Extractions&Ire - 2025-08-18
Behind every decontamination journey is a contamination story. Twitter: https://x.com/Explosions_Fire Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplosionsAndFire/ Join the Discord!! https://discord.gg/VR6Fz9g Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ExplosionsandFire Music: Tracks taken from the album ‘Cerulean Memories’ by the artist Aeroplankton. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EgmES7LhwI Bandcamp: https://aeroplankton.bandcamp.com/album/cerulean-memories A big thank you to Indigo for all the help with the editing again!! References: "Low-Cost Synthesis of Highly Luminescent Colloidal Lead Halide Perovskite Nanocrystals by Wet Ball Milling" https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsanm.8b00038 https://doi.org/10.1021/acsanm.8b00038 "Tuning the Optical Properties of CsPbBr3 Nanocrystals by Anion Exchange Reactions with CsX Aqueous Solution" https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325880658_Tuning_the_Optical_Properties_of_CsPbBr3_Nanocrystals_by_Anion_Exchange_Reactions_with_CsX_Aqueous_Solution http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s11671-018-2592-4
This is the most positive interaction he's ever had with the color yellow
I still dont trust yellow one bit 😡
Absolutely true
It's because the fear of yellow was overpowered by the innately human craving for lead
"That's Piss" - This is why I love this channel xD
He's growing.
“I run a serious business now”
* proceeds doing his work in a flooded shed *
* goes to bunnings every week *
Welcome to Straya! 🤣
It's a serious shed.
the shed has a suit and a tie
Conclusion: the most successful way to do chemistry is not doing chemistry 😅.
"forget about the chemicals for a year and then it does what you want" truly is the dream, congratulations.
Sums up my PhD. Spent a couple of years failing to make what I wanted, then found a compound I'd made in my first year at the end of my second year. Tested it and got my first good result of my PhD.
"Temporally induced Nanocrystal morphology transfer"
Hey Tom.
I did my PhD on perovskites. The emission of perovskite nanomaterials is in fact size dependent like any other semiconductor. However, most perovskite nanocrystals are too large for the excitons to be significantly quantum confined (they are always a little confined though). This is where the distinction between perovskite nanocrystals and perovskite quantum dot comes in. All quantum dots are nanocrystals, but not all nanocrystals are quantum dots. You can make CsPbBr3 quantum dots by increasing the amount of halide you have relative to the lead and caesium. A good source for this is zinc bromide as zinc doesn’t become incorporated into the product, however, this is used in hot injection and I don’t know if it will work for ball milling.
Another really simple route to a nanocrystal solution is just to dissolve your CsBr and PbBr2 in DMSO with both Oleic acid and Oleylamine (2:1 ratio of Oleic acid to Oleylamine) and then just pour that solution into toluene at 80 C. The perovskite will crystallise immediately and you will get a colloidal solution. It’s like a budget version of hot injection.
Feel free to contact me if you want more tips and tricks!
Awesome insight! Boosting with a like! 😁
I always love when an expert in the field leaves a super friendly and helpful comment. I'm just waiting for my turn, so Tom needs to do a video on cyclic peptides 😅
@jacobtierney4419 pretty sure this field is so specialised that a PhD is the entry level. Tom just finished his. 10,000 hours and that. (but yeah, nerd community spirit ftw)
A fellow perovskite PhD dooer! im just in my 1st year so got a lot to learn but its so cool to see my favourite youtube science dooers approach thisear so got a lot to learn but so cool to see my favourite youtube science d
Hello fellow Perovshite survivors! I did my MSc on them and I am never touching them again if I can help it.
Wow. This might be the only time someone opted to explain something atomic in terms of probability densities and it actually did help make more sense. Well done!
You would love floatheadphysics then
Weyl done
He’s really a physicist, ya know. Or at least that’s what the U decided he’d get.
Summery: Getting trench foot while doing chemistry in a shed while worrying that he will poison baby birds with lead. (He runs a serious business now)
Trench foot isn't a very summery ailment
@stevenfarrow2377it's winter in Australia, dude
Shed Lead: 2 tasty 2 poisonous
31:26 Shakes vial in ultrasonic "This extra .25 hz of agitation will do the trick"
I think they mean one of those wand type ones that Steve Mould has.
lol 😆👍
Teknologia
and glass vials are not very good at passing ultrasound.
This made me giggle so much
Stopped eating my lead to watch this.
