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Chemistry Classes for Adults

128 free chemistry classes for adults (18+) on Wunder — short, fact-checked courses and lessons with narration and a quiz. Filter by age — each link is its own page, not a JavaScript toggle.

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How do broken bones heal?
A break tears bone and nearby vessels, marrow, periosteum, and soft tissue; bleeding and damaged cells create a repair site within hours. In overlapping phases—hematoma and inflammation, soft callus, hard callus, and remodeling—the body bui
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How does taste actually work?
You bite a cracker, and saliva turns its surface into a chemical sample. Molecules then reach taste pores; that is where tasting starts.
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How Cast Iron Pans Work
Learn how thermal mass, heat flow, water, and seasoning chemistry shape what happens in a cast-iron pan.
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Why Octopus Blood Is Blue
Follow the copper chemistry, gills, three hearts, and costly jet propulsion behind an octopus's blue blood.
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Peregrine Falcon: The Physics of the Stoop
Follow a peregrine from a cliff ledge into the stoop, where anatomy, air, and timing make the fastest dive on Earth possible.
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Reading Reaction-Energy Diagrams
Learn to read reaction-energy diagrams, calculate activation barriers and ΔH, distinguish rate from overall energy change, and see how catalysts reshape the pathway.
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How to Read Titration Curves
Read axes, locate equivalence, distinguish endpoint from chemistry, and use titration data to estimate concentration and pKa.
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How to Use Dimensional Analysis in Chemistry
Learn to convert units with visible cancellation, move between mass and moles, handle squared and cubed units, and audit chemistry answers by their dimensions.
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How Chemical Equilibria Shift
Learn how concentration, pressure, temperature, inert gases, and catalysts affect a chemical equilibrium—and when the reaction quotient can check your prediction.
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How Plastic Is Made
Plastic production starts before a plant ever sees a pellet: hydrocarbon feedstocks such as ethane, propane, and naphtha are converted into chemical building blocks. The first handoff is from feedstock to purified monomer, before polymeriza
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Oxidation Numbers: A Practical Guide
Learn to assign oxidation numbers, solve unknowns, and use changes in the numbers to identify redox reactions.
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How does the stomach avoid digesting itself?
Picture a spoonful of food meeting acid and pepsin in a hollow chamber beside living cells. The stomach aims that chemistry into the lumen, so digestion happens next to the wall without becoming digestion of the wall.
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Ocean Acidification: Chemistry, Life, and Coastal Choices
Follow carbon dioxide into seawater, then trace how changing chemistry reaches shells, food webs, coasts, and the decisions that protect marine life.
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William Harvey and the Circulation of Blood
Follow William Harvey as observation, experiment, anatomy, and quantity turn the heartbeat into a theory of blood circulation.
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Bioluminescent Bays and the Seas That Glow
Follow the chemistry, ecology, and uncertainty behind glowing bays, waves, deep-sea animals, and milky seas.
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Why does someone else's misfortune sometimes feel satisfying?
You hear that a smug rival was caught cheating. You notice a tiny lift in your mood before you decide what you think. That reaction has a name: schadenfreude.
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How a Zipper Works
See how a zipper's tracks, elements, slider, tape, and lock turn one pull into a reversible chain.
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How does a cell make protein?
Picture a ribosome reading a message while amino acids form a chain. The message is not DNA: you are watching a temporary RNA copy turn stored information into a molecule.
Heat wave
How do coastal wetlands respond to heat waves?
Trace warming water, plant tradeoffs, oxygen, food webs, chemistry, monitoring, and resilience through coastal-wetland heat waves.
Estuary
How do coastal wetlands shape estuaries?
Trace tides, sediment, water chemistry, habitat, storms, and restoration through how coastal wetlands shape estuaries.
Water quality
How do coastal wetlands clean polluted water?
Follow runoff, settling, nitrogen transformation, sediment chemistry, and monitoring through how coastal wetlands attenuate and transform pollution.
Salinity change
How do coastal wetlands respond to salinity change?
Trace tides, freshwater, drought, plant tolerance, animal habitat, soil chemistry, and monitoring through coastal-wetland salinity change.
