Applied Science - 2025-01-01
Simple sugars can exist in multiple molecular conformations, some of which have different tastes and optical properties. Steve Mould's video on optical rotation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=975r9a7FMqc Reaction's video on Mexican Coke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NY66qpMFOYo Research paper describing enzymatic synthesis of L-glucose: https://nopr.niscpr.res.in/bitstream/123456789/17714/1/JSIR%2061%285%29%20361-365.pdf D-mannose on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Micro-Ingredients-Mannose-Supplement-Soluble/dp/B01L2TFP1Q My crystals were almost entirely the sweet form, but it is possible that your bag may have the bitter-tasting form to begin with. D-fructose on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Fructose-Fruit-Sugar-16-ZIN/dp/B07DXVSGJT D-glucose, also known as dextrose, also known as "corn sugar", can be found on Amazon, or beer homebrewing stores. https://www.patreon.com/c/AppliedScience
Relevant to what I do as a Job? No.
Relevant to one of my hobbies? No.
Still sat through every minute of this vid, because you can make anything interesting. Stay curious!
Ha, it is relevant to making chocolate or fudge and an assortment of candies.
Happy New Year, Ben!
It's really spooky to realize that equilibrium often means changing constantly. Reality is extremely messy when you really look closely at it.
What do you mean? What is constantly changing?
@leocurious9919 6:28 ff.
@leocurious9919A turns into B at the same rate as B turns into A is a simple example. Constantly changing, but proportions remain the same.
When you look at a whole lot of individual pieces, it inevitably turns into probability and statistics.
@pseudolullus Ah, on the microscopic scale, sure. Like temperature it is very different micro vs. macro.
Those shots downward of the reflected light rotating in different ways is by far one of the clearest examples of polarization of light. Its something that should be in chemistry textbooks even, its so succinct
I remember something that looked vaguely similar to that in my organic chemistry textbook, though it was definitely not a photograph, it was a drawing, but it looked somewhat similar. I also remember identifying chemicals using various basic instruments such as a meltemp, a polarimeter, and simple paper chromatography, and probably a few other things before we got on to using FTIR, NMR, MS, GC, LC, MS/MS, LC-MS/MS, GC-MS/MS, and probably a couple I can't remember.
It was an old textbook at the time as the professor was quite old and she said once she found a good textbook, she kept using that, same edition even, as long as she could (like she'd stop and look for a new one if it was hard to obtain or started to get expensive or whatever), she allowed us to use different editions if we could get them cheaper, and if the problem sets were different or something we could email her for a PDF but other than that it was up to us to figure out which page correlated to what.
I remember one professor for one of my classes that just said "you wont need a textbook" in an email, then first day he had a student come to the board to write down letters he spoke, which eventually wrote a link on the board to a download for the PDF of the textbook he wanted us to use. One of my favorite professors of all time, dude didn't want people paying (wasting) money to support the publisher, but he was also smart about it, he left zero papertrail of what he did, so if a student was a snitch, they'd have no proof. Even if they took a picture of the link on the board, it wasn't his handwriting!
@chemputer man, you had some amazing teachers it sounds like. I'm jealous a bit haha. I had some amazing professors at Sac State in the physics department, but none to the point if actively engaging in textbook piracy
@chemputerDo you remember the textbook titles? I'd like to read them!
1:35 This effect is actually something that happens when you drink tea. Most teas contain monosaccharides glucose and fructose in different amounts depending on the varietal and type of processing. Most teas are substantially sweeter when cooled down, and is especially perceptible with teas that usually are not that sweet when warm (for example, rock oolong teas).
I always wondered why this was, and though it was perhaps due to the tastebuds having a different response at different temperatures. I never figured it would be a change in the molecules!
Another tea observation, when I had tea at a friends house it was always a nice clear orange. For a long time I wondered what the secret to this was as my tea was always blackish. It turns out if you use soft water, distilled water, or add a little acid you can have a more clear orange tea. Seems I have hard water and it appears to react with the tea in some way, tannins?
