Extractions&Ire - 2025-02-08
Turning IR light into visible light(maybe??) Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/ExplosionsandFire BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/explosionsandfire.bsky.social Subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExplosionsAndFire/ Join the Discord!! https://discord.gg/VR6Fz9g Music for this video is from the Aphex Twin Soundcloud archives Thanks again to Indigo for the editing help and the sick guitar gifs
"If it gets any hotter, the vials will shatter" shakes vial to increase reaction rate
ngl goated plan
Nah he was taking away the heat through his fingers obviously
@@felixar90 Of course! Quenching the reaction with large convenient heat sink, it's obvious when you think about it.
i think i keep watching just because Tom always shakes, rattles and rolls things when it doesn't seem advisable -- nah it's the shed atmosphere that keeps me coming back, it makes me feel like i could do the same if i had a shed/bird sanctuary. I keep wondering if my apartment balcony is just shed-like enough to participate.
increases movement of air around the vial to increase the cooling rate above ambient its a good move
It's nearly 3:00 AM and here I am, watching my favorite Australian make glowy rocks
2am here, and same.
I quite enjoy my 5 AM glowy rock content
It was almost 3am when I started and past 3 when I stopped.
And it's an hour later and I'm watch glow rocks at 6am
Tom sweetening our dreams
The F orbitals explanation cracked me up, a s it was 1: correct, 2: a absolutely crap explanation (for a laymen) and 3: incredibly funny and exactly how we thought about them in uni.
"it's really weird in there, shit's fucked"
my inorganic chem course barely even mentioned f orbitals past “they exist, don’t forget” and “they do nothing”
@@juuuuuniper same. Which would then piss off the rare earth chemists i would try to go off and work for later xD
He somehow made it difficult to follow for me and I've worked in the chirped pulse amplification lab at University of Rochester. I love this channel so much, please never stop Tom.
Funny to me because it made some sense from a 1980 HS chem background, but was also enough to show I’ll never catch up.
I'd like to imagine he put the samples in al foil (a highly reflective substance) for the express purpose of triggering laser safety enthusiasts into commenting.
oh shit its cubicmetre
If it helps, it only gets more reflective as wavelength increases!!
"Can I put something in your muffle furnace?" Well... umm... movie and dinner first?
Of course you can ... Daddy
I believe the glycene meme was a thing because the videos were being aggressively pushed to normal users that had no interest in purchasing industrial precursors
It's not a meme... That's just how everything is on the internet now..
next: youtube advertisement for mass quantities of high purity sulphuric acid
Wouldn't be surprised if it was China's "netizens" way of sharing about the plant exploding (idk if that's what happened, just that's a common thing in China due to lack of any real safety standards) while getting around the censorship.
They advertise war planes and other weird stuff sometimes too, probably someone else's recommendations like your government spy or something
WDYM industrial precursor, it's pretty normal self-prescribed drug for biohackers 😊😊😊😊
From now on, "Can I put something in your muffle furnace" will be my go-to pickup line.
[suspicious look]
"Is it going to catch on fire?"
@@PSUQDPICHQIEIWC Nice one. I would have gone with "Doesn't take so small samples,"
Definitely has a selection bias effect towards chemistry and chemical engineering girls - maybe materials engineering too - nothing wrong with that, probably actually more of a feature than a bug, really!
@@PSUQDPICHQIEIWC “Only if you’re doing it right.”
NTTAWWT
"Let's go somewhere dark, then we can get sad."
Oh god, the crinkly reflective aluminium foil under the IR laser is making me so nervous
Yeah not the greatest in hindsight
@ Here's hoping the birds wore IR goggles too. Great video though!
i had the same thought when i saw that foil next to the laser :O
I cant see the problem with that, well, can't see anything else either
I'm just imagining that somewhere behind him, a plane falls out of the sky and crow eats dirt.
23:20 it's so nice of you to help out medical doctors to publish papers to look good on their CV. "The novel effects of rare earth metal poisoning on the human body" is just screaming to be cited.
Fun fact: Yttrium, Erbium and Ytterbium were found and isolated from Gadolinite mineral found in a mine in Ytterby, Sweden.
