• A man and woman who were sickened after coming into contact with the nerve agent Novichok are in critical condition in the UK.
• The couple has been identified as Charlie Rowley, 45, and Dawn Sturgess, 44.
• The poisonings happened on Saturday, near the site of a March incident in which Novichok was likely used in the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian spy, and his daughter Yulia.
• Novichok is a class of chemicals that means "newcomer" in Russian.
• Nerve agents like Novichok attack the spaces between nerves and muscles to overwhelm essential bodily functions.
• Enough of the chemical can stop a victim's breathing or heart, leading to death.

Nerve agents kill people with gruesome efficiency, yet only after triggering unconscionable suffering through their powerful poisoning effects.

Authorities in the UK are looking into how a couple came into contact with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok. They are the latest to be sickened by the chemical, which officials believe was used in the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in March.

Novichoks were developed during the Cold War by the Soviet Union, though after that nation's collapse, Russia did not declare its stockpiles of the chemicals to the international community, Reuters reports.

British prime minister Theresa May said after the Skripal incident that based on a laboratory identification of Novichok, "Russia's record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations, and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations, the government has concluded that it is highly likely that Russia was responsible for the act against Sergei and Yulia Skripal."

In March, passers-by found the father and daughter collapsed on a public bench. Paramedics rushed them to a nearby hospital.

The toxicity of Novichoks "may exceed that of VX" — the deadliest of five common nerve agents— according todocuments released by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Reuters reported that Novichoks may even be "five to 10 times more lethal" than VX. Other powerful nerve agents include tabun, sarin, soman, and GF.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is accused of having his agents use VX in the 2017 assassination of his half-brother, Kim Jong Nam, and the chemical is reportedly strong enough to kill with a single drop.

In pure form, most nerve agents are colorless and mostly odorless liquids. Any of them can harm a person through the skin, breathing, ingestion, or all three routes, depending on how it's dispersed. VX resembles a thick oil but dissolves in water, while sarin (which was spread over a Syria's Idlib province on April 4, 2017) quickly evaporates into the air.

Some Novichoks can exist as powdery solids, the BBC reports, while others are "binary weapons" — meaning they can be made on-the-spot by mixing together two less-toxic ingredients that are easier to sneak across international borders.

"This is a more dangerous and sophisticated agent than sarin or VX and is harder to identify," Gary Stephens, a pharmacology expert at the University of Reading in the UK, told the BBC.

How nerve agents attack the body and brain

These two graphics illustrate what most nerve agents do to the body and how they work.

To produce these symptoms, nerve agents attack the body's cholinergic system, which is used to transmit signals between the brain and muscle tissues.

The chemicals specifically target an enzyme that drifts in the spaces, or synapses, between nerve cells and muscle cells. There, they persist and constantly trigger muscles into overdrive.

This can paralyze victims, stop their breathing, and trigger convulsions, all of which can lead to death.

This story was originally published on March 8 at 12:15 p.m. ET and later updated with new information. Diana Yukari contributed to a previous version of this post.

SEE ALSO: Putin has touted an 'invincible' nuclear weapon that really exists — here's how it works and why it deeply worries experts

DON'T MISS: The nerve toxin reportedly used on Kim Jong Un's half-brother takes only a single, oily drop to kill

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what happens when you get bitten by a black widow spider

• Two chemists have found a way to make sunscreen work better. 
• The treatment boosts the body's ability to deflect ultraviolet rays which cause sunburns and cellular DNA damage. 
• The molecule created is a simplified version of melanin, a biological pigment that can absorb and dissipate UV light, with customizable properties that allow researchers to make it into an effective sun-protection supplement.
• The hope is that sunscreen-makers can use ingredients are more naturally-derived, while offering greater UV-A and UV-B protection. 

Sunscreens nowadays just aren't cutting it. With summer temperatures heating up, slathering on SPF 50 sometimes won't even guarantee protection from the sun's rays. 

More and more beach-goers are also looking for sunscreen that has for more naturally-derived active ingredients over chemical ones like oxybenzone, which was also recently banned in Hawaii.

"There's an obvious need to improve current sun protection, a need for higher SPF, broader protection than what the current sunscreens offer," said Ayala Lampel, a chemist at the City University of New York.

With fellow chemist Rein Ulijn, Lampel sought to create a better, nature-inspired sunscreen.

The product they created is a bio-inspired material called "Peptide Pigments" that can be used as supplemental UV boosters. They can increase the SPF and broad spectrum of existing UV-filtering active ingredients like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. That way, sunscreen companies could use smaller amounts of these active ingredients without  losing any strength. 

Targeting melanin

What started as an academic project at the Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center of CUNY to create melanin-like peptide molecules turned into a commercial pursuit shortly after the chemists' results were published in the journal Science in June 2017.

To get to a better sunscreen, the researchers turned to biology.

