Chemistry Nobel goes to reactions like those that gave life a hand
Altering molecular handedness has implications for the origins of life.
Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both ambitious and, well, strange. One of his ongoing projects involves turning anything and everything into alcohol. (The fact that he does this despite not in fact appearing to like alcohol feels significant here.) Anyway, in a new video, Braun puts all his previous alcohol videos to shame by setting out to produce ethanol from thin air. Really. The theory is actually pretty simple: air contains, among other things, hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Ethanol contains hydrogen, carbon and oxygen! So basically, the idea is: And in fairness, that is the idea—it’s just that, as ever, there’s an awful lot of detail lurking in those question marks. Watching a NileRed video is often like a journey into the depths of human emotion, just with added chemistry and expensive, esoteric machinery from China. This one is no exception—our hero declares at various points that, “I was completely delusional,” “Everything I was doing was totally wrong,” “This was a total failure” and “I completely scre

Aug 9, 2026 → Aug 9, 2026
Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both ambitious and, well,…
Read original at Gizmodo →1 updates from 1 source.
Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both…
Read original at Gizmodo →What this story stands on. Tier 0 is a primary record or the subject's own words; higher tiers must be attributed, never stated as bare fact.
Nigel “NileRed” Braun is one of the OG chemistry YouTubers, and he’s become famous on the platform for his Charlie Brown-esque air of melancholy, along with his unstinting devotion to performing experiments both ambitious and, well,…
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Altering molecular handedness has implications for the origins of life.
The prize was given to the French and Japanese scientists for solving the mystery of life's asymmetry.
If you own gold jewelry, you might notice that it doesn’t tarnish as easily as other materials, like silver. For a long time, scientists understood that this was because gold…