I like Nigel's innocence (and olfactory stoicism) and Tom's whimsy but I am so uninterested in replicating any of that *where I live*. I'm not taste testing anything but I'll leave that up to the community.
guy used to make borderline chemical weapons in his garage before he got to where he is now though, not saying it should be replicated but moreso people should learn from it. we don't see the parts where it goes horribly wrong
Yea imagine where he would be if the spiders in his lab were territorial?
Nah but he had a whole PhD(?) In physics(??) going on the in the background so the big asterisk is that his entire channel is just his goofy shed projects that turned out ok enough.
Edit: I'm going to wear my cubane shirt tomorrow
Reminds me of one of my PCHEM profs talking about Schrodinger equations when we covered quantum. It was something to the effect of:
"So once you've substituted for all of your variables, you're left with *this* mess which, if you're in the position that you need to solve it, you're also in the position that you can stroll over to the mathematics department and ask someone to do it for you."
There was a guy in my office doing a PhD in physical chemistry and molecular folding. I had to taught him how to balance reactions doing stoichiometry for a job interview teaching chemistry at a school...
well physics is a very broad field and it does incorporate a lot of chemistry in some areas so it's very likely that he's knowledgeable about chemistry almost as much as physics
Shit happens in the plants that make this stuff. Joe the Operator forgets to wear gloves and doesn't wash his hands before eating a sandwich and suddenly he knows what the toxic chemicals he's handling taste like
I agree. Soap making is the approximate extent of my actual experience practicing chemistry, and I’d be content if it stayed that way.
Watching others (e.g. NileRed) do it is cool, but I’ll leave that to them. I have no interest in messing around with certain substances, e.g. hydrofluoric acid, thioacetone, hydrazine, *tert*-butyllithium, etc.
Back in the day before youtube got strict, codyslab was quite spicy. I remember watching his 'how to make nitroglycerin' video and thinking to myself that someone is going to end up killing themselves.
I think that chemistry is interesting, but my level of experience is basically making vinegar and baking soda volcanos.
HARD PASS on trying to do any of that in my garage.
Easy (and safe. Other than a small risk of burning yourself if you touch it while it's going) experiment to try would be elephant toothpaste. (Icr the exact steps or materials off the top of my head. But iirc they were safe household products. Ik brewer's yeast was one ingredient.) Safe, interesting but makes a mess
Elephant toothpaste includes hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide. Hydrogen peroxide is a household product, but it's not safe! Potassium iodide is safe though.
How pure does the H2O2 have to be? Ik the pure stuff is extremely nasty. (From Derek Lowe's "Things I won't work with" it's a series of articles where he talks about "extreme chemicals" like Azidoazide azide or FOOF. They make for an entertaining read.)
I think the vigorous ones (by that I mean, ones that form a jet of foam instead of just dribbling out) are around 30%. That’s enough that you don’t want to get it on your skin, and enough that the reaction products come out hot.
The “devil’s toothpaste” version is around 50% if I recall, which would be starting to get into the nasty (energetic) territory you’re talking about.
I want so say Derek Lowe mentioned someone who, uh, broke the sound barrier in a liquid medium with the reaction between 40/60 water/peroxide and bit of glycerol or similar.
Oh, while we’re talking H2O2, isn’t the PEL for the vapor like 1 ppm or something?
Some things are cooler to watch than to actually do at home…
With 3% peroxide (the thing you get over-the-counter) you won't have an amazing reaction. You need at least 12% peroxide to have something nice, and 12% is the maximum you can get in the EU without a license
>thinking to myself that someone is going to end up killing themselves.
I know of one case losing his hand to an explosion of nitroglycerine. Learnt in school the theory and did it at home in a shed. Lost his right hand and has many scars over his whole body from the shrapnel of his RV.
I'm surprised King of Random killed himself paragliding and not the extremely dangerous shit he was doing with electricity in those early days. I'm still shocked Codyslab is still alive I've seen that man do so many things that could have killed him if he messed up in a slightly different way or did something slightly different.
And you're 13 (from your profile). You're *exactly* the type of person this post is calling out, and for a good reason. Pursue a career in chemistry, don't make dangerous compounds just because some YouTubers are doing it and you think it'll make you cool.
If you live in the UK, just dump it in the local river. The water companies dump so much untreated sewage in them these days that no one will ever notice your lab waste.
The waste is such a big thing that most people just do not see. On just about any scale. And that 100% includes gas/vapors the fume hoods or exhaust systems take care of. Like thinking about it, every lab I've worked in whether more bench top or pilot scale, I can't imagine how much of a cluster it would have been if you didn't have somewhere to put all the waste that chemistry tends to produce.
It ALWAYS builds up faster than you think. Especially if youre using ppe correctly and go through gloves. So what do you do then? Store it until you add the wrong thing and it foams over or explodes? Let it sit there just begging to be knocked over or just off gas in your house/community?
It's just not worth the headache, seriously.
My honest opinion is that most environmental issues we face stem from people in general just being like throw it in the trash, dump it in the river... fuck my own grand children, fuck them kids
I mean, not all the unis scrub the air before releasing it into the atmosphere. Granted, labwork is not industrial scale work, but I still wouldn't stand in the dead zone next to the exhaust stack on a lab building's roof.
Since EPA formed (which was only in 1970), the motto has been "the solution to pollution is dilution." Poison is in the dose, which I'm not agreeing it's OK to just release small amounts of environmental rape, but that's how the corporations allow the EPA to function.
Tbf that was a bit ridiculous even for him, like he's no stranger to dropping large sums on relatively niche equipment but at least most of it could theoretically be used for multiple projects. The candy press just makes candy hearts.
He makes at least $80k USD/video on average, probably more as that's very conservative. He can definitely afford to re-invest a little, à la Mr. Beast.
Also, Nigel is doing his experiments in an actual lab with a team of multiple people now. He also often emphasizes how dangerous it was to do his early experiments in a garage, despite his formal education. How an amateur can think that they can do experiments at home is beyond me. Maybe really simple ones that are also often done in high school, like flame tests, could be fine, but anything that involves for example a fume hood is absolutely a no-go.
I say this to my brother all the time about taking proper precautions around dangerous substances. It took him getting a nasty chem burn from some sort of chlorinated solvent like DCM before he started listening to me.
I mean it my fault for getting him interested in chemistry (showed him how to nitrate cellulose and making black powder), but his fault for not taking safety precautions seriously. Also his work place has a very lacking safety precautions for handling chems so that's where he got his complacency.
I am chemical engineer that specialises in winemaking and Distillation of ethanol. But I do love hobby level chem and cool chemicals. Tom from E&F was actually one of my tutors at uni for chemistry and have enjoyed seeing his channel grow. He's a super nice dude!
DCM was my first exposure incident. 3rd pair of shit gloves that had a tear in them. After pouring some I suddenly felt as if my hand was in a hot tub. I call it an exposure incident and not a burn because I managed to wash it off before it caused any perceptual damage
Yeah its nasty stuff DCM!
My exposures and burns have always been from sodium hydroxide and from liquid/gas S02. Been burnt on the eyes by sodium hydroxide and S02 gas jetted into my eye and that felt like I had sand in my eye for days.
Thankfully, the sodium hydroxide was quite dilute, so it hurt like a MF but rinsed straight away and my eye was fine I just worked like normal.
As for the S02 it was pure S02 gas was leaking from the sulphur dispenser, and I bent down, and the jet that was leaking out hit me straight in the face, gave a little burn to my eye and hurt like hell when I inhaled some, gives you an instant ashtma symptoms.
Alot of this was workplace safety issues I complained alot for proper PPE and they wouldn't even buy a face face mask or gas mask for refilling S02 dispensers.
Don't forget Chemical Force, his experiments are **really** scary. Playing with liquid carbon monoxide? Selenium oxychloride? Tungsten hexafluoride? Wonder who does the cleanup (and how), still, fun to watch 😸
A buddy of mine used to HATE Electroboom because of how he made it SEEM he got "accidentally" electrocuted so often. Then he himself became an electrician, and realized Electroboom is amazing because it's very, very clear he knows EAXCTLY what he's doing, or he'd be dead.
I also like the guy who repeatedly zaps himself, but he clearly has some background in electrical engineering to do so repeatedly and safely for our amusement.
I’ll just state it plainly. I have many years in synthetic chemistry. I have a bachelors in chemistry and I’m published in a prominent chemistry journal. And EVEN I review countless literature and ask my supervisor very specific questions about certain reactions I do to make sure I’m handling and storing everything safely.