This led them to melanin, a biological pigment that absorbs and disperses UV light across the skin, forming a barrier that protects the skin from UV damage in humans. It's also responsible for summer tans and the color of skin and hair. 

"It's a bit of a miracle material in some ways in terms of its protective ability and its aesthetic function and the fact that it's seen in all living organisms," Ulijn said. But often, it's poorly understood and difficult to produce in the lab, he said.

How it works

What chemists have tried to do in the past is produce melanin by starting with tyrosine, an amino acid precursor, then oxidizing it. Tyrosine is a building block for proteins and other polypeptide materials like melanin. The oxidation reaction works like the browning of apples or bananas or avocados, in which melanin is also the culprit.

Upon oxidation, tyrosine becomes very reactive. And if you have a group of tyrosines colliding together, you end up with "a mess," as Ulijn calls it. Most lab-produced melanin end up as black, dirt-like polymers that cannot be dispersed or incorporated into existing cosmetic products. Imagine applying a foundation speckled with dirt onto your face. 

What Ulijn and Lampel tried to do was yield a more favorable material from the melanin formation process in the lab by imitating how melanin forms in nature.

Instead of using tyrosine as a precursor, Lampel and Ulijn pre-organized it into a short peptide. These peptides consist of organized amino acids and give the molecule more favorable chemical properties. When the tyrosines react, instead of everything happening all at once, it's now more ordered.

The end result was a product that was simpler than melanin, but retained the same overall properties including broad spectrum sun protection against UV-A and UV-B rays as well as blue light like those emitted from electronic devices. By hacking biology, Lampel and Ulijn were able to make the molecules more customizable. They can tune the color of the molecules to match it to different foundation shades as well as the UV absorption by changing the sequence of the peptides. 

Lampel and Ulijn designed the product to easily dissolve into existing cosmetic products. That way, it has a non-oily texture, and doesn't leave behind white streaks. To start, the product is intended to work alongside existing sunscreen products, but Lampel and Ulijn want to see if they can completely replace current sunscreens one day.

For the past five months, the researchers have been working to ensure that the product is consistently reproducible. Now, they're seeking out a corporate partner to collaborate with testing out safety and efficacy. They're also looking for seed money to hire a CEO and a small research and development team.

With everything on track, Lampel says that they're expected to complete human testing in the next year for a first generation product, and hope to bring the product to market in 18 to 24 months.

SEE ALSO: Here’s why certain sunscreens are so dangerous for coral that Hawaii plans to ban them — and what you should use instead

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Why cities can't get rid of rats

Inhaling helium and talking like Daffy Duck is a classic party trick. But not many know how helium works. Helium is much lighter than air, so sound waves move much faster through the gas. This amplifies the higher frequencies in your voice. The gas sulfur hexafluoride works in the opposite way. The following is a transcript of the video.

It’s a classic party trick- suck down a balloon and you’ll sound like Daffy Duck every time. But helium isn’t the only gas that’ll change the way you talk. So what’s going on here?

Your voice is as unique as your fingerprint. Janice didn’t inhale a balloon full of helium. That’s just her “normal” voice. So, let's take a look at how that's even possible. The sound of your voice starts in your voice box, or larynx. It’s a two-inch piece of cartilage at the top of your throat. In the box are two stretchy strands of tissue, your vocal cords. Which vibrate against each other at a specific frequency when you talk.

Women generally have thinner, shorter, tighter vocal cords than men. So, their vocal cords vibrate faster which generates a higher pitched voice. That sound is called the fundamental frequency of your voice. On its own it just sounds like a simple buzzing. But when it reaches your vocal tract, the sound waves start bouncing around. Those reflections interfere with each other. Which creates a mix of other frequencies, that you can detect with a spectrogram. So even though your voice starts out as one frequency, it ends up as a mix of multiple ones.

And that's where helium comes into play. Helium is lighter than air. Which means sound moves faster through helium than through air – nearly 3 times faster, in fact. So the sound waves bounce around faster in your vocal tract, which amplifies the higher frequencies in your voice. It's sort of like how speeding up your voice makes it sound higher.

But hold on a sec. These people aren't inhaling helium. They're sucking down sulfur hexafluoride, which is six times heavier than air. So sound waves move slower through it, which amplifies the lower frequencies in your voice. But here's the fascinating thing. The pitch of your voice hasn't changed when you inhale either gas, because your vocal cords move at the same rate no matter what gas you're breathing. So your fundamental frequency stays, well fundamental.

Regardless of whether you want to sound like Daffy Duck or James Earl Jones, keep in mind that inhaling anything but air can be dangerous. Especially when the gas is denser than air, because it will sink to the bottom of your lungs. And you may have to get it out like this. What questions do you have about the human body? Let us know in the comments and thanks for watching.

Join the conversation about this story »

• The Nobel Prize in chemistry went to three scientists who used directed evolution to make new proteins that are in biofuels and cancer drugs.
• The winners include Americans Frances Arnold and George Smith, as well as Sir Gregory Winter from the UK.
• Arnold is the fifth woman to win a chemistry Nobel since 1901.