I❤lead acetate
I love to eat lead azide 🥰
Tetraethyllead is my fav drink!
It is the best flavor of metal.
It’s in the air so you never really stop. Thank you air planes.
"No rave is worth lead exposure" my friend you are the Sun Tzu of chemistry
now i wanna see him try to make one without lead that you could put on nails
"No rave is worth lead exposure" ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
The utter silence when he shined the torch into the jar and it came back just overpoweringly green all over was really funny.
It’s something he’s never seen before and had absolutely no idea what to do.
So rare for an experiment to go to plan!
I had the same reaction... mid sentence stop and stare with brain trying to formulate an answer to the eternal question "...wut"
I was expecting red + green = yellow, not a vibrant green.
I think everyone was in absolute shock when it worked that ridiculously well especially with how little material was in there
20:14 call it "aging", if they can do it with wine and cheese, you can do it with perovskites
mmm delicious dry aged lead
I like my perovskites like I like my women
@jeremymcadam7400 Full of lead
@jeremymcadam7400 Ground up with a bunch of solvents?
22:46, I loved this part. The pure shock of something not going brown or black or red
"Joined the war on the side of the exciton" with a crude stencil of broken solar panel needs to be a shirt.
"How I avoid bad yields is just by not calculating." also a banger.
"Demineralizing our own water! That's sovereign capability!" also a banger.
My favorite was "I don't know if it's gonna work, you don't know if it's gonna work. There's a lotta lead." Words to live by.
FINALLY A NEW MERCH DROP!?! 😂
“This isn’t a numbers channel”
"id rather be shooting lead than shooting blanks"
"It's gonna have to contend with the red from the—" glows perfectly green
The stunned silence was appropriate. That just worked as if it was supposed to xD
"abandon your crystals in a shed for 11 months" not the most useless scientific paper I had come across 😂
I LOVE LEAD
Lead is sweet, tastes delicious, and all the negative press on lead, is so that the UPPER CLASS can keep all the delicious metal to themselves. Like they did with lead based face and wig powder in the 1800s.
mmm sweet and tasty
ME TOO
daily injection made my brain glow :>
YUMMY
“The birds might come back…”
* checks next door
* faint avian glowing from a dark corner.
“Yeap, that’ll be them.”
Faint Avian Glowing sounds like an amazing name for a band
1:07 not enough real world scientists engage in ominous foreshadowing
You pick up an abandoned experiment a year later and just knock it out of the park? Lead really is amazing! I want glowing lead nails on one hand and glowing radium nails on the other hand.
Moral of the story: it can go yellow, as long as it's got lead in it it's fine
the amazing power of lead wrangles the yellow into submission
also your profile pic is really sick!
Love for Lead > Hate for Yellowchem
That’s why the old alchemists made so much money
@gakulonthanks! I recommend you make your own it's really fun
I wonder if the yellow in the tumbler second time was due to lead, lotsa yellow lead compounds.
Dude we are running in my university lab with tungsten carbide milling cups for synthesizing thermal electric materials. Recently our lab had been trying to use ball milling as well as microwave processing for crystal size reduction. The really neat thing with microwave processing is that we can cause a crystal phase transition from say cubic to tetragonal and retain that phase transition post microwave processing. Currently my research is focusing on producing amorphous Si and Te for thermoelectrics and optoelectronics. It is so cool to see this being done outside of conventional means. You are one of the reasons I got into the material science side of electrical engineering. Thank you so much for helping me to find my passion.
Hey mate, that could actually work really nicely with some of the research my group is doing. Do you have any good DOIs about this crystal phase change?
talking of bumper stickers, "no rave is worth lead exposure" also goes pretty hard
The stunned reaction to the procedure actually working is priceless
I like how the mullet showed up the second you finished school. You're a true child of Oz, Tom.
It's so much more on brand isn't it
It genuinely made me laugh when you hit the jar with the torch, expecting it not to work. "But it does have to compete with the red from the...", just throwing the UV torch in silence and disbelief.
Love the electrical cables in puddles, probably connected to questionable equipment - health and safety is for cowards, go LEAD!
This is why the RCD was invented. Bloody Aussies. 🤣❤
He's unstoppable, the madman!
7:28 "I don't know if it's going to work. You don't know if it's going to work. There's a lot of lead."
I work in a research hospital with a cyclotron and many radioactive devices and I am stealing this so hard.