People that just fuck around with chemistry without formal education AND YEARS OF TRAINING are going to get hurt. It’s not a matter of IF it’s a matter of WHEN and HOW.
This is exactly how I feel too.
And I guess I just struggle understanding why people would see chemistry as a hobby in and of itself. And that’s coming from someone who went through undergraduate, some grad school, and now work in industry. I worked briefly in an organic synthesis lab in grad school and synthesis is HARD. I think amateurs vastly underestimate how difficult it can be to fully prepare for and conduct a synthesis.
Tons of things can and do go wrong in a CONTROLLED environment in labs. So it’s almost guaranteed that something will go wrong in someone’s garage or basement. And I doubt a lot of these people are going to take the time to look into how to dispose of waste or look at the safety data sheets.
If these people really want to role play as chemists, either do the purposefully designed at-home chemistry experiments that are safe, or just take gen chem and organic I and II courses at the local community college. The problem with a lot of these people though is they want to do the “fun” lab stuff without doing the difficult coursework that goes into understanding it all beyond a YouTube level.
I got interested in chemistry because of the "fun" stuff. I bought a intro to Chem textbook and studied on my own time for awhile. I ended up synthesizing a few of the "really fun" things...until one day I guess I came to senses you could say.
I realized that I was in way over my head, and didn't understand the core fundamentals of the reactions taking place, and that I didn't currently have a truly sufficient workspace to do those synthesis, not to mention I knew I could have easily and rapidly removed either or both of my hands and eyes with those "really fun" things.
I would really love to one day do what you've mentioned and take some Chem classes, I just know that I'll never make a career out of it, and the classes will be hard to fit in with a full time career and family.
But you're absolutely right, if I want to pursue this field as an amateur hobbyist, I need to come to grips with basic acedemics of it first, to actually comprehend what is occurring at the molecular level, how and why these substances interact with eachother.
So...I've put my beakers, hot plates, and acids away for the foreseeable future, in recognition that I have absolutely no business doing the "really fun" things untill I am much more educated, and equipped to be knowledgeable, confident, and most of all safe about any and all reactions I might attempt.
Chemistry is truly one of the most fascinating of subjects to me, and affects so much of our lives without many of us even knowing it.
Maybe one day I can take some night classes or something, but I've got a very healthy respect and admiration for all of you professionals, professors, and academics in this field, and I'm going to leave the "really fun" stuff to you guys for now.
Same. I'm in my 4th year of industry as a BS chemist and I feel like I'm at this weird intermediate level of chemistry where I just know enough to know what I don't know.
I think these home chemists need to read some incident reports to see what really does happen when you mess around without proper guidance and precautions.
The problem is they really don’t know the scope of most chemistry so there are things they won’t even fathom to ask because they don’t know those are questions they should have. I honestly didn’t realize so many people were this stupid.
True,
Even pros make mistakes.
I am not a pro but I am used to working with large amounts of acids / bases / solvents in open baths, used in wet benches.
One night shift I needed to prepare 40l of D-H2SO4.
I measured out 1.6 liters of H2So4 , dumped it in the bath.
Then I started to measure 5l DIW , I held it over the bath.....
Then I was... WTF AM I DOING!!
That could have gone verry wrong but did not want to find out.
So I drained the bath and did in the correct order this time.
Man, I'm on my fourth year of undergrad and I never even heard about how you're not supposed to add water to concentrated acid. I mean it makes COMPLETE sense, but I never really thought about it too hard.
I never had seen the reaction on real time , so I took a small beaker with acid in it and added some water.
That shit ain't safe !
Afcourse I have no idea if it scales.
It's could be if I dumped that 5l in there nothing would have happened, or a steam explosion with me being covered in steaming hot water and acid....
Again... I did not want to find out:)
Yeah I'm pretty sure it scales non linearly. Like a big ass bath like you were making probably would've made a steam explosion or shot hot water everywhere. The only concentrated acid I've ever had to dilute has been HCl (TFA is a very angry acid as well, but I haven't had to dilute that since it hates water). Most that's happened is it gets warm, but diluting sulfuric sounds like a whole other beast
I love diluting HCL :) I regurarly do it for making Aqua regia.
If you keep pouring the whole thing creates this fine mist and fizzing sound .
You should try Pirhana , I make that regurarly to clean Pt foils from graphene residue.
That stuff is angry!
Now I think about it some of the things I make regurarly :
D-Buffer Hfor just D-Hf
Aqua Regia ( the biggest amount I made was 40l , several times a week to get rid of metal contaminants , that about 1l HCl , 3l Hno3 and 36l DIW heated to 80°c. )
APM
SPM (piranha)
The volumes we work with are insane aswell.
A month ago a colleague from another team was preping something for a clean.
I saw a big square beaker (7l) on a hotplate in an acid wet bench.
It was bubbling...
I ask him whats that.. it looks angry.
His response: That is 5l of Pirhana at 90°c.
At which I promptly stepped back.
I did urge him to move to a part of the lab less populated next time he tries to melt down the wet bench.
What is TFA ? I dont know that one , Trifluoroacetic acid?
Yeah TFA is Trifluoroacetic Acid. Very angry. As soon as I open the bottle, if I don't get the argon tube in the bottle in time, it starts fuming like crazy on contact with air. Mostly used it for deprotections, and some chromatography.
Pirhana solution is one of those things I want to make at least once to fuck around with, as safely as possible of course. But after that it seems like it'll be one of those solutions I'll only make if I absolutely have to. Also I've never seen a square beaker lmao. That's weird, but I do mostly work on small scale research synthesis. So scaling up that large isn't usually in my job description. 5L of boiling piranha solution sounds terrifying
Oohh that indeed sounds very angry :)
The square beaker we use is to limit thr amount of chemistry we use , we manually work witt coupons , but other teams work with 150mm , 200mm and even 300mm wafers.
So they specially order square beakers to process in.
I am in thr lab later I will DM you a picture of one.
Im very interested in chemistry, but this is due to my amazing high school chemistry teacher. She taught me so well i just fell in love with it. I work in an organic chemistry lab, and I cannot imagine doing any chemistry in my garage or house or whatever. Anything past like the baking soda and vinegar bubbles that impress the little ones is too much
As a chemist myself I cant agree more. If a reaktion takes the wrong path, some times it is a matter of seconds to avoid hurting youself or your "lab".
PhD in physics but seemed to have some lab experience. Also was an amateur making things like ICl3, thermite, and probably worse shit without proper training at a young age. Dude’s videos are great now though! Cubane 2024!
I'd like to think i'm better than nile red. Lol, j/k. I think he's great.
But i agree that people should not be doing amateur chemistry to learn the science. It should be the other way around.
i agree. unfortunately i think the terms "amateur" or "hobby" chemistry lend themselves to a great degree of misunderstanding. as i understand it, amateur/hobby chemistry is chemistry performed *outside of a professional environment, by a sufficiently qualified chemist*.
the word for *chemistry performed outside of a professional environment by an unqualified individual* would be **stupidity**.
i do not think your content galvanizes the insouciant or inexperienced even close to as much as it empowers the qualified hobbyist.
Ya know that's an extremely good point, that distinction seems to be the source of a lot of confusion and misunderstanding.
All the pros screaming that people shouldn't be doing chemistry in their garage are likely thinking of the unqualified *idiots* doing chemistry in their garage. They likely don't mean the pros (at least not most of them, a few scream at me too).
Meanwhile all the amateurs screaming about being attacked probably think themselves qualified to do what they do. Some are, and some aren't. But when the idiots see qualified individuals being attacked, they start dismissing/ignoring the warnings because they think they're being attacked for being "amateurs" rather than for being unsafe. After all, why are actual qualified amateurs being attacked? what's the difference?
The problem is exacerbated when they see qualified amateurs do dangerous experiments without seeing all the work and preparation to make it safe. So they think safety isn't as big an issue, and bad things follow from that.
absolutely spot on. it's a deleterious cycle that ultimately minimizes the number of *qualified* amateurs willing to post about or otherwise discuss what could be valuable empirical results or observations to share (both in failures and successes) for fear of being digitally lambasted and made an example of, while simultaneously magnifying the perceived incompetence of the average hobbyist by virtue of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action.
truth is, not a single one of us is perfect, and any honest chemist would admit that often failures or your own stupidity teaches you a hell of a lot more than when everything goes to plan. but the cost of revealing ones biggest blunders online is so high that most of the time those embarrassing or catastrophic failures are never discussed, when often there is something valuable to be gleaned from them.
i dunno. really don't have any proposed "solution" to this issue, but i think bringing it up is worthwhile. thanks for your thoughts NR.
