What things are made of
What things are made of
Atoms, metal, glass, plastic, and every kind of stuff
Sour, and eager to give something away
What Makes Something an Acid?
An acid is a substance that hands out a tiny particle, which is what makes it sour and able to eat into things.
Let’s go →Wrong-sized atoms get in the way
Why Is Pure Gold Too Soft for a Ring?
Mixing metals makes them stronger, because odd-sized atoms jam the neat rows that let metal bend.
Let’s go →Light, cheap to reuse, and it protects itself
Why Are Drink Cans Made of Aluminium?
Aluminium is light, does not rust because it seals itself, and can be recycled with a fraction of the energy it took to make.
Let’s go →The part that would not burn
What Is Left When Something Burns?
Ash is the mineral part of the fuel — the bit that could not burn, left sitting there when everything else left as gas.
Let’s go →Pieces too small to see
What Is Everything Made Of?
Everything is built from atoms, and there are only about a hundred different kinds to build with.
Let’s go →Fire welds the grains together
Why Does Baking Mud Make Stone?
A brick is mud baked so hot that its grains fuse at the edges and become, in effect, a new stone.
Let’s go →Where roast smells come from
Why Does Food Turn Brown When It Cooks?
Above about 140 °C, sugars and proteins react to make brown colour and roasted flavour.
Let’s go →Shaking a mixture until it gives up
How Does Cream Turn Into Butter?
Churning cream smashes the coats off fat droplets so they clump into butter.
Let’s go →A cliff of tiny shells
What Is Chalk Made Of?
Chalk is soft white rock made from the shells of countless tiny sea creatures that settled on an ancient sea floor.
Let’s go →Burning wood twice
Why Does Charcoal Burn Hotter Than Wood?
Charcoal is wood heated without air until only carbon is left, which then burns hotter and almost smokelessly.
Let’s go →Splitting a liquid into two
How Does Milk Become Cheese?
Cheese is milk split into curds and whey, with the curds pressed, salted and left to age.
Let’s go →Flat plates with water between them
Why Can You Shape Clay but Not Sand?
Clay can be shaped because its grains are flat plates that slide on water and stay wherever you leave them.
Let’s go →It sets by reacting, not by drying
Why Does Concrete Go Hard Under Water?
Concrete hardens by reacting with water rather than losing it, which is why it can set at the bottom of a river.
Let’s go →Loose electrons, and a price that works
Why Are Wires Made of Copper?
Copper carries electricity well because its outer electrons are loose, and it is cheap and bendy enough to use everywhere.
Let’s go →Mostly air, in tiny boxes
Why Does Cork Float?
Cork is tree bark full of sealed air-filled cells, which makes it float, squash, and keep bottles shut.
Let’s go →A fluffy seed parachute
How Does a Plant Become a T-Shirt?
Cotton fibres are seed hairs that get combed straight, twisted into thread, and woven into cloth.
Let’s go →Sunlight from a very long time ago
What Is Crude Oil?
Crude oil is ancient buried sea life, cooked under rock into a mixture that gets split into fuels and plastics.
Let’s go →A narrow window of heat
Why Does Custard Suddenly Scramble?
Egg proteins unfold and thicken custard, but a little more heat makes them clump.
Let’s go →Making a colour hold on
How Does Colour Stay in Cloth?
A dye colours cloth by bonding to the fibres themselves, rather than sitting on the surface like paint.
Let’s go →One kind of atom, all the way through
Why Is There a Table of Everything?
An element is stuff made of just one kind of atom, and the whole world is built from about ninety of them.
Let’s go →Twist turns short fibres into long ones
How Does Fluff Become Thread?
Thread is short fibres twisted until friction holds them together as one continuous strand.
Let’s go →Mostly air, held in a shape
Why Is Foam So Light?
Foam is mostly trapped air, which is why it is so light and such a good insulator.
Let’s go →Oil goes far hotter than water
Why Does Frying Taste Different From Boiling?
Oil reaches far higher temperatures than water, so frying browns food that boiling only softens.
Let’s go →Flow into every crevice, then stop flowing
How Does Glue Hold Two Things Together?
Glue must first be runny enough to fill every tiny pit in both surfaces, and then stop being runny.
Let’s go →The metal that will not change
Why Is Gold So Special?
Gold is prized because it never corrodes, is easy to shape, and is genuinely rare — and it was made in exploding stars.
Let’s go →Some colour dissolves, some just sits there
Why Does Ink Stay on the Paper?
Ink is colour carried in a liquid that then leaves, either soaking into the fibres or drying on top of them.
Let’s go →A mesh built from fruit
Why Does Jam Set?
Jam sets when pectin from fruit forms a mesh that traps the sugary liquid.
Let’s go →A lined pit that runs out of air
Where Does Rubbish Actually Go?
A landfill is a sealed lined pit where rubbish rots extremely slowly, because almost no oxygen reaches it.
Let’s go →Stopping something from rotting
How Does Skin Become Leather?
Leather is animal skin treated so its fibres cannot rot, staying flexible and tough for years.
Let’s go →Melted, then cooled too fast to crystallise
How Do You Turn Sand Into a Window?
Glass is melted sand, cooled so fast that the atoms freeze in place before they can form crystals.
Let’s go →Fibres, shaken flat and let dry
How Is Paper Made From a Tree?