Terbium too. Cant wait for Bium!
Some people toil for years to use high-energy collisions to generate a single atom that lasts for a couple dozen milliseconds so they can say they've found just one new element.
Some people just pick up a random rock outside of some Swedish mine and find four.
Yeah, if anyone wondered "why does yttrium have similar properties to those lanthanides, and a suspiciously similar name?", the key point is that chemical processes in the earth cause similar elements end up in the same rock deposits, and the naming here is a consequence of that.
Has anyone actually seen all these lanthanides IRL? 😅
@@DaēnāVanguhiyes
Shout out to Otto the sausage dog.
Otto may even be alive 8 years later, as google tells me sausage dogs live for 12-16 years.
theres a likely chance this is jerma985's dog, which is also a sausage dog named otto
last i heard he's doing fine but he's old
@@kern9422 the implication that a guy selling rare earth metals over skype is also a fan of jerma's dog is really funny
@@kern9422 this is what i was thinking lmao. they are german dogs and otto is a german name but i want to believe
12-16 is actually -4 so he probably died about 12 years ago :(
"Let's go somewhere dark....and then we can get sad."
This channel always delivers
Crazy man from upside-down land is posting again
do you have any idea how little that narrows it down
@@manitoba-op4jx i know about 3 youtubers from there
Not so crazy. Before the advent of cell phones I made and sold a few thousand IR detectors with the same compound of rare earth elements. Pretty easy to make: A business card, a glue dot and a small pile of tiny crystals. The hard parts were teaching myself about upconversion and finding a place to buy the compounded elements. After that it was easy money.
@@LoudenNess You CAN be extremely smart and crazy.
"Mad Science" had to come from somewhere, after all 😁 (the term, not the show/movie)
@@manitoba-op4jx you're the one in upside-down land, we're in upside-up.
Averaging more than a video a month lately, this man cannot be stopped.
That's what happens when you finished doing a permanent head damage (PhD) degree. Can speak for experience.
ah, violating the conservation of energy in a shed by a mad Aussie Physicist. The best use of 38:06 minutes I can think of!
but he's chemist?
@@jskratnyarlathotep8411 He merely plays a chemist on TV.
"And somehow... that works" is my favorite type of science
to quote everyone's favorite Gary Brannan,
"and for some reason I've never been able to fathom,
/that was enough/."
> “how will combustion make rare earth nanoparticles capable of photon upconversion?…idk!”
> made gold nanoparticles with spooky physics properties using explosions in a previous video
So, I’ve used one of those furnaces for goldsmithing purposes, and I found that the temperature setting was off by an order of magnitude; just something to be mindful of in the future! Cheers and thanks for another great video.
Oh damn okay, might have to calibrate it with the melting point of metals or something??
@ExtractionsAndIre Yep, that was my approach precisely — or turn it all the way up if precision wasn’t a factor. Dealers choice.
@@ExtractionsAndIre You should add a good quality thermocouple reader and a few calibrated TCs to your arsenal, anyway, good sir.
Am I mistaken in thinking the crucible is made of graphite
Thermocouples with stainless probes aren’t expensive, and most current DMM’s have inputs and a display for temp. Source: my garage and CaCO3 decomposition.
“It’s not as bad as lead.” Funnily enough, this is true for every non radioactive metal except for Beryllium so… sure!
No, thallium and cadmium are much worse.
Cadmium will also kill you horribly.
@@Frommerman Yeah, it's not nice either with thallium...
@@user255I think I see where you’re coming from. The issue with beryllium is however that its half life in the body is infinite. Without (a) knowing that you’ve had beryllium enter your body and then (b) getting the aid of a chelating agent (none of which are very good at it), your body becomes a time bomb of cancer even with a few micrograms of it.
I suspect mercury is also worse. I think thallium takes the cake though.
Holy hell, he actually bought a proper furnace for the video. We're practically getting NileRed-level production values at this point!
1:02 I know for a fact that all four scandium chemists are fuming rn
Not only the chemist but also almost all manufacturers of BAW filters for 5G.
Without Scandium all modern mobile communication would be very difficult 😅
The majority of the filters for selecting the mobile frequencies are now using AlScN a sputtered piezoelectric ceramic.
