Cake From Lab Chemicals

The Nottingham crew that has brought the entertaining hair-stylings of Martyn Poliakoff with their series of Youtube videos on each element in the periodic table (periodicvideos.com) has celebrated its first birthday. In honor of the occasion they made a cake out of lab chemicals. The only non-hazardous labeled materials used were butter and eggs, which are impossible to find an appropriate lab substitute.

Although chemists don’t have a chemistry rock star, Youtube has made Martyn Poliakoff as close as we’ll get. Unless someone is bold enough to go the Paris Hilton route.

Safety Note: The cake baker, Samantha Tang, has no gloves on although she has a lovely accent and introduces me to a new interjection, “Pants!” In the background there are other lab workers without lab coats and their personal protective equipment.

Phil first covered the website earlier this year: The Periodic Table of Videos

Mitch

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The Periodic Table of Videos

I’d like to share this link with you: The Periodic Table of Videos (http://www.periodicvideos.com/).

A group of lecturers around Prof. Martyn Poliakoff from the University of Nottingham have compiled this “Periodic Table”, which contains a video of a few minutes for every (!) known element. Sometimes it’s an explosive experiment (e.g., Hydrogen), in other cases they simply show a sample, while giving some information about the element. I must say, I am impressed how they manage to come up with something for all the lanthanoids and actinoids. For Ytterbium, Yttrium, Terbium and Erbium, they even went on a trip to Ytterby (Sweden), the town these elements are named after. A great distraction for rainy days, and also a useful video collection for teaching!

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