Wetland oxygen
How do coastal wetlands breathe in waterlogged soils?
Trace oxygen gradients, roots, microbes, sulfide, methane, carbon, and field evidence through the hidden chemistry of coastal wetlands.
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Why onions turn sweet
Cooking onions does not create sweetness from nothing: it softens cells, drives off pungent sulfur volatiles, concentrates stored sugars and adds browning chemistry.
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The Maillard reaction is not caramelisation
Brown is a colour shared by different chemistries. Follow amino acids, reducing sugars, heat and water to learn why the Maillard reaction is not caramelisation.
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Smoke: combustion chemistry and food deposits
A clean flame, a smouldering chip, and a flare-up do not make the same smoke. Follow wood from cellulose to volatile compounds, soot, PAHs and the deposits that flavor food.
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Emergency kitchen chemistry: substitutions that actually work
When the pantry fails, replace the ingredient's job: match the acid, water, fat, protein or starch, then keep tested food-safety controls intact.
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How does a cucumber become a pickle?
Vinegar supplies the acid in one pickle; microbes build it in another. Compare the chemistry, ecology, flavour and safety controls that make a cucumber last.
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Olive oil: what extra virgin means
Follow an olive from harvest through crushing, malaxation and separation, then learn why bitterness, pungency, chemistry and sensory testing all matter to the words extra virgin.
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Smoke: combustion chemistry and what it deposits
The flavour on bacon is not the fire. It is what failed to burn: phenols, carbonyls, acids — and a few things you did not order.
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Nixtamalisation: the corn chemistry that built Mesoamerica
Raw maize will not feed a city. Alkali, a night in the pot, and the grain becomes food.
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Baking soda vs baking powder: two chemistries
One is a base waiting for acid. The other already brought the acid. Swap them and the muffin tells on you.
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Emulsions: mayonnaise, hollandaise and the physics of not splitting
Oil and water do not stay mixed. Mayonnaise and hollandaise are what happens when you hire the right molecule, and what happens when you don't.
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Why searing does not seal in juices
A nineteenth-century chemist said a hot crust locks juices in. The sizzle in your pan is the sound of that idea failing.
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Coffee: extraction, roasting and the perfect cup
Why the same beans make brilliant and bitter coffee: grind, temperature, time and the chemistry of extraction.
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Baking is chemistry: flour, fat, sugar, leavening
Why baking punishes improvisation: gluten, gas, fat and sugar are reagents, and the oven is the reaction vessel.
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The Maillard reaction: why browned food tastes better
Toast, steak crust, coffee, beer: one chemist's 1912 discovery explains the flavour of almost everything brown, and why boiling never gets there.
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Why onions make you cry, and how to stop it
A cut onion builds a tear-gas molecule in seconds. Chemists finally caught the enzyme responsible in 2002, and it explains every kitchen trick.
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Eggs: the most versatile molecule in cooking
One egg can set a custard, lift a souffle, hold mayonnaise together and glaze a pastry. Protein unfolding explains all four.
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The chemistry of caramel
Heat one pure ingredient and hundreds of new compounds appear. Sugar's slow collapse from clear syrup to bitter black, degree by degree.
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How spiders spin silk stronger than steel
Follow liquid spidroin through glands and spinnerets, then see how molecular structure, drawing, and web design make silk strong, tough, and light.
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How do bees make honey
Follow nectar from flower to hive as worker bees collect, transfer, chemically process, dry, cap, and store honey for the colony.
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The deep ocean and the creatures of the abyss
Descend through pressure, darkness, bioluminescence, vent chemistry, whale falls, deep corals, and the tools that reveal life in the abyss.
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How we know what stars are made of
Learn how spectroscopy reads atomic fingerprints in starlight to reveal elements, temperature, motion, and stellar history.
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Giant squid and the search for a legend
Follow the trail from Kraken stories and broken specimens to giant squid anatomy, deep-sea cameras, and the living animal still hiding in the dark.
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How ancient Romans made concrete that lasts
Explore pozzolana, lime, aggregate, the Pantheon's dome, seawater chemistry, lime-clast healing, and the limits of copying Roman concrete today.