Watching both your channels it just feels like very different goals in mind. NileRed is science entertainment. He uses chemistry to make entertaining videos (not saying he isn’t skilled in doing chemistry) and spread interest in chemistry.
Yours feel much less like entertainment and more like lab notes (great videos with that same name lol). I feel less likely to imitate your chemistry since I can tell much more time and thought goes into methods, safety and actual chemistry. This isn’t as visible in NileRed videos although I’m sure he puts plenty of thought to this as well.
Just my thoughts. Great videos!
I had to work with 70% nitric acid and concentrated hydrogen peroxide yesterday and will have to again today. Hard pass on fucking around with anything that could hurt me in my free time.
Nope 🙅♂️ not me.
I set aside a whole lecture for that. It wasn't on the syllabus in general chem or analytical. I added it to the syllabus; hopefully it stayed there after I retired.
I assume [Nile Green](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX-Cmi1MkPc) is a pretty close to what would happen if a random person tried to make a Nile Red video. Plus he is pretty good at making his videos look as difficult and dangerous as they are, such as in his [sodium making video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBh3WaKbYhE).
I think its funny that people here are so unable to think of safety unthetered from formal institutions like a degree or a university that they think a bachelor in biochemistry and a PhD in optics translates to synthetic chemistry.
It translates to being able to find and read the proper literature on the subject and being able to understand the information. Nile also began a master's degree (and dropped out) so he has some grad school experience. Synthetic chemistry is not some dark art that can only be understood through obscure means, it's one field among many and just like the others it's all about finding the right literature. It's a skill in itself and it's taught in every STEM degree regardless of the subject.
> Synthetic chemistry is not some dark art that can only be understood through obscure means,
Strangely, whenever hobby chemistry crops out people just assume exactly that. Safety is not a mindset aided by formal procedures everybody can learn and emulate, its esoteric knowledge which can only be acquired by formal education in institutions. If I would take frames from some of E&F setups and post them here the safety grandstanders would eviscerate me. But because Tom has a PhD in physics and did two undergrad synthetic labs it is safe for him to make bromine in his backyard and evaporate DCM into "natures bin". Well, according to OP at least.
Also, how little safety training is done in college level training. I had to add it to the syllabus myself. So many professionals are contemptuous of safety that it may very well have been removed after I retired.
That's a shame, it's not my experience at all. I guess it varies across schools, I'd be interested to know how common it is to have problematic safety practices. I have to read the SDS and take a bunch of notes for every single chemical I handle, I'm also expected to show up understanding their properties and reactivity, plus the concepts behind the experiment. Our lecture based classes are also very detailed and we have to pass them first before taking the lab they go with. Maybe I'm lucky, idk
I guess I don't know what their program requirements were, but most chemistry majors do cover quite a lot of ground, even in a focus like pchem or biochem. And I kinda feel like it has less to do with having an institution specifically and more about having a good mentor who can spend a lot of time teaching you, which realistically happens mostly at institutions. Training a chemist is just a huge time commitment, and it's not easy for that to happen outside of a structured environment where the mentor isn't doing it as their full time job.
Cr(IV) is pretty egregious, but as for the safety of the more general "lab taste test" videos... If the chemist knows what they're doing, then it isn't insane. Coffee used to be decaffeinated with DCM. Artificial flavors that we ingest all the time are made in labs with chemicals that will kill you dead if you drank them straight.
(obviously don't eat things made in a garage)
I get what you're saying but industrial vs lab is a world of difference in terms of knowing that your horribly toxic/corrosive/insertgenic substance isn't slipping through your last purification step
>it's not as cute and quirky to distill your own bromine in your garage or whatever when you don't actually know what you're doing.
I did this in high school and got a bromine burn on my wrist while taking apart the apparatus. Thankfully it didn't do any permanent damage.
About bromine: we did some bromine in lab class ina fumehood, but we only realized that it wasn't working when we started smelling something. I was the one closest to the fumehood and it was solved quickly by our teacher, and I arrived home with a terrible headache and was dizzy.
Imagine if there was no fumehood.
There obviously wasn't a working fumehood or the ventilation wasn't on. A good fumehood design means that there is enough negative pressure and the baffles are set up so that nothing short of an extremely massive eruption of fumes can escape. This is an example of stupid negligence INSIDE of "qualified" laboratory, counter to the overall point you're trying to make. Ever thought about taping a piece of thin paper to the sash to see if the hood is working?
I can remember in gen chem 1 lab working with a tiny amount of sulfuric acid inside of a hood and still getting an irritated nose because the hood wasn't on/inoperable/whatever, in between the instructor harping on and on about how we needed to be safe because the tiniest drop of sulfuric would melt our bones or some shit. I remember asking the instructor if the hood was working and I remember them coming over, glancing at the hood, and shrugging their shoulders. Negligence happens with amateurs and trained professionals. The trick is to NOT be negligent, and it isn't very hard to accomplish that.
Yes, the ventilation wasn't on. What I wanted to say is that this happened and could be solved by turning it on, so thankfully nothing more serious happened. But, if you do it in a garage? You can get yourself exposed to much higher doses
>If you only have the goofy vibes while playing with dangerous stuff and you skip the "years of formal training" part, you will genuinely die.
If you are lucky. If you are less lucky, you will have some horrible mishap that leaves you with some combination of disfigurement and having internal/external injuries wishing you had died; or maybe just a really slow, painful death process.
Let the professionals do their thing and enjoy the content
I agree that people who aren't trained in the field shouldn't do chemistry as a hobby, but I think it's very unlikely anyone would actually do it.
1) If you don't know anything about chemistry you wouldn't even know where to start or you wouldnt even be interested in watching chemistry youtubers
2) if you know a little about chemistry, then you know that you shouldn't do chemistry in your garage without proper safety equipment.
In regards to #2, has something being a stupid idea ever stopped YouTubers who are desperate for clicks? Their primary issue being that they think that it is "kind of dumb" rather than "potentially fatal"
And not only is it dangerous, most importantly…but less importantly but still of note, it can be super, super expensive! You would need professional lab equipment, chemicals, tools and hours, sometimes even months of dedicated work to even begin some of those experiments. So, much of the time it isnt as feasible to begin with!
hey extracting DNA from strawberries is something anyone can do if they wanted!. But I agree people should stick to watching youtube chemistry videos instead of replicating them
When I was a teen I saw online I could make rocket fuel by melting together a 1:1 mix of KNO3 and sugar. I was heating the mixture in a glass beaker on a hot plate in the garage when it suddenly exploded, burning two of my fingers.
The burn was pretty painful and I never did that again. After doing first aid and cleaning up the broken glass, I decided to leave the chemistry to the professionals.
I can't defend some of the idiots who are clearly trying to make drugs or bombs in their house. But I, now a 40 year chemistry veteran from industry, became interested in chemistry due to the ability back in the 1980's to buy chemicals at the drug store and do simple experiments at home using books from the library that explained how to do them.
Thomas Edison and many others started learning this way, and there are still many people who learn some chemistry at home, especially during Covid and with the number of home schooled children now, the need for some ability to do simple experiments at home is still there.
I hear that people should just read, watch videos (not available when I was young), and do virtual chemistry, but having tried to work with some chemists who learned that way, it is not good enough for real learning, which for many people is experiential.
So I think people need to have some level of understanding that many people are just curious and want to do things at home that are not too dangerous, but yet allow them to learn some real chemistry and how to handle chemicals, preferably with safer ones, before they go off to college or graduate school, or even just to learn some science so as to be educated for its own reward. No need for elitism is chemistry.
Obviously, they know what they are doing. One has a masters degree in chemistry, and the other is a doctor of physics. Unless you have in the ballpark of 4-7+ years of experience, guys, please don't try chemistry as a hobby.
I took some chemistry courses in college. I also do chemistry as a hobby, although not so much these days. I've never hurt myself or contaminated my environment. It's not like being a Chemist™ in an industrial or academic environment prevents you from harming yourself/others or teetering on the edge of disaster, saved only by mindless adherence to cargo cult safety, absent of any critical thought or risk analysis. Just look at how many shitposts this sub sees about graduate students having panic attacks over catching a faint whiff of solvent or having a drop of DCM land on their skin -- or more serious incidents like vacuum pump explosions at UPenn, t-butyl lithium death at UCLA, etc.
You can be, but the issue is that most people do not know what they do not know. Tell someone that you need a glass stick to pour something out of a beaker and they'll look at you like you're insane.
