Text on screen — 'Reactions, Everyday Chemistry. Produced by the American Chemical Society.' Title — 'Chemistry Life Hacks.' Three pictures appear side by side. One is of the television character MacGyver, another of Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev. In between them is a picture that amalgamates their features — MacGyver with a long beard.
NARRATOR:
Chemistry Life Hacks — MacGyver meets Mendeleev in these everyday chemistry-inspired tricks to make your life a little easier with all the evidence you need to back it up.
Text on screen — 'Everyday Chemistry For Maximised Efficiency. Chemistry Life Hacks Volume 1.'
NARRATOR:
Now, let's get started.
Text on screen — '1, Coffee, Cream & Salt.' Cartoons with subtitles demonstrate the narrator's ideas.
NARRATOR:
You're buying the best roast in town, but no matter what you do, your coffee always ends up bitter. Well, chances are you're brewing with water that's way too hot. The hotter the water, the deeper the extraction from your beans and the more bitter compounds end up in your brew. So, we've got an excellent trick for you so you don't have to worry about becoming barista to get it right. If your coffee is too bitter, add a tiny little pinch of salt and taste a world of difference. When salt dissolves, sodium ions break off into your coffee…
Shot of a drawing of sodium ions with the chemical name 'Na'.
NARRATOR:
..and block bitter molecules from reaching your tongue, greatly enhancing the flavour. Don't have salt on hand at your neighbourhood coffee shop?
A hand holds a single-serve satchel of iodized salt next to a cup of black coffee.
NARRATOR:
Just keep a couple of these in your purse or wallet and you'll do just fine.
Text on screen — '2, Brown Bagging Bananas.'
NARRATOR:
You're starving for some bananas but all they had at the store were bright green ones. Bananas can take a day or two to ripen, but here's a tip to get them up to standard really, really quick. Put your bananas in a paper bag and throw a couple of ripe tomatoes in there. The bananas, depending how green they were to start, will ripen twice as fast. This is because of a plant hormone called 'ethylene' that's used to make fruits ripen faster. When you place ripe tomatoes in the bag with bananas, the bag traps the ethylene gas that is produced by the already-ripened tomatoes which, in turn, forces the bananas to ripen much faster. Also, the riper the bananas get, the more ethylene they produce.
Text on screen — '3, How to Save a Cookie.'
NARRATOR:
You ate way to many, way too fast, passed out on the couch and left the cookies out. Now they're rock hard, unappetising and spoiled your plans to spoil your own diet. No problem. Here's a little trick that's been passed down for generations. Put your cookies in a tin or large zip lock bag with a piece of bread, and they'll be as soft as when they came out of the oven. Cookies contain far more sugars than bread. Sugars are known to be hygroscopic — that is they soak up moisture from the surrounding environment. This, alongside the dense nature of cookies, allows them to absorb moisture coming from that piece of bread, keeping them nice and soft for a much longer period of time.
Text on screen — 'ACS, Chemistry for Life. American Chemical Society.'