Two Americans and a Briton won the 2018 Nobel Prize for Chemistry on Wednesday for harnessing the power of evolution to produce novel proteins used in everything from environmentally-friendly detergents and biofuels to cancer drugs. 

Scientists Frances Arnold, George Smith, and Sir Gregory Winter are sharing the prize for their research using directed evolution to produce enzymes for new chemicals and pharmaceuticals. The fruits of this work include the world's top-selling prescription medicine -- the antibody injection Humira sold by AbbVie for treating rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases.

"This year's Nobel Laureates in Chemistry have been inspired by the power of evolution and used the same principles – genetic change and selection – to develop proteins that solve mankind's chemical problems," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the 9 million Swedish crown ($1 million) prize.

Arnold, an American chemical engineer and biochemist at Caltech, will receive half of the $1 million, while Smith from the University of Missouri and Sir Gregory Winter from Cambridge will share the other half. 

Arnold is the fifth woman to win the prize, which has been awarded to 181 people since 1901. 

"I’m bouncing off the walls, but I’m trying to pretend to sound calm and collected," she told NobelPrize.org when reached by phone early Wednesday. 

Arnold said her background as a mechanical engineer gave her the ability to tackle protein engineering in a totally different way from what others were trying.

"The way most people were going about protein engineering was doomed to failure," she said.

Instead, she tried a more "obvious" route: copying "nature's design process," that is, evolution.

"All this tremendous beauty and complexity of the biological world all comes about through this one simple, beautiful design algorithm," she said. "And what I do is use that algorithm to build new biological things."

The Nobel committee is set to award this year's peace prize on Friday. 

SEE ALSO: The one thing a renowned climate scientist does to reduce her own impact on the environment

Join the conversation about this story »

• Earth has some pretty severe weather— hurricanes, earthquakes, and tsunamis can be devastating — but we're better off living here than on other planets. 
• Earth's worst storms are nothing compared to the sulfuric acid rain on Venus, towering dust devils on Mars, or supersonic winds on Neptune.
• Watch the video above to see how good we have it here on Earth.

The following is a transcript of the video.

Sulfuric acid raining from the sky. Epic dust storms raging for months on end. And giant hurricanes that could swallow Earth whole. If you think Earth has some bad weather, think again.

Now Mercury has little to no atmosphere, and therefore, no real weather to speak of. But you would feel the full brunt from the most powerful storms in our solar system called coronal mass ejections. These explosive storms form on the Sun and bathe Mercury's surface in high-energy radiation. So if the lack of oxygen and extreme temperatures don't kill you, the radiation certainly will.

This isn't as much of a problem on Venus, however. After all, the entire planet is covered with clouds. Bad news is, they're toxic. These clouds rain sulfuric acid that's so corrosive it would eat through your skin on contact.

On Mars the surface is rocky and desert-like. So wind can stir up loose soil, creating giant dust devils twice the height of Mt. Everest. But that's nothing compared to the dust storms that sometimes engulf the entire planet for months at a time.

And the weather on Jupiter isn't any better. Of course, there's the Great Red Spot. A hurricane-like storm that's been raging for at least 300 years. But there's another storm on Jupiter that's equally powerful. With wind speeds twice as fast as a Category 5 hurricane. Its name is Oval BA. But is commonly called the Little Red Spot. Despite being about the size of Earth. And it's been growing in size since astronomers discovered it in 2000.

Next door, is a weather phenomenon that's even larger: Saturn's north pole harbors a giant jetstream called "The Hexagon." Each of its six distinct sides are larger than Earth itself! And at its center is a massive, rotating cloud system. That's 50 times larger than the average eye of a hurricane on Earth.

Moving right along. Next up: Uranus. If you look at its tilt, you'll notice that Uranus spins on its side! Which makes its seasons more extreme than anywhere else in the solar system. For example, winter time has no sunlight. And because Uranus is so far from the sun, winter lasts the equivalent of 21 Earth years. That's 21 years with temperatures that can reach as low as -216 degrees Celsius.

Last but not least is Neptune. You'll want to pack a windbreaker for this visit. Nicknamed "the windiest planet," Neptune's strongest winds can exceed 1,930 kilometers per hour. That's one and a half times the speed of sound on Earth. And fast enough to fly from NY to LA in just 2.3 hours.

So maybe the acid rain, towering dust devils, and super-fast winds make our planet's weather look a little nicer- not too hot, not too cold, not too windy. Just right.

Join the conversation about this story »

• Sexual chemistry is an important part of a relationship. 
• Often times you can tell you have sexual chemistry with someone before engaging in physical intimacy. 
• Both laughing together and certain body language clues could be indicative of sexual chemistry.