Paper is a mat of wood fibres, floated in water, drained flat and pressed until they grip each other.
Let’s go →Mostly a surface job
What Does a Marinade Actually Do?
Marinades flavour and tenderise the surface of food — they hardly penetrate at all.
Let’s go →How hard the atoms hold on
Why Do You Need a Furnace to Melt Iron?
Metals melt at wildly different temperatures because their atoms grip each other with wildly different strength.
Let’s go →Mixed together, not joined together
Why Can You Get the Salt Back Out?
A mixture is stuff jumbled together but not joined, which is why you can always get the pieces back out.
Let’s go →Two things make a third thing
What Happens When Atoms Join Up?
Atoms join into molecules, and the new thing behaves nothing like the pieces it was made from.
Let’s go →A thread made from nothing that grew
Why Was Nylon Invented?
Nylon is a made fibre: long molecule chains pulled straight, giving thread that is strong, endless and rot-proof.
Let’s go →Three jobs in one tin
What Is Paint Made Of?
Paint is coloured powder held in a glue and thinned with a liquid that leaves once it is on the wall.
Let’s go →Making the jar uninhabitable
Why Does Pickling Stop Food Rotting?
Pickling makes food too acidic and too salty for the microbes that would spoil it.
Let’s go →Millions of small links, joined into chains
What Is Plastic Actually Made Of?
Plastic is made of gigantic molecules — one small unit joined to itself thousands of times into a chain.
Let’s go →Melting versus mashing
Why Does Glass Recycle Better Than Paper?
Glass and metal melt back to what they were. Paper fibres get shorter each time, so paper runs out of lives.
Let’s go →Twist, and twist again
Why Is a Rope Stronger Than Its Threads?
A rope is strong because twisting makes every fibre squeeze its neighbours, so pulling only tightens the grip.
Let’s go →Tangled springs
Why Does Rubber Bounce Back?
Rubber springs back because its long tangled molecules straighten when pulled and coil up again when let go.
Let’s go →A rock you are allowed to eat
Where Does Salt Come From?
Salt is a mineral that comes from evaporated seawater or from underground beds left by ancient seas.
Let’s go →A caterpillar's sleeping bag
Where Does Silk Come From?
Silk is one long thread a caterpillar spins to make its cocoon, unwound whole and woven into cloth.
Let’s go →The same temperature, treated gently
Why Do Cooks Simmer Instead of Boil?
Boiling and simmering are the same temperature; boiling only adds violence.
Let’s go →The bits that did not get to burn
Why Does a Fire Make Smoke?
Smoke is fuel that never finished burning — tiny solid specks, lifted away by the rising hot air.
Let’s go →Fat, turned inside out
How Is Soap Made?
Soap is made by reacting fat or oil with a strong alkali, producing molecules with a water end and a grease end.
Let’s go →Cooking without soaking
Why Does Steaming Keep the Flavour In?
Steam cooks food at boiling temperature without dissolving its flavour away into water.
Let’s go →A pinch of carbon changes everything
What Makes Steel Stronger Than Iron?
Steel is iron with a small, carefully controlled amount of carbon, which jams the metal's layers and makes it strong.
Let’s go →Turning tough into silky
Why Do Cooks Boil Bones for Hours?
Hours of gentle heat turn tough collagen into gelatine, giving stock its body.
Let’s go →A shape that fits a lock
Why Is Sugar Sweet?
Sugar is a molecule from plants that fits the sweet receptors on your tongue — and it feeds almost everything alive.
Let’s go →Scrubbing, and rebuilding
What Is Toothpaste Actually Doing?
Toothpaste is a mild abrasive with detergent, flavour and fluoride — and the fluoride is the part that rebuilds enamel.
Let’s go →The wick drinks its own fuel
Why Does a Candle Burn for Hours?
A candle burns steadily because the flame melts the wax and the wick draws exactly as much as it can burn.
Let’s go →Glowing gas, not glowing wood
What Actually Is a Flame?
A flame is gas driven out of the fuel, glowing hot as it joins with oxygen from the air.
Let’s go →The same atom, two arrangements
Why Is Diamond Hard and Pencil Lead Soft?
Diamond and pencil lead are the same atom. Only the pattern of the bonds is different, and it changes everything.
Let’s go →Light finds nothing to grab
Why Can You See Through Glass?
Light goes through glass because there is nothing in it that can absorb visible light, and nothing inside to scatter it.
Let’s go →A shared pool of electrons
Why Is Metal Shiny?
Metal shines because its outer electrons are shared loosely by every atom, and that sea throws light back.
Let’s go →Nothing alive has the tool for it
Why Does Plastic Never Rot?
Plastic lasts because nothing alive has the chemical tool to cut it up, so it only ever breaks into smaller pieces.
Let’s go →A bundle of drinking straws
Why Does Wood Split One Way?
Wood splits along the grain because it is a bundle of water-carrying tubes, easy to part and hard to cut across.
Let’s go →It is mostly trapped air
Why Is Wool So Warm?
Wool keeps you warm because its kinked fibres trap still air, and still air is very bad at carrying heat away.
Let’s go →Bacteria doing the thickening
How Does Milk Become Yoghurt?
Bacteria turn milk sugar into acid, which makes milk proteins clump into a soft set.
Let’s go →