Melissa and Jam, Bleav
394 episodes listed below
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A podcast that helps you understand the fascinating chemistry hidden in your everyday life. Have you ever wondered why onions make you cry? Or how soap gets your hands clean? What really is margarine, or why do trees change colors in the fall? Melissa is a chemist, and to answer these questions she started a podcast, called Chemistry for your life! In each episode Melissa explains the chemistry behind one of life’s mysteries to Jam, who is definitely not a chemist, but she explains it in a way that is easy to understand, and totally fascinating. If you’re some...
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · August 2026
Two-voice format pairs a chemist with a non-chemist to explain household chemistry, with recurring depth on bird preening oil and structural feather color.
Chemistry For Your Life keeps its questions close to home: diaper wetness indicators, deodorant versus antiperspirant, mosquito repellent, and glass.
You came for diapers and deodorant; you left understanding color-changing chemistry, bacteria, and mosquito stealth.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Listener questions turn blue bird feathers into a lively lesson in light, structure, and perception.
Chemistry For Your Life works through listener questions on carbon chains, MRI follow-ups, pools, pigments, and birds, so the episode plays like a busy chemistry inbox.
A diaper's yellow-to-blue signal opens into pH, light absorption, and indicator chemistry.
Diaper wetness indicators make a familiar nursery cue feel like a small chemistry demo. Melissa explains how the strip shifts with its chemical environment, moving from yellow in a more acidic range to blue in another pH range.
A clear, practical chemistry review of why deodorant and antiperspirant tackle different underarm problems.
This single-episode review turns a familiar bathroom staple into a small, useful chemistry lesson. It draws a clean line between deodorants and antiperspirants, two products that often get treated as if they do the same job.
Bird feather oil turns familiar chemistry into an easygoing birdwatching lesson.
Bird feather oil gives Chemistry For Your Life a tidy way back into familiar science: preening becomes a lesson in how birds spread oil across their feathers to help shed water.
A mosquito spray label leads into the sensory chemistry of DEET.
DEET starts in a familiar place: the mosquito spray label, where the name can blur with DDT before the episode turns toward how mosquitoes find people in the first place.
A familiar myth gets a clear chemistry answer, with a useful medicine example along the way.
Glass gets the spotlight, and the piece returns to a familiar question: whether it is a liquid. Melissa and Jam keep the tone easy to follow as they walk through amorphous solids, then distinguish a material that changes over time from one that simply behaves like a liquid.
Research made practical, patient, and public.
Chemistry with the footnotes left in.
The periodic table, read by a business desk.
Chemistry, queerness and grad school, told by the chemists
This episode explores whether glass is a liquid, explaining that it's actually an amorphous solid formed by rapid cooling.
Chemistry For Your Life hosts Melissa Collini and Jim Robinson answer listener questions about 20-carbon chains, MRI voxels, particle accelerators, bird feathers, and pool chemistry.
Melissa and Jam of Chemistry For Your Life explain how urine moves through a diaper’s polymer matrix to reach an acidic yellow indicator strip.
Chemistry For Your Life answers how deodorant and antiperspirant work by separating sweat reduction from bacterial odor control.
Chemistry For Your Life hosts Melissa and Jim apply chemistry concepts to bird behavior, including compost heat used to incubate eggs and pigments chemically altered inside feathers.
Chemistry For Your Life hosts Melissa and Jam explain what DEET is, how it repels mosquitoes, and how it differs from DDT.
Melissa explains the physics of how birds fly to co-host Jam, using chemistry and everyday examples.
Melissa and Jam host a rematch of their game 'Fun Fact or Fake Factoid' where they test each other's knowledge of chemistry facts.
Melissa and Jam interview Claire, a pharmacology PhD candidate, to explain the chemistry behind MRIs.
This episode explores the chemistry of aluminum foil, explaining its properties and uses in everyday life.
Melissa and Jam answer listener questions about the chemistry of everyday things, starting with gunshot residue and fingerprinting.
Claire Caballero, a pharmacology and neuroscience PhD student at the University of North Texas Health Science Center, explains antidepressant mechanisms with Melissa and Jim.
At 1,059,000 downloads, Melissa and Jam use the YouTube replay to thank listeners and answer questions about Chemistry For Your Life.
Chemistry For Your Life explains ADHD through Melissa's focus on dopamine and Adderall™'s action in the brain.