was on fire, so it seemed apt. Also, it was the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of the novel, Good Omens.
It was back to COVID-19 science in June, because everyone was talking about dexamethasone — a well-known, readily available and, crucially, cheap steroid that has been shown to help patients with the most severe symptoms. Want to know more about its history? Check out the post.
By July nothing was over, but we’d definitely all had enough. So it was time to talk about something completely different. What better than a post all about sweet things, to mark national lollipop day?
In August the folks at Genius Lab Gear sent me an awesome set of Science Word Magnets. Do you need a set of these for when you finally make it back to a whiteboard? Check out this post for a discount code…
September was all about skin chemistry
There’s evidence that low vitamin D levels are correlated with worse COVID-19 outcomes and, in the UK, we can’t make it in our skin in the winter months — so September was all about vitamin D. Want to know more? Read all about sunshine and skin chemistry.
It’s Mole Day on the 23rd of October, so I did some ridiculous and, frankly, slightly disgusting calculations. Did you know that if we drained the blood out of every, single human on the planet, we’d only have about half a mole of red blood cells? You do now.
In November I went back to cleaning chemistry. Well, we had all been stuck at home for a while. This time, it was ovens. Why is cleaning ovens such hard work? Why do we use the chemicals we use? I explained all that. Read on!
Annnnd that brings us to December, and the STEM Heroes Colouring Book — a project I’m super proud to be a part of. So, hey, there’s been some good stuff!
Here’s to the end of 2020, and let’s hope that 2021 brings us some good things. It has to, surely? January traditionally brings a health scare, but no one’s doing that in 2021, are they? Are they? I guess we’ll find out soon… lots of love to everyone, stay safe, and stay well!
The effect was achieved by combining various substances with different pH indicators, that is, substances that change colour when mixed with acids or alkalis.
Now, this is completely awesome, but, not something most people could easily reproduce at home, on account of their not having methyl orange or bromothymol blue, or a few other things (that said, if you did want to try, Isobel’s full method, and other indicator art, can be found here).
But fear not, I’ve got this. Well, I’ve got a really, really simple version. Well, actually, I’ve got more of an experiment, but you could make it into more of a rainbow if you wanted. Anyway…
This is what you need:
some red cabbage (one leaf is enough)
boiling water
mug
white plate, or laminated piece of white card, or white paper in a punched pocket
cling film/clear plastic wrap (if you’re using a plate)
First, make the indicator. There are recipes online, but some of them are over-complicated. All you really need to do is finely chop the red cabbage leaf, put it in a mug, and pour boiling water over it. Leave it to steep and cool down. Don’t accidentally drink it thinking it’s your coffee. Pour off the liquid. Done.
If you use a plate, cover it with cling film
Next, if you’re using a plate, cover it with cling film. There are two reasons for this: firstly, cling film is more hydrophobic (water-repelling) than most well-washed ceramic plates, so you’ll get better droplets. Secondly, if you write on a china plate with a board marker it doesn’t always wash off. Ask me how I know.
Next step: hunt down some household chemicals. I managed to track down oven cleaner, plughole sanitiser, washing up liquid, lemon juice, vinegar, limescale remover and toilet cleaner (note: not bleach – don’t confuse these two substances, one is acid, one is alkali, and they must never be mixed).
Label your plate/laminated card/paper in punched pocket with the names of the household substances.
Place a drop of cabbage indicator by each label. Keep them well spaced so they don’t run into each other. Also, at this stage, keep them fairly small. Leave one alone as a ‘control’. On my plate, it’s in the middle.
Add a drop of each of your household substances and observe the colours!
Red cabbage indicator with various household substances
IMPORTANT SAFETY NOTE: some of these substances are corrosive. The risk is small because you’re only using drops, but if working with children, make sure an adult keeps control of the bottles, and they only have access to a tiny amount. Drip the more caustic substances yourself. Take the opportunity to point out and explain hazard warning labels. Use the same precautions you would use when handling the substance normally, i.e. if you’d usually wear gloves to pick up the bottle, wear gloves. Some of these substances absolutely must not be mixed with each other: keep them all separate.
A useful point to make here is that pH depends on the concentration of hydrogen ions (H+) in the solution. The more hydrogen ions, the more acidic the solution is. In fact, pH is a log scale, which means a change of x10 in hydrogen concentration corresponds to a change of one pH point. In short, the pH of a substance changes with dilution.