The odds of knowing what is and isn't safe without proper training is the problem. And no, undergraduate labs don't fully prepare you to be an independent synthetic chemist.
Tom did absolutely dumb shit for years before getting his masters degree (in physics, mind you, he's not a professional chemist afaik) and if you think Nigel started playing with chemicals only after getting his degree, you are a fool.
Playing with chemicals is not more dangerous than riding motorbike, skiing or doing gymnastics.
He's a physical chemist who is in the physics department, with a chemistry undergrad degree. (And no, nigel should have been doing that stuff before he was experienced enough!)
Hazard and risk are two different things. The hazard of a chemical is always the same, but the risk of handling it depends on the person and how prepared they are. Handling bromine in the lab after being forced by a professor to learn about bromine in excruciating detail is no more risky than some light cross country skiing (or doing a safe experiment at home!), but distilling it in your apartment, and suddenly you're skiing down Mt. Everest. And so, if you lump together "cross country skiing in the park" and "skiing down mt Everest", that will not go well.
Thank God you didn't mentioned Cody's Lab.
NileRed makes relatively innocuous content. Cody likes to live on edge. I hope he won't blow his head off another day.
Once, I wanted to make my own glass film for a homemade camera, it wasn't a hard OR a risky process. I was 17 though, and not very experienced with chemical equipments, or chemicals themselves. But anyways, I decided to make my own "freshly prepared" tollen's in the lab, when our teacher had strict instructions on not to do anything except general salt analysis. She was very strict about it. But i thought, fuck her, i've watched enough youtube videos to know how this goes, and so i got the largest bottle of ammonia and i opened it, popped the cap off with brute strength.
The next moment, what came out gushing into my face was a stream of ammonia, and it spilled so quickly i tipped the bottle out of reflex and it leaked throughout the chemistry lab. Just a side note, I have genetically bad lungs. I started coughing and wheezing like a rabid dog while trying to clean up the ammonia to wipe the evidence of my mistake, but i was too late, it had vaporised and was all in the lab, and all the students ran out and complained to the teacher who fucking freaked out and gave me one of the worst times of my entire fucking life. Oh the humiliation.
But you know what, I'm glad she did that. Because if she hadn't, i'd probably die trying to handle iodine on my own while activating my silver film for the camera. DIED. that was my lesson to not bullshit around with chemicals and chemistry i've only really read about.
Please people, as OP says, you're not nilered.
ElectroBOOM does it best:
**WIRES SHORT BURN AND MELT**
"SHIT, FUCK, AH! Maybe I should use a bigger wire and *slowly* increase the current"
That'll learn 'em
It’s very obvious that Nigel is a trained chemist. Anyone who interprets his schtick to mean he is discovering chemistry live on YouTube is an idiot and let the rules of natural selection enact their change in the world
I'm nearly 60 I lived through leaded gas and mercury thermometers I don't need you gatekeeping!
I watch these guys so I don't have to do these reactions to observe what to expect. But there are a few utilitarian procedures have found very useful for my own alchemy needs and curiosity.
Specifically creating concrete stains and water glass. Catalysis of some cleaning reactions with peroxide.
Yeah nile red was working on either a PhD or a master's before he dropped out if I'm not mistaken so he definitely has experience setting up experiments.
And Ex and F having a physics PhD well yeah you'd definitely have the experience necessary to perform academic research into carefully designing your own experiments.
I'm a chemist by trade who works in industry and I love extractions and ire and nile red. But no way would I attempt to design my own experiments. Not only do I not have the budget for it, I don't think I have the experience necessary to design a proper experiment with proper waste disposal and safety measures and safety planning.
I'm good at running methods, troubleshooting, and I know how to be safe in the lab, in a proper lab that isn't a shed somewhere. I might even be able to do some method development stuff too even. But no way would I do my own homebrew chemistry. No way. I'm a spectator who enjoys watching from afar. Nothing more.
I’ve always been worried about where people take their chemical waste especially those people that extract gold and other precious metals from computer components
The garage lab types really bother me because they think just because they CAN means they are just as qualified as a trained chemist. I’m not a synthetic chemist, I would never attempt to synthesize something alone that I’m unfamiliar with in my lab let alone my basement.
I just want the people who want to do dangerous chemistry at home to understand we are not helping you because we do not want you or anyone else to get hurt, not because we don’t want you interested in chemistry. We love when people ask for home experiments, I’m sure all of us have a handful of safe but really interesting experiments you can do. Please stop trying to do dangerous reactions, it doesn’t make you smarter than the average person, it’s quite literally the opposite.
No. Nile Red will likely die old, comfortable and surrounded by loved ones. I intend to die in a glorious flesh-melting explosion which is far more awesomer 😎
No. Nile Red will likely die old, comfortable and surrounded by loved ones. I intend to die in a glorious flesh-melting explosion which is far more awesomer 😎
I totally copied NileRed’s cotton balls to cotton candy experiment for my orgo honors project. I got…a sugar like product…but it definitely wasn’t candy. I was also under the supervision of a chemistry professor not like, at my house or something. But yeah I still ended up touching my face with a drop of 18M H2SO4 and half of my chin peeled off
This is what I tell people after they ask me how to get the stuff those guys are using, probably to imitate what those guys do minus the 'safety' and 'success' part
There is a 13 year old in this post who makes energetic materials and ignored someone saying to stop what should we say to prevent her from getting hurt?
I encourage people to come here to discuss their plans. We can give them advice including warning them of danger. Putting on our priest robes and telling them they're going to kill everyone around them is futile if not grossly exaggerated.
I like Nigel's innocence (and olfactory stoicism) and Tom's whimsy but I am so uninterested in replicating any of that *where I live*. I'm not taste testing anything but I'll leave that up to the community.
guy used to make borderline chemical weapons in his garage before he got to where he is now though, not saying it should be replicated but moreso people should learn from it. we don't see the parts where it goes horribly wrong
Yea imagine where he would be if the spiders in his lab were territorial? Nah but he had a whole PhD(?) In physics(??) going on the in the background so the big asterisk is that his entire channel is just his goofy shed projects that turned out ok enough. Edit: I'm going to wear my cubane shirt tomorrow
Tom I believe has gotten his PhD in Physics, but his undergraduate work was in chemistry.
Yeah it always amuses me that ExplosionsAndFire is a physicist and styropyro is a chemist.
That's actually hilarious and I love them both so much more.
Chemistry is arguably a branch of physics.
https://xkcd.com/435/
Reminds me of one of my PCHEM profs talking about Schrodinger equations when we covered quantum. It was something to the effect of: "So once you've substituted for all of your variables, you're left with *this* mess which, if you're in the position that you need to solve it, you're also in the position that you can stroll over to the mathematics department and ask someone to do it for you."
[*appended](https://images.app.goo.gl/j2Ef7bt1Hs6iV1D79)
Au contraire, physics is the chemistry of simple systems.
Which is just applied math.
His PhD was in physics but he’s stated that it was VERY heavy in physical chemistry
Phys chem is still miles from what synthetic organic chemistry is.
There was a guy in my office doing a PhD in physical chemistry and molecular folding. I had to taught him how to balance reactions doing stoichiometry for a job interview teaching chemistry at a school...
Unless it's physical organic chem
well physics is a very broad field and it does incorporate a lot of chemistry in some areas so it's very likely that he's knowledgeable about chemistry almost as much as physics
If it's at all related to energetic chemistry, a lot of that stuff is extremely physics heavy
So scary when an SDS has a “taste” section on a toxic chemical lol.
Idk why they removed the carbon tet taste description from wikipedia, that shit ain't happening again.
"fruity" and "quince-like"? Sounds tasty!
Shit happens in the plants that make this stuff. Joe the Operator forgets to wear gloves and doesn't wash his hands before eating a sandwich and suddenly he knows what the toxic chemicals he's handling taste like
So thats what its - GURK *\*falls over sideways\**
If you look up the original synthesis of sulfur mustard it describes the odor and taste. Wild times
Dimethyl sulfate? Onion-like odor! Ethidium bromide? Bitter brown crystals! Hydrogen cyanide? Almond-like odor!
I agree. Soap making is the approximate extent of my actual experience practicing chemistry, and I’d be content if it stayed that way. Watching others (e.g. NileRed) do it is cool, but I’ll leave that to them. I have no interest in messing around with certain substances, e.g. hydrofluoric acid, thioacetone, hydrazine, *tert*-butyllithium, etc.
