science

Here a [Co4Zr2O(OnPr)10(acac)4] single-source precursor is deposited onto Al-doped SrTiO3 [...]

what the...?!?

It's also the worst possible course of study to ever require for anyone outside organic chem majors.

I loved biology and statistics, and was pretty neutral towards calculus, but for some reason, chemistry is incomprehensible to me (Physics too, but that’s because neither the teacher nor I knew how to use my Casio graphing calculator, so I tried to do all the math on paper and ended up wasting the whole class doing arithmetic instead of listening-I’ve thought about taking a basic physics course at a community college, but I don’t think even that would help with chemistry).

My sister’s a science teacher and was taking masters level organic chemistry classes while I was taking high school chemistry. At one point she showed me some of her coursework and I literally decided in that moment that I didn’t want to study biology badly enough to go through organic chemistry.

That sounds like she’s a really bad teacher, lol, but my strengths are definitely in different areas, so it’s also a fair insight.

Inorganic chemistry is fairly simple and fun as long as you keep it in the lab. Industrial-scale inorganic chemistry gets ridiculously complicated because all the reactants and products are complicated and messy. Also, a large reactor will have all sorts of gradients, which means that the reactions take place in unfavourable conditions all the time. None of it is ideal, and none of it follows simplified laws or rules very well.

Sure, we have all sorts of fancy calculations, but none of them predict very accurately what’s going to happen and when. Even the best models and theories give approximate and crude answers when you’re dealing with messy industrial-scale chemistry.

Models give you a rough idea, lab experiments give you a decent idea, but running the process at full scale is the only way to find out exactly how those reactions really work in real life.

Turns out, our theories are too simple to handle complicated solutions. They can predict the behaviour of simple solutions very well, but that’s not good enough. In real life, you rarely have well behaved clean reagents.

incomplete combustion, likely some nasty nitrates in there.

seems very resources intensive, and with specific reagents/chemicals.

That's bad

No, the problem is definitely that we produce anything at all out of plastic that doesn't strictly require it for whatever reason. Some medical applications are probably good examples. Anything that doesn't strictly need to be plastic just grinds down to microplastics, contributing to their pollution of every last environment we check on earth. Every plastic product produced is one in which a business has forced their externalities onto the rest of society instead of addressing them themselves.

The problem is plastic.

That problem is actually just billionaires even existing but blamed on the little guy

Oh also just thought of another angle that could become problematic like CO2 generation over the centuries has resulted in global warming: if that device only produces hydrogen from the plastic and not 1 oxygen molecule for every 2 hydrogens, burning that hydrogen will use up oxygen and create more water.

Compared to hydrogen produced from electrolysis that also produces the balancing oxygen and uses up water such that the ratio of H and O as well as the total amount of water doesn't change over time.

At small scales, it doesn't really matter, but the same could be said for basically any pollution and well gestures around. It didn't start out like this for any of them.