coke can liner experiment

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Scientist dissolves soda can to reveal a thin plastic liner inside.

Most people who drink canned soft drinks believe they’re drinking directly out of the aluminum can. However, YouTube science account NurdRage revealed that’s not actually the case.

In a recent video, they did a science experiment and revealed a thin plastic liner inside a Coca-Cola, preventing the drink from touching the metal of the can. In other words, the soda is being held in plastic, not aluminum.

To start the experiment, they sand the label off the Coke can to reveal the shiny metal beneath.

From there, they open the can and soak it in a 5% solution of hydrochloric acid to dissolve the metal entirely.

While most people would expect the drink to leak once the metal can was dissolved, that didn’t happen. Instead, a thin plastic liner held the drink in place.

Many people try to avoid drinking out of plastic, especially thin plastic, and it turns out that aluminum cans are no better!

The purpose of the liners is to prevent the metal can from leaching into the beverage, so the can is really just for marketing and nostalgia.

Watch the plastic liner be revealed in the video below:

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Viral Video Reveals The Bizarre Way You Can Make a Soda Can Fully Transparent

The world produces a staggering 180 billion aluminium cans every year, but it's a safe bet many of the people consuming those beverages don't know about a hidden material concealed inside the metal cylinders.

For decades, aluminium can manufacturers have lined the inside of their cans with plastic. Why? Well, it's to protect the beverage from the can… and also to protect the can from the beverage.

By insulating the drink inside the can from the metal can itself, the lining prevents acids and other chemicals in the beverage from corroding the aluminium – while at the same time preventing the aluminium from interacting with the liquid and affecting its flavour.

Different manufacturers use a number of different kinds of polymer or epoxy liners for this purpose, and the amazing thing is, it's possible to actually reveal these hidden liners inside the can by dissolving the aluminium on the outside.

A viral video by science education company MEL Science reveals how easy it is to do this – but please be aware, as the video itself states, you shouldn't attempt this at home.

That's because the technique involves a dangerous chemical, and it also produces fumes, so it requires a very well-ventilated area (others strongly advise only doing it with a fume hood).

Nonetheless, the technique is relatively simple to perform.

All you need is an aluminium can, sand­pa­per, a large beaker that the can will easily fit inside of, drain clean­er (containing sodi­um or potas­si­um hy­drox­ide so­lu­tion), a wood­en rod, and a large glass con­tain­er – plus protective gear of course, including gloves, glass­es, and a mask.

As the video explains , you simply buff the external surface of the can with the sandpaper, until its paint is removed and you're left with a silver, shiny cylinder.

Then, you can open the can with the ring-pull, and use a wooden rod to suspend the can inside the beaker. Drain cleaner is then poured inside the beaker, surrounding the can.

After two hours or so, the aluminium should be completely dissolved, and you're left with what almost looks like an optical illusion: a squidgy, seemingly invisible cylinder of soft drink, contained inside the transparent plastic liner.

Of course, if you do attempt this at home with all the right equipment and supervision – not that you should, mind you – make sure you don't drink the beverage, as it may be contaminated by other chemicals at this point.

While the soda liner is something of an industry secret, it's a known thing in the scientific community , and science enthusiasts have been showing off the results of this technique for years online, revealing the hidden plastic concealed in the can .

A chapter in a corrosion book talked about the liners inside soda cans. I dissolved a can with NaOH to reveal it. pic.twitter.com/2Ed46DxjiB — John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) April 19, 2015

The use of certain plastics in these liners has also been a cause of scientific concern, with some research suggesting BPA-lined cans could be linked to health problems.

For that reason, much of the industry has moved away from BPA liners , although some companies, including the most obvious soft drink maker, seem to still be holding out .

For more on this weird and little-known topic, check out this awesome book excerpt in Wired .

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Inside The Blockbuster Plot To Steal Coca-Cola's Top Secret Can Liner

If you're an American pop culture fanatic, you're probably familiar with the so-called Cola Wars that took place during the 1980s and the subsequent plot the sell Coke's coveted secret formula to Pepsi in 2006. While the would-be heist received much media attention, most casual cola observers are probably unaware of another plot to steal Coca-Cola's trade secrets that seems like something straight out of a spy film. 

The woman at the center of the plot was Shannon You, a Chinese-American chemist who had been hired as an engineer in Coca-Cola's research department (via Bloomberg ). You had a background in polymer science and had worked with a number of high-profile companies where she worked as a chemist on early 3D printing projects, and even had a hand in inventing industrial adhesives all before beginning her job with Coke. 

You's role at Coke made her responsible for one of the company's most important trade secrets, the formula for a thin coating found inside of every can of Coca-Cola that serves to prevent the sugary liquid from eating through its metallic housing . After You learned she would be laid off from her role with the company as a result of restructuring, the scientist began to devise a plan to steal the formula for the coating and use it to start her own company, per Bloomberg. 

Dr. You's Fraudulent Business Plans Explained

Because the formula for the can coating You had hoped to steal technically belonged to a multitude of materials science and coatings companies, her fraud spanned across a multitude of companies besides Coca-Cola. Before she learned of her looming termination, You had found a way to manipulate the companies responsible for creating Coca-Cola's can coating to let her in on important information that concerned the formulas they used to create the all-important coating. 

It wasn't long until You had compiled a collection of each company's coating formula, even going as far as to start work at a government agency in order to collect more secret can coating formulas after concluding her employment with Coke (via ABC News ). 

You's plan was reportedly to take the formulas she had compiled with her back to China in order to apply for the country's prestigious Thousand Talents grant program. The program is designed to help foreign-trained entrepreneurs start their careers in China, but critics of the program say it encourages grant holders to steal proprietary information from foreign companies (via phys.org ). 

As if stealing formulas wasn't enough, You was also found guilty of working with a co-conspirator to create fake documents for the Thousand Talents application that made it look like Coke had given a Chinese-based chemicals company permission to use the formula for their can lining, per Bloomberg. 

How You's Coca-Cola Espionage Came Unraveled

You eventually won the Thousand Talents grant; however, her plan to start her own company was beginning to come apart at the seams. Members of You's family had warned her about previous winners being investigated by the FBI , but the warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears, per Bloomberg . 

Shortly after winning the program, You went on to work for Eastman Chemical, although her reputation for causing altercations during her time with Coke and other companies had made its way throughout the American chemical coatings industry, according to Bloomberg. You's new employer received correspondence from Coca-Cola and other previous employers advising the chemist's supervisors to be wary of You attempting to break the NDAs she had signed in her previous positions. Her employment quickly came to an end after an altercation with one of the company's top managers which ultimately led to You being asked to hand over a hard drive she had created containing proprietary information from Eastman Chemical and Coca-Cola. When managers found the information hidden on the hard drive, You was reported to the FBI and was arrested shortly after a trip back to China. 

Today, You is serving a 168-month prison sentence after she was found guilty by a Tennessee judge, per the United States Attorney's Office Eastern District of Tennessee . Even after her prison sentence is over, You probably won't be returning to the lab anytime soon, as she is also required to serve out a three-year supervised release term. 

Inside the Soda Can – The Can Ripper

Did you know that soda cans have thin plastic liners inside.

Print this Experiment

Did you know that soda cans have thin plastic liners inside to keep the acid in the soda from reacting with the metal? No kidding! Take a closer look.

Here's What You'll Need

10 g copper (ii) chloride crystals (also known as cupric chloride), 500 ml distilled water, triangular file, two aluminum pop cans, 400 ml beaker, the can ripper demonstration.

The science teacher shows her amazing strength by ripping an “ordinary” soda can in half. As you might imagine, the soda can is far from ordinary. The inside of an aluminum can is scratched with a file to remove the thin plastic coating. A solution of copper (II) chloride (also known as cupric chloride) is added, and the aluminum is oxidized as the copper is reduced. After a few minutes, the teacher can rip the can in half.

Remember, this procedure must be performed by an adult!