Compound Interest’s Cabbage Indicator page (click image for more info)
Which means that if you add enough water to acid, the pH goes up. So, for example, although the pH of pure ethanoic acid is more like 2.4, a dilute vinegar solution is probably closer to 3, or even a bit higher.
Compound Interest, as is usually the case, has a lovely graphic featuring red cabbage indicator. You can see that the colours correspond fairly well, although it does look like my oven cleaner is less alkaline (closer to green) than the plughole sanitiser (closer to yellow).
As the Compound Interest graphic mentions, the colour changes are due to anthocyanin pigments. These are red/blue/purple pigments that occur naturally in plants, and give them a few advantages, one of which is to act as a visual ripeness indicator. For example, the riper a blackberry is, the darker it becomes. That makes it stand out against green foliage, so it’s easier for birds and animals to find it, eat it and go on to spread the seeds. Note that “unripe” colours, yellow-green, are at the alkaline end, which corresponds to bitter flavours. “Ripe” colours, purple-red, are neutral to acidic, corresponding with much more appealing sweet and tart flavours. Isn’t nature clever?
You can make a whole mug full of indicator from a single cabbage leaf (don’t drink it by mistake).
Which brings me to my final point – what if you can’t get red cabbage? Supermarkets are bit… tricky at the moment, after all. Well, try with some other things! Any dark-coloured plant/fruit should work. Blueberries are good (and easy to find frozen). The skins of black grapes or the very dark red bit of a rhubarb stalk are worth a try. Blackberries grow wild in lots of places later in the year. Tomatoes, strawberries and other red fruits will also give colour changes (I’ve talked about strawberries before), although they’re less dramatic.
For those (rightly) concerned about wasting food – you don’t need a lot. I made a whole mug full of cabbage indicator from a single cabbage leaf, and it was the manky brown-around-the-edges one on the outside that was probably destined for compost anyway.
So, off you go, have fun! Stay indoors, learn about indicators, and stay safe.
EDIT: after I posted this, a few people tried some more experiments with fruits, vegetables and plants! Beaulieu Biology posted the amazing grid below, which includes everything from turmeric to radishes:
Image reproduced with kind permission of Beaulieu Biology (click for larger version)
And Compound Interest took some beautiful photos of indicator solutions extracted from a tulip flower, while CrocodileChemist did something similar and used the solutions to make a gorgeous picture of a tree. Check them out!
If you’re studying from home, have you got your Pocket Chemist yet? Why not grab one? It’s a hugely useful tool, and by buying one you’ll be supporting this site – it’s win-win!
Want something non-sciency to distract you? Why not check out my fiction blog: the fiction phial. There are loads of short stories, and even (recently) a couple of poems. Enjoy!
In short, I think it’s best I shut up and leave the medical side to the experts. But! I DO know about something relevant. What’s that, I hear you ask? Well, it’s… soap! But wait, before you start yawning, soap is amazing. It is fascinating. It both literally and figuratively links loads of bits of cool chemistry with loads of other bits of cool chemistry. Stay with me, and I’ll explain.
First up, some history (also not a historian, but that crowd is cool, they’ll forgive me) soap is old. Really, really, old. Archaeological evidence suggests ancient Babylonians were making soap around 4800 years ago – probably not for personal hygiene, but rather, mainly, to clean cooking pots. It was originally made from fats boiled with ashes, and the theory generally goes that the discovery was a happy accident: ashes left from cooking fires made it much easier to clean pots and, some experimenting later, we arrived at something we might cautiously recognise today as soap.
Soap was first used to clean pots.
The reason this works is that ashes are alkaline. In fact, the very word “alkali” is derived from the Arabic al qalīy, meaning calcined ashes. This is because plants, and especially wood, aren’t just made up of carbon and hydrogen. Potassium and calcium play important roles in tree and plant metabolism, and as a result both are found in moderately significant quantities in wood. When that wood is burnt at high temperatures, alkaline compounds of potassium and calcium form. If the temperature gets high enough, calcium oxide (lime) forms, which is even more alkaline.
You may, in fact, have heard the term potash. This usually refers to salts that contain potassium in a water-soluble form. Potash was first made by taking plant ashes and soaking them in water in a pot, hence, “pot ash”. And, guess where we get the word potassium from? Yep. The pure element, being very reactive, wasn’t discovered until 1870, thousands of years after people first discovered how useful its compounds could be. And, AND, why does the element potassium have the symbol K? It comes from kali, the root of the word alkali.
