Steve takes a long while to get to the interesting chemistry part of the video, spending a whole lot of time explaining our sense of taste and how each taste aspect (sweet, sour, savory, etc) work.
It's really interesting, and it's really great applications of macromolecule chemistry.
Admittedly, the answer to the video's title question turns out to be less interesting and more obvious (once Steve explains it) than it might have.
This just seems dumb, so, so, so remarkably dumb.
There is one chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, who famously tasted every chemical he discovered.
I'll warn you that there are some casual, NSFW words here and there in the video. It is, after all, a bunch of idiot friends (with access to chemistry lab supplies) tasting their way through the alkali metal chlorides.
Please do NOT try to repeat this experiment.
LD50 values from SDSs, links included...
Oh, wow...
I've posted about fire tornados before, even including one of the Slow Mo Guys the first time they filmed the multi-fan set-up.
I've posted about rainbow fire before, usually in service of saying "don't use methanol."
I've never posted about rainbow fire tornados before.
Do yourself a favor and watch this, especially the slow motion rainbow fire tornados at 1:20 and again at 4:40.
So pretty...so pretty...
If anybody finds an explanation as to why the colors appear in rainbow order in the flame tornado, please share it, because I've no clue at all.
Tom Scott's YouTube channel is among my favorites. I subscribe to his main channel and highly recommend that you do, too. His second channel, not so much.
I very much appreciate that he does research to verify what his videos say and often posts links to his cited sources in the description of his videos.
So here when he says that he has done his research and can't definitively say that the radon gas that is intentionally breathed in for pain relief is either scientifically verifiable or is scientific bunk, I believe him and appreciate the transparency in this video.
I certainly took a similar journey to what Tom describes at 2:20: skepticism, looking at research (I admittedly didn't do independent research), and finally *shrug*. I hope that someone takes Tom up on his offer to have somebody do a double blind study on the radon 'mine' showcased in the video.
A while back I posted about the BBC show Look Around You!, a parody of distance learning shows from the late 70s and early 80s. I find the parody hilarious, but I have come to understand through the years that satire is only funny if you're in on the joke.
So, I'd like to let a few more folks in on the joke. I'm assuming that the Look Around You! shows are spoofing British versions of the shows from the videos below. Admittedly, the shows below are a little more plot-driven that Look Around You! is, but it's still a paper thin plot.
The videos below are from KET, Kentucky Educational Television, the PBS network that I grew up watching on the Louisville PBS stations. They were designed to help prepare adults for their GED (General Education Development) tests. If those tests were passed - and they're still around and available - then the person would effectively have earned a high school diploma.
The shows would be played on local PBS or often available as VHS tapes at local libraries. Students would watch the shows and work through a workbook that they would have ordered and purchased in advance. I remember shows in math and English, but I assume that there were also social studies and science shows, too. The shows that I remember tended to have loose plots tying the lessons together.
There was the English program...
...the math program...
You can even check out what the workbook would have looked like thanks to the magic of YouTube.
And, yes, I remember watching some of the shows because I was that nerdy. I would have been in elementary or middle school at the time and likely would have looked at most of the concepts as being things I already knew.
But, man, I was always down for some 3-2-1 Contact.
That's funny...and at least somewhat dangerous.
In the above video Cody - I assume that's his name, the YouTube channel is Cody's Lab - breathes in sulfur hexafluoride, a dense, inert gas known to deepen the sound of your voice similarly to how helium raises the pitch of your voice.
Cody then immediately breathes in perfluorobutane, an even more dense gas that makes your voice even deeper.
He then comments, "wow, that's actually hard to get back out of your lungs."
And there's the danger.
Neither sulfur hexafluoride or perfluorobutane are reactive or toxic. They won't do anything themselves to your body. but they will push the air out of your lungs and make it tough for that air to get back into your lungs. The perfluorobutane, apparently, is even more effective at blocking your lungs from taking air back in because it's just that much denser than air...
I'm skeptical as to the veracity of this video short.
The video purports to show the mentos and (diet) coke experiment but performed underneath a layer of oil.
I feel like that's far less reaction that I would expect to see from the reaction - even under a vegetable oil 'cap' layer.
So I went hunting and found a few more videos.
This one fits more with what I would expect to see - at least it does at about 0:50. The freshly opened 2L of Coke has Mentos dropped straight into it moments before the 2L is lowered into the oil. You can see a similarly - if slightly less violent - reaction at 2:50 when multiple Mentos are dropped into a full layer of Coke at the bottom of the aquarium. Both are more vigorous than the video up top.