• Mix 10 g copper (II) chloride crystals with 500 mL water until it is dissolved.
• Use the file to scratch a line entirely around the inside of the can.
• Pour the copper (II) chloride solution into the can past the scratched line.
• Let the can sit for 15 to 20 minutes in the 400 mL beaker.
• When the scratched line becomes more pronounced, pour the solution into the beaker and rip the can in half.

It’s tricky to know just when to pour out the solution of copper (II) chloride before it eats all the way through the aluminum and the can falls apart on its own. It’s also a good idea to wear gloves when “ripping” the can apart.

Inside the Can – Exposing the Soda Can Liner

Exposing the soda can liner that you saw in the video or in the pictures to the right requires the use of a strong base called sodium hydroxide. This procedure must be performed in a lab with a fume hood.

• Put on your safety glasses, safety gloves, and splash resistant apron. This is serious!!!
• Rinse out a recycled soda can with water.
• Use a coarse sand paper to scratch the paint off the middle part of the soda can. You want the strong base to be able to react with the exposed aluminum metal.
• Fill the soda can with tap water.
• Fashion a hook (using strong paper clips, for example) to attach to the tab on the top of the can.
• Place the can in a 600 mL beaker and pour just enough 6M sodium hydroxide into the beaker to cover three quarters of the can. THIS MUST BE PERFORMED IN A FUME HOOD!
• Over the span of five to ten minutes, the strong base will dissolve the thinnest parts of the aluminum can to reveal the plastic lining.
• Making sure your gloves, glasses, and apron are still on, carefully remove the soda can from the solution of sodium hydroxide and immediately rinse the outside of the can in the sink. Carefully pour the water out of the can (hopefully without tearing the liner).

It’s important to note that many attempts were made to create the soda can that was used on the video. If you get it the first time you try it, you’re amazing!

This experiment inspired a great student research project called  Soda Can Corrosion .

If this experiment intrigues you, take a look at  Fizz Factor: 50 Amazing Experiments with Soda Pop .

How Does It Work?

As you’ve discovered, aluminum cans have a polymer coating on the inside of the can. When the file is used to scrape away the polymer coating, the aluminum metal is exposed. The aluminum reacts with the copper (II) chloride solution and an electron exchange takes place. Aluminum gives electrons to the copper ions. This causes the copper ions to turn into copper metal.

At the same time aluminum metal turns into aluminum ions. Al metal + Cu+2 ions —> Al +3 ions + Cu metal. The solution ions become a metal (Cu), which are the orange and red particles you see at the bottom of the solution. The new aluminum ions have different properties than the aluminum metal. This is why you can easily rip the can in half. The aluminum ions are not in a solid form, but instead dissolve into the liquid.

Did you know…  The main acid in most soda pop is carbonic acid. Some sodas still contain phosphoric acid (which eats away at your teeth!). Both acids are much weaker than hydrochloric acid, which is the natural stomach acid. A can of pop does not make stomach contents much more acidic. In fact, flat soda pop is sometimes recommended as a remedy for nausea. It actually soothes stomach irritations.

Additional Info

The History of the Liner – Technicians at the American Can Company, even before Prohibition, began toying with the idea of putting beer in a can. As early as 1929, Anheuser-Busch and Pabst experimented with the canning process. Schlitzeven proposed a can design that looked like a small barrel.

The major problem the early researchers were confronted with, however, was not strength, but the can’s liner. Several years and most of the early research funds were spent to solve this perplexing problem. Beer has a strong affinity for metal, causing precipitated salts and a foul taste. The brewers called the condition “metal turbidity”.

The American Can Company produced the flat or punch top can in 1934. The lining was made from a Union Carbide product called “Vinylite”, a plastic product which was trademarked “keglined” on September 25, 1934.

Reference – A special thanks to Flinn Scientific for the explanation of the soda can ripper.

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Chemist convicted of stealing BPA-free can liner trade secrets for a Chinese firm

Xiaorong you took confidential information from coca-cola and 7 chemical firms, prosecutors say, by craig bettenhausen, april 26, 2021.

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Xiaorong (Shannon) You, formerly a senior R&D chemist at Coca-Cola and Eastman Chemical, has been convicted in Greeneville, Tennessee, of stealing trade secrets related to bisphenol A (BPA)–free beverage can liners. Prosecutors say You took intellectual property (IP) valued at $120 million from Coca-Cola and 7 chemical companies, intending to sell it to a Chinese polymer firm that was supported by government programs, including China’s controversial Thousand Talents Plan.

You, 59, was a principal engineer for global research at Coca-Cola from December 2012 through August 2017, when Coca-Cola fired her. She went to work for Eastman the following month. Eastman fired her in June 2018 and recovered a hard drive at her home containing trade secrets from Eastman, Coca-Cola, AkzoNobel, BASF, Dow, PPG Industries, Toyochem, and Sherwin-Williams.

BPA is a monomer used to make the epoxy resins that have lined steel and aluminum cans since the 1960s. Beverage companies are looking for alternatives to BPA because of concerns about the health effects of residual monomer in the 350 billion aluminum cans used around the world.

During You’s employment at Coca-Cola, the beverage maker was testing BPA-free can liners from several chemical and coatings companies. Some were epoxies made without BPA, like Sherwin-Williams’s valPure V70 , which uses tetramethyl bisphenol F. Others were based on polyolefins and other types of plastic.

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Federal law enforcement officials arrested You on Feb. 14, 2019. She has been in custody since then because she is deemed a flight risk. Prosecutors say that although she has no debt and a net worth of more than $1 million, her Michigan apartment was bare. “She has elected to have only a folding chair, a folding table, and a single mattress. That does not suggest she is settling into a new job, beginning a new career,” a court document says.

Instead, she was negotiating a deal with her Chinese partners, telling them on April 8, 2018, that “she does not intend to do anything ‘until she sees the money,’ ” according to the document.

You and her partners won funding from China’s Thousand Talents Plan as well as $12 million from a related program called Yishi-Yiyi sponsored by Shandong Province, prosecutors say. The jury found You guilty on 11 charges, including 7 counts of trade secret theft, along with conspiracy, wire fraud, and economic espionage. Her sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 1.

US officials often characterize the Thousand Talents Plan as being designed to encourage IP theft. Emily Weinstein, an analyst at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says that is an exaggeration, though she does see a pattern of ethical lapses and IP misappropriation among participants.

Weinstein says the structure of China’s talent recruitment programs and their applications encourage secrecy in a way that is unusual among scientific fellowship programs. Most information about the programs are inaccessible on the internet outside of China, for example. “There’s a piece of it that involves not being completely honest,” she says.

Yangyang Cheng , a China science policy scholar at Yale Law School, cautions against reading too much into one case. “Industrial espionage is as old as industry; it happens and has happened all over the world. It would be wrong and indeed harmful to interpret every act of individual greed through the lens of geopolitics,” she says.

The Thousand Talents Plan, now rolled into a larger High-End Talent Recruitment program, brought more than 10,000 people to China, including Jay Siegel, dean of pharmaceutical science at China’s Tianjin University .

“Although all unethical behavior is unacceptable,” Siegel says, “the incidence here appears to scale at less than 0.1%.” He suggests that tensions might be eased if more Americans studied in China. “400,000 Chinese students study in the US, whereas only 10,000 Americans study in China,” he says. “The flow of information is indeed horribly imbalanced, but for the greater part it is ethical.”

This story was updated on April 29, 2021 to incorporate comments from Emily Weinstein, Yangyang Cheng, and Jay Siegel.

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The Science Behind a Soda Can

• Posted on March 4, 2020

Homar Murillo

You’ve probably heard a few horror stories about your soda of choice. But could the seemingly unremarkable and greatly overlooked soda can be worse for you than the beverage inside?

In this post:

Acidity of Fizzy Drinks

Soda cans have a lot going on beneath their aluminium surface. Lining their interior is a protective shield that prevents the soda inside from reacting with the metal.  

Fizzy drinks are generally corrosive substances, not only for our teeth but for metals as well. This is because, alongside carbonated water and lots of sugar, soda contains acid.