@katgod Adding something acidic to hard water would check out then. Hard water is slightly alkaline from the calcium and soft water has much of the minerals removed so it is slightly acidic.
This channel really is a treasure trove. How many people are able to speak so comfortably of such a variety of subjects, making them accessible and interesting, and so often putting together incredibly advanced practical demonstrations...
We did a lot of work developing an enzymatic process for D-psicose, an epimer of D-fructose. It's about as sweet as table sugar but only 1/10th the calories. It's made from HFCS so you get an equilibrium between glucose, fructose and psicose. I think they use simulated moving bed chromatography to separate everything, but not sure.
Sugar chemistry and artificial sweeteners are pretty interesting. I always found it interesting that 2 amino acids linked together (aspartate and phenylalanine) with a methyl ester group and you get something 200 times sweeter than table sugar with no calories (aspartame, aka nutrasweet). Or sucralose, replace a few OH on sucrose with Cl and you get something 600 times sweeter. The history behind it is pretty interesting too, if true, when a scientist was told to test it and he thought he said taste it.
Oy vey play with polymers and see what happens..😅
I’ve been using Allulose (D-psicose) for a few years. Thank you for all your work! It’s made a great small business for me.
Once Trump gets RFK jr into place, HFCS will be banned! 😉
Aaa, but glucose, fructose etc. don't get stuck in the receptor. Artificial sweeteners do, hence multiplied effect.
Not true
Thank you for making a video, I’ve really missed your channel
Love the "Hands of Fate" reference. Torgo music is now stuck in my head.
I like to see “MST3K forever stream” the Torgo theme is now also in my head.
D-Manos: d-hands of fate
t-t-the master wouldn't like it.
@macmacox He sleeps in a bed of his own drippings.
Gave me whiplash! Hilarious.
Sugars tend to be a bit of a nightmare for chemistry students. These properties were discovered by Emil Fischer with not much more advanced capabilities than a high school chemistry lab, so he basically gave his best guess on how they actually worked and those guesses stuck as definitions. Now, a bunch of things relating to sugars are a bit backwards compared to our modern systematic nomenclature which can become rather confusing.
Franklin guessed at the polarity of the electron and we've been living with that decision ever since!
The thing with L and D, and with + and -, is that with just the formula, you can know if a sugar is L or D, but you can't know if its + or -, without experimental data (or simulation i guess)
That's probably why the notation never dissapeared. L/D is useful, even if L/D may not have been the most descriptive letters for it.
On the other hand, +/- is kind of a weird notation.
Imagine we added the color of a compound in its sistematic name. That would be odd.
@ficolas2sometimes they do; azulenes come to mind ;)
@T3sl4 patiently waiting for metric electricity polarity
Fischer Esterification is how you make biodiesel from waste oil.
One of the substances you made is called "invert sugar" or "inverted sugar syrup" and it is popular additive in food and medicines as it allows using less sucrose while attaining same level of sweetness. IIRC the solution is sometimes called "syrup simplex" (i.e. "simple syrup") in pharmacopoeias. The surcose is basically pre-digested for you by acid-catalysed hydrolysis.
I was once surprised finding out that sugar can be used as a reducing agent as the aldehyde group easily oxidizes into a carboxylic acid group. It can also undergo disproportionation (dismutation) into a 50:50 mixture of corresponding alcohol and carboxylate by the action of a strong base, also known as Cannizzaro reaction.
I great amount of work focused on the wet chemical analysis of carbohydrates has been made in late 1940s and 1950s and this was before instrumental analysis became so ubiquitous. I can recommend a book "Periodic Acid and Iodic Acid and their Salts" (Frederick G. Smith, 1950) that discusses how hypervalent iodine compounds can be used for identification and determination of various carbohydrates. These specialty reagents, particularly periodic acid and periodates, are being used in modern chemical processes, e.g. for the preparation of niche materials such as dialdehyde cellulose.
