chemistry experiment

A short experiment dissolving the aluminum of a Coca-Cola can with drain cleaner to reveal the clear plastic film lining inside.

PBS Space Time considers whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon, comparing the two elements' chemistry and why silicon is the most plausible alternative.

NileRed tries to make a ring from pure purple gold, a gold-aluminium intermetallic that is brittle and hard to work with. The 53-minute video follows the chemistry and many failed attempts before he produces a finished ring.

NileRed makes radioactive uranium glass from scratch, showing the chemistry involved and the green fluorescence under a blacklight. The video includes warnings about handling radioactive material.

Cody's Lab obtains pure heavy water (D2O) and drinks it as a taste test, reporting its flavor and feel. It is a short self-experiment.

A short animated lesson, featuring Dr. Quantum, on the double slit experiment and how observing electrons seems to change their behavior.

Veritasium visits Richard Lenski's lab to explain the decades-long E. coli evolution experiment, which asks how repeatable evolution is and shows bacteria evolving to use a new food source.

Periodic Videos visits a fluorine expert to show how reactive the element is in action. It also includes a discussion of fluoride and tooth enamel.

ACS Reactions investigates why Mexican Coke, supposedly cane sugar sweetened, tested as having glucose and fructose, explaining that sucrose breaks down in acidic soda.

The Explosions&Fire channel taste-tests the chloride salts of the alkali metals (lithium through cesium), plus some alkaline earth metals and ammonium. The presenter describes the flavors, and the results are more pleasant than expected.

A social experiment in which an 18-year-old woman runs a Tinder profile as a man and sees how differently the dating experience plays out for men.

Veritasium revisits Thomas Young's original double slit experiment with light, showing how interference supports the wave nature of light. It uses a pond-wave demonstration to explain the pattern.

Excerpts from W. Edwards Deming's Red Bead Experiment, where workers draw beads from a bowl and are judged on red ones that are largely down to chance. It shows how system variation, not individual effort, drives results.

A Swedish fiber provider's short experiment in which volunteers wear Oculus Rift headsets that add lag to their view of real life. They try to do everyday tasks like making pancakes.

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on designing spiroligomer molecules and building Clasp, a Common Lisp on LLVM that interoperates with C++, to program molecular design. It covers the chemistry, automatic differentiation for force fields, and how the compiler is built.

A SciShow episode in which Hank Green introduces five of the most dangerous chemicals, from lethal toxins to substances that explode on contact. It is an entertaining overview of extreme chemical hazards.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows how to make small batches of specialty glass with minimal equipment, including designing and making photochromic glass. He covers ingredients, melting and the challenges involved.

Professor Jeff Dahn lectures on why lithium-ion batteries die and how chemistry changes could make them last decades.

NileRed attempts to make transparent wood, inspired by an AvE video, by removing lignin and infiltrating the wood with resin. It is a long, detailed walkthrough of the chemistry and the practical difficulties.

Cody's Lab collects a sample of dust from the side of a highway and refines it to recover platinum-group metals deposited by catalytic converters. The video walks through the chemistry of separating and assaying the precious metals.

A hidden-camera social experiment in a park where three people try to steal a bike in the open: a white teenager, a black teenager and a young woman. It records how bystanders react to each.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy introduces his series on Michael Faraday's lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle. He describes the free companion book and the commentary and caption features that help modern viewers.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make radiative sky cooling paint from grocery and hardware store materials, including a novel calcium carbonate microsphere synthesis. The paint can cool a surface below ambient air temperature in direct sunlight without electricity.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

Lex Fridman interviews University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin about the origin of life, aliens, complexity and consciousness. The conversation centers on Cronin's assembly theory.

Steve Mould explains homochirality: why biological molecules like sugars and amino acids come in only one handedness. He covers ideas about how this asymmetry might have arisen, touching on meteorite samples and RNA.

Christian Schafmeister's Google Tech Talk on Clasp and CANDO, a Common Lisp implementation on LLVM and C++ used to design molecules, including energy minimization and force-field calculations.

Synthetic organic chemist James Tour gives a lecture arguing that origin-of-life research is far from explaining how life began. The talk was published by the Discovery Institute and drew sharp criticism.

A 1967 live film of Tom Lehrer performing his patter song "The Elements" in Copenhagen, reciting the chemical elements to a Gilbert and Sullivan tune. It is a short, polished example of his satirical piano-and-voice style.

Thunderf00t presents high-speed camera footage of alkali metals such as sodium and NaK reacting with water. The footage shows that the explosion is not caused by hydrogen ignition, as the usual explanation says. It is a Coulomb explosion driven by electrons leaving the metal.

A Capella Science parody of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, rewritten about molecular bonding and orbitals and sung a cappella.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

The Thought Emporium synthesizes chicken noodle soup from pure chemicals, following an original patent for artificial chicken flavor. The video explores how many chemicals it takes to make a convincing soup.

LabCoatz uses mass spectrometry, with help from other science YouTubers, to reverse engineer the Coca-Cola flavor and builds a chemically-identical replica. The video walks through a year of work on the formula.

AlphaPhoenix builds a scaled-down version of the Veritasium electricity thought experiment using about a kilometer of wire and an oscilloscope. He measures how the signal actually propagates and explains the result.

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

Doug McGuff presents the biochemistry behind high-intensity strength training and the paleo diet, including how the body stores and burns fat. It is a roughly hour-and-a-half full-length lecture.

Viznut demonstrates bytebeat, experimental music generated by extremely short C programs. It is the first of a series of videos on the technique.