We've all been there. They're sitting across from you looking you deep in the eyes, head slightly turned sideways, with the corner of their mouth curled into a smirk. You say something funny (not that funny), and they laugh all too easily. Chances are you have sexual chemistry with this person. 

"When you feel a magnetic pull or spark towards someone when you're not engaging in physical intimacy, this is what we call sexual tension,"Rachel Hoffman, LCSW, M.Ed., told INSIDER.

Though there's a good chance you're both feeling it, there are obvious signs that you have sexual chemistry with someone you're dating or seeing casually.

They make eye contact with you.

When someone makes eye contact with you, that's a key sign they're attentive and interested in what you have to say. Eye contact with someone who you have sexual chemistry with is slightly different. "If you look into your date's eyes and feel like there's a kindness behind their eyes, that's a sign," Hoffman said. "They'll have what seems like a sparkle in their eyes."

Read more: 7 things everyone should know about the power of eye contact

You feel physically drawn toward them.

"You may be sitting next to someone and feel drawn to them," Hoffman told INSIDER. "You want them to touch you and kiss you." 

You can't keep your hands off each other.

You're out to drinks and you can't keep your hands off of each other. It'll be more subtle — he'll put his hands around your back when he's talking, or maybe he guides you through a crowded bar, Hoffman said. If he reaches for your hand or puts his hand, then you can almost guarantee that he's into you.

• Almost 40% of American engagements happen between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, making it 'diamond season.'
• There are two sources of diamonds: natural mining or synthesis within a laboratory. And both are "real diamonds."
• In the 1970s, labs started to use a chemical method to grow diamonds. At the time, the technique couldn’t produce a gem-quality stone, but today we can grow quality diamonds within days.
• Synthetic diamonds and natural diamonds are chemically identical, and even the most sophisticated techniques can not detect a difference between a flawless mined diamond and a flawless human-made diamond.
• No matter its origin, a diamond can be assessed by the “four Cs” of cut, color, clarity and carat weight.

It’s diamond season. Almost 40 percent of American engagements happen between Thanksgiving and Valentine’s Day, with Christmas the most popular day to pop the question – and hand over a sparkly piece of ice. Jewelry stores do at least double their usual monthly sales in December.

Since at least the late 1800s, with the discovery of huge diamond mines in South Africa, people have treasured these dazzling gems. The beauty and splendor of diamonds goes well beyond the surface. Like a diamond hunter digging in an underground mine, one must look deeper to their atomic characteristics to understand what sets these stones apart – and what makes them valuable not just for romantics but also for scientists.

On the atomic level

When mined from the earth, diamonds look like cloudy rocks before they’re cut and polished. Their chemical nature and structure were unknown for centuries. It was Isaac Newton’s experiments in the 1600s that first suggested diamonds are made up of the fourth-most abundant element, carbon.

People doubted Newton’s discovery, which is understandable considering how different diamonds look from other common forms of carbon, like the graphite in pencils or the ash left over in a wood-burning fireplace. But in 1797, English scientist Smithson Tennant confirmed the composition of diamonds.

It turns out that carbon takes two common forms that have crystalline structures on the atomic level. Graphite is a repeating two-dimensional, honeycomb-like shape, with layers stacking on top of each other. Alternatively, carbon can form a repeating three-dimensional shape, a tetrahedron – and that’s your diamond.

Where do they come from?

There are two sources of the precious gemstone: natural mining or synthesis within a laboratory.

Natural diamonds are formed under intense pressure and heat in the Earth’s crust over millions of years. Natural deposits have been found all over the world, from Northern Canada to Western Australia, even underwater in Namibia.

Mines were the only source of the gemstone until 1955, when General Electric produced the first synthetic diamond using what’s called the high-pressure, high-temperature process. This process works by applying hundreds of thousands pounds of pressure to graphite at 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit to force the carbon into the correct crystalline structure. It’s sort of like an artificial version of the extreme conditions that produce diamonds deep within the earth.

In the 1970s, labs started to use the chemical vapor deposition method to grow diamonds at lower pressures. At the time, the HPHT technique couldn’t produce a gem-quality stone. This improved method converts a hydrocarbon gas mixture by breaking it down to its components, carbon and hydrogen molecules, with an intense heated filament or plasma and deposits it onto a substrate, ultimately forming a solid diamond. Originally, this process had a very slow growth rate, but it’s now optimized to grow quality diamonds within days.

Together these techniques are largely responsible for human-made diamonds – upwards of 4 billion carats worldwide annually.

There’s a common misconception that a natural diamond must be inherently different than a synthetic diamond. To the contrary, they are chemically identical and share the same physical properties. Even the most sophisticated techniques can not detect a difference between a flawless mined diamond and a flawless human-made diamond – both are “real” diamonds. However, truly flawless diamonds of either type are extremely scarce.

Assessing a diamond

No matter its origin, a diamond can be assessed by the “four Cs” of cut, color, clarity and carat weight. Specialized laboratories grade each category, as created by the Gemological Institute of America.