This is so interesting! I always wondered what inverted sugar actually was.
I searched about it but couldn't understand what it was.
Thanks so much for this! I'm a biochemist and teach mutarotation, but I had no idea that the flavors of the sugars changed! I'm demoing this when I teach it in the spring!
I've been itching for a new Applied Science video for what feels like ages!
had to do a double take at my notifications, happy new years ben!
I was taught that L-glucose would make a good no-calorie sweetener when I was studying at the university. Well, somebody figured out how to do that cheaply (about 10 years ago). It turned out that L-glucose is also a very good laxative, so much that it might be useful for things like colonoscopy prep.
I'd be very interested to know the cheap method of production. Sigma sells l-glucose for $100/gram. It's true that the hygroscopic properties that would make it a great baking ingredient, also make it a laxative. Probably the best way to use it commercially is to blend it with normal sugar, and reduce the calorie content by just 20%. Although, I agree that artificial sweeteners like sucralose are difficult to beat for beverages and similar things.
Reminds me of Olestra.
Is that the stuff that made those sugar free gummy bears infamous?
Hmm, that seems consistent with what I have been fed prior getting anal probed. Fortunately by doctors, not by aliens.
Edit: nope, it wasn't sugar based. Some kind of glycols were in it.
I was wondering if bacteria or anything can ferment the stuff, and well, I guess that answers my question: if they did, you'd have terrific gas from the ensuing carnage, as this is what lactose intolerance is.
...Would that then mean, if such a product became widespread, it might not degrade quickly in the environment? Abiotic paths would still degrade it pretty quickly, say days to months (so-called reducing sugars, like glucose, are easily oxidized by fairly mild ions like Cu(2+), for example), but in the mean time, might it stick around? I wonder if its use would require some rethinking of wastewater treatment? Perhaps there are bacteria or fungi that can consume it, that just don't happen to be present in the human microbiome.
...Huh, this comment was just idle curiosity out loud, and I expected to be quickly informed by internet search... but alas, only one partial hit? Wikipedia mentions Burkholderia caryophylli having some ability to oxidize it, but I don't see any promising hits for articles about it. Perhaps L-glucose's interaction with known biological systems is very poorly researched!
Ben, this is fantastic.
Thanks for closing out the year with a sweet video!
There will never be enough of this sort of content on YouTube
Nice! Always excited to see a new upload from you!
It's already 2025 here - and what a great start for a year should it start with new Ben's video!
Happy New Year, mate!
My brain rotated to the left
When one of my cats got a preliminary cancer diagnosis I started looking into sugars, because of how cancer cell metabolism works, and it turns out a team of researchers wrote a paper about the cancer-treating properties of L-Sorbose
It can't do it alone, unfortunately, or they'd have announced they have a cure, but according to their research it significantly boosts the effectiveness of chemotherapy.
Sugars are wild!
(L-Sorbose is very common and used to synthesize vitamin c)
As someone who actually works with HPLC and Sugar analysis I can not wait to see your next video!
Ben is the very best kind of teacher.
Man, so inspiring! I'll use it for my organic chemistry class, such a fantastic example to illustrate equilibriums in the context of carbonyl chemistry. I whish we academics would all be as good as you! Such an amazing channel, keep going!
I watched the video by Veritasium, but you way of pointing the lens down the length of the tube makes the effect so much more directly apparent. Even though with the reflection and stuff the actual math is more complicated, the visual effect is on point for the effect you want to show.
This reminds me of how honey and agave nectar taste bad when you mix them with water even when fully dissolved in, but if the water is hot while mixing then it actually tastes right
This was a big section in my first Orgo Chem at college and I loved it. And yeah, the D and L refer to the direction of the functional groups with respect to right hand rule and prioritization of those chemical groups around a central atom (usually carbon), rather than optical rotation.
That's what I remembered...I think that it was just coincidence that his first examples where D and L also correlated with bending light to the right and left. However, just to make sure, I found one internet sight where that actually stated that it was the direction the that molecule rotated...which I am still skeptical about...