See what I mean about connections?
butyl ethanoate
Why is the fact that the ashes are alkaline relevant? Well, to answer that we need to think about fats. Chemically, fats are esters. Esters are chains of hydrogen and carbon that have, somewhere within them, a cheeky pair of oxygen atoms. Like this (oxygen atoms are shown red):
Now, this is a picture of butyl ethanoate (aka butyl acetate – smells of apples, by the way) and is a short-ish example of an ester. Fats generally contain much longer chains, and there are three of those chains, and the oxygen bit is stuck to a glycerol backbone.
Thus, the thick, oily, greasy stuff that you think of as fat is a triglyceride: an ester made up of three fatty acid molecules and glycerol (aka glycerine, yup, same stuff in baking). But it’s the ester bit we want to focus on for now, because esters react with alkalis (and acids, for that matter) in a process called hydrolysis.
Fats are esters. Three fatty acid chains are attached to a glycerol “backbone”.
The clue here is in the name – “hydro” suggesting water – because what happens is that the ester splits where those (red) oxygens are. On one side of that split, the COO group of atoms gains a metal ion (or a hydrogen, if the reaction was carried out under acidic conditions), while the other chunk of the molecule ends up with an OH on the end. We now have a carboxylate salt (or a carboxylic acid) and an alcohol. Effectively, we’ve split the molecule into two pieces and tidied up the ends with atoms from water.
Still with me? This is where it gets clever. Having mixed our fat with alkali and split our fat molecules up, we have two things: fatty acid salts (hydrocarbon chains with, e.g. COO– Na+ on the end) and glycerol. Glycerol is extremely useful stuff (and, funnily enough, antiviral) but we’ll put that aside for the moment, because it’s the other part that’s really interesting.
What we’ve done here is produce a molecule that has a polar end (the charged bit, e.g. COO– Na+) and a non-polar end (the long chain of Cs and Hs). Here’s the thing: polar substances tend to only mix with other polar substances, while non-polar substances only mix with other non-polar substances.
You may be thinking this is getting technical, but honestly, it’s not. I guarantee you’ve experienced this: think, for example, what happens if you make a salad dressing with oil and vinegar (which is mostly water). The non-polar oil floats on top of the polar water and the two won’t stay mixed. Even if you give them a really good shake, they separate out after a few minutes.
The dark blue oily layer in this makeup remover doesn’t mix with the watery colourless layer.
There are even toiletries based around this principle. This is an eye and lip makeup remover designed to remove water-resistant mascara and long-stay lipstick. It has an oily layer and a water-based layer. To use it, you give the container a good shake and use it immediately. The oil in the mixture removes any oil-based makeup, while the water part removes anything water-based. If you leave the bottle for a minute or two, it settles back into two layers.
But when we broke up our fat molecules, we formed a molecule which can combine with both types of substance. One end will mix with oily substances, and the other end mixes with water. Imagine it as a sort of bridge, joining two things that otherwise would never be connected (see, literal connections!)
There are a few different names for this type of molecule. When we’re talking about food, we usually use “emulsifier” – a term you’ll have seen on food ingredients lists. The best-known example is probably lecithin, which is found in egg yolks. Lecithin is the reason mayonnaise is the way it is – it allows oil and water to combine to give a nice, creamy product that stays mixed, even if it’s left on a shelf for months.
When we’re talking about soaps and detergents, we call these joiny-up molecules “surfactants“. You’re less likely to have seen that exact term on cosmetic ingredients lists, but you will (if you’ve looked) almost certainly have seen one of the most common examples, which is sodium laureth sulfate (or sodium lauryl sulfate), because it turns up everywhere: in liquid soap, bubble bath, shampoo and even toothpaste.
I won’t get into the chemical makeup of sodium laureth sulfate, as it’s a bit different. I’m going to stick to good old soap bars. A common surfactant molecule that you’ll find in those is sodium stearate, which is just like the examples I was talking about earlier: a long hydrocarbon chain with COO– Na+ stuck on the end. The hydrocarbon end, or “tail”, is hydrophobic (“water-hating”), and only mixes with oily substances. The COO– Na+ end, or “head”, is hydrophilic (“water loving”) and only mixes with watery substances.