The most commercially popular drink, Coke, is one of the most acidic drinks on the shelf. With a pH of 2.5 , Coke contains 2 ingredients that are common in nearly all soda drinks: phosphoric acid and citric acid.

While the presence of these acids is masked by the addition of sugar and other preservatives, Coke – and many fizzy drinks – still has a very acidic pH reading, especially when you consider that battery acid is not far off with a pH of 1.

Although a tasty beverage, the acidity of soda is bad for a couple of reasons. The most obvious is its impact on our bodies. The least obvious is its impact on the soda can.

CAN You Believe It?

Acids react with and corrode various metals, including the aluminium used in a soda can. If a typical fizzy drink was contained in an aluminium can without a protective shield, it could eventually eat through the material.

This is because of phosphoric and citric acid. Soda can manufacturers, such as Ball, have determined these substances to have high corrosion levels which they must compensate for.

To prevent any accidents, a protective coating is added to the inside of the soda can. Typically a polymer plastic lining, this coating shields the aluminium from the soda and prevents them from reacting together.

What Are Soda Cans Made Of?

Soda cans are made of aluminium. There’s also a protective soda can lining that made from resin, normally polymer or epoxy, but there are many different materials that are sometimes used instead:

• Polyethylene
• Polypropylene

There are several factors that must also be considered when manufacturing these crucial liners. It’s not only important for them to be affordable, they must also be:

• Curable so that they can harden
• Strong and stable so that they don’t tear or rupture while the can is being handled
• Flexible in order to fit the shapes of different cans
• Sprayable for easy application
• Sticky so that they keep close to the walls of the can and don’t separate
• Sustainable with a long shelf-life

Protective liners are not restricted to the soda can. They are an important part of nearly every canned food product.

So far, the lining inside a soda can doesn’t seem to have any downfalls. So why does it have the potential to be more harmful to us than the drink itself?

The Aluminium Can Making Process

This fascinating video explains how aluminium soda cans are made from thin sheets of rolled aluminium through to the final product:

Bisphenol-A (BPA) in Aluminium Cans

The dangers associated with a soda can all come down to one compound: bisphenol-A.

Commonly known as BPA, this organic synthetic compound constitutes approximately 80% of epoxy/polymer resins used in soda cans and canned food liners. While this makes a tenacious coating, BPA has a notorious reputation.

BPA has the ability to mimic natural hormones in the body. In this way, it has been classified as an endocrine disruptor. It enters the body by transferring into the soda, which we then drink.

This means that BPA actually interferes with our hormonal system by altering or breaking down the production of hormones.

BPA and the Endocrine System

Hormones are an integral part of our biology. They are produced and stored in the endocrine system, a chemical messenger system that includes (but is not limited to):

• Pituitary gland
• Thyroid gland
• Parathyroid gland
• Adrenal glands
• Ovaries and testicles

By circulating hormones through the body, the endocrine system affects nearly every organ and cell. It is responsible for a range of important processes, including:

• Hair growth
• Reproduction
• Cognitive performance
• Injury response
• Sensory perception
• Cell division
• Metabolic rate

By disrupting this vital system, BPA has the potential to cause problems with fertility, development and overall health. It has even be linked to various cancers, and in 2012 was banned from being used in baby bottles, sippy cups and any packaging used by infants.

Should You Be Worried?

At this point, you’re probably scared to death of that can of Coke or Fanta in your fridge. Well, fear not! While BPA is a dangerous chemical, its toxicity to the body all depends on a dose-response relationship.

A dose-response relationship outlines that the danger of a substance – be that BPA, theobromine or even sugar – runs parallel to the dose we are exposed to.

Are all Aluminium Cans Lined with BPA?

The short answer is yes, BPA is found in the linings of most aluminium cans and canned foods. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be harmed by it. Everything in moderation, right?

In fact, the exposure limit of BPA – the point after which it becomes dangerous – is nearly impossible to reach given the small amount of BPA present in can linings (4.5 parts per trillion).

An article from 2017 has explained that a person weighing an average of 70kg would have to eat over 64 cans of green beans a day in order pass BPA’s exposure limit. In terms of drinking soda, you would have to consume 8,000 cans per day.

The Soda Can Science Experiment

Next time you have an empty soda can and some spare sodium hydroxide solution, give the experiment below a try to see the liner for yourself:

• Take an empty soda can and wash it out with some water
• Using sandpaper, scratch off the paint from the middle of the can. This will allow the aluminium to dissolve more easily later on
• Fill the can with water and find something – like a hook – to attach to the tab
• Use this hook to submerge ¾ of the can in a 3 molar solution of sodium hydroxide (a strong base). Alternatively, 6M sodium hydroxide can also be used for faster results
• Leave the can for 24 hours in 3M solution or 5-10 minutes in 6M solution
• Over time, the strong base will dissolve the aluminium, revealing the plastic lining

To see how the experiment is performed, you can watch it here.

About the author

Science Writer

All content published on the  ReAgent.co.uk  blog is for information only. The blog, its authors, and affiliates cannot be held responsible for any accident, injury or damage caused in part or directly from using the information provided. Additionally, we do not recommend using any chemical without reading the Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS), which can be obtained from the manufacturer. You should also follow any safety advice and precautions listed on the product label. If you have health and safety related questions, visit  HSE.gov.uk .

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This is What Happens When You Dissolve the Aluminum on a Soda Can

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Disgruntled Employee, China: The Secret Plot To Steal A Coca-Cola Formula

Shannon you had not left herself much time-the following day was her last at coke. but the month had been a busy one..

Shannon You had access to some of the most closely held information at Coke

On the evening of August 8, 2017, Shannon You badged out of the Atlanta headquarters of the Coca-Cola Co. for one of the last times. Coke was struggling to retain its perch atop the world beverage market, as once-loyal consumers migrated to brands that evoked wilderness aquifers or herbal healing or masochistic sports workouts-not fizzy fun and mass culture. The new chief executive officer's plan involved a restructuring. Twelve hundred employees would be let go, and You, a chemist in her mid-50s, had been informed several weeks earlier that she was among them.

Anytime a company lays someone off, there's a possibility the person will take something with them. Coke, holder of the world's most famous trade secret, was particularly attuned to that risk. It had an intelligence-bureau-style classification scheme, like other corporations that deal in proprietary information, and it had software that tracked employees' data use. That summer, as more and more employees learned they were leaving, the data loss prevention system began to ripple with alerts. "To say that that activity blew up the DLP system" would be "a bit of an understatement," a Coke information security manager later testified. Much of that activity resulted from employees reclaiming personal files they'd stored on their work computers-tax returns, kids' school projects, bank loan information. But not all of it did.

Shannon You in particular had access to some of the most closely held information at the company: a set of detailed chemical recipes for the 2-micron-thick plastic liners inside the beverage cans Coke filled and sold. A federal prosecutor would later describe these as the company's "other secret formulas." Developed at great expense, they were likely even more important than the theatrically guarded recipe for Coke's namesake soft drink-that sugary, acidic brew would, without a liner, devour the metal of its can. The liner formulas didn't actually belong to Coke but to the multinational paint and coatings companies that were its partners. Shannon You was responsible for evaluating the formulas; she was one of only two people at Coke with access to many of the specifics.

An internal company report on the chemist's activity that August evening begins at 6:02 p.m. Shannon You plugged a Western Digital hard drive into a USB port on a computer, then tried to move files onto the drive from a folder entitled BPANI-an abbreviation for a class of can liner. Because she was being laid off, however, she was flagged in the internal network, and the transfer was blocked. A pop-up on her screen reminded her that any file transfers off her work computer should go through a cloud storage account the company had set up with the software company Box Inc.

Shannon You ignored the message. At 6:08 she plugged a different hard drive into her computer and tried to move files onto it, again unsuccessfully. At 7:00, she plugged the original Western Digital drive back into her computer, but rather than drag and drop files, she opened Microsoft Excel and tried saving them onto the external drive through that. That didn't work either. Nor did it work at 8:41 when she tried the same thing with Microsoft Word.