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The blue whale, the largest animal that ever lived
Explore blue-whale anatomy, krill feeding, ocean journeys, conservation history, and the methods scientists use to study a giant.
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How Customs Importer Security Filings Work
Follow shipment scoping, 10+2 data elements, importer responsibility, source records, loading deadlines, ACE transmission, updates, and filing controls through an Importer Security Filing.
WH
How Water Heaters Work
Follow storage tanks, burners, elements, tankless flow, heat pumps, solar input, distribution, safety, and efficiency through a hot-water cycle.
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How does a microwave heat food
Microwaves jostle water molecules in a metal box — hotspots, duty cycles, and common myths.
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How does a battery store energy
Batteries store chemical potential, not a tank of pure electricity — charge, sag, and fade.
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How to read an electrochemical cell diagram
Trace oxidation, reduction, electron flow, and salt-bridge ions without reversing the cell.
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How to convert units with dimensional analysis
Use units as algebra to convert chemistry quantities and catch mismatched dimensions.
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How to use Le Chatelier's principle
Predict how concentration, pressure, temperature, catalysts, and inert gases affect a chemical equilibrium.
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How to reason about chemical equilibrium
Use Q, K, Le Chatelier’s principle, ICE tables, and reaction conditions to explain equilibrium shifts and calculations.
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How to write a net ionic equation
Strip spectator ions from a balanced aqueous reaction while preserving states, atoms, charge, and the chemical change.
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Stoichiometry from equation to yield
Use balanced equations, mole ratios, limiting reactants, molarity, and yield to solve chemistry problems.
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How to solve a stoichiometry problem
Balance the reaction, convert to moles, use coefficients, find limiting reactants, and report yield with units.
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Balancing redox equations
Use the half-reaction method to balance atoms, charge, electrons, and solution conditions in oxidation–reduction equations.
Tidal inlet
How do tidal inlets connect ocean and lagoon?
Follow flood and ebb currents through channel anatomy, sediment deltas, salinity, nursery habitat, storms, dredging, and adaptive coastal management.
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Why does the body age?
Connect molecular maintenance, senescence, organ reserve, frailty, and evolutionary tradeoffs to explain why aging is uneven and interconnected.
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Why does depression happen?
Unpack depression as a heterogeneous system of reward, body, thought, stress, and feedback—not a single sadness or chemical shortage.
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Why do we get dry skin in winter?
Follow winter dryness through the skin's water gradient, barrier lipids, washing chemistry, indoor heating, and the distinct jobs of moisturizer ingredients.
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Why do we get bad breath?
Trace bad breath from tongue biofilms and sulfur chemistry through saliva, gum pockets, food volatiles, source anatomy, measurement, and smell perception.
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Why do we get allergies?
Follow an allergy from failed tolerance and allergen-specific IgE to mast-cell activation, tissue symptoms, cross-reactivity, and the immune memory that makes reactions persist yet vary.
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Why does the placebo of a brand name work?
See how brands become learned treatment cues that shape expectation and pain—without changing chemistry, replacing active drugs, or making approved generics pharmacologically weaker.
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How the ozone layer absorbs ultraviolet
Trace oxygen photochemistry, ultraviolet absorption, catalytic chlorine, polar clouds, and ozone monitoring.
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How carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater
Trace gas exchange, carbonic acid, bicarbonate, pH, buffering, and shell-building chemistry.
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How polar stratospheric clouds glow
Explore high-altitude ice, twilight scattering, polar vortices, and the ozone chemistry on cloud particles.
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How whales communicate underwater
Follow whale calls, anatomy, sound transmission, echolocation, hydrophones, and ocean noise.
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How do fireflies make light?
Luciferin and luciferase turn chemical energy into cold photons timed as mating signals.
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How does the body heal a broken bone?
Hematoma, soft callus, hard callus, then remodeling under load rebuild living bone.
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How do kidneys filter blood?
Nephrons filter, reabsorb, and secrete — then hormones tune pressure, water, and chemistry.
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How do electric eels generate electricity?