Bars of soap contain sodium stearate.
This is perfect because dirt is usually oily, or is trapped in oil. Soap allows that oil to mix with the water you’re using to wash, so that both the oil, and anything else it might be harbouring, can be washed away.
Which brings us back to the wretched virus. Sars-CoV-2 has a lipid bilayer, that is, a membrane made of two layers of lipid (fatty) molecules. Virus particles stick to our skin and, because of that membrane, water alone does a really bad job of removing them. However, the water-hating tail ends of surfacant molecules are attracted to the virus’s outer fatty surface, while the water-loving head ends are attracted to the water that’s, say, falling out of your tap. Basically, soap causes the virus’s membrane to dissolve, and it falls apart and is destroyed. Victory is ours – hurrah!
Hand sanitisers also destroy viruses. Check out this excellent Compound Interest graphic (click the image for more).
Who knew a nearly-5000 year-old weapon would be effective against such a modern scourge? (Well, yes, virologists, obviously.) The more modern alcohol hand gels do much the same thing, but not quite as effectively – if you have access to soap and water, use them!
Of course, all this only works if you wash your hands thoroughly. I highly recommend watching this video, which uses black ink to demonstrate what needs to happen with the soap. I thought I was washing my hands properly until I watched it, and now I’m actually washing my hands properly.
You may be thinking at this point (if you’ve made it this far), “hang on, if the ancient Babylonians were making soap nearly 5000 years ago, it must be quite easy to make… ooh, could I make soap?!” And yes, yes it is and yes you can. Believe me, if the apocolypse comes I shall be doing just that. People rarely think about soap in disaster movies, which is a problem, because without a bit of basic hygine it won’t be long before the hero is either puking his guts up or dying from a minor wound infection.
Here’s the thing though, it’s potentially dangerous to make soap, because most of the recipes you’ll find (I won’t link to any, but a quick YouTube search will turn up several – try looking for “saponification“) involve lye. Lye is actually a broad term that covers a couple of different chemicals, but most of the time when people say lye these days, they mean pure sodium hydroxide.
Pure sodium hydroxide is usually supplied as pellets.
Pure sodium hydroxide comes in the form of pellets. It’s dangerous for two reasons. Firstly, precisely because it’s so good at breaking down fats and proteins, i.e. the stuff that humans are made of, it’s really, really corrosive and will give you an extremely nasty burn. Remember that scene in the movie Fight Club? Yes, that scene? Well, that. (Follow that link with extreme caution.)
And secondly, when sodium hydroxide pellets are mixed with water, the solution gets really, really hot.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realise that a really hot, highly corrosive, solution is potentially a huge disaster waiting to happen. So, and I cannot stress this enough, DO NOT attempt to make your own soap unless you have done a lot of research AND you have ALL the appropriate safety equipment, especially good eye protection.
And there we are. Soap is ancient and awesome, and full of interesting chemistry. Make sure you appreciate it every time you wash your hands, which ought to be frequently!
Stay safe, everyone. Take care, and look after yourselves.
Want something non-sciency to distract you? Why not check out my fiction blog: the fiction phial. There are loads of short stories, and even (recently) a poem. Enjoy!
If you’re studying from home, have you got your Pocket Chemist yet? Why not grab one? It’s a hugely useful tool, and by buying one you’ll be supporting this site – it’s win-win!
Chemicals. The word sounds a little bit scary, doesn’t it? For some it probably conjures up memories of school, and that time little Joey heated something up to “see what would happen” and you all had to evacuate the building. Which was actually good fun – what’s not to love about an unplanned fire drill during lesson time?
But for others the word has more worrying associations. What about all those lists of additives in foods, for starters? You know, the stuff that makes it all processed and bad for us. Don’t we need to get rid of all of that? And shouldn’t we be buying organic food, so we can avoid ….
A little while ago now I wrote a post entitled Amazing Alkaline Lemons?. It’s been very popular, sort of. Well, it’s elicited an awful lot of comments anyway. Quite a few have mentioned buffers, which are jolly important things. They also seem to be somewhat misunderstood. So here we go, buffers 101:
Buffers regulate pH (remember that pH is the scale that measures how acidic, or basic, a solution is), and they’re essential in the body. Without them, your blood pH would fluctuate, and that that would be a very bad thing indeed. Outside a very narrow pH range (7.38 to 7.42, which is essentially neutral) proteins are denatured and enzymes stop working. In short, your body would quickly stop functioning in a really quite fatal way.