😂
@@faxezu Interesting! I was unaware of ScAlN being used for that.
This is so cool! Ive worked with upconverting particles as a lab tech for years! We use them as detection particles in high sensitivity lateral flow assays, kind of like the covid home test kits but more sensitive and advanced. They do require a specialized reader, but that also allows us to give a quantitative result for the amount of antigen in the sample. My PI had a little demo kit with three vials of differently doped nanoparticles, which would glow in different colours when hit with an IR laser. The method's called UCP-LF, and I used it mostly for detecting the CAA antigen produced by a parasitic worm. Never thought id see my beloved nanoparticles on E&I!
I'd love to see more UCNP LFTs. I wonder if they could be used for LFTs of whole blood?
@@lmackenzie89 we used serum, plasma or urine! But with a blood separation pad they also work with whole blood! Several tests our lab designed were intended for use with finger prick blood
Wow that is some crazy science, cool shit bro!
@@stanhilt1912 That's awesome! Would love to read about it if you feel comfortable sharing links.
@@patches.742No, he didn't list fecal, unfortunately.
(lol sorry, that was bad, I admit; if confused, read his reply above yours)
i love the little jingle when upconversion shows up, you need to do more little jingles when stuff shows up
🎶🌈🌟TAR🌟🌈🎶
💛💫🔆🟡PISS SCIENCE🟡🔆💫💛
We got turd chemistry boys! Yes! Finally! Piss chemistry has been a theme of these experiments for years. With tar. But now, I think we've really got some fresh avenues of exploration via the humble number two. Also, as a man with two NIRS laser burn scars on his calf, a lovely 850, with a 750 partner when I was double checking the power was, in fact, in excess of what was documented and it was unsafe for use in patient populations until I'd made a teflon diffusor, you very much want to be careful with that little chappie.
I really love the other helpful picture. That completely transformed my understanding of the field
So I work at a paper mill and we have a muffle furnace to do ash testing. Normally for ash testing you do it in a covered crucible with the lid just slightly cracked so it chars and doesn't ignite, then you take the lid off and crank up the heat to ash it. One time I realized plastics generally burn at a lower temp than paper so I thought I had a really smart way to estimate the plastics content of our rejects by combusting off the plastics and weighing the remaining fiber.
I set it up and go do something else. A hour or two later I come back and see most of the management team running around trying to figure where the burning smell was coming from. They thought oil or hydraulic fluid got ignited somewhere. I sheepishly stop our GM and say that I think I know what happened. Lo and behold we open the furnace and there's a nice big plastic fire in there. Somehow the lid had gotten knocked off, maybe when I was closing the door. I was banned from using the oven for anything other than ash testing finished goods after that.
The perils of trying to innovate among the old guard.
Random fun fact: A lot of green laser pointers actually are upconverted IR lasers. 1064 nm IR light from an Nd:YAG laser is getting upconverted to 532 nm which is a nice green colour.
And it stays collimated?
@@enricobianchi4499Yup! The materials used for it are crystalline, single-crystal that is, so it’s fully controllable
And the Nd:YAG is itself usually pumped by a lower-wavelength IR laser diode (808 nm from memory?).
Isn't it, like, ultra-inefficient? Lasers are already not the most efficient thing, and then after upconversion you dump more than 80% of energy into heat.
@@enricobianchi4499 it stays collimated because the new re-emission process is basically the laser emission process all over again, treat it like a laser with optical pumping but EXOTIC.
A colleague of mine while in uni did some work with Europium and Er doped glasses. He synthesised the oxides first, I guess by the same method, not sure in this one. However I remember that the conversion was very weak in the powder form. I would guess due to scattering. But once melted in a glass matrix they were so very bright when illuminated. I aways enjoyed helping him out with the high temp glass furnace. You just can't convey WHAT is the feeling to look into a large glass furnace. We did have just 2 ridiculously large furnaces for the glass melting step, and it was easier to use them and not worry about minutia like electric bills 😂.
