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Web Videos Show Off the Wonders of Chemistry
Timmy writes "Wired Science has picked ten of the best videos from YouTube and their own show on PBS to highlight the wonderful things chemistry can do. Only four of them involve fire or explosions. The rest range from music videos about the polymerase chain reaction to reactions that repeatedly change color. One shows how to pour sodium acetate stalagmites. Another shows Chris Hardwick giving instructions for building a glow stick while making absurd comments."
And some chemistry videos are just scams (^_^)
If you can't get your hands on some of those chemicals at your local pharmacy, diet coke and mentos always works.
Orbis terrarum est non altus satis
.... tells you right out how many include fire and/or explosions. That's the sort of data a geek REALLY needs.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Too bad the youtube version of this video requires you to log in and be over 18...
My high school chemistry teacher did the gummy bear combustion thing. Filled the entire room with smoke.
He also did the color-change chemical thing. Its freaky to see in real life.
Ever see the mythbusters about the coke and Mentos? At the end they make giant exploding bubble foam. We did that too.
Man, I loved my chemistry teacher. He probably only got away with all that shit is because he retired that year.
...a clear victory for thermite... May the gods smile upon whoever decided to combine aluminum and rust. But, this was posted on Sunday so I have to wait all the way until next weekend to spark anything up... =(He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
From TFV:
"Adding something cold to thermite doesn't cancel it out, it just makes it angry."
Wow, just wow. We've talked about this kind of thing before in the context of CSI and Mythbusters.
I really wish that popular science shows would at least attempt to bring some education into the mix. I am not against blurring of education and entertainment, but the videos presented are simply bad entertainment. Why not give an elementary discussion of 'heat capacity' or energy that is associated with phase transitions, etc? It would still give the explosion of thermite and provide a small education.
Does anybody remember the old PBS series "3-2-1 contact" or "Square One?" It had education plus entertainment in a nice combination IMHO. What I would like to see is a Mythbusters-type show where they try to predict things *first* with introduction to physics / chemistry concepts, and then test their findings (with explosions and the hilarious consequences.) They do this a bit with their *Warning Science Content* segments, but it could be made a bit more rigorous.
Yes, I know the arguments that this is making kids "interested in science," but true research / science is very little about explosions, and these shows are, in my experience, not making kids interested in the rigor or reality of scientific reasoning. The question regarding thermite was proposed by a 30+ year old man!
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
...about how chemistry-as-a-hobby is increasingly a victim of the War on Terror (TM).
Most things are accessible if you're creative enough. The benign stuff you can just buy outright from a chemical supply store. Now that the interwebs are available to the unwashed masses, the nasty stuff can be improvised.
My friends' 10-year old daughter was complaining recently about inaccessible chemicals interfering with her science fair project. (She wanted sulphuric acid - Her mom insisted on lemon juice because she "didn't want to be put on a list"). Her mom complained (half-heartedly - mostly in fun) after I told the girl that hydrochloric acid could be purchased without ID under the name muriatic acid and that sulphuric acid was readily available from car batteries and could be concentrated by boiling it until white smoke appeared. I even took the extra precaution of pointing out the need for proper ventilation.
I'm straying off-topic, but when on a roll...
Seems to me that using dangerous chemicals along with kids is preferable to what I did as a youth - Swiping them off-hours from the school chem-locker, stashing them in the closet, and experimenting unsupervised. On a related note, the first time I tried to swipe gasoline by storing it in a Styrofoam Sonic cup was messy, but an open door into a whole new kind of fun.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Dear Slashdot,
More this and less Microsoft/RIAA/FSF crap.
Sincerely,
BadAnalogyGuy
Chemistry isn't as nearly as 'cool' as these pretty make-fire videos lead one to believe. Every explosion a young chemist commits brings them closer and closer the sad reality of their career later in life, performing volumetric titrations day in day out in labs with limited ventilation and no capacity to do dumb shit with metal sodium. Chemists are nothing more than glorified, poor cooks who use class 'A' glassware.
Does this mean we can cast fire, acid, cold, and lightning spells now?
-Aegis Runestone-
i've really been enjoying Breaking Bad on amc
high school chemistry teacher gets lung cancer, decides to leave the world without saddling his family with debt, so he begins to make meth
in the episode i just saw tonight
***SPOILER***
he goes into a drug lord's den with a bag of meth. said drug lord isn't very impressed with the man and has put his partner in the hospital. so said mild mannered chemistry teacher, now unafraid of death, takes the "meth" he brought with him and throws it on the floor, hard
it's really fulminated mercury
BOOM
meth drug lord meets fulminated mercury beats any youtube chemistry video i've seen
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Potassium permanganate is purple.
Besides, even the video says "chlorate".
I think they could have used a bigger bucket of liquid nitrogen on number 10.
Two videos, two errors. Eight more to go...
No sig today...
I'm curious though, what school the 10 year old goes to. Want to start sending my siblings-children there!
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I never realised Gummy bears were so toxic!
Wow, #2, biovisions was by far the best, IMHO. What a great concept and beautiful implementation. I'd love to see more of this type of stuff (going to Google it after this reply). Wouldn't it be great to have a "Google Body" where you could zoom in and zoom out on a simulated body?
I freggin' love this stuff.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I already had my juicer out too.