So what is a buffer? A buffer is actually a mixture, of a weak acid and its salt. Or, as chemists would say, its ‘conjugate base‘. (I’m deliberately avoiding the word ‘alkali’, because alkali has a specific meaning and it would be wrong to use it in this situation – I mention this because the word ‘alkalising’ has come up more than once).
The main buffer system in the blood is the bicarbonate buffering system. We need it because our blood has to transport carbon dioxide out of our bodies, and when carbon dioxide is dissolved in solution it forms an acid called carbonic acid. If this weren’t somehow controlled, our blood pH would quickly plummet and, as I’ve already mentioned, we’d die. This would obviously be something of an evolutionary dead-end.
Chemistry to the rescue! Carbonic acid (H2CO3) forms, but it also breaks apart again to form hydrogen ions (H+) and bicarbonate ions (HCO3–) producing something chemists call an equilibrium (symbolised by the funny two-way arrow you can see below).
H2CO3 ⇌ H+ + HCO3–
Equilibria have a way of balancing themselves out, and this is key to how buffers work. If you add some extra hydrogen ions to a buffer system the equilibrium shifts to absorb those hydrogen ions, keeping the pH constant. Likewise, if an alkali (or base) is added, it goes the other way and actually causes more hydrogen ions to be released. This is remarkably difficult to budge, unless you swamp it with a really strong acid (or base).
As a result, your blood pH stays perfectly balanced, and a good thing too. And all you need for it to work is to breathe. I recommend that if you want to stay healthy you don’t stop doing that.
There are other important buffer systems in the body. One that gets mentioned quite a lot is the phosphate buffer system. This plays a relatively minor role in controlling blood pH, but it is pretty important for your cells. This buffer is made up of dihydrogen phosphate ions and hydrogen phosphate ions. Phosphate plays an important role in bone health, not to mention your body’s ability to use energy effectively. Fortunately, unless you have some kind of fairly serious health problem your kidneys do a cracking job of controlling phosphate levels, so there’s no need to worry too much about it, beyond aiming, as we all should, for a generally healthy diet.
So there we are. Buffers are a mixture, they form naturally in the body, you don’t really need to do anything to help them along, and they quietly keep you alive. Pretty cool bit of everyday chemistry really.
When you start writing a blog it’s hard to predict what people will find most interesting. Inevitably, it’s not what you expected. For example, two of The Chronicle Flask’s most-read posts are about rhubarb and lemons. Perhaps people are more interested in fruit than I ever imagined. Or perhaps I’m getting a lot of hits from people mistakenly looking for recipes.
Or maybe it’s because both feature the ever-interesting topic of acids. In which case, I should probably write something else about acids.
So, this is a post about bases.
Just in case this spectacular bit of contrariness isn’t immediately obvious, bases – some of which are called alkalis (I’m coming to that in a minute) – are at the other end of the pH scale to acids. Acids are the things with a pH value of less than 7, and bases have pH values of more than 7. So basically (hoho), they’re the opposites of acids.
I’m using the word base deliberately, and not just because of all the brilliant chemistry puns you can make with it. The more familiar word is probably alkali, but while all alkalis are bases, not all bases are alkalis.
Alkalis are often described as soluble bases. More precisely, alkalis are produced from the metals in group 1 (the ‘alkali’ metals) and group 2 (the ‘alkaline earth’ metals) of the periodic table. The more general term, base, applies to anything that can neutralise an acid. Chemists have another definition: a base is a proton (H+ ion) acceptor, while acids are proton donors (actually chemists have yet another definition, but the proton acceptor one is the one that gets trotted out most often).
The distinction between alkalis and bases does matter to chemists and the two types of substance usually look quite different – bases tend to come in solid lumps or powders (baking soda, for example) and alkalis are more likely to arrive as a solution in a bottle – but in terms of chemistry they both get involved in the same type of chemical reaction, which is neutralising acids.
We make use of this all the time, whether we realise it or not. For example if you’re suffering from acid indigestion you probably reach for the indigestion tablets. An advertising campaign for a particular brand of these says that they “turn excess acid into water and other natural substances”. Those ‘natural substances’ are salts – presumably it was decided that the word ‘salt’ had too many negative connotations (which is probably true: how many people would pop a pill that promised to turn into salt in their tummy?) The main ingredient in the tablets in question is calcium carbonate; a base that reacts with stomach acid to produce calcium chloride. Which is definitely a salt, if not the one most people think of when they hear the word.