The cut of a diamond is defined in two ways. There’s “the general shape of the cut stone,” with shapes including round brilliant (most common), oval, emerald, pear, princess, trilliant, triangle, heart and radiant. And there’s “the degree of perfection achieved by the cutting and polishing process” as rated on a scale ranging from excellent to poor. The type and quality of the cut ultimately determines the way light reflects in the stone, contributing to its “brilliance.”

The color of a diamond is graded on a scale from “D,” being perfectly colorless, to “Z” having the most color. Originally, the color of the stone was a huge hint about how it was formed because until 2007 about 90 percent of the high-pressure, high-temperature synthetic stones were yellow orange or yellow. Almost no stones from that process were colorless, so a colorless stone was almost certainly natural. But the HPHT growing process has greatly improved and as of 2016, 43 percent of synthetic diamonds were colorless.

Diamond clarity indicates the presence of inclusions, or tiny imperfections, in the stone. Inclusions make every diamond unique and provide strong clues to whether a diamond is natural or synthetic. The HPHT process uses metal flux, or a hot metal liquid, which acts as a solvent to dissolve the carbon source, graphite, to be rearranged and grown into a diamond. Diamonds grown this way can have inclusions of metals. The resulting stones may be magnetic – if a diamond reacts with a magnet, it is certainly synthetic. Additionally, most synthetic diamonds receive high clarity grades, while natural diamonds contain larger inclusions.

Many consumers focus on carat weight – that is, diamond size. The stone is weighed on a scale where one carat is 200 milligrams (0.007 ounces). Diamonds larger than four carats are almost guaranteed to be natural because that’s the limit for the size of the diamonds that the synthetic processes can grow.

Although the “four Cs” of diamonds ultimately define retail value, sentimental value can be even greater. Buyers must decide if a natural or synthetic stone fits the bill for them, based on factors that might include the ecological and ethical ramifications of diamond mining as well as the lower price tag for synthetic rocks.

Diamonds found beyond your ring finger

Although diamonds are well known for their place in the jewelry industry, they play other valuable roles, too.

Their physical properties, especially hardness, are ideal for abrasive applications. Small diamonds can be found coating cutting wheels, drill bits and grinding wheels, which are used for cutting concrete or brickwork.

Diamonds also have certain optical properties that make them suitable for various spectroscopy techniques, or measurements involving the electromagnetic spectrum. Scientific researchers use these tests to help identify the composition of materials they’re investigating.

A previously common place for diamonds was on record players, where to this day the needle that touches the recordcan be a very small diamond sliver.

Whether one appreciates the aesthetic or scientific characteristics of the gem more, diamonds can dazzle.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Bernie Madoff was arrested 10 years ago today — here's what his life is like in prison

• A New York City jury awarded 21-year-old Alonzo Yanes nearly $60 million on Monday after he was left permanently disfigured by a botched high school chemistry experiment.
• Yanes was 16 years old in January 2014 when his teacher, Anna Poole, conducted an experiment that went horribly wrong, causing a fireball to rip through their classroom.
• He was engulfed in flames that left him with serious burns on his face and upper body.
• Visit INSIDER's homepage for more stories.

A young man who was left permanently disfigured after a botched high school chemistry experiment was awarded nearly $60 million in damages by a New York City jury on Monday.

The jury awarded Alonzo Yanes, who is now 21, $29.6 million for past pain and suffering and the same amount for future pain and suffering, according to the New York Post.

Yanes was a 16-year-old sophomore at the competitive Beacon High School in January 2014, when his teacher, Anna Poole, messed up an experiment, causing a fireball to rip through the classroom. The jury held Poole and the city's education department liable for the incident, The New York Times reported.

Yanes spent five months in the hospital recovering from third-degree burns that covered his face, neck, arms, and hands, and undergoing multiple skin graft surgeries.

During the three-week trial, Yanes testified about how his injuries have left him with deep-seeded insecurities, which he blames for the fact that he's still a virgin.

One of the jurors, 65-year-old Jo Ann Jacobsen, told the Post that she wanted to award Yanes more money, but compromised with the other jurors on a lower amount.

Read more:This teenage quadruple amputee is inspiring others with her beauty tutorials

"(Yanes') testimony was sad because he was trying to be strong. He was 16! He may never have a girlfriend. He may never have a family. I just feel really bad for him," Jacobsen told the New York Daily News.

Yanes' attorney had argued for an award of $70 million during the trial, while lawyers representing the city said he deserved just $5 million.

In a prepared statement, the city's Law Department said: "The well-being of students is the top priority of the Department of Education and this chemistry experiment is no longer used in any classroom as a result of this tragic accident. While we respect the jury's verdict, we are exploring our legal options to reduce the award to an amount that is consistent with awards that have been upheld by the courts in similar cases."