Stacked electrocytes add voltages so chemical energy becomes controlled fields in river water.
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How does the liver detoxify the body?
Portal blood meets hepatocytes; Phase I/II chemistry and bile export remodel what you absorb.
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How do salmon find the river they were born in?
Juveniles imprint on home-stream chemistry; adults add magnetic ocean maps for the long return.
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How do sharks smell blood from far away?
Water-sampling nares track patchy chemical plumes; movie-range blood myths fail real dilution.
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How do antibiotics stop working?
Targets, selection, gene transfer, and molecular tactics — why resistance is evolutionary pharmacology.
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How does the endocrine system work?
Hormones are chemical mail; receptors decide who listens; feedback loops keep the body in range.
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How does the human brain work?
Neurons, maps, chemistry, perceive-act loops, and plastic costly wetware that rewires with use.
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How does the ocean regulate climate?
Heat storage, currents, carbon chemistry, water-cycle engines, ice and sea-level feedbacks.
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How does the reproductive system work?
Haploid gametes, hormone clocks, tracts, and placental exchange — anatomy as a generation project.
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How does the eye turn light into sight?
Optics bend light, photoreceptors flip chemistry, and cortex builds a world from compressed spike trains.
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How does the food chain move energy?
Producers capture sunlight as chemical fuel; each trophic handoff leaks heat until only a thin top remains.
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How does the periodic table organise matter?
Read atomic identity, electron families, chemical trends, and real materials from one compact map of matter.
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How does the ocean work?
Explore ocean basins, currents, waves, chemistry, ecosystems, climate links, and the moving water beneath the surface.
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How does chemistry explain everyday matter?
Use atoms, bonds, reactions, acids, carbon, materials, and energy to decode the substances of everyday life.
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Typography Foundations
Typography is the craft of making language visible — and its highest goal is to be invisible, a 'crystal goblet' that reveals meaning without showing itself off. Learn letterform anatomy, serif vs san
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Applied Chemistry
Chemistry earns its keep when it leaves the beaker. This is applied chemistry: the deliberate steering of reactions — controlling how fast they go, how much product they give, and which way they settl
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Nutrition Science & Dietary Biochemistry
Your body never uses food — only the molecules it breaks food into. This course rebuilds nutrition from the biochemistry up: what a calorie really is, how carbs, fats, and proteins are dismantled and
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Food Chemistry & Culinary Science
Cooking is chemistry you can eat. This course teaches the handful of reactions underneath every dish — how heat moves and why water caps browning, what the Maillard reaction and caramelization really
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Food safety and chemistry fundamentals for adult cooks
About one in six people gets sick from food each year — from hazards you can't see, smell, or taste. This course gives adult cooks the science that actually matters: how bacteria multiply in the dange
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The Science of Steel & Concrete
Concrete is strong when squeezed and hopeless when stretched; steel is the opposite. The whole built world is that marriage. From the carbon jamming a crystal lattice to the chemistry growing a rock i
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Food preservation science chemistry
Food doesn't spoil on its own — it gets eaten, by microbes and by its own enzymes. This course reveals the single idea behind every preservation method ever invented: none adds magic; each takes away
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Anatomy Essentials for Photographers
A photographer's anatomy: not what a surgeon needs, but the handful of structures that reach the surface and change what your lens sees. Bone fixes the landmarks you pose from, muscle and fat model th
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Navigation Systems
Navigation is the history of answering one question — where am I? From knotted ropes and the Pole Star to Harrison's chronometer and atomic clocks in orbit, each method was invented to fix exactly whe
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Fire Science and Safety Engineering for First Responders
Fire is not a thing you can grab — it is a chemical reaction that continues only while four conditions stand together. Told as one argument, this course shows how every firefighting tactic attacks a l
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Biochemistry Fundamentals
Biochemistry can feel like a swamp of names. This course hands you one idea to hold onto — that life is chemistry which manages energy and information — and builds the whole subject around it: carbon
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Typography: The Craft of Letters
You read type all day; this teaches you to see it. Learn the anatomy of a letter, why serifs are 2,000 years old, how type carries a voice, the invisible craft of spacing, and the readability-versus-d
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Forensics: The Science of Solving Crimes
What crime-scene science can genuinely prove, and where it oversells. Two national scientific reviews drew the line for us: DNA and chemistry measure things and hold up; bite marks, hair and footwear ask a human to judge a resemblance, and did not.