Tangentially, calcium chloride is also a food additive with the E number E509. It falls into the category of anti-caking agents, which is sort of funny when you think about it.
Anyhoo, that’s one place you use a base (rhyming now as well as punning, sorry). You’re actually making one yourself every time you eat, because your liver produces a substance called bile (bloggers love bile) which helpfully neutralises the acid your stomach produces. If it didn’t, your intestines would get damaged by that acid, so it’s important stuff.
Interestingly, in a lot of the older medical traditions (you know, swallow three leeches with meals, turn around three times under a full moon and bury a toad under a horseradish in a mock turtle) the body’s health depended on the balance of four ‘humors’, or vital fluids: blood, phlegm, ‘yellow bile‘ (choler), and ‘black bile‘. If you had too much of the last two, it was supposed to cause aggression and depression, and in fact the Greek names for them are the root of the words cholera and melancholia.
It’s interesting that in the 21st century many people are obsessed with ‘alkalinizing‘ the body (just check out the comments on that lemons post) when for thousands of years people have understood that too much alkali is probably a bad thing. Public understanding of science has really moved on hasn’t it?
Bile does something else that’s really quite important in the body, it helps you to digest fats. Bases are generally really good at breaking down fats. This is another thing that’s been known for quite a while, ever since soap was first discovered about (sources vary quite considerably on this) six thousand years ago. Soap is made by a process of saponification, in which fats react with a strong base, usually sodium hydroxide (otherwise known as caustic soda, or sometimes lye). This breaks apart the fat molecules to make glycerol and carboxylate salts (they’re the soap bit). Because of this use, sodium hydroxide features in a famous, and rather gruesome scene, in the film Fight Club.
The fire diamond for NaOH
Because bases are so good at breaking down fats they’re actually surprisingly (or not, if you’ve just watched that Fight Club clip)dangerous, especially because they’re also quite good at breaking down proteins. Your skin is mostly fat and protein, so they can do quite a bit of damage. Remember fire diamonds? The one for sodium hydroxide has a 3 in the blue box, which means that short exposure could cause ‘serious temporary’ or ‘moderate residual’ injury – yikes.
Corrosive hazard symbol
The European hazard symbol is even more alarming, featuring a hand with holes being burned through it. Of course, acids have symbols like these too, but people sort of expect acids to do this kind of stuff. Whereas they’re often (unless they’re chemists) strangely unaware of the dangers of alkalis. For example there’s the a famous, and gruesome, story of the serial killer John George Haigh, who famously dissolved the bodies of his victims in oil drums full of concentrated sulfuric acid. It worked quite well, but he was caught eventually when the police searched his workshop and found sludge containing three human gallstones and part of a denture.
Sulfuric acid is a particularly powerful acid, and is undoubtedly incredibly dangerous stuff, but sodium hydroxide is not much safer. It will cause instantaneous and serious burns, and solid sodium hydroxide gets incredibly hot if it’s added to water. In fact, the water will quickly boil if you’re not careful.
In May last year American Carmen Blandin Tarleton was in the news because she had just received a face transplant. She needed it because her estranged husband had doused her with concentrated sodium hydroxide six years previously. She had undergone fifty-five operations before she made the decision to get the transplant. The pictures are really quite horrific. I won’t reproduce one here; you can see the result of the attack if you follow the link above. Tarleton has also written a book about her experiences. She was left blind and horribly disfigured, with burns to 80% of her body. Doctors described it as “the most horrific injury a human being could suffer”. Sodium hydroxide is not nice stuff.
It’s surprisingly, shockingly, easy to buy sodium hydroxide. Because it’s used in soap-making, you can get it quite easily. It’s even available on Amazon. And of course it’s an ingredient in lots of drain cleaners available in supermarkets. When they say you should wear gloves to handle this stuff, it’s definitely not health and safety gone mad. You really should. Even I would (and I’m really bad about wearing gloves).
So spare a thought for bases. They’re just as interesting, and certainly no nicer or safer than their acidic cousins. In fact, they’re so good at breaking down fat and protein that they could arguably be more dangerous. And next time you’re cleaning out your oven, do remember to wear your gloves.
Well, 
the chronicle flask 