I want to wholeheartedly thank you all the way from Texas for your efforts to continue sharing Australian culture with the rest of the world. Other than that one Simpsons episode, Steve Irwin, and the occasional spider meme, you're basically the closest thing to an Australian educational ambassador that we'll ever see here.
Dankpods is getting up there too
There's also How to Cook That!
well american culture is ......
yes aussie culture and values are good, not as good as kiwis, but good
To add to the list: HowRidiculous and their 50M, or however many subs, are also Aussie.
I Did A Thing, Aussie.
Kiki Rockwell (musician who also does behind the scenes videos), New Zealander, but Kiwis are Aussie-adjacent.
Though, HR are the only ones I'd call children friendly, as they don't swear (at least on camera) on account of being religious (they don't throw it in our face, and it's rarely brought up, if you're like me and not religious).
However, only we here in the US are sticklers for profanity, which is unfortunate since it's hat modifiers words most of the time, to amplify sentiments. So to be immersed in Aussie culture, there's going to be profanity most times lol Even Kiki who is a very nice gal, swears! lol (she's Indie enough still that she talks with us in the comments)
Shout out to Pete for being the realest.
35:16 "Lets go somewhere dark, and then we can get sad" I don't know that I have ever been quite so seen before.
Edit: And then the bloody thing worked! That never happens, I'm starting to get concerned about your professionalism.
This is why goths love optics labs
The dark is where I always prefer to be sad.
The Aussie uploaded again. WOOOOOO
Gday from the other Austr* country
Hell yeah we are Austr Brothers
Can you fwd our mail please?
Austriches in law
and even better honorary kiwi neighbours
...Austr* cousins?
My Phd was based on Mossbauer Spectroscopy and I found your electron orbital helpful pictures perfectly reasonable and slightly hilarious lol
Every single time I think about you and "He hasn't uploaded in a bit, is he ok?", you upload within 24 hours, thank you kind man
Dude, came here checking on him and see he posted less than 24hrs.
Maybe we should get together and invoke him once a month.....
I've got geometry too, and this video put me into an excited state.
I am spherical
@37.10 absolutely savaging the upconversion literature on brightness metric. It really is badly needed in the field though. Well worth writing a perspective or opinion paper about.
Similar things have been done for circularly polarised light brightness emitted from chiral materials. Circularly polarised brightness being defined as excitation coefficient multiple by quantum yield multiplied by strength of circularly polarised emission (g factor).
This is also what was essentially used to make Gas Mantles work for a short period before electric lighting really took over
You can still buy mantles that are pre-treated with a combustion solution that when burned the first time leaves behind a lattice of nano-particles with similar chemical makeup to this, and then when it is exposed to a gas flame it glows creates a very bright usable light.
Technology Connections has a good video on their use
"Let's go somewhere dark, THEN we can get sad"
He real for that one...
Ah, yes, the People's Republic of Italy, that country known for producing inexpensive products. I LOL'd
On a serious note, I worked in a research lab that did combustion synthesis of mixed metal oxides with some rare-earth elements (they were working out phase diagrams for uncharted oxide compositions). They found that using PEO, PEG, or PVAlcohol as the fuels helped to complex the metal ions for more even mixing during the drying/combustion stages. Also, IIRC they always mixed them a bit oxidizer rich to minimize any carbon leftover, since any excess nitrate groups will decompose to oxides with the combustion heat.
These helpful pictures were very helpful for visualising the electron shielding. Great job! <3
• ) } —> •
Phil is going to yell at you so much for using foil at a laser.
This is what I’m worried about honestly
I hope the bird's ok!
I heard it glows weakly blue-ish when hit with a strong IR laser, and it may have heavy metal poisoning
Only way to find out is to use up conversion nanoparticles to do some in vivo imaging I reckon
“100% pure L-glycine powder?!” Glycine, H2N-CH2-COOH, is achiral. So there is no such thing as L-glycine. 17:28
Wait, I didn't even realize that!
Aww, can't we have just a little chirality? as a treat?
@@jaredragland4707 As someone who's had to separate enantiomers with chiral shift reagent derivitizations, absolutely fucking not, lol.
Wouldn’t it be A-glycine (Ambidextrous) then? It would make a great switch-enantiomer!