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Spices of the World
The flavors that launched fleets and built empires. Tour the spice rack ingredient by ingredient, understand where each spice comes from and what it does chemically, and learn to build blends instead
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Steelmaking: From Ore to I-Beam
Everyone has it backwards: steelmaking isn't adding carbon to iron, it's taking twenty times too much of it away. Follow one atom from red rock to finished beam — reduced by a gas rather than melted,
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Reactor Physics: Criticality, Control, and Safety
A chain reaction is a knife edge between two exponentials, in a machine nobody can see inside — it should be far beyond human control. It isn't, because about 0.65% of the neutrons show up late. Build
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GPS: How Satellites Tell You Where You Are
Understand the elegant trick behind the blue dot: atomic clocks broadcasting time, and a receiver solving for its own position from the delays. You'll grasp why relativity must be corrected for and wh
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Refineries: How Crude Oil Becomes Everything
Nature hands you the wrong barrel. A refinery rewrites molecules — by boiling point, by shape, by sulfur — until the skyline is one answer to one mismatch.
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How Batteries Work: Chemistry You Can Hold
Get the electrochemistry straight: why electrons flow, what anodes and cathodes actually are, and how lithium-ion earned its dominance. You'll understand charging, degradation, and what battery breakt
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The Space Shuttle: Anatomy of a Spaceplane
The Shuttle was sold as an airliner to orbit. What got built was a compromise — and once you see the compromise, the wing, the cost, and both accidents become legible.
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Analytical Chemistry
There are only two questions in analytical chemistry — what is it, and how much — and no machine answers either. Each technique exploits a different physical trick and is therefore blind in a differen
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Biochemistry: The Chemistry of Life
You are built from four families of polymer with tiny alphabets, joined by one repetitive trick — so the variety cannot come from the parts. It comes from shape. This course follows one argument throu
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Molecular Biology
Genetics can treat a gene as a symbol. This course opens the box, and finds that the information is a molecule — long, wound around itself, chemically under attack, and far too big to search. Every ma
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Organic Chemistry II
Organic I taught you to run a mechanism forward. Real chemistry runs backward, and asks two questions: what is this, and how would I make it? This course builds the vocabulary those questions need — c
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Materials Chemistry
Every material on Earth performs about a hundred times below what its own chemistry promises. Bonding sets a ceiling you can't change; defects decide what you actually get — and the art is knowing whi
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Cell Biology
A cell isn't a bag of chemicals — it's a factory that spends energy every second to hold order against a universe that erodes it.
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Human Anatomy I
Anatomy looks like the longest vocabulary list in science — and it isn't. The names are descriptions written by people looking at the thing. Fix one frame of reference, learn a little grammar, and you
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Human Anatomy II
Look inside a trunk and it looks like a bag of unrelated objects. It isn't. Nearly every organ is a bud off one embryonic tube, packed into a space designed so it can move without friction.
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General Chemistry II
General Chemistry I told you what reacts. This one answers the three questions it couldn't: will it go, how fast, and how far — through energy, entropy, rates, equilibrium, acids, buffers and batterie
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Organic Chemistry: An Introduction
Carbon's chemistry has tens of millions of compounds, so memorizing it is hopeless. This course teaches the one principle that replaces memorization — electrons move from rich to poor — and uses it to
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Introduction to Chemical Engineering
See how chemistry scales up into refineries, food, and medicines — and why that's a different discipline, not a bigger flask. You'll follow material and energy through a process, meet the square-cube
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General Chemistry I
Begin chemistry the way a college first term does: atoms, the periodic table, bonds, moles, balanced equations, and predicting what reacts.
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BBQ and the Science of Smoke
Low-and-slow is chemistry you can taste. You'll understand what smoke, collagen, and the infamous stall are actually doing to a brisket, and come away able to manage a fire and a long cook with intent

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