It wasn't until the end of the month that she found a solution. On August 25, Shannon You used her phone to take a series of photos of her work computer monitor with one file after another open. And around that time she learned, probably from colleagues, of another simple workaround. Late in the evening on August 29, she uploaded several encrypted files from her computer to a personal Google Drive account. Coke's information security system, set up to block transfers to USB devices, let these proceed. The next night she uploaded some more.

Shannon You had not left herself much time-the following day was her last at Coke. But the month had been a busy one. On August 17, unbeknownst to her supervisors, she'd traveled to the Chinese city of Weihai. There she met with businessmen who were helping her start her own coatings company. To fund the venture, Shannon You was applying for millions of dollars in government money, and while in town she had an interview for a provincial grant program called Yishi-Yiyi.

A month later, she'd fly to Beijing to stand for another application, this time to a national grant program called the Thousand Talents. The money, she wrote in her application, would help the company she was co-founding "build the first BPANI coating production line in China," breaking the "international monopoly" in the global food container coatings industry. The files from her Coke computer were central to the plan, and she apparently was aware of the legal jeopardy that put her in. "I'm the one taking all the risks in the end," she complained in Mandarin to one of her fellow aspiring co-founders on a WeChat voice message. "If anything happens to me, the money I've made wouldn't even be enough for the lawyer's fee."

Three years later, Shannon You did go on trial, for wire fraud, conspiring to steal and possessing trade secrets, and economic espionage. Federal prosecutors argued that the victims of her crimes were the seven companies that, at a cost of nearly $120 million, developed the coatings-companies against which her venture intended to compete. But Shannon You's can coating conspiracy may have had another victim, too.

Western counterintelligence officials have long warned about Chinese grant programs such as Thousand Talents. Their stated purpose is to tap Chinese scientists and engineers who've gone abroad for educational and professional opportunities, luring them back to start businesses in China with the promise of generous financial support and freedom from bureaucratic hurdles. And that in part is what they do. But the grants can also work as bounties, inducing entrepreneurs to steal trade secrets from non-Chinese companies, then use them to start competitors. "The reality is it's a complete facade for intelligence operations," says Jay Tabb, a former executive assistant director of the FBI who headed its national security branch when You was indicted. "We know now from many, many, many cases that these programs are a way for the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party to enlist people to illegally collect information."

Shannon You's case supports that idea up to a point. But it also suggests that if the Chinese government has created a system for incentivizing intellectual-property theft, it's a balky, unpredictable one. You ripped off the multinational companies she worked for and worked with, but her confederates also appear to have scammed the Chinese government. Sometimes if you try to pay people to take things for you, they just take your money instead.

Most of the objects we touch, and many we don't, have a coating. Computer keys have a special layer so they're not smudged by skin oils. So do touchscreens. Specially developed paints protect suspension bridges from salty air, help stealth fighters evade radar detection and kill the barnacles that would otherwise encrust ship hulls. All of these are developed and sold by paint and coatings companies such as Akzo Nobel, Dow Chemical, PPG Industries and Sherwin-Williams.

Aluminum beverage cans are particularly tricky. The biggest factories stamp out 16 million cans a day; each requires a perfectly uniform inner coating, sprayed on in seconds. The liner recipes are calibrated to the recipes of the drinks, with their different levels of acidity, sugar, caffeine, oils and, in some cases, alcohol. The polymer, once dried, can't react in any way with the beverage, even after months on a supermarket shelf, lest the precisely calibrated flavor profile of a Topo Chico strawberry hibiscus hard seltzer or a Monster Assault energy drink be corrupted.

All that complexity lends the industry a deep resistance to change. But Shannon You arrived at Coke at a rare moment of disruption, caused by concerns about a ubiquitous liner ingredientcalled bisphenol A, or BPA. A growing, if not unanimous, body of research has suggested that BPA can interfere with the body's endocrine system, increasing the risk of a host of health problems including Type 2 diabetes and accelerated puberty. In 2010, France banned BPA in baby bottles, later expanding the ban to include any food packaging sold in the country. California, the European Union and China followed with baby bottle bans the next year, and California later added BPA to a list of chemicals that required warnings in consumer products.

The prospect of broader bans set off a scramble for new liner chemistries. But replacing BPA was a challenge; the chemical is exceptionally good at linking together other monomer molecules into tough, lightweight epoxy resins. It took coatings companies several years and multiple generations of liners to create formulations that didn't compromise durability. The technical term for the category is BPANI, for "bisphenol A non-intent." The last part, short for "non-intentionally," reflects that even nominally BPA-free products may have absorbed trace amounts from their surroundings.

Coke, in the jargon of the packaged food value chain, is a "filler," buying its cans from such global canmakers as Ball Corp. It doesn't make coatings or even apply them, but as the world's biggest maker of carbonated soft drinks, its decisions essentially determine which liners will find a market.

Shannon You found herself in a position of great power over that process, as Coke continued to seek better BPANI formulations. She'd come to the US from China on an academic scholarship in 1990, earning a master's degree from Kent State University in Ohio, then a Ph.D. in polymer science and engineering from Pennsylvania's Lehigh University. She became an American citizen in 1999, settling with her daughter and husband, a mechanical engineer, in Delaware, where she had a job as a senior chemist in DuPont's 3D printing business. Her DuPont manager later described her as one of the best scientists he'd ever worked with.

In 2004 she relocated her family to Massachusetts for a job with the French firm Cie. de Saint-Gobain, then, five years later, joined Honeywell International Inc. as a materials engineer. Over time she shifted her specialty to abrasion technologies, co-inventing sandpaperlike adhesives for industrial grinders and scratch-proof films that can block laser beams.

In December 2012, Coca-Cola hired Shannon You as a principal engineer in its global research division, responsible for helping decide which BPA-free liner formulations would come before the company's powerful Scientific and Regulatory Affairs group. The job made her the main contact between Coke and the coatings companies, and upon her arrival, those relationships immediately grew strained. Her professional persona, like her research interests, tended toward abrasion. "Dr. You was more aggressive in her approach than anyone else we had worked with," Dan Leschnik, Akzo Nobel NV's global technical services manager, would testify at her trial. "She was pushy for additional information, not only down to the component level, but specific amounts of each ingredient."

The companies had never had to disclose this information before and were deeply reluctant to do so. But Shannon You was unafraid to use the leverage that came from representing one of the world's biggest fillers. "She told us frequently that we were always behind, we were trailing our competitors, and she would tell us that she could help us," testified Leschnik. It wasn't just Akzo-she told multiple suppliers that they were the industry laggards and, therefore, in particular need of her help. She claimed "that she knew more about polymer chemistry than we did," testified Tom Mallen, vice president for compliance and technology marketing for Sherwin-Williams Co.'s packaging division, "and that we needed to reveal our chemistry to her so that she could know whether the material was going to be worth looking at or not." If she didn't get the information she asked for, she told Mallen, "she was going to stop any qualifications of our material or prohibit them from ever occurring."

On one level, it made sense for Shannon You to push for as much data as possible about a new packaging technology. But there were also suggestions that she was not acting purely in her employer's interests. Executives at one prospective supplier, Japan's Toyochem Co., were bewildered when she tried to get them to sign a one-way nondisclosure agreement, under whose terms they, not she, would be prohibited from revealing any proprietary information to anyone else. She told Takayuki Suzuki, a Toyochem marketing manager, it was a way to avoid the hassle of a traditional bilateral NDA. It would be better, she suggested, not to involve anyone else at Coke in the arrangement.

Shannon You's focus at work didn't always fit with her responsibilities, either. "She was obviously very, very interested in the chemistry to the exclusion of the performance of the coating," Sherwin-Williams's Mallen recalled, which was "a major step change from people that had held the position beforehand." Chemistry rather than performance was the kind of thing that would interest someone making a liner rather than just approving one.