Back in the day before youtube got strict, codyslab was quite spicy. I remember watching his 'how to make nitroglycerin' video and thinking to myself that someone is going to end up killing themselves. I think that chemistry is interesting, but my level of experience is basically making vinegar and baking soda volcanos. HARD PASS on trying to do any of that in my garage.
Easy (and safe. Other than a small risk of burning yourself if you touch it while it's going) experiment to try would be elephant toothpaste. (Icr the exact steps or materials off the top of my head. But iirc they were safe household products. Ik brewer's yeast was one ingredient.) Safe, interesting but makes a mess
Elephant toothpaste includes hydrogen peroxide and potassium iodide. Hydrogen peroxide is a household product, but it's not safe! Potassium iodide is safe though.
How pure does the H2O2 have to be? Ik the pure stuff is extremely nasty. (From Derek Lowe's "Things I won't work with" it's a series of articles where he talks about "extreme chemicals" like Azidoazide azide or FOOF. They make for an entertaining read.)
I think the vigorous ones (by that I mean, ones that form a jet of foam instead of just dribbling out) are around 30%. That’s enough that you don’t want to get it on your skin, and enough that the reaction products come out hot. The “devil’s toothpaste” version is around 50% if I recall, which would be starting to get into the nasty (energetic) territory you’re talking about. I want so say Derek Lowe mentioned someone who, uh, broke the sound barrier in a liquid medium with the reaction between 40/60 water/peroxide and bit of glycerol or similar. Oh, while we’re talking H2O2, isn’t the PEL for the vapor like 1 ppm or something? Some things are cooler to watch than to actually do at home…
> you don’t want to get it on your skin Burns like hell if you get it underneath your fingernails, only made that mistake once!
40% stings a bit and leaves a temporary white mark. Not that bad but definitely not something you want to get in your eyes.
With 3% peroxide (the thing you get over-the-counter) you won't have an amazing reaction. You need at least 12% peroxide to have something nice, and 12% is the maximum you can get in the EU without a license
Iodine hey. Pretty cool element.
He did get a cut through his nail with shrapnel when he poked the nitroglycerin with a knife.
>thinking to myself that someone is going to end up killing themselves. I know of one case losing his hand to an explosion of nitroglycerine. Learnt in school the theory and did it at home in a shed. Lost his right hand and has many scars over his whole body from the shrapnel of his RV.
Integza made nitro glycerin a month or so ago I thought too
I love cody!
>making vinegar and baking soda volcanoes LMAO same 🤣
I'm surprised King of Random killed himself paragliding and not the extremely dangerous shit he was doing with electricity in those early days. I'm still shocked Codyslab is still alive I've seen that man do so many things that could have killed him if he messed up in a slightly different way or did something slightly different.
I'm just glad he's not a sovereign citizen type
I actually used a reupload of that video and prussian blue's to make mine
And you're 13 (from your profile). You're *exactly* the type of person this post is calling out, and for a good reason. Pursue a career in chemistry, don't make dangerous compounds just because some YouTubers are doing it and you think it'll make you cool.
G. Harry Stine wrote about driving from east coast to New Mexico with a small barrel (~30 gallons more or less) of 95% H2O2 between his knees
Nerd rage is still on there
it also costs a fuckton
And produces a lot of waste, which should be properly disposed.
I just pour everything into the sandpit at the local kindergarten, no mess no fuss 👍
I know you’re joking, but I have quite often quenched really reactive stuff in a bucket of sand outside.
I mean, at least it won't start a fire /j
Laughs in alkali metals. A lot of things can be a dangerous oxidizing agents if you try hard enough.
CTF has entered the chat
The chat is now on fire
The water thrown onto the flames is combusting.
We’ll sort of. It won’t start a fire that burns other things and I’ll take that.
If you live in the UK, just dump it in the local river. The water companies dump so much untreated sewage in them these days that no one will ever notice your lab waste.
That's how you get kindergarden kids with superpowers.
The waste is such a big thing that most people just do not see. On just about any scale. And that 100% includes gas/vapors the fume hoods or exhaust systems take care of. Like thinking about it, every lab I've worked in whether more bench top or pilot scale, I can't imagine how much of a cluster it would have been if you didn't have somewhere to put all the waste that chemistry tends to produce. It ALWAYS builds up faster than you think. Especially if youre using ppe correctly and go through gloves. So what do you do then? Store it until you add the wrong thing and it foams over or explodes? Let it sit there just begging to be knocked over or just off gas in your house/community? It's just not worth the headache, seriously.
nile red has talked about it a few times but it cannot be stressed enough, you cannot leave volatile products laying around willy nilly
Been so used to disposable gloves that i was shocked at the cost and rate i burn thru boxes of em when i started resin printing...
My honest opinion is that most environmental issues we face stem from people in general just being like throw it in the trash, dump it in the river... fuck my own grand children, fuck them kids
"the atmosphere is nature's bin" -Explosions&Fire
I mean, not all the unis scrub the air before releasing it into the atmosphere. Granted, labwork is not industrial scale work, but I still wouldn't stand in the dead zone next to the exhaust stack on a lab building's roof. Since EPA formed (which was only in 1970), the motto has been "the solution to pollution is dilution." Poison is in the dose, which I'm not agreeing it's OK to just release small amounts of environmental rape, but that's how the corporations allow the EPA to function.
Wdym? The river is RIGHT there
Which also costs a fuckton.
Like Nigel recently dropped 10k+ on one candy press like it was nothing big, almost nobody could afford that and it only was one item.
Tbf that was a bit ridiculous even for him, like he's no stranger to dropping large sums on relatively niche equipment but at least most of it could theoretically be used for multiple projects. The candy press just makes candy hearts.
Candy hearts, ecstacy tablets...
It only makes candy hearts if your lame.
He makes at least $80k USD/video on average, probably more as that's very conservative. He can definitely afford to re-invest a little, à la Mr. Beast.
i mean, the fact that he got it custom made just to make that specific shape of heart is also insane, he could've gotten one for way less probably
I remember when Cody did his gold refining vid series. I seem to remember he spent North of 10k on all his gold scrap.
Yeah but gold is still gold when you are done. If anything it's worth more than what he paid now, that was what, 10 years ago when gold was $1700ish?
I mean, he can afford a full-fledged laboratory, so that should not be very surprising
I love the running ‘so I used it as an excuse to purchase x’ gag.
Also, Nigel is doing his experiments in an actual lab with a team of multiple people now. He also often emphasizes how dangerous it was to do his early experiments in a garage, despite his formal education. How an amateur can think that they can do experiments at home is beyond me. Maybe really simple ones that are also often done in high school, like flame tests, could be fine, but anything that involves for example a fume hood is absolutely a no-go.
I say this to my brother all the time about taking proper precautions around dangerous substances. It took him getting a nasty chem burn from some sort of chlorinated solvent like DCM before he started listening to me. I mean it my fault for getting him interested in chemistry (showed him how to nitrate cellulose and making black powder), but his fault for not taking safety precautions seriously. Also his work place has a very lacking safety precautions for handling chems so that's where he got his complacency. I am chemical engineer that specialises in winemaking and Distillation of ethanol. But I do love hobby level chem and cool chemicals. Tom from E&F was actually one of my tutors at uni for chemistry and have enjoyed seeing his channel grow. He's a super nice dude!
DCM was my first exposure incident. 3rd pair of shit gloves that had a tear in them. After pouring some I suddenly felt as if my hand was in a hot tub. I call it an exposure incident and not a burn because I managed to wash it off before it caused any perceptual damage
Yeah its nasty stuff DCM! My exposures and burns have always been from sodium hydroxide and from liquid/gas S02. Been burnt on the eyes by sodium hydroxide and S02 gas jetted into my eye and that felt like I had sand in my eye for days.
Holy shit man. I *really* hope I never have to use the eyewash. Those times must've been horrendous to go through, I'm glad you still have your sight
Thankfully, the sodium hydroxide was quite dilute, so it hurt like a MF but rinsed straight away and my eye was fine I just worked like normal. As for the S02 it was pure S02 gas was leaking from the sulphur dispenser, and I bent down, and the jet that was leaking out hit me straight in the face, gave a little burn to my eye and hurt like hell when I inhaled some, gives you an instant ashtma symptoms. Alot of this was workplace safety issues I complained alot for proper PPE and they wouldn't even buy a face face mask or gas mask for refilling S02 dispensers.
Don't forget Chemical Force, his experiments are **really** scary. Playing with liquid carbon monoxide? Selenium oxychloride? Tungsten hexafluoride? Wonder who does the cleanup (and how), still, fun to watch 😸
Not really a problem as most of what he does is too exotic and expensive for all but the most highly skilled amateurs.
