the.com/cellulose
Earth's favorite building material: wood, paper, cotton, and your salad's unchewable bits.
means A tough, fibrous carbohydrate made of long chains of glucose that forms the walls of plant cells, giving plants their structure and giving your gut a free pass to leave it undigested.
from Coined in French as 'cellulose' in the early 19th century by joining 'cellule' (little cell, from Latin 'cella', a small room or chamber) with the chemical suffix '-ose' used for sugars — because it was discovered to be the main substance making up plant cell walls, and it's chemically a chain of glucose, a sugar. The name is basically chemistry's way of saying 'cell-stuff, sugar-flavored.'
- most abundant
- most common organic compound on Earth
- chemical kicker
- glucose chains humans cannot digest, cows can
- hidden use
- found in ice cream as thickener, not just trees
- explosive cousin
- nitrocellulose became the first synthetic plastic and gunpowder substitute