Eventually, Sherwin-Williams and some other suppliers came up with an unorthodox solution to their Shannon You problem: They created a custom NDA covering Shannon You by name, so she could then be given access to the details she demanded. That had the effect of entrusting some of their most valuable intellectual property to her individually. In two years, she had amassed a personal liner formula database worth tens of millions of dollars. Her computer at Coke's headquarters was the only place in the world where all those trade secrets coexisted.

By 2016, Coke seems to have realized that it, too, had a Shannon You problem. Dana Breed was hired that year to oversee the approval of new materials used by the company. At Coke's Atlanta headquarters, Breed, like other employees who sat within earshot of Shannon You's cubicle, couldn't help but hear her conversations with suppliers, and Dana Breed was warned she would need headphones to tune Shannon You out. "On her phone calls, Shannon was very animated," Breed recalled at trial. The contentiousness of the negotiations was impossible to miss.

Dana Breed clashed immediately with Shannon You, who refused to provide even basic data about the formulations. Less than a year after Dana Breed's hiring, Shannon You was notified that she was being laid off as part of Coke's "lean center initiative." Even at this point, Coke's attempts to deal with Shannon You's liner formula hoard were ad hoc. The IT department was never informed that she had exceptionally valuable IP that should be subject to extra security. On Aug. 3, as Coke prepared to work with the chemical companies to undo the unusual NDAs, Dana Breed gave Shannon You an external hard drive and instructed her to put the formulas on it-though, if Shannon You had tried to comply, she'd have triggered the same IP protection measures that would temporarily frustrate her after-hours data transfer attempts later that month. Dana Breed followed up daily. Shannon You didn't respond to the messages, nor could she be found at her desk.

By Augusr 31, her last day at Coke, Shannon You had found a job in Tennessee, at Eastman Chemical Co. There she would make $157,000 a year, a slight bump over her Coke salary, with a $15,000 signing bonus. Unable to reach her, Dana Breed looked in Shannon You's vacated cubicle and found the hard drive, still empty.

It's unclear exactly when Shannon You began contemplating going out on her own, but correspondence with Fan Hongmei, her aunt, suggests that the two had been discussing it for nearly a decade. Fan lived in China-her text and voice memo exchanges with Shannon You were in Chinese and used Shannon You's Chinese given name, Xiaorong. In the voluminous communications log submitted as evidence in Shannon You's trial, Fan emerges as a cajoling, indefatigable presence-the idea of starting a state-subsidized Chinese company seems to have originated largely with her. You, with a sister and an ailing mother in China, found the idea appealing. Also, there was the money. In her Thousand Talents application, Shannon You estimated that the market for BPANI coatings in China, where there was no domestic supplier, was worth about 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) annually.

In early 2017, Fan connected her niece over WeChat with Liu Xiangchen, the general manager for a chemical company called Weihai Jinhong Group, based in Weihai, in Shandong province. A photo of Liu later uncovered by the FBI shows a man with a wary expression and a mop of hair swept across his forehead. The idea he proposed was for his company to make the coatings at first, then spin off an independent firm. In exchange for overseeing the process, he'd own 5% of the new company. You would be its chief technology officer and own a third of it. Much of the rest of the ownership would be a family affair: Fan would also own a large stake, as would her husband and two of Liu's aunts.

Liu presented himself as an expert on getting government money; he said seven of Weihai Jinhong's 800 employees had won talent grants. For the new venture, Liu applied on Shannon You's behalf for national and provincial grants worth a total of 30 million to 50 million yuan.

From March through August 2017, as Shannon You's time at Coke was coming to an end, Liu set about creating an alternative, more accomplished version of her for the grant applications. Some of the burnishing was purely cosmetic: In one WeChat message, Liu asked Shannon You to retake her application photo. "If you could straighten up your hair a little bit," he wrote, "that would be great." Other improvements were more significant. In March, Liu asked Shannon You for an employment verification letter from Coke that identified her as the company's chief technology officer, a meteoric fictional promotion. She demurred at first, but in a PowerPoint later prepared for her Thousand Talents application, she identified herself as having "served as chief technology officer or technical director at six different Fortune 500 companies"-a description true only if one allowed for a very generous definition of "or." Most significantly, Shannon uYou's application claimed falsely that she herself had "manufactured the world's most advanced second-generation BPANI coating production and preparation technologies."

Just as important was the fiction created around the technology on which the new company would be built. Investigators would later find on Shannon You's external hard drive a patent license from Coke giving Weihai Jinhong permission to use its BPANI coatings and manufacturing techniques. That license, cited multiple times in her Thousand Talents application, was fake-the relevant technologies weren't even Coke's to license. But the application was in all likelihood not read with a critical eye, thanks to an added measure Liu took. In a September WeChat message, Fan claimed that Liu had paid a 10,000-yuan bribe to facilitate the application process. There are hints of other bribes as well.

After Shannon You's presentation in Weihai in August 2017 supporting her application to Shandong's provincial grant program, Yishi-Yiyi, and then her defense, in a Beijing conference center a month later, of the Thousand Talents application, the early feedback was promising. Liu sent word in October that "reviews for the Yishi-Yiyi scientific and technological investment project were mostly good. Barring something unforeseen, the project should be officially approved." Fan wrote that they could start preparations for the new company by late fall.

Other members of Shannon You's family, however, began to worry about her venture. A sister in California sent Shannon You links to news stories about the FBI targeting Thousand Talents participants. Another, in China, expressed similar concerns: "The Americans are very bad! They are framing Chinese people everywhere!" she said in a WeChat audio message. Nor did she like the sound of her sister's business associates: "These people are really shady! They are treating you like a fool, thinking you care about the fame, the little bit of money."

You reassured her siblings, but she didn't trust her partners, either. Her main concern wasn't getting caught but getting bilked. In February 2018, Liu received official confirmation that Shannon You had won both the Thousand Talents and Yishi-Yiyi awards, entitling her to a total of 5 million yuan over four years. Not all the news was good: Weihai Jinhong had gotten a corporate award, too, but it was a fraction of what Liu had requested. And after the initial jubilation, months went by without Shannon You seeing any of the money. "All this excitement," she said in a WeChat voice message to Liu. "Excitement is useless!" Suspicion came to dominate her correspondence. "If the money is not in my account, I won't even begin," she threatened in a series of voice messages to Liu. "I wouldn't even discuss it. It's not like I'm starving here like those Chinese people who went back because they couldn't make it here." On the contrary, she said, she was doing very well in America. "I'm making a lot of money here. You just want to talk nonsense? To scam me?"

In a text to Fan, Liu defended himself, pointing to his year of work on the falsehood-ridden applications, the risks he had taken by knowingly misrepresenting the terms of Shannon You's employment to the Chinese government, and his drafting of the 29-page fraudulent patent licensing authorization from Coke. After all that, he said, it was Shannon You, not he, who got the grant money, a reward that "bears no risk for her, only great fame and wealth." Fan, for her part, tried to placate her niece: After decades in the US, she had forgotten how things got done in China. "It's been so many years that people would call you 'unacclimatized,' " Fan told her.

As for the intellectual property Shannon You would be bringing with her, there was no hurry with that, either. The plan was for the Weihai Jinhong spinoff to first form a partnership with an overseas supplier-the Italian company Metlac SpA, a major European coatings company, seemed like a good candidate-to legitimately license existing liner formulas to produce for the Chinese market. Then, over a few years, Shannon You and her team could quietly incorporate the BPANI formulas she had taken from Coke into their own products, shortcutting years of trial and error. The resulting product wouldn't be exactly the same as, say, Akzo Nobel's or Sherwin-Williams's. "You are not stupid," Fan said in a voice message in early 2018. "At the most, the technology will have some resemblance at a glance, but no one can prove it." And there was plenty of precedent for the strategy, Fan said: "The scholars returning from overseas are all doing it this way."

Less than a month later, Shannon You flew to Weihai to sign her employment contract with Weihai Jinhong. Her signature made the new coatings venture official, codifying her 33.5% stake and entitling her to a salary of 600,000 yuan per year. A trio of photos later recovered from Shannon You's iPhone document the signing ceremony. In a coral-colored dress and black lace cardigan, Shannon You sits beside Weihai Jinhong's CEO, Xu Dongguo, whose gray crew cut gives him a military air. They are at a table in a banquet hall, and a white wine rack in the shape of a double bass looms up behind them. In the last photo, Shannon You shakes hands with Xu and smiles, her left hand balled at her side.

