The Fascinating Chemistry of Everyday Life & What Does it Mean to Be Alive?

When you order something online, do you then track the package to see where it is and when it is coming? This episode begins with the results of a survey about how people track their orders and why and how they hate it when a package is late. https://blog.4over.com/delivery-tracking-consumers-statistics Do you know how soap and moisturizers work? Do you know how caffeine keeps you awake? It’s all chemistry! Everything you do and everywhere you go there is a lot of fascinating chemistry going on and here to explain it is chemist Kate Bibendorf. Kate is a chemist and author of the book It’s Elemental: The Hidden Chemistry in Everything (https://amzn.to/3ycoZEK) You will hear things you never knew before and you will likely never drink a flaming shot of vodka ever again! How do you define - life? Seems like we should know and understand the definition of life but it turns out be a mystery. Why? That’s what Carl Zimmer set out to discover. Carl writes the writes the Matter column for The New York Times and is author of 13 books including Life's Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive (https://amzn.to/3yhCBP1) and he joins me to explain what we do know, what we don’t know and how…