The teacher who caused the accident has been taken out of the classroom and now works at the Department of Education's Central Office, where she teaches other teachers on classroom best practices, according to the Daily News.

• Read more:
• A stowaway fell from a plane as it was landing in London, a shocking occurrence that happens more than you may think — here's why
• A woman had a black horn growing from her thumb for 5 years and doctors had to surgically remove it
• A man said that it took his city months to fill in a pothole. So he threw it a birthday party.
• Taylor Swift is battling Scooter Braun over the ownership of her old music. Here's everything you need to know about the powerful music manager.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Nxivm leader Keith Raniere has been convicted. Here's what happened inside his sex-slave ring that recruited actresses and two billionaire heiresses.

• Bright blue fireworks are far more challenging to produce than common colors like red, white, or green.
• Pyrotechnicians have been trying to produce brilliant blue fireworks for centuries, to no avail. 
• The challenge is that the copper compound needed to create that bright color breaks down at the high temperatures needed for a firework to work. 
• Meanwhile, the chemicals that make more common colors like red, green, and white are harder to destroy. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: Fireworks have been around for millennia. They flood the sky with brilliant bursts of scarlet, emerald, and ivory. But never blue. Pyrotechnicians have tried to produce blue fireworks for centuries, and they have yet to succeed. Why is blue so elusive?

John Conkling: The blue has been very, very difficult to achieve at a level comparable to the greens and reds and whites, just because it's a stability issue at high temperatures.

Narrator: That's John Conkling. He's one of the world's leading experts in pyrotechnics, and he says the problem comes down to chemistry.

You see, to make fireworks, you need four basic components: Fuel, usually gunpowder, a compound that produces color, a fuse, and glue to hold it all together.

You mix this stuff up into what's called a pellet and then shoot it into the air. When the fuse burns up it sets off the gunpowder, which explodes. That explosion heats up those color-producing compounds, causing them to glow.

And it turns out,

Conkling: The hotter you can get the molecules in your flame the more ignition you're going to get, so the brighter and more intense the flame color is going to be.

Narrator: But there's a limit. Because temperatures that are too hot will break down those molecules and wash out the color.

But some molecules are hardier than others. Strontium chloride, the compound used to make red fireworks, can withstand at least 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. That's hotter than some lava. But to make a blue firework, you need copper chloride, which is much more fragile.

As soon as it gets hot enough to blaze blue, at least 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, it starts to break down. And even after centuries of searching, we still haven't discovered the right one, nor have we found a more stable replacement for copper chloride. And even if we do, we'd better hope that it's cheap and non-toxic.

Conkling: Arsenic, for example, has been used in some old fireworks formulations, but obviously an arsenic compound is not something you'd want to put up in the smoke where people are watching the fireworks.

Narrator: To be fair, we've gotten close-ish.

Conkling: There are some respectable pale blues that are used in special effects, where the audience is closer to the action, where the color is more visible. But it's been a long search, and we're not there yet.

Narrator: But there's still hope for bright blue.

Conkling: Certainly it's possible. There are a lot of people working on it. There could be a breakthrough one of these days.

Narrator: And even if we never find that brilliant blue, there's still plenty to get excited about on the horizon, like fireworks that burst into different shapes and patterns, even letters. So maybe one day we could see an American-flag firework for the Fourth of July.

We just need to get that blue.

Join the conversation about this story »

• Although it's impossible to say exactly what would happen if all insects on Earth suddenly vanished, it's likely that civilization and ecosystems would be in serious trouble.
• Nitrogen-rich feces would potentially build up, choking plant life and preventing new growth. 
• Meanwhile, no dermestid beetles and other corpse-eaters would lead to fewer custodians available to clean dead bodies and recycle their nutrients back into the ecosystem. 
• Plus, the absence of mosquitoes and other insects would mean fewer food sources for bats, birds, and other animals up the food chain. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Humans might have built civilizations, but insects own the world. After all, over half of all known species are insects. So if they all suddenly vanished, you'd notice. No more summers of singing cicadas and flickering fireflies. No bees to pollinate apple, cherry, peach, or almond trees. No one to make honey. A world without insects means a world with empty grocery-store shelves. But that would be just the beginning of our problems. Now, it's impossible to say exactly what would go down, but here's a worst-case scenario of what could happen if all the insects disappeared.

There are a few insects most people would be happy to see vanish. Like mosquitoes. They kill hundreds of thousands of people every year by transmitting malaria, West Nile virus, and other diseases. But if they disappeared tomorrow, we might actually miss them. There are over 3,000 species of mosquitoes on Earth, all of which are food to birds, bats, frogs, and other animals. No more mosquitoes means these creatures and the animals that eat them could go hungry. The same goes for the dreaded cockroach, a protein-packed meal for birds, rodents, and even humans in some parts of the world. If we lost all 4,400 species of roach, entire ecosystems would struggle to survive. Believe it or not, we'd have even worse troubles ahead since we'd face a serious poop problem without one of the world's greatest recyclers, the dung beetle.