Shannon You's time at Eastman Chemical would prove shorter and even more tumultuous than her tenure at Coke. Eastman, spun off in 1994 from the once-mighty Eastman Kodak Co. and based in Kingsport, Tennessee, is a major producer of the polymers used by coatings companies. Impressed by Shannon You's research background and experience at Coke, her new employers wanted her to help improve their compounds, not in beverage packaging, where the company had a strong research program, but in food-tuna and soup cans require their own types of polymer liners.

From the start, however, Shannon You showed a stubborn focus on drink cans. One of her Eastman supervisors was Deep Bhattacharya, at the time global director of technology for the company's coatings and inks business. "It was not unusual to find her spending a lot of time trying to figure out what Eastman was doing on the beverage side," he would later testify.

Nor had Shannon You changed her interpersonal style. She would "belittle people," Deep Bhattacharya said. "She took on a very aggressive and combative approach and also drove hard to indicate that she knew a lot more than the others because of her prior work experience." She described herself, he recalled, as "very famous."

That turned out to be true-within coatings chemistry, anyway. When Coke's suppliers learned of her hiring by Eastman, several reached out to her new employer. Sherwin-Williams sent a letter advising the chemical company of its legal responsibility to ensure that she didn't use the information from her special Coke NDA. "A lot of our customers actually shared a concern about having Dr. You work on some of those project teams because of the experience they had while she worked at Coke," Deep Bhattacharya testified.

Her work personality also made her extended absences that much more noticeable. The trip to Beijing to defend her Thousand Talents application came just two and a half weeks into the job. The following spring, in April 2018, she took a business trip to meet members of the company's technical team in Shanghai and attend an industry conference in Guangzhou. The trip was supposed to last two weeks. While there, Shannon You met with prospective customers, ostensibly on behalf of Eastman, but she neglected to include her local Eastman colleagues in the meetings. She met with Weihai Jinhong and signed the partnership paperwork with the company's CEO, Xu. All the while, she was parrying increasingly exasperated emails from her bosses at Eastman. "Greetings, Shannon," one began, "quite a few concerns are being raised with this trip." In the end she stayed for more than a month, then asked to work for an additional week from Atlanta, where she still had a house.

During this time, Shannon You was reaching out to the Italian supplier Metlac to set up meetings about collaborating in the Chinese market. She led Metlac to believe that Eastman's CEO, Mark Costa, would be accompanying her. But then she reported that he regrettably had a conflict. She offered to speak to Metlac CEO Pier Ugo Bocchio herself, not necessarily about Eastman but about a Chinese company that was, as she put it in one text, "very interested in working together with you to get in this field." Investigators would later find photographs she took with her phone, against company policy, of the specialized equipment in Eastman's labs. They'd also find emails You sent to vendors from her Eastman email address inquiring about similar equipment for a lab in China. No one at Eastman had asked her to equip a lab there; no one at Eastman had any idea what she was doing.

On June 21, 2018, Shannon You received an email invitation for a meeting that afternoon with Deep Bhattacharya, along with another of her supervisors and a human resources representative. A half-hour before the meeting was to start, she spent 11 minutes uploading files from her work computer to the same Google Drive account she'd used to circumvent Coke's data loss prevention measures 10 months earlier. At the meeting, Deep Bhattacharya handed her a printed list of Eastman's concerns about her job performance. The conversation quickly deteriorated. "She refused to read through them," he testified. "She flung it across the table back to me." Ashley Angles, the HR manager, decided to stop the meeting. She asked You to work from home for the rest of the day to cool off.

What Shannon You did instead brought her career at Eastman swiftly to an end. She left the building that houses the company's technology research division and its labs. Rather than go home, however, she crossed Eastman's campus to the executive offices, where she spent the next two hours. She badged in and went looking for Deep Bhattacharya's supervisor. When she couldn't find him, she demanded to meet with the chief technology officer, one of the most senior people at the 14,000-person company. When informed that the CTO was busy, she attempted to interrupt his meeting. She was asked to leave the building. Eventually, she did.

At that point, Eastman's HR department decided to fire her, and had events unfolded differently, that might have been that. Despite the trail of alarmed business partners and shell-shocked colleagues behind her, You could have moved on, going down in Eastman office lore just as she had at Coke. But that night, after finally going home, she logged on to the company network and copied the documents she'd saved to her Google Drive to a personal hard drive connected to her work laptop. Eastman's IT department, growing increasingly concerned about her, was on alert: The next morning a technician was able to reconstruct what she had done by remotely querying the operating system on You's laptop.

That afternoon, June 22, Shannon You was invited to another meeting and informed of her termination. According to Angles, she took the news with surprising equanimity. Then Angles demanded the hard drive with the proprietary data on it. Shannon You seemed to grow nervous, Angles would recall at trial, and said the device was back at her condo. Unwilling to let her out of their sight until they had the hard drive, Angles, along with a company security manager and an IT manager, followed You home in an improvised caravan and waited outside her house while she retrieved it.

Back on campus, an Eastman IT security technician examined the hard drive, where he found some of Shannon You's personal files and the Eastman data she'd taken. He also found her Coke documents, organized neatly in folders bearing the names of the chemical companies she'd gotten them from. Eastman's lead global investigator, a former FBI agent, reached out to his former colleagues there and handed over You's devices.

In the meantime, Shannon You quickly found yet another job, as a principal engineer at XG Sciences, a nanomaterials maker in Lansing, Michigan. (It ceased operations last year.) She traveled again to China, where Liu gave her some cash, and Xu walked her through the process of buying a luxury waterfront apartment so she could have a place in China to park her grant money. And the three of them accompanied Weihai city government officials to Italy to meet with Metlac.

In September 2018, Shannon You flew back to the US and was met at the Atlanta airport by agents from Customs and Border Protection. The CBP agents didn't say so, but they were acting at the behest of the FBI. Agents at the FBI's Knoxville, Tennessee, field office had obtained a search warrant for the hard drive Eastman had recovered, and they would go on to obtain warrants for Shannon You's Yahoo! and Google accounts. Agents had sent the files they found on Shannon You's devices to the chemical companies whose names appeared on the files; the companies confirmed the information was proprietary. At the Atlanta airport, Shannon You was led to a small interview room, while agents down the hall inspected her laptop, two phones and a hard drive. She had more than $10,000 in cash. When a CBP agent began asking her questions from a list he had in front of him, she took it, read it herself, and wrote her answers directly onto the paper. The agent had never had anyone do that, he later testified.

When Shannon You got her devices back, she deleted her WeChat history, which the agents had already copied. She pressed on with her plans. In November 2018 she took another trip to Italy with her Chinese partners and Weihai officials to meet again with Metlac. The company had been noncommittal before. This time, it was definitive: It wanted no part of the proposed deal, and it did not want to work with You. Without a partner already established in the industry, the Weihai Jinhong team was at an impasse. They apparently balked at the prospect of building an entire research and development team around Shannon You's expertise and pilfered IP.

There's another possibility, though, and it's the one Shannon You seems to have come around to: that the fabricated applications were part of a larger, more cynical scam. At some point, Liu and Xu may have realized that, rather than invest their government money in a chancy venture with a volatile personality, they could just pocket it. "The main problem right now is that I don't know what shenanigans Liu Xiangchen is up to," Shannon You said at one point in a WeChat message to family members. "He just utters nonsense all the time! You know?! All shenanigans!"

Shannon You's aunt had voiced similar concerns. Once Weihai Jinhong had some of its grant money from the government, Fan warned on WeChat, it didn't need to do anything for the venture. Liu could spend the money on himself and write it all off as the cost of trying to start a business, a palatable explanation should any authorities decide to look. He could, she said, "use it however he wants, like dine-and-wine, buying gifts, work on personal connections, and it will be enough for everyone to submit their invoices." It would be just one more example of a Chinese government-backed venture failing. Perhaps the whole thing was, indeed, shenanigans.