I believe you're referring to R/S notation, which is labelling priorities of the substituents attached to a chiral center. D/L is a quick and dirty legacy of relating molecular light polarization to the absolute stereochemistry of R/S glyceraldehyde (which could not be accurately determined when the D/L system was created), and the sign of optical rotation (+/- system) is an observational system based on the direction of light rotation which is not constant (it depends a lot on the parameters of the system).
Thing is--all these parameters are related to some extent, they just tell you slightly different things about the same system. D/L cannot tell you about specific stereochemistry of a molecule, but is specific (eg, we know the stereochemistry of a D-glucose molecule) to that enantiomer of the molecule. Same thing for +/-. R/S notation will tell you the exact stereochemistry of a molecule but will not tell you which way it will rotate optical light on its own(unless you already know, for example (2R,3S,4R,5R)2,3,4,5,6-pentahydroxyhexanal is D-Glucose, so you know which way it will rotate light).
Source: am chemist + clayden's organic chemistry textbook for reference.
Sugar chemistry is maybe the most famous "fundamental" chemistry research areas that amazes us non professionals. 75 years ago and all those clever experiments needed to figure all this out! You are indeed creative and attentively observing in a way that reminds us about them!
(Von Euler Chelpin is one famous name I recall)
thankfully, there was more to this video than I thought there would be from the title.
Fundamental chemistry at it's finest - hell yeah!
Thank you for the finest and highest quality content on youtube!
ITS A HOLIDAY MIRACLE
Ben stay making the best content on YouTube
So much get to be discovered in chemistry. I find it one of the most exciting fields in STEM
Organic chemistry is awesome
Those equilibria you mention bring a good deal of complexity to the soft drink manufacturing process, as they must be taken into account during syrup preparation. Great topic: sugars have a lot of interesting quirks.
Welcome back we have missed you.
Sugars pulling the molecular equivalent of a Three Stooges skit, what a time to be alive. Happy new year!
I knew that the various kinds of sugars can have different isomorphic shapes and forms, but now I know that all this is at least 3 or 4 times as complex than I was previously aware of. Fascinating!
Fascinating learning that starch and cellulose are the same thing... Thanks for that!
Long time no see ! Its ok , your an original YouTube legend!
I believe that the spirals are a conoscopic interference pattern. It may be something to look into and see if it fits what you are seeing. I think the polarization of the specimen and the meniscus of the water refracting the polarized light are making it. Interference patterns are commonly used for identifying minerals with petrographic microscopes.
as a glycobiologist and Applied Science fan, I'm stoked about this crossover!
Manos The Hands of Fate reference in an Applied Science video?!? 2025 is such a strange time to be alive lol. Happy new year!!
The best science themed-youtube channel.
This is one of the most fascinating things to start the year by learning.
This simple method of observing inner-reflection of unidirectionally-polarized light in a tube, filled with sugar solution, is the brightest idea I learnt today.
the radial arms thing absolutely blew me away - so cool. I have no idea how or why you would do it, but seeing a gradient of mixtures along the tube where it bends one way then the other would look crazy.
Thanks for putting these videos together, you are truly one of the all time greats - I will always drop whatever I'm doing to checkout what you've been up to - never disappointed.
Happy New Year!! It's so wild clicking a random video about a cookie machine would bring me so much education and enjoyment for over a decade.
Great to see the NileRed gear make an appearance.
Been a while since you last uploaded, glad that you're back.
@floodo1 - 2025-01-01
Legitimately one of the best channels on YouTube
@WangleLine - 2025-01-01
Yeah!!!
@cipaisone - 2025-01-01
100%
@Timsturbs - 2025-01-01
passion channels are always better than "for entertainment" ones
@Cartilog-z4f - 2025-01-01
Yeah, and we get about two videos a year.
@WTFinc - 2025-01-01
Ikr. Few channels can post quarterly and still be relevant.