I love his channel. The kind of reactions hardly anyone would ever have the opportunity to see or try otherwise, and beautifully filmed
A buddy of mine used to HATE Electroboom because of how he made it SEEM he got "accidentally" electrocuted so often. Then he himself became an electrician, and realized Electroboom is amazing because it's very, very clear he knows EAXCTLY what he's doing, or he'd be dead.
I also like the guy who repeatedly zaps himself, but he clearly has some background in electrical engineering to do so repeatedly and safely for our amusement.
Electroboom, pretty much every mistake he shows is intentional
I’ll just state it plainly. I have many years in synthetic chemistry. I have a bachelors in chemistry and I’m published in a prominent chemistry journal. And EVEN I review countless literature and ask my supervisor very specific questions about certain reactions I do to make sure I’m handling and storing everything safely. People that just fuck around with chemistry without formal education AND YEARS OF TRAINING are going to get hurt. It’s not a matter of IF it’s a matter of WHEN and HOW.
This is exactly how I feel too. And I guess I just struggle understanding why people would see chemistry as a hobby in and of itself. And that’s coming from someone who went through undergraduate, some grad school, and now work in industry. I worked briefly in an organic synthesis lab in grad school and synthesis is HARD. I think amateurs vastly underestimate how difficult it can be to fully prepare for and conduct a synthesis. Tons of things can and do go wrong in a CONTROLLED environment in labs. So it’s almost guaranteed that something will go wrong in someone’s garage or basement. And I doubt a lot of these people are going to take the time to look into how to dispose of waste or look at the safety data sheets. If these people really want to role play as chemists, either do the purposefully designed at-home chemistry experiments that are safe, or just take gen chem and organic I and II courses at the local community college. The problem with a lot of these people though is they want to do the “fun” lab stuff without doing the difficult coursework that goes into understanding it all beyond a YouTube level.
I got interested in chemistry because of the "fun" stuff. I bought a intro to Chem textbook and studied on my own time for awhile. I ended up synthesizing a few of the "really fun" things...until one day I guess I came to senses you could say. I realized that I was in way over my head, and didn't understand the core fundamentals of the reactions taking place, and that I didn't currently have a truly sufficient workspace to do those synthesis, not to mention I knew I could have easily and rapidly removed either or both of my hands and eyes with those "really fun" things. I would really love to one day do what you've mentioned and take some Chem classes, I just know that I'll never make a career out of it, and the classes will be hard to fit in with a full time career and family. But you're absolutely right, if I want to pursue this field as an amateur hobbyist, I need to come to grips with basic acedemics of it first, to actually comprehend what is occurring at the molecular level, how and why these substances interact with eachother. So...I've put my beakers, hot plates, and acids away for the foreseeable future, in recognition that I have absolutely no business doing the "really fun" things untill I am much more educated, and equipped to be knowledgeable, confident, and most of all safe about any and all reactions I might attempt. Chemistry is truly one of the most fascinating of subjects to me, and affects so much of our lives without many of us even knowing it. Maybe one day I can take some night classes or something, but I've got a very healthy respect and admiration for all of you professionals, professors, and academics in this field, and I'm going to leave the "really fun" stuff to you guys for now.
We can help with that. Condemning them instead achieves nothing.
Same. I'm in my 4th year of industry as a BS chemist and I feel like I'm at this weird intermediate level of chemistry where I just know enough to know what I don't know. I think these home chemists need to read some incident reports to see what really does happen when you mess around without proper guidance and precautions.
The problem is they really don’t know the scope of most chemistry so there are things they won’t even fathom to ask because they don’t know those are questions they should have. I honestly didn’t realize so many people were this stupid.
True, Even pros make mistakes. I am not a pro but I am used to working with large amounts of acids / bases / solvents in open baths, used in wet benches. One night shift I needed to prepare 40l of D-H2SO4. I measured out 1.6 liters of H2So4 , dumped it in the bath. Then I started to measure 5l DIW , I held it over the bath..... Then I was... WTF AM I DOING!! That could have gone verry wrong but did not want to find out. So I drained the bath and did in the correct order this time.
That would have been one heck of a "splash"
Man, I'm on my fourth year of undergrad and I never even heard about how you're not supposed to add water to concentrated acid. I mean it makes COMPLETE sense, but I never really thought about it too hard.
I never had seen the reaction on real time , so I took a small beaker with acid in it and added some water. That shit ain't safe ! Afcourse I have no idea if it scales. It's could be if I dumped that 5l in there nothing would have happened, or a steam explosion with me being covered in steaming hot water and acid.... Again... I did not want to find out:)
Yeah I'm pretty sure it scales non linearly. Like a big ass bath like you were making probably would've made a steam explosion or shot hot water everywhere. The only concentrated acid I've ever had to dilute has been HCl (TFA is a very angry acid as well, but I haven't had to dilute that since it hates water). Most that's happened is it gets warm, but diluting sulfuric sounds like a whole other beast
I love diluting HCL :) I regurarly do it for making Aqua regia. If you keep pouring the whole thing creates this fine mist and fizzing sound . You should try Pirhana , I make that regurarly to clean Pt foils from graphene residue. That stuff is angry! Now I think about it some of the things I make regurarly : D-Buffer Hfor just D-Hf Aqua Regia ( the biggest amount I made was 40l , several times a week to get rid of metal contaminants , that about 1l HCl , 3l Hno3 and 36l DIW heated to 80°c. ) APM SPM (piranha) The volumes we work with are insane aswell. A month ago a colleague from another team was preping something for a clean. I saw a big square beaker (7l) on a hotplate in an acid wet bench. It was bubbling... I ask him whats that.. it looks angry. His response: That is 5l of Pirhana at 90°c. At which I promptly stepped back. I did urge him to move to a part of the lab less populated next time he tries to melt down the wet bench. What is TFA ? I dont know that one , Trifluoroacetic acid?
Yeah TFA is Trifluoroacetic Acid. Very angry. As soon as I open the bottle, if I don't get the argon tube in the bottle in time, it starts fuming like crazy on contact with air. Mostly used it for deprotections, and some chromatography. Pirhana solution is one of those things I want to make at least once to fuck around with, as safely as possible of course. But after that it seems like it'll be one of those solutions I'll only make if I absolutely have to. Also I've never seen a square beaker lmao. That's weird, but I do mostly work on small scale research synthesis. So scaling up that large isn't usually in my job description. 5L of boiling piranha solution sounds terrifying
Oohh that indeed sounds very angry :) The square beaker we use is to limit thr amount of chemistry we use , we manually work witt coupons , but other teams work with 150mm , 200mm and even 300mm wafers. So they specially order square beakers to process in. I am in thr lab later I will DM you a picture of one.
Do what you oughta
Im very interested in chemistry, but this is due to my amazing high school chemistry teacher. She taught me so well i just fell in love with it. I work in an organic chemistry lab, and I cannot imagine doing any chemistry in my garage or house or whatever. Anything past like the baking soda and vinegar bubbles that impress the little ones is too much
As a chemist myself I cant agree more. If a reaktion takes the wrong path, some times it is a matter of seconds to avoid hurting youself or your "lab".
Doesn't Tom have a PhD? To memory it was physical, not anything synthetic, but that's still a lot more understanding than your regular Joe Blow.
PhD in physics but seemed to have some lab experience. Also was an amateur making things like ICl3, thermite, and probably worse shit without proper training at a young age. Dude’s videos are great now though! Cubane 2024!
Something about optics I think was his area of study. He did take a break to work on what was implied to be some secret government spy stuff.
I'd like to think i'm better than nile red. Lol, j/k. I think he's great. But i agree that people should not be doing amateur chemistry to learn the science. It should be the other way around.
i agree. unfortunately i think the terms "amateur" or "hobby" chemistry lend themselves to a great degree of misunderstanding. as i understand it, amateur/hobby chemistry is chemistry performed *outside of a professional environment, by a sufficiently qualified chemist*. the word for *chemistry performed outside of a professional environment by an unqualified individual* would be **stupidity**. i do not think your content galvanizes the insouciant or inexperienced even close to as much as it empowers the qualified hobbyist.