The evidence uncovered by federal investigators, while suggestive, doesn't settle the question one way or the other. Attempts by phone and email to reach Liu and Xu were unsuccessful. Weihai Jinhong didn't reply to a query conveyed via its official website, and calls to the company's legal office went unanswered. Bloomberg Businessweek couldn't find contact information for Fan.

There is evidence, though, that the Chinese government itself has begun to worry about widespread fraud in its tech funding programs. After the failure of several major government-backed chip projects in recent years, Chinese anticorruption authorities announced investigations into a cabinet official in charge of industrial policy and three executives from the National Integrated Circuit Industry Investment Fund Co., China's main investment vehicle for building domestic chipmaking capabilities. These investigations may be a way to place blame for the disappointments of failed high-profile technology efforts, but they aren't the only example. There are also allegations of widespread fraud in the electric vehicle market, an industry with extensive government support. Chinese investigators have found that some domestic automakers, to qualify for extra subsidies, were inflating their sales by selling cars to shell companies, then stripping them for parts.

On February 12, 2019, a federal grand jury in Tennessee returned wire fraud and trade secret theft charges against Shannon You and Liu. Two days later, the FBI arrested Shannon You at her apartment in Lansing. Agents also searched her town house outside Atlanta and interviewed her husband at their home in Massachusetts-he would lose his job after her arrest. The agents noted that You's Michigan home, where she'd been living for months, was barely furnished, with a mattress on the floor, TV trays for shelving and, in the living room, a bankers box containing a Western Digital hard drive. In a kitchen cabinet was a locked briefcase whose combination she claimed not to know. When agents got it open, they found about $4,000 in Chinese yuan, euros and other foreign currencies. All of her important personal documents were there, too, including her passport, Social Security card, diplomas and marriage certificate, as well as her daughter's birth certificate. "She was intending to run away," Assistant US Attorney T.J. Harker said at trial.

Agents took Shannon You to the FBI's Grand Rapids, Michigan, office and spoke with her for a little over two hours. In a video recording of the session, she faces the camera, wearing a pink sweater and glasses. Sitting across the table from her is Bill Leckrone, the lead investigator on the case, and a second agent who speaks little except to mention that he is a chemical engineer. When Leckrone asks You about Weihai Jinhong, she insists at first that she was merely a matchmaker, helping Metlac break into the Chinese market. There was, she says, no money involved. Asked about her aunt's role, she says that Fan probably wanted to give her niece an excuse to come back to China so they could spend time together.

As Leckrone reveals how much of Shannon You's digital life he has seen, she does admit to a greater and greater role. But the plans for a company were "just talking," she says. The contract she signed with such fanfare was "just paper" and came to nothing. "I have never had any intention to develop anything," she says. Nor, she insists, did she have any intent to share her secrets with anyone. It does seem to be the case that she ended up keeping the coatings formulas to herself-one of her refrains to her partners was that they had to pay up before she would deliver anything. The FBI is convinced that there is at least one additional device of hers that they were not able to recover.

In August 2020 a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment adding economic espionage charges, because Shannon You allegedly acted to benefit a foreign government through a business it supported, and adding her aunt as a defendant. (Like Liu, Fan presumably remains in China, beyond the reach of US law enforcement.) At Shannon You's trial, held in Greeneville, Tennessee, in April 2021, her lawyers contested that the coatings formulas she was accused of stealing were trade secrets at all and put a patent attorney named J.D. Harriman on the stand. A reasonably skilled chemist could have come up with the formulas on their own based on publicly available data, he argued, contradicting the coatings company executives whose testimony had preceded his. The defense also put the Coke executive Yu Shi on the stand; Shannon You and the company's broader coating research effort had been under her supervision at the time. Under questioning, she said that Coke had been on a tight deadline to approve the new coatings and that the sensitive files Coke received from its suppliers weren't always clearly marked as such.

The defense's other witness was Shannon You's daughter, Linda Xu, a computer scientist at Google. Xu described a frugal, itinerant upbringing, the small family sometimes having to be apart as her parents found and lost work. Once her mom got her job at Coke, her parents fell in love with Atlanta and wanted to retire there. "She doesn't always express herself well," Xu would later write to the judge, "but you won't find anyone as caring."

At trial, Xu recalled two vacations in Italy, when she was in college and her mom still at Coke. The family was hosted by the Bocchios, the family that owns Metlac. "There were a lot of toasts that I remember," she said, "where we were celebrating they got some approval for something, and we're talking excitedly about opening the market somewhere in the US, some places in Europe and Asia."

On April 22, 2021, the jury returned a verdict of guilty on all counts. In May 2022, Shannon You was sentenced to 14 years in federal prison. Coca-Cola and Eastman declined to comment on the case. Shannon You's lawyer, Corey Shipley, didn't return messages, nor did Metlac representatives.

China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs declined to comment directly on the case but said the government has instructed the relevant entities to abide by international laws and ethics when participating in overseas talent programs.

"The government completely fabricated my case," Shannon You says. It's a few minutes before 5 p.m. on October 13, and she is calling from the phone bank of the low-security penitentiary in Aliceville, Alabama, where she's serving her sentence. She is responding to a letter asking to speak for this story, which she received the night before. She would have called earlier in the day, she says apologetically, but she was at her job in the prison factory.

"It's profiling," she says of the case against her. "I'm a naturalized citizen, I'm well educated and well known in the field, and I traveled to China to do business. So that's the reason that they targeted me." It was all just political. Tennessee is "a red state," she adds. "The judge is completely, completely on the government's side." And the jury didn't understand the nuances of trade secrets. "This is not like something like robbery, drugs or murder. I had some files in my home that somebody else sent to me," she says. "They claim that's proof."

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The conversation isn't long-inmate calls at Aliceville are limited to 15 minutes. Shannon You proposes a second call the next evening, and perhaps more after that. She has so many arguments to make; she's working closely on her appeal and mentions that she's speaking with her lawyer the next day. At the appointed hour the next evening she doesn't call, though. Months later, responding to a follow-up email, she writes that her lawyer has discouraged her from speaking to the press for the time being. "I will contact you after appeal," she writes. "I look forward to telling you the truth." -With Gao Yuan

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Secret Plastic in Aluminum Cans Revealed through This Funky Experiment

This video shows us what’s hidden inside our everyday cans..

Just a bottle of sodium hydroxide , water, emery paper (sandpaper), and a can are all that are needed for this experiment. 

We discover the hidden material that lurks beneath our aluminum cans’ smooth exterior: plastic . 

The plastic isn’t there just for the sake of it, there’s a good reason behind it: it prevents the can from corroding and contaminating food or drinks.

We all use cans to drink fresh sodas, beers and even juices, most of us blissfully unaware of what they’re made of, or even questioning if there’s much more to them than their hardish exterior.

But just like an onion, it turns out our everyday cans have layers too!

How exactly was this discovered? And who can check if this is true? Anyone, it turns out.

By watching this video’s cool experiment you’ll see how easy it is to uncover the truth behind cans.

Be careful though, plastic gloves are needed in order not to injur yourself, as you’ll see from the video these are strong chemicals – keep an eye on children before doing this one!

So, which recycling box do we place cans in now? Plastic or aluminum? Stick to aluminum for now. 

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The Science Behind Aluminum Soda Can Coatings

You've probably heard some horror stories about your soda of choice. But could the seemingly insignificant and greatly overlooked soda be worse for you than the drink inside? A lot happens to soda cans under their aluminum surfaces. They are lined with a protective cover that prevents the soda inside from reacting with the metal. 