The silence of your success was deafening.
I really wish my solid state physics professor described exciton and charged particle movement as 'pissing off into the conduction band.' I think I would have done so much better in that class
Hearing about electrons pissing off is by far some of the most entertaining explanation of chemistry I've heard. And he's got very stiff competition with a Canadian....
"you want the electron to piss off out of its hole, go trough some wires and then your bitcoin miner or whatever"
I about chocked on my coffee. Comedy gold (lead?) and class chemistry is why I fucking love this channel.
Imagine he pulled out a mortar and pestle when he explained the tumbler wouldn’t work 😂
I'd rather be firein' lead than shootin blanks! YEE HAW PARDNEER
You can see why he has a degree in lasers cause anytime there's a new light he's mesmerized
Maybe the ultrasonic bath took longer to be effective because there was too little water in the bath. Apparently your supposed to fill them 2/3 to hit resonance I think. Love seeing the colorful lead chemistry
Agreed! I used a sonicator for lots of my reactions, and there's definitely a lot of variability in success depending on how deep the bath is and where the reaction is placed in the bath. (Best for me always seemed to be with the bath at least 3/4 full, about 1/3 of the way from the edge of the bath, suspended so it wasn't directly against the bottom of the bath.) If I used a capped test tube, I could actually find the ideal location just by holding the tube in the bath and moving it until I got max vibration. Then, clamp it in that location.
42:32 I can confirm that Strontium Aluminate glow powder is excellent for putting in nail polish and resin. It works very well and it's relatively non toxic. Highly recommend.
Can't speak for any other viewers, but I really enjoy when you talk more about the science.
28:00 This shot of the perovskite fluorescing that brightly under the blacklight in a sunlit room is arguably even more striking than the highliters-in-the-dark demo. That's incredible.
It's shocking how often the secret is indeed lead.
Which is funny because I remember reading that perovskite solar cells are more efficient than the silicon based solar cells. Unfortunately they still have problems to work out, but lead (while dangerous) seems to be very useful.
And when the secret isn't lead, it's cadmium.
@pocketsizedweeb the leaching issue is going to be a doozy to 'figure out'
@pocketsizedweebthe problem is that perovskites decompose under uv light, which is a challenge for solar panels.
You should know that today I recommended your channel to a coworker with a degree in geology specifically because he likes crystals and crystalline matrices, and I referenced the original lead perovskite video specifically. I also told him you make all your stuff in your backyard shed, which he found amusing.
So anyway you've made your way to the retirement-aged geologist-turned-mailmen demographic 😂
The real Ire of this video isn't the extraction its that the camera can't articulate how bright the fluorescence is.
45:23 - The forbidden fruit roll-up.
Lead and nano crystals sounds lovely to lungs
What if asbestos also gave you lead poisoning? XD
“How I avoid bad yield is by not calculating.” 😂
YAAAY MORE LEAD
We crave the lead
It seems the lead has already gotten to yall.
The fact this worked so well means he's bound to absolutely, catastrophically bugger up a future experiment.
Breaking up the scintillator crystal as a source would have added some bonus thallium into this wonderful toxic mess. Awesome results with the fluorescence!
Sometimes you get a stark reminder of how specialized some of our fields can get. The citation at 33:50 for saying caesium iodide is used in radiation detectors makes total sense, but as a radiochemist it feels like the most obvious thing in the world that we use CsI:Tl scintillators
FINALLY MORE LEAD
@ExtractionsAndIre - 2025-08-18
The music in this video is from the the album ‘Cerulean Memories’ by the artist Aeroplankton. Check it out here! Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EgmES7LhwI
Bandcamp: https://aeroplankton.bandcamp.com/album/cerulean-memories
As always, if you make music that you think would be cool, please email me a link to some tracks, thanks!!
@Molecule_Madness - 2025-08-18
When you’re finished with the big cubane series, will you then make energetic cubane compounds?
@Molecule_Madness - 2025-08-18
I don’t mean ONC, but other nitrated cubane compounds.
@onyxmn13 - 2025-08-18
she be extracting till I Ire
@PetraKann - 2025-08-19
Enhanced perovskital nano-crystal fluorescence via a transient 'shed abandonment' chemical synthesis pathway.
@retard223 - 2025-08-19
One of the most American things I've ever heard 🇺🇲🇺🇲🇺🇲🥰🇦🇺