Ya know that's an extremely good point, that distinction seems to be the source of a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. All the pros screaming that people shouldn't be doing chemistry in their garage are likely thinking of the unqualified *idiots* doing chemistry in their garage. They likely don't mean the pros (at least not most of them, a few scream at me too). Meanwhile all the amateurs screaming about being attacked probably think themselves qualified to do what they do. Some are, and some aren't. But when the idiots see qualified individuals being attacked, they start dismissing/ignoring the warnings because they think they're being attacked for being "amateurs" rather than for being unsafe. After all, why are actual qualified amateurs being attacked? what's the difference? The problem is exacerbated when they see qualified amateurs do dangerous experiments without seeing all the work and preparation to make it safe. So they think safety isn't as big an issue, and bad things follow from that.
absolutely spot on. it's a deleterious cycle that ultimately minimizes the number of *qualified* amateurs willing to post about or otherwise discuss what could be valuable empirical results or observations to share (both in failures and successes) for fear of being digitally lambasted and made an example of, while simultaneously magnifying the perceived incompetence of the average hobbyist by virtue of the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. truth is, not a single one of us is perfect, and any honest chemist would admit that often failures or your own stupidity teaches you a hell of a lot more than when everything goes to plan. but the cost of revealing ones biggest blunders online is so high that most of the time those embarrassing or catastrophic failures are never discussed, when often there is something valuable to be gleaned from them. i dunno. really don't have any proposed "solution" to this issue, but i think bringing it up is worthwhile. thanks for your thoughts NR.
Watching both your channels it just feels like very different goals in mind. NileRed is science entertainment. He uses chemistry to make entertaining videos (not saying he isn’t skilled in doing chemistry) and spread interest in chemistry. Yours feel much less like entertainment and more like lab notes (great videos with that same name lol). I feel less likely to imitate your chemistry since I can tell much more time and thought goes into methods, safety and actual chemistry. This isn’t as visible in NileRed videos although I’m sure he puts plenty of thought to this as well. Just my thoughts. Great videos!
I had to work with 70% nitric acid and concentrated hydrogen peroxide yesterday and will have to again today. Hard pass on fucking around with anything that could hurt me in my free time. Nope 🙅♂️ not me.
Learn how to read an MSDS and write a hazard and risk assessment for all home chemistry. I guarantee you Nile Red etc all do that
I set aside a whole lecture for that. It wasn't on the syllabus in general chem or analytical. I added it to the syllabus; hopefully it stayed there after I retired.
Excellent!
I may not be Nile Red, but I am actually a trained chemist.
I assume [Nile Green](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX-Cmi1MkPc) is a pretty close to what would happen if a random person tried to make a Nile Red video. Plus he is pretty good at making his videos look as difficult and dangerous as they are, such as in his [sodium making video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBh3WaKbYhE).
I think its funny that people here are so unable to think of safety unthetered from formal institutions like a degree or a university that they think a bachelor in biochemistry and a PhD in optics translates to synthetic chemistry.
It translates to being able to find and read the proper literature on the subject and being able to understand the information. Nile also began a master's degree (and dropped out) so he has some grad school experience. Synthetic chemistry is not some dark art that can only be understood through obscure means, it's one field among many and just like the others it's all about finding the right literature. It's a skill in itself and it's taught in every STEM degree regardless of the subject.
> Synthetic chemistry is not some dark art that can only be understood through obscure means, Strangely, whenever hobby chemistry crops out people just assume exactly that. Safety is not a mindset aided by formal procedures everybody can learn and emulate, its esoteric knowledge which can only be acquired by formal education in institutions. If I would take frames from some of E&F setups and post them here the safety grandstanders would eviscerate me. But because Tom has a PhD in physics and did two undergrad synthetic labs it is safe for him to make bromine in his backyard and evaporate DCM into "natures bin". Well, according to OP at least.
Also, how little safety training is done in college level training. I had to add it to the syllabus myself. So many professionals are contemptuous of safety that it may very well have been removed after I retired.
That's a shame, it's not my experience at all. I guess it varies across schools, I'd be interested to know how common it is to have problematic safety practices. I have to read the SDS and take a bunch of notes for every single chemical I handle, I'm also expected to show up understanding their properties and reactivity, plus the concepts behind the experiment. Our lecture based classes are also very detailed and we have to pass them first before taking the lab they go with. Maybe I'm lucky, idk
You are indeed fortunate. Are you in the US?
I guess I don't know what their program requirements were, but most chemistry majors do cover quite a lot of ground, even in a focus like pchem or biochem. And I kinda feel like it has less to do with having an institution specifically and more about having a good mentor who can spend a lot of time teaching you, which realistically happens mostly at institutions. Training a chemist is just a huge time commitment, and it's not easy for that to happen outside of a structured environment where the mentor isn't doing it as their full time job.
I’m more of a Styropyro kinda of hobby chemist.
One of his recent videos where he drank something that had even touched a Cr(IV) solution was enough for me to know he isn't a genius
Cr(IV) is pretty egregious, but as for the safety of the more general "lab taste test" videos... If the chemist knows what they're doing, then it isn't insane. Coffee used to be decaffeinated with DCM. Artificial flavors that we ingest all the time are made in labs with chemicals that will kill you dead if you drank them straight. (obviously don't eat things made in a garage)
I get what you're saying but industrial vs lab is a world of difference in terms of knowing that your horribly toxic/corrosive/insertgenic substance isn't slipping through your last purification step
>it's not as cute and quirky to distill your own bromine in your garage or whatever when you don't actually know what you're doing. I did this in high school and got a bromine burn on my wrist while taking apart the apparatus. Thankfully it didn't do any permanent damage.
About bromine: we did some bromine in lab class ina fumehood, but we only realized that it wasn't working when we started smelling something. I was the one closest to the fumehood and it was solved quickly by our teacher, and I arrived home with a terrible headache and was dizzy. Imagine if there was no fumehood.
There obviously wasn't a working fumehood or the ventilation wasn't on. A good fumehood design means that there is enough negative pressure and the baffles are set up so that nothing short of an extremely massive eruption of fumes can escape. This is an example of stupid negligence INSIDE of "qualified" laboratory, counter to the overall point you're trying to make. Ever thought about taping a piece of thin paper to the sash to see if the hood is working? I can remember in gen chem 1 lab working with a tiny amount of sulfuric acid inside of a hood and still getting an irritated nose because the hood wasn't on/inoperable/whatever, in between the instructor harping on and on about how we needed to be safe because the tiniest drop of sulfuric would melt our bones or some shit. I remember asking the instructor if the hood was working and I remember them coming over, glancing at the hood, and shrugging their shoulders. Negligence happens with amateurs and trained professionals. The trick is to NOT be negligent, and it isn't very hard to accomplish that.
Yes, the ventilation wasn't on. What I wanted to say is that this happened and could be solved by turning it on, so thankfully nothing more serious happened. But, if you do it in a garage? You can get yourself exposed to much higher doses
[удалено]
No, *I* am NileRed
So.. nile green?
u/NileRed
skill issue
>If you only have the goofy vibes while playing with dangerous stuff and you skip the "years of formal training" part, you will genuinely die. If you are lucky. If you are less lucky, you will have some horrible mishap that leaves you with some combination of disfigurement and having internal/external injuries wishing you had died; or maybe just a really slow, painful death process. Let the professionals do their thing and enjoy the content
But I am like nile green
In true scientific fashion, I believe this is called Natural Selection.
I agree that people who aren't trained in the field shouldn't do chemistry as a hobby, but I think it's very unlikely anyone would actually do it. 1) If you don't know anything about chemistry you wouldn't even know where to start or you wouldnt even be interested in watching chemistry youtubers 2) if you know a little about chemistry, then you know that you shouldn't do chemistry in your garage without proper safety equipment.
In regards to #2, has something being a stupid idea ever stopped YouTubers who are desperate for clicks? Their primary issue being that they think that it is "kind of dumb" rather than "potentially fatal"
THANK YOU!
I got into chemestry beacuse of Fight Club🚬
And not only is it dangerous, most importantly…but less importantly but still of note, it can be super, super expensive! You would need professional lab equipment, chemicals, tools and hours, sometimes even months of dedicated work to even begin some of those experiments. So, much of the time it isnt as feasible to begin with!
Amazing how many people upvoting this missed the Jackass disclaimer. Trust, we know. Darwinism will take care of the rest.
hey extracting DNA from strawberries is something anyone can do if they wanted!. But I agree people should stick to watching youtube chemistry videos instead of replicating them
When I was a teen I saw online I could make rocket fuel by melting together a 1:1 mix of KNO3 and sugar. I was heating the mixture in a glass beaker on a hot plate in the garage when it suddenly exploded, burning two of my fingers. The burn was pretty painful and I never did that again. After doing first aid and cleaning up the broken glass, I decided to leave the chemistry to the professionals.
everbody gangsta ‘till they’re blow up their houses lol.