Carbonated beverages are often corrosive, not only to our teeth but to metal as well. This is because, in addition to carbonated water and lots of sugar, sodas also contain acid. Acids react with and corrode all kinds of metals, including the aluminum used in soda cans. If a typical soda is packed in an aluminum can without a protective cover, it can end up eating the material. This is because of phosphoric acid and citric acid. Soda can manufacturers, such as Ball, have determined that these substances have high corrosion levels and must be compensated for. To prevent any accidents, a protective coating is added to the inside of the soda can. Usually a polymer plastic lining, this coating protects the aluminum from the soda and prevents them from reacting together.

Food Grade High-Speed Coating Line

What are soda cans made of

Soda cans are made of aluminum. There is also a protective soda can liner made of resin, usually polymer or epoxy, but sometimes many different materials are used instead: polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, styrene, acrylic fiber, vinyl plastic. There are several other factors that must be considered when manufacturing these critical liners. It is not only important for them to be affordable, but they must also be Cureable, so they can harden Be strong and stable, so they won't tear or break when handling cans Flexible to accommodate different can shapes Paintable and easy to apply Sticky so they stay close to the can wall and won't separate Sustainable, long shelf life Protective liners are not limited to soda cans. They are an important part of almost all canned foods.

The process of making Coke cans

Shearing, large rolls of metal are cut into sheets on a shear at 160 sheets per minute. Coating, the internal protective coating is placed on a pre-rolled sheet and cured. Printing, the sheets are decorated with any printing method the customer desires, then the decorated sheets are coated with a varnish and cured. Coating A second internal protective coating is placed on the sheet and cured. SlittingCuts each sheet containing up to 35 blanks into individual blanks, which are then canned. The finished ends are packaged into tubes for delivery to manufacturing plants and customers. Body forming body blanks are sent to the body builder where they are formed into cylinders and joined at their side seams by cementing or welding. The flanged formed cylinders go from the body builder to the flanging machine. Here, the metal at each end is rolled to form a flange at each end of the can. Spray coating places the final coating on the inner surface of the can. This is a special composite protective coating. Here the final internal coating is baked and cured through a funnel-type oven, where the time-temperature cycle must be carefully controlled.

The cans are packed into cartons or placed on pallets for delivery to the customer.

Please follow coating line manufacturer LITONG to get your solutions, we also offer   Single-Coating Line  and   Double-Coating Line . Contact us for more.

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5 science experiments you can try with a coke can.

Oct 4, 2016

The Crazy Russian Hacker is one of the most interesting dudes on YouTube. You may remember him as the dude who turned Nutella into a fire starter .

In his latest video , he shows us five quirky little experiments you can do with a simple can of soda. Low-key, we kind of wish we had this guy as a science teacher. I probably would have stayed awake more.

Let's check 'em out real quick and see what kind of wacky things come from a our midday caffeine fix.

The Imploding Can

The first and most dangerous of the experiments requires you to boil some of the water inside the Coke can and submerge it face down into a bowl of water.

The interior of the can should instantly concave, leaving a crushed can that you won't have to lay a finger on.

This one, he stresses, kids should not try at home.

Blowing A Can Out A Glass

Put an empty soda can into a glass bowl and blow sideways. The can should propel out of the glass with a decent amount of force.

The Russian Hacker even tries to make a game out of it, seeing if he can shoot the can into another cup.

The Suction Cup

A pretty cool party trick, we find out how to get a can of soda to stick to your forehead. Press the bottom of the empty can against your forehead until a vacuum is created.

If done right, it should stick to your head like a soda-slinging demon from hell.

Balancing On The Rim Of A Jar

If you've got the patience, this trick is probably our most favorite. Fill an empty can of soda with about 100 mL of liquid. Then, carefully place it on the rim of a jar. Use your hands to steadily balance the can until you're confident it can stand on its own.

Your friends will argue that you glued the can on, to which  you can gingerly tap it and shatter their perceptions.

The Sink Test

Finally, we get a visual look at how different diet sodas are compared to regular. Using a fish tank, the two variations of Coca-Cola are dropped at the same time. The original sinks straight to the bottom while the diet float to the top.

A great trick to see which beverages are more calorie friendly than others.

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Rashaun Hall

5 coolest experiments involving Coca-Cola

How to perform cool experiments with cola at home

Safe­ty pre­cau­tions

Don’t drink the Coca-Cola used in any ex­per­i­ments! Ob­serve safe­ty pre­cau­tions when work­ing with heat­ing de­vices.

Reagents and equip­ment

• bleach (15% so­lu­tion sodi­um hypochlo­rite);
• a rusty tool;
• fry­ing pans;

Step-by-step in­struc­tions

Diet Coke and Men­tos erup­tion

Toss a Men­to into a bot­tle of Diet Coke. Ob­serve the re­lease of gas and for­ma­tion of a spout of foam .

Coca-Cola and milk

Pour 50 mL Coca-Cola into 30 mL milk . Ob­serve as the milk cur­dles and the so­lu­tion pales.

Coca-Cola and rust

Let a rusty tool sit in 150 mL Coca-Cola for 5 hours. Re­move it from the so­lu­tion, wipe it off with a pa­per tow­el, and pay at­ten­tion to the dis­ap­pear­ance of the rust.

Cola and bleach

Add 20 mL bleach (15% so­lu­tion sodi­um hypochlo­rite) to 50 mL Coca-Cola. Ob­serve as the mix­ture pales.

How much sug­ar does Cola con­tain?

Pour 200 mL of clas­sic Coca-Cola onto a fry­ing pan. Heat un­til all the liq­uid evap­o­rates. Re­peat the ex­per­i­ment in a sec­ond fry­ing pan us­ing Diet Coke. No­tice the large quan­ti­ty of black tar from the clas­sic Coca-Cola.

Process de­scrip­tion

• Men­tos have a rough sur­face, which aids the for­ma­tion of a large amount of car­bon diox­ide gas from the Coca-Cola on its sur­face. Food ad­di­tives in the Cola and Men­tos con­trib­ute to the for­ma­tion of a large quan­ti­ty of foam.
• Milk con­sists main­ly of pro­teins, fats, mi­croele­ments, and wa­ter. When Coca-Cola is added, the phos­phor­ic acid it con­tains forces the milk to cur­dle. Mean­while, the form­ing clots of pro­teins drag col­or­ing mol­e­cules with them, caus­ing the mix­ture to pale.
• Rust con­sists most­ly of iron(III) ox­ide, and de­vel­ops on iron ob­jects due to hu­mid air or house­hold chem­i­cals. But it’s no prob­lem for clas­sic Coca-Cola! A rusty tool left in Coca-Cola will be thor­ough­ly cleaned from the unattrac­tive tar­nish. This hap­pens thanks to the phos­phor­ic acid in Coca-Cola, which dis­solves the iron(III) ox­ide. 2H₃PO₄ + Fe₂O₃ = 2Fe­PO₄ + 3H₂O
• Bleach con­tains sodi­um hypochlo­rite, which is a strong ox­i­diz­ing agent and eas­i­ly ox­i­dizes the col­or­ing mol­e­cules in the Coca-Cola, caus­ing it to pale.
• The main in­gre­di­ents of clas­sic Cola are sug­ar and wa­ter. As the wa­ter evap­o­rates, the mix­ture thick­ens and forms a black mass re­sem­bling tar, which main­ly con­sists of caramelized sug­ar. Diet Coke con­tains sug­ar sub­sti­tutes in­stead of reg­u­lar sug­ar. These sub­sti­tutes are much sweet­er than sug­ar – even be­ing added in tiny amounts, they make the drink ev­ery bit as sweet as the clas­sic ver­sion. As a re­sult, we see a much small­er amount of residue than in clas­sic Cola.

Dozens of experiments you can do at home

One of the most exciting and ambitious home-chemistry educational projects The Royal Society of Chemistry

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A community for asking whether programs, products, or services are legitimate.

IsItBullShit: Coke cans have a plastic "liner" inside them.

I saw this video recently (on April 1st): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1pB6O6AYMU

My first thought was it's a well orchestrated April fools joke. But then the comments make it seem like it's actually real. It looks real.

I started thinking about recycling aluminium etc, I've seen cans melted but never any indication of plastic...

My feeling is it's bullshit.

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