Chemistry YouTube Videos – February 2010 Roundup

A student in a chicken suit gets tackled by organic chemistry lecturer Owen Priest at Northwestern University.

An excellent video on methane by the Periodic Table of Videos crew last month.
Safety Note: Samantha “Pants!” Tang is not wearing a lab coat, gloves, and her hair is not fully pulled back.

Also from the Periodic Table of Videos, Sam shows us the Traffic Lights reaction.
Safety Note: Sam does not wear gloves even while working with NaOH powder.
EH&S Note: Throws the solution down the sink.

Mitch

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Android Spectroscopy

I was jealous when I saw Joel write about his boss using his iPhone’s light source for experiments (finally, a really useful science iphone app). I knew I had to one-up him for no other reason then I am a Google Android user. Below is a video of an app I made; the app will scroll through the visible spectrum. In the video the glass contains red wine.

During the video you can see the wine absorbing blue light when the camera pans over the glass for the first time. Next time it pans over the red wine the light is green and still not transparent, but as the light was turning yellow the solution became more transparent. By the end, the light was red and it transmitted through the wine just fine.

If I had an other Android phone on hand I probably could have made a quick and dirty visible spectrometer.

Mitch

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Funny Flasks

During a recent group clean up, I came across these gems drying in an oven.  No one knew where they’d come from or how we obtained them:

Looks like the glass blower just capped some broken-off joints to make tiny flasks.  Although, I gotta say, if you’re going to do chemistry on that small of scale, why not just grab a 1 dram vial?

Merry Christmas, all!  Safe travels and well wishes in the new year

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More SEM fun

Happy Thanksgiving, all!

ASPEX is initiating a Name That Sample contest.  Head over to the ASPEX site to cast your vote.  Voting ends 11:59pm Friday night.  The winner will win a 1Gb flash drive courtesy of ASPEX.  Here’s Volume 1’s mystery picture:

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Close up Pictures of Stir Bars (with a Wide Angle Lens!)

A while ago, we had an offer from ASPEX, a microanalysis company, to provide a free SEM scan of an object of our choosing (that post being a follow up to our M&M mystery post).  The stir bar won and was sent away, never to return.

The results are in, and they are as cool as expected.  Analyst Ben Abraham captured several images of our very, very old stir bar, with corresponding chemical composition analysis.  The stir bar contains several elements, some expected, some not.  At various sampling points around the stir bar, carbon, oxygen, aluminum, silicon, iron, sodium, magnesium, sulfur, chlorine, calcium, zinc, fluorine, and chromium (!)  were identified.  Clearly, after several good years of wear and tear, the surface of the stir bar becomes irregular and several impurities remain on the stir bar.

As a follow up, it would be interesting to see what a brand new stir bar looks like.  Also, it would be interesting to see what two old stir bars look like after a lifetime of cleaning by only soap and water, versus one cleaned regularly with aqua regia or piranha mix or some such cleaning solution.  I don’t know how this analyzed stir bar was cleaned.  Most likely soap and water.

Make sure you click over to the ASPEX site to see the rest of the images and results.  You can also check out the rest of the site, including their desktop SEM.

PS, if you don’t get the joke in the title, watch this.

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Chemistry YouTube Videos

• Hitler Tries To Learn Organic Chemistry. A funny chemical take on an old meme.
  
• An other awesome video from the Periodic Table of Videos guys, this time for chlorine. I’ve always enjoyed their informative and entertaining videos. However, I will have to lightheartedly take Pete Licence to task. Pete says at ~1:15, “Chlorine wants an other electron to get that noble gas configuration and it will move heaven and Earth to get that electron.” But, chlorine gas already has a filled octet and that is the chemical used in the experiment. It probably isn’t the best idea to infer a discussion from the electron affinity for a single chlorine atom in the gas-phase and use it as a simplification, with a smile and a wink, when explaining the reactivity of chlorine gas.
  
• Paulina Mason thought you guys might like her attempt at singing the Periodic Table.
  

  I study at Carleton University in Canada. The video shows a very cool way how our chemistry professor encouraged memorizing all 117 elements of the periodic table. We had to make up a melody, and sing them in front of 500 people class, for an extra mark. That was hilarious:)

Mitch

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Bad Pun Day

I don’t have a pun for this graphical abstract, but I can’t help thinking it disapproves of me looking at it.

Graphical abstract from: Dynamic viscoelastic behavior of individual Gram-negative bacterial cells.

Mitch

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If Jim Henson Taught Chemistry

I’ve had a few people tell me about this video, and saw it on BoingBoing as well. It’s creative, if not terribly informative, I guess I don’t know what I should expect from something like this. I do know I thought that at least one fuzzy member of the cast might be of help when cleaning glassware.

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Teasing Undergrads

Because undergrads make it so easy….

From Chemical Stick Figures

Mitch

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Poll (Updated and Bumped)

In response to the post on the M&M caper, a representative from a company named ASPEX, a provider of “microanalysis solutions for a wide range of production environments” including SEM and EDX analysis, contacted us and offered a free SEM scan of any object of our choosing using their benchtop SEM (updated to massage wording).  Naturally, we jumped at the opportunity.

I immediately contacted the Raleigh News and Observer to see if the subject of the M&M article wanted to provide some of the tooth-like sugar lump for SEM analysis.  How cool would that have been?  I received two responses from the N&O.  a) the state used all of the sample in figuring out the composition of the sugar lump (really?  The WHOLE thing to find out it was sugar?), and b) my use of the N&O’s image was in violation of copyright, and I needed to remove the image.  oops.

So, since we can’t get our hands on that, let’s have a vote to see what we should send to ASPEX for analysis!  Choose from a few foodstuffs as well as a few labstuffs, or tell us what you want to see up close and personal.  Voting will be open until Thursday so cast your vote NOW!

ASPEX also wants readers to know that you, too, can send in any sample of your choosing for a complimentary SEM scan!  Just head over to their website and fill out the form.  If the object you vote for doesn’t win, send it yourself!  Make sure you let us know, so we can link to the results and have a regular picture swap.

Happy scanning.

RESULTS!

Well, thanks to everyone who voted. The teflon stir bar won a decisive plurality, getting 40.4% of the vote. An M&M made a strong late game run, and finished 2nd with 23.4%. Rounding out the top 5 were Peanut (17%), Rubber septum (10.6%) and Other (8.5%).

I’ll be sending ASPEX a nice, scuffed up, old teflon stir bar soon. Let’s see what happens to one of these things after years of hard work.

Don’t forget, if you want to send in something of your own for a free SEM scan, just head to their website for the form to fill out.

Here is a picture of  a ‘new’ stir bar and the stir bar we’re sending for SEM to see what it looks like really really close up.

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