 Okay, let's take a look at our electrons. Now, here's the deal. Electrons are negatively charged particles, and I'll write it down in a second, but I want you to know that they're these tiny, crazy tiny little particles that are like zipping around the outside of the nucleus. They're like orbiting the nucleus, and they're negatively charged, and in my picture here, they're black. All right, let's go write that out. Whoa, that was magic. Electrons, they orbit the nucleus, orbit the nucleus. They're negative. I often draw them like that. If you have negatively charged particles around the outside of the nucleus, and positively charged particles on the inside of the nucleus, what is possibly true about the charge of the whole thing? Well, the fact is that you can count up... Let's see, let's do it in green. You can count up your charges to determine the charge of the atom as a whole. Whoa, look at this. So, my inner green circle, tell me what the net charge of the inner green circle is going to be. You only have positive particles. In this little scenario, you have three positive particles, and what were those called? Those are your protons. So, you have a net charge of three plus. Positive three, that makes sense, doesn't it? Outside, orbiting the nucleus, you have how many electrons? You have three electrons, and electrons are negatively charged, and you have a negative three charge. And tell me, the atom as a whole, how, what is its charge? All together, this atom has no charge. How could we change the charge of the atom? Well, we could change the number of protons. What's that going to do? That actually could change the charge, but then we're going to change the element. And so, let's not ever change the element unless we're told, what are you going to do to go from one element to the next element? And then you can change the number of protons. But if you're just trying to change the charge, change the number of electrons, and you can. The element stays the same. I believe that an element that has three protons in it is going to be, I think it's lithium. So, this is a lithium atom. And we could either add electrons, and this is legit dog pounds, you can. I could plus one electron. Tell me what's going to happen. If I added one electron into this mix, now what's my charge? Well, check it out. Now I have four negative charges and three positive charges, so I have a net charge of negative one. And here's the thing. That's okay. You can do that. And now you have an ion. An ion is a charged atom. And you charge your atom by changing the number of electrons. In this case, we now have a lithium, that's my lithium atom, with a negative one charge. You can write it like that, or you could write it like lithium negative. And those are two ways to write. If I showed you this, I would say, dude, tell me about this thing. Tell me everything that you can know about that little symbol right here. You'd look on your periodic chart, you'd be like, oh, lithium, it has three protons. Because I just told you it was a lithium atom. And then you'd say, okay, if it has three protons, but it has a negative charge, then it has to have three electrons to neutralize the charge, and then one more electron so that now it has a negative charge. That's awesome. That's easy. Now you know we have four electrons in this lithium atom. This lithium ion, because it's charged. We could take away an electron. It's also totally legit. Let's take that electron away. And if we take it away, now we, well, if we took away four, we took away one. Then you're going to be back to neutral again. But let's say we go back to three. Take away one electron. Now you've got two electrons and three protons, which means you have one extra proton, which gives you a positive one charge. So in that case, you'd have lithium positive. Now, for all the chemistry buffs out there and all the chemistry teachers out there, I give a big woof woof to, it ain't that simple. There are actually rules about how many electrons you can lose and how many electrons you can gain. And most of the time, in fact, I probably would have to say all of the time, lithium will lose an electron, it won't gain an electron. And there are, like, have fun in chemistry when you get to learn all those rules. That's cool. I want you to know that if we change the number of electrons, we get an ion of the same atom. Now, who the heck cares? Why are ions important? Whoa. When we start talking about physiological function of human bodies, for example, your entire nervous system runs on moving ions. True story. Sodium ions and potassium ions, they move back and forth. Calcium ions move all around in your body. You would not be a functioning critter if you did not have moving ions in your body. They basically are like electricity. So understanding the concept of an ion is really important for understanding future, like, processes in cells and body parts. Electrons, so they make ions. Awesome. Electrons are also really important because they allow, they are chemical bonds. What? Not James bonds, chemical bonds. That was good enough. Electrons, when two atoms share electrons in some flavor, that is a chemical bond. And remember that we took atoms when we had our little hierarchy cake. Seriously, I did that more than once on accident. Our hierarchical organization of living systems, remember that we combined atoms together to get molecules. You are, you have very few independent atoms rolling around in your body. Most of you is made up of molecules, which are atoms that are combined, that stick together because they are literally sharing electrons. Sometimes, so, okay, let's write this down. This is a chemical bond. You're sharing electrons between two atoms. Here is my chemical bond. This is the chemical bond, like, I could draw it like that. That's usually how I will draw it, like a line connecting two atoms. Chemical bonds come in flavors. Of course they do. Some chemicals, some atoms form chemical bonds and they share electrons evenly, like these guys. These guys are sharing equally. This is not an example of my children. This is not Keenan and this is not Kai. They do not share equally. I encourage them to be this kind of chemical bond. It's a covalent bond. Covalent bonds share atoms equally. My children tend to be sure more of the polar, excuse me, will do, ah. They tend to be more of the ionic bond, not ironic, ionic, isn't it ionic? But they do not share at all. In fact, one atom in an ionic bond, one atom steals the electrons completely. So if these two atoms were forming a chemical bond and atom A completely steals the electrons, like, hogs them all into its own nucleus, atom B is sitting there going, oh, share your electrons, please, I want some. Adam B is going to hang out and, like, keep trying to get its electrons back. But atom A is like, pfft, right, dude? You're out of luck. That is, like, my children, bad boys. And that's an example of an ionic bond. Ionic bonds are like bully bonds. They are not equally sharing. But of course, as is all things scientific, there's a total spectrum on this thing. You can be anywhere on the spectrum between fully covalent sharing equally and happily and kindly to fully ionic, like, dude, I've done stole your electrons and good luck getting them back. Or somewhere in the middle. And if you're somewhere in the middle, you tend to be called a polar covalent bond. And you could figure it out. If, for example, A is kind of hogging the electrons, do you kind of agree that, oh, you could kind of be sort of negative because it's hogging the electrons? And B would be sort of positive because it's kind of losing its electrons. It's losing its negative charges. That would be a polar covalent bond. This concept of polarity is really important when we start thinking about water. And we're going to talk about water today. So we will come back to this concept and make sure that you understand what I'm talking about. Logs? All right, let's talk before we dive into, oh, wow, water is like two away. We get to talk about energy first. But first we're going to talk about chemical notation so that we know what we're writing about.