They put my family back together :-).
http://xkcd.com/346/
Eh, big deal.
Web videos have been showing off the wonders of biology for years.
Where is the video of Youtube's servers burning in the the /. effect?
Now that is something I would register to see...
When the country falls into chaos, politicians talk about 'patriotism'. Lao-Tzu
Brainiac is to a science show as a parakeet is to a velociraptor.
Seriously, I watched a season of it and was dumbfounded at the amount of misinformation and fake stunts they pulled. Once they put a fire extinguisher into a oven, and it exploded in a fireball shortly after. Yes, that's right. A fireball.
Mythbusters may err on the side of theatrics, but they never fake a result. And they have people who actually know stuff about science, instead of Richard Hammond.
I read "Bringing Up Boys" a while back, and right of the bat there were some amusing tales of what boys in particular get up to.
Now ad science to this mix - and my son who is now 9months old...
Why, we CAN experience our childhood adventures all over.
"Honey, I am NOT just messing around... this stuff is important... yes I know he's only nine months old... well by the time he is old enough I'll want to have had this sorted out no problem..."
And why do only four of those experiments explode?
MORE 'SPLOSIONS!
Seven Days with Ubuntu Unity
I found more chemistry videos online. They are pretty great and I learned new things from them. Check them out: http://www.sutree.com/Learn.aspx?q=chemistry
One BlendTec blender, with blades replaced with sodium. One bag of Mentos, reduced to a fine powder with said BlendTec blender. One bottle of coke. One Chuck Norris action figure. And a VERY, VERY long stick to turn the blender on with.
(What do you need the Chuck Norris for? Oh, the question you should be asking is, what does he need you for. And the answer is, he doesn't need you for anything, so you'd better get running while you still can.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Kinda. Depends on what you define the scientific method to be. [I'm reiterating a point made previously (http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=466370&cid=22553660)]. New scientific knowledge (and let's not go out on a cartesian limb here) is the product of two major components, one of them being being the design and execution of experiments combined with peer review.
The other is insights, ideas, and imaginations. There is no well-known algorithm, no "scientific method", by which we can generate ideas and infer connections in the data we observe. All we can do (as far as I know) is to take the ideas we generate and apply the first component, rigorous testing, to discard the ones of non-maximal usefulness.
This is elegantly summed up in the phrase "It is not the purpose of science to produce infinite wisdom, but to guard against infinite folly" [citation needed] (linked post says Brecht).
As an anecdotal example of what I'm talking about, it one day dawned on me that there must be a reason why code colouring is such a deal-breaking feature of editors (in the mind of most coders, at least), and that the reason is that colours are in some way perceived more readily (easier or faster). [That's the insight component]. Later, I listened to the an OCW intropsych lecture about visual perception, and indeed the lecturer made a few experiments (without the rigour part) with the class showing that:
1. Finding a red circle in a blob of green ones is fast
2. Finding a tee in a blob of ells is slow.
3. Finding a tee in a blob of ells is fast if there's a red tee, no red ells and a bunch of green letters (my assumption about the details).
Presumably, he could apply a bit of rigour and publish a peer-reviewed article containing "my" idea (only it's probably not that new by now).
The important point is: how did I come up with the idea? It just sorta' popped into my head, and no methodology could reliably have produced that idea.
I believe the problem is even more serious for college students. Is there any statistics?
, because hobby chemistry was pretty much destroyed well before 9/11. The "War on Drugs" caused most chemical sellers to eliminate sales to individuals, and in some states (like Texas) it is illegal to even own laboratory glassware without a permit (and regular inspections) from local police.
Add in the effect of lawyers and insurance companies (who drove chemistry sets off of toy store shelves), and you have one more "perfect storm" contributing to the ongoing "dumbing down" of the US.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I'm not sure (but I might be) that I represent most people my age... but if chemistry isn't your thing, then the ONLY way I'm interested in it, is if it involves fire and/or drugs.
Saw a couple of the videos but most were blocked from my proxy at work. I'll have to wait till I get home. In the mean time go to YouTube and search for "steve spangler". He has some entertaining clips on science experiments. He's beed on channel 9 here in Denver, and also the Ellen show.
Truly entertaining educational videos: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/lookaroundyou/media/ , and more on Youtube.
Another great video: Mercury Drop Experiment
A cyclic redox reaction on the surface of a drop of mercury causes it to wobble around. Chemical energy -> motion.
Click "Activity 3" or "Activity 5" for the coolest ones.
Does anyone know the formula for the color-changing experiment? That amazes me, and assuming I don't kill myself or my neighbors in the process, I would love to try it out.
Plus, if anyone knows the recipe, do you also know the reaction that is taking place and why it happens repeatedly?
The other videos were cool, but that was the only one I just kept repeatedly staring at in amazement.
Or the consequences of these wonders, which all home chemists need to consider before trying to make them or anything else.
If you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people. If you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree
It seems fairly clear in retrospect:
1) Water sinks o bottom of jar full of molten wax
2) Water boils
3) Big problems
The problem is, how do I warn my sons about these kinds of risks without encouraging them to do stuff equally as stupid?
Unfortunately, based on my antics and similar antics that I've since learned about my dad pulling in his youth, I think I'm doomed...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.