I guess your yttrium is iron contaminated, so upconversion is very weak. I work a lot with luminescent oxides and can tell for sure that traces of iron are one of the biggest problems, especially in the case of aluminum compounds. Y(NO3)3 should be white and gives a transparent colorless solution. Also it is better to use a stock solutions of RE with known concentration than trying to weight such small amounts. Another thing is what your calcination step should be performed under oxidizing conditions in order to burn out all the carbon from the sample, although graphite could generate some CO and hinder the carbon oxidation. Calcination on carbon is usually performed when you need to reduce some ions in the host matrix, for example, Ce4+ to Ce3+ in Y3Al5O12
My thoughts exactly 🤔
Could you precipitate the iron out as sulfide, or will that knock out the rare earths too?
@SocialDownclimber in case of phosphors, this strategy is not useful. It is better to submerge some piece of relatively pure aluminum in the solution of AlCl3 to reduce iron to metal onto the aluminum and get rid of that sacrificial piece as well as the part of the impurities like iron, copper and manganese. Maybe repeat this step multiple times. Precipitation of insoluble salts is not an option since salts are usually slightly soluble. Also, impurities are usually presented in such small amounts, so it is nearly impossible to precipitate them and filter out/centrifugate. Also, FeS and other iron sulfides are not stable in acidic conditions (solutions of aluminum salts are always acidic due to hydrolysis) and easily oxidizes by atmospheric oxygen to more soluble species
I work in semiconductor, and your skills would be valued in my field. You might have to move for a job, but it will be worth it. I love it, portland or would love to have you! Good luck!
Funny you should say that, my postdoc job for the last few months has been in semiconductor fabrication! Been super fun
@@ExtractionsAndIre nice, hit me up if you do decide to move here. Arizona has a big semiconductor economy with tsmc Intel and others having absolutely huge fabs there.
Unless your postdoc job like you mentioned is a more permanent thing, if so congratulations 🎉
hey I get the draw of us institutions
but bro, there are issues with american .... many things
you may become less fun if you do this
@@ArchDudeify but money can become a thing, and painted tables will become not a thing in the US.
@@ArchDudeifyalso it seems like he found a spot locally. Also, with our current trajectory politically, I would hope to move my family to Australia lol. Even though it seems Murdoch has a hold on both of our countries. It's hopeless no matter where we are.
I’m in communications engineering - had ‘how do pumped lasers actually work’ in the back of my brain for years.
Nice to see the chemistry demonstrated!
They make muffle furnaces for combustion. But even if it isn't one designed for it, it's mostly fine. I have a thermodyne fb1315m that I use for pyrolisis of ram ICs and the ashing process produces a lot of smoke. After a couple years of it, the furnace is fine.
The furnace you got works essentially the same way as a muffle furnace but I would recommend picking up a better pid controller (it looks like it uses a standard sized one). That would allow you much better control of ramp, dwell and deramp settings (I did this with my muffle furnace and now I can control it with my phone). With better temp control, you could place a small fused quartz crucible inside the graphite one to reduce contamination.
As for the laser circuit board, it looks like the laser driver I got for a lep module. It most likely is a constant amperage power supply and the potentiometer adjusts the amperage output.
The answer I was looking for in the comments. Thank you for sharing your experience and expertise!
Hey this is what my reaserch team is studying! We are using upconversion through high harmonic generation to create deep UV beams to create an interference pattern that we can get heterodyne data from! It is super cool that we can use these nonlinear processes to do this kind of thing from a benchtop perspective.
this channel is the best quality chemistry shit posting. I didn't even do chem at school, but i love this shit
@BryceAC - 2025-02-08
26:55 the ebay laser yearns to elevate your retina to a higher energy state
@lohphat - 2025-02-08
“Do not look into laser with remaining good eye.”
@baconman2366 - 2025-02-08
thats some styropyro shit right there!
@flopasen - 2025-02-08
do not gaze into the forbidden crystal
@OmniversalInsect - 2025-02-08
Do not look into the operational end of the device.
@paulkepshire5056 - 2025-02-09
@OmniversalInsect
Do not submerge the device in liquid, even partially.
Most importantly, under no circumstances should you— [bzzzpt]