How to spice guard your bird feed — and other nifty chemistry life hacks

We all love a life hack that makes our day a little cheaper and easier. And the neat tricks that iron out the niggles of life can come from some interesting places. There’s some cool chemistry loitering in your cupboards that can also be put to good daily use. Here’s how — in words and video.

1) Clean your silver

There are plenty of products out there for polishing up the silverware. But there’s actually no need to buy any of them — all you need is some aluminium foil and a little bicarbonate of soda (sodium hydrogen carbonate).

Simply add a tablespoon of bicarb and a few strips of foil to a cup of hot water. Then drop in your tarnished silver and leave it for a few minutes. Remove, rinse and hey presto … sparkling silver.

So how does it work? Well, the black tarnish is silver sulfide. It slowly accumulates as the silver reacts with sulfur in the atmosphere and food (don’t use silver spoons to eat eggs! The sulfur in them brings up the tarnish quick sharp).

Polishing your silver removes the tarnish to reveal the silver underneath, but that slowly wears away at the surface detail. It’s much better, then, to use the foil trick…