You see, history has taught us exactly what happens when these critters can't do their job. Back in 1788, the British introduced cattle to Australia, and these cows pooped a lot. Each one poops enough to fill five tennis courts every year. But while the dung beetles back in Britain would eat and break down cow poo, the native Australian beetles wouldn't touch the stuff because they evolved to munch only on dry, fibrous marsupial dung. So the cow poop piled up. By 1960, the cattle had carpeted 500,000 acres of pasture in dung. That's enough to cover over half of Rhode Island, and while a little bit of poop is great for fertilizer, this ocean of dung would flood plants with nitrogen, making it impossible for anything to grow. So, imagine if all 8,000 species of dung beetle, plus other doo-dining insects, like flies, vanished worldwide. The land would be knee-deep in...you know.

Farmland, forest, and desert would all collapse, and floating throughout would be loads of corpses. You see, most animals won't eat dead bodies. That's where flesh-eating beetles, aka dermestids, and other corpse-munching insects come in. Over 500 species of these grisly undertakers live worldwide, devouring dead flesh until nothing but bone remains. Without them, there would be fewer custodians around to clean up the mess. Sure, there would still be hungry vultures and bacteria around to help, but it wouldn't be enough.

So, that's where we could end up in an insect-less world. Starving to death while drowning in a sea of poop and corpses.

Join the conversation about this story »

• Sheril Kirshenbaum is an associate research scientist at Michigan State University and author of "The Science of Kissing," a book that explores why and how humans kiss.
• As more people turn to online dating during the COVID-19 pandemic, Kirshenbaum says that most couples who meet up in person will probably not be a great match.
• Our senses of touch, taste, and especially smell play a huge role in who we fall for — things that are impossible to gauge through a online chat or phone call.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

For those dipping their toes into the dating pool during stay-at-home orders, it's been like swimming in a version of Netflix's reality series "Love is Blind."

In the show, contestants must get engaged before ever actually meeting one another in person. And while a lockdown engagement might be a bit extreme, it's entirely possible that two people have grown to really like one another over the previous weeks and months. Maybe it started with a match on a dating app, followed by flirting over text. Then came regularly scheduled Zoom dates. Perhaps they've even started envisioning a future together.

Now, as states start to ease restrictions, some may have broached taking the next step: an in-person rendezvous.

What are the chances that their online connection will lead to true love?

In my book, "The Science of Kissing," I describe how compatibility requires engaging all of our senses. And absent the touch, taste, and smell of a potential partner, people dating online during quarantine have essentially been flying blind.

Muzzled neurotransmitters

Human attraction involves the influence of cues that evolved over millions of years.

On a traditional date in a restaurant or move theater, we actively gather details about someone by walking side by side, holding hands, hugging and — if things get far enough — kissing. These experiences send neural impulses between the brain and body, stimulating tiny chemical messengers that affect how we feel. When two people are a good match, hormones and neurotransmitters bring about the sensations we might describe as being on a natural high or experiencing the exhilaration of butterflies. Finding love isn't rocket science — it's anatomy, endocrinology, and real chemistry.

One of the most important neurotransmitters involved in influencing our emotions is dopamine, responsible for craving and desire. This natural drug can be promoted through physical intimacy and leads to the addictive nature of a new relationship. Of course, dopamine is just one player in a chemical symphony that motivates behavior. Intimate encounters also promote the release of oxytocin, which creates a sense of attachment and affection, and epinephrine, which boosts our heart rate and reduces stress. There's also a decrease in serotonin, which can lead to obsessive thoughts and feelings about the other person.

In fact, one study showed that people who report that they've just "fallen in love" have levels of serotonin similar to patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. This chemical cocktail can even lead to trouble sleeping or a loss of appetite — symptoms people often attribute to meeting "the one."

Our noses also play a powerful role in who we fall for. The famous "sweaty t-shirt experiment" reported that a man's natural scent may influence how women choose a partner. The women in the study nearly always expressed a preference for the odor of men who differed genetically from them in immune response to disease. Scientists theorize that selecting someone with genetic diversity in this region, called the major histocompatibility complex, could be important for producing children with flexible and versatile immune systems.

A kiss can make or break it

While a man's natural scent may not be something women consciously notice early on in a heterosexual relationship, getting up close and personal can serve as a kind of litmus test for a couple. A kiss puts two people nose to cheek, offering a reliable sample of smell and taste unrivaled by most other courtship rituals. Perhaps that's one reason a 2007 University of Albany study reported that 59% of men and 66% of women have broken off a budding romance because of a bad first kiss.

Complicating matters, factors that typically grab our attention in person are less obvious to recognize in a witty profile or photo. Studies of online dating behavior reveal superficial features are correlated with the level of interest an individual receives. For example, short-haired women do not tend to get as much attention from men as those with long, straight hair, while men who report a height of six-foot-three or six-foot-four fare better than their peers at interacting with women. The initial focus on appearance promotes pairing based on characteristics that aren't significant in lasting relationships, compared with more important factors for long-term compatibility, like intimacy and shared experiences.