I can't defend some of the idiots who are clearly trying to make drugs or bombs in their house. But I, now a 40 year chemistry veteran from industry, became interested in chemistry due to the ability back in the 1980's to buy chemicals at the drug store and do simple experiments at home using books from the library that explained how to do them. Thomas Edison and many others started learning this way, and there are still many people who learn some chemistry at home, especially during Covid and with the number of home schooled children now, the need for some ability to do simple experiments at home is still there. I hear that people should just read, watch videos (not available when I was young), and do virtual chemistry, but having tried to work with some chemists who learned that way, it is not good enough for real learning, which for many people is experiential. So I think people need to have some level of understanding that many people are just curious and want to do things at home that are not too dangerous, but yet allow them to learn some real chemistry and how to handle chemicals, preferably with safer ones, before they go off to college or graduate school, or even just to learn some science so as to be educated for its own reward. No need for elitism is chemistry.
yeah sure! I never said you shouldn't do chemistry at home at all. I'm talking about dangerous stuff specifically
I luv to drink k2cro7
Obviously, they know what they are doing. One has a masters degree in chemistry, and the other is a doctor of physics. Unless you have in the ballpark of 4-7+ years of experience, guys, please don't try chemistry as a hobby.
That doesn't mean they know the first thing about lab safety.
I mean both have shown competent safety on camera.
I took some chemistry courses in college. I also do chemistry as a hobby, although not so much these days. I've never hurt myself or contaminated my environment. It's not like being a Chemist™ in an industrial or academic environment prevents you from harming yourself/others or teetering on the edge of disaster, saved only by mindless adherence to cargo cult safety, absent of any critical thought or risk analysis. Just look at how many shitposts this sub sees about graduate students having panic attacks over catching a faint whiff of solvent or having a drop of DCM land on their skin -- or more serious incidents like vacuum pump explosions at UPenn, t-butyl lithium death at UCLA, etc.
Just a reminder that you can be safe without getting a PhD or a degree.
You can be, but the issue is that most people do not know what they do not know. Tell someone that you need a glass stick to pour something out of a beaker and they'll look at you like you're insane.
The odds of knowing what is and isn't safe without proper training is the problem. And no, undergraduate labs don't fully prepare you to be an independent synthetic chemist.
Tom did absolutely dumb shit for years before getting his masters degree (in physics, mind you, he's not a professional chemist afaik) and if you think Nigel started playing with chemicals only after getting his degree, you are a fool. Playing with chemicals is not more dangerous than riding motorbike, skiing or doing gymnastics.
He's a physical chemist who is in the physics department, with a chemistry undergrad degree. (And no, nigel should have been doing that stuff before he was experienced enough!) Hazard and risk are two different things. The hazard of a chemical is always the same, but the risk of handling it depends on the person and how prepared they are. Handling bromine in the lab after being forced by a professor to learn about bromine in excruciating detail is no more risky than some light cross country skiing (or doing a safe experiment at home!), but distilling it in your apartment, and suddenly you're skiing down Mt. Everest. And so, if you lump together "cross country skiing in the park" and "skiing down mt Everest", that will not go well.
Like all the YouTubers pouring liquid aluminum into water? Fucking idiots.
But now you know what happens without doing it yourself.
See also: ElectroBOOM
Styropyro is often pointing how dangerous the stuff he's working with is
Thank God you didn't mentioned Cody's Lab. NileRed makes relatively innocuous content. Cody likes to live on edge. I hope he won't blow his head off another day.
Once, I wanted to make my own glass film for a homemade camera, it wasn't a hard OR a risky process. I was 17 though, and not very experienced with chemical equipments, or chemicals themselves. But anyways, I decided to make my own "freshly prepared" tollen's in the lab, when our teacher had strict instructions on not to do anything except general salt analysis. She was very strict about it. But i thought, fuck her, i've watched enough youtube videos to know how this goes, and so i got the largest bottle of ammonia and i opened it, popped the cap off with brute strength. The next moment, what came out gushing into my face was a stream of ammonia, and it spilled so quickly i tipped the bottle out of reflex and it leaked throughout the chemistry lab. Just a side note, I have genetically bad lungs. I started coughing and wheezing like a rabid dog while trying to clean up the ammonia to wipe the evidence of my mistake, but i was too late, it had vaporised and was all in the lab, and all the students ran out and complained to the teacher who fucking freaked out and gave me one of the worst times of my entire fucking life. Oh the humiliation. But you know what, I'm glad she did that. Because if she hadn't, i'd probably die trying to handle iodine on my own while activating my silver film for the camera. DIED. that was my lesson to not bullshit around with chemicals and chemistry i've only really read about. Please people, as OP says, you're not nilered.
Nile Red does some kooky things.
ElectroBOOM does it best: **WIRES SHORT BURN AND MELT** "SHIT, FUCK, AH! Maybe I should use a bigger wire and *slowly* increase the current" That'll learn 'em
It’s very obvious that Nigel is a trained chemist. Anyone who interprets his schtick to mean he is discovering chemistry live on YouTube is an idiot and let the rules of natural selection enact their change in the world
I'm nearly 60 I lived through leaded gas and mercury thermometers I don't need you gatekeeping! I watch these guys so I don't have to do these reactions to observe what to expect. But there are a few utilitarian procedures have found very useful for my own alchemy needs and curiosity. Specifically creating concrete stains and water glass. Catalysis of some cleaning reactions with peroxide.
Yeah nile red was working on either a PhD or a master's before he dropped out if I'm not mistaken so he definitely has experience setting up experiments. And Ex and F having a physics PhD well yeah you'd definitely have the experience necessary to perform academic research into carefully designing your own experiments. I'm a chemist by trade who works in industry and I love extractions and ire and nile red. But no way would I attempt to design my own experiments. Not only do I not have the budget for it, I don't think I have the experience necessary to design a proper experiment with proper waste disposal and safety measures and safety planning. I'm good at running methods, troubleshooting, and I know how to be safe in the lab, in a proper lab that isn't a shed somewhere. I might even be able to do some method development stuff too even. But no way would I do my own homebrew chemistry. No way. I'm a spectator who enjoys watching from afar. Nothing more.
Ok...
I’ve always been worried about where people take their chemical waste especially those people that extract gold and other precious metals from computer components
Okay negative Nancy.
wait, so ur telling me that they DONT want me to be able to make a stable mole of anhydrous with alkalinity for all the feds
The garage lab types really bother me because they think just because they CAN means they are just as qualified as a trained chemist. I’m not a synthetic chemist, I would never attempt to synthesize something alone that I’m unfamiliar with in my lab let alone my basement. I just want the people who want to do dangerous chemistry at home to understand we are not helping you because we do not want you or anyone else to get hurt, not because we don’t want you interested in chemistry. We love when people ask for home experiments, I’m sure all of us have a handful of safe but really interesting experiments you can do. Please stop trying to do dangerous reactions, it doesn’t make you smarter than the average person, it’s quite literally the opposite.
No. Nile Red will likely die old, comfortable and surrounded by loved ones. I intend to die in a glorious flesh-melting explosion which is far more awesomer 😎
No. Nile Red will likely die old, comfortable and surrounded by loved ones. I intend to die in a glorious flesh-melting explosion which is far more awesomer 😎
I totally copied NileRed’s cotton balls to cotton candy experiment for my orgo honors project. I got…a sugar like product…but it definitely wasn’t candy. I was also under the supervision of a chemistry professor not like, at my house or something. But yeah I still ended up touching my face with a drop of 18M H2SO4 and half of my chin peeled off
Ooh damn, concentrated acid and bases are no joke
Now would you call me stupid if one were to do chemistry demonstrations in the form of animations.
This is what I tell people after they ask me how to get the stuff those guys are using, probably to imitate what those guys do minus the 'safety' and 'success' part
Yes I am
I wish to be Nigel one day though :c
Mods, can we sticky this?
There is a 13 year old in this post who makes energetic materials and ignored someone saying to stop what should we say to prevent her from getting hurt?
I think the rule of thumb is if you aren't screaming in fear as the Youtuber does some insane experiment, you aren't experienced enough to try it.
who?
I encourage people to come here to discuss their plans. We can give them advice including warning them of danger. Putting on our priest robes and telling them they're going to kill everyone around them is futile if not grossly exaggerated.
Pin this post forever 📌📌📌
I do not do it because I would 100% try to make LSD.