Still, at a time when many of us are feeling more isolated than ever, online dating does offer some benefits. Quarantine has encouraged men and women to take additional time to learn about each other prior to meeting, sparing the anxiety of rushed physical intimacy.

For some couples, a real-world date will kindle the spark that began online. Many others will realize they're better suited as friends.

Sheril Kirshenbaum, associate research scientist, Michigan State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE ALSO: Love in lockdown: How a couple distanced by Italy's regional restrictions stays connected

READ MORE: 5 common mistakes couples make that can hurt or end their relationship, according to a psychotherapist

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

• A explosion at a port rocked the Lebanese capital city of Beirut on Tuesday, killing at least dozens of people.
• As videos of the explosion spread across social media sites, some users claimed an atomic bomb caused the disaster due to the appearance of a mushroom cloud.
• The Lebanese prime minister says the blast came from a stockpile of ammonium nitrate in a warehouse.
• Nuclear weapons experts say the detonation was definitely not triggered by an atomic bomb.
• Atomic explosions are characterized by a blinding flash of light, a pulse of searing heat, and radioactive fallout, none of which were detected.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When an enormous explosion created a mushroom cloud over Beirut, killing dozens of people and injuring thousands more, online commentators and conspiracy theorists quickly jumped to a frightening claim: A nuclear bomb had gone off in Lebanon's capital city. But as state officials say, and contrary to those fast-spreading rumors, the explosion was almost certainly not caused by a nuclear weapon.

Even before Lebanese officials said the explosion was caused by a large stockpile of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse at the port, according to The Guardian, experts who study nuclear weapons quickly and unequivocally rejected the idea that Beirut had been hit with a nuclear bomb.

Key to those rejections are the videos that Beirut residents managed to record video of the huge detonation.

People trained cameras on the Beirut port at the time of the blast because a worrisome cloud of smoke rose beforehand. Some of those videos show small flashes of light and reports (or sounds) that are distinctive to fireworks. Moments later, the huge explosion — which came with a visible blast wave and mushroom-like cloud of smoke — rocked the area, destroying nearby buildings and shattering distant windows.

In a tweet that accumulated thousands of likes and reshares before it was deleted, one user wrote: "Good Lord. Lebanese media says it was a fireworks factory. Nope. That's a mushroom cloud. That's atomic."

Vipin Narang, who studies nuclear proliferation and strategy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, immediately spiked the claim. "I study nuclear weapons. It is not," Narang tweeted on Tuesday.

Martin Pfeiffer, a PhD candidate at the University of New Mexico who researchers the human history of nuclear weapons, also rejected assertions on social media that a "nuke" caused the blast. "Obviously not a nuke," Pfeiffer tweeted, saying later: "That's a fire setting off explosives or chemicals." 

Pfeiffer indicated that the explosion lacked two hallmarks of a nuclear detonation: a "blinding white flash" and a thermal pulse, or surge of heat, which would otherwise start fires all over the area and severely burn people's skin.

The explosion did trigger a powerful blast wave that apparently shattered windows across Beirut, and it was briefly visible as an expanding, shell-like cloud — something often seen in historic footage of nuclear detonations. But Pfeiffer noted such blast-wave clouds, known to weapons researchers as a "Wilson Cloud," are made when humid air gets compressed and causes the water in it to condense. In other words: They aren't unique to nuclear bombs.

A back-of-the-envelope calculation reshared on Twitter by Narang suggests the blast was equivalent to around 240 tons of TNT, or about 10 times as large as the US military's "mother of all bombs" or MOAB is capable of unleashing. By contrast, the "Little Boy" bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 was about 1,000 times as powerful.

As a counterpoint to suggestions the Beirut explosion was caused by a nuclear weapon, Pfeiffer offered a video showing the detonation of a rocket-propelled "Davy Crockett" nuclear weapon, which exploded with a force equivalent to about 20 tons of TNT.

The Davy Crockett was one-tenth as strong as the Beirut explosion, but had a distinctive flash that's missing from Tuesday's blast. No reports suggest there was any radioactive fallout after the Beirut blast, which would have been quickly detected.

It's not crazy to wonder if a large blast in a populous city might be an act of nuclear terrorism, of course. In fact, it's one of 15 disaster scenarios that the US government has simulated and planned for (to the point it created scripts for local authorities to use after such an attack).

But in this case, Beirut's tragedy was not in any way nuclear.

SEE ALSO: I just nuked Manhattan in a realistic new VR simulation, and the experience changed how I understand the bomb

DON'T MISS: If a nuclear weapon is about to explode, here's what a safety expert says you can do to survive

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's how easy it is for the US president to launch a nuclear weapon