Quantum Dots made with… olive oil? 

As soon as I saw the expensive olive oil, I was screaming "NOOOOO!! The chlorophyll is fluorescent!!" More expensive virgin olive oils contain more chlorophyll. It is one of the ways you can check for olive oil quality.

I have learned not to attempt to make a fluorescent compound with an even more fluorescent solvent

Olives are green and your neck is red. The important part is that neither is yellow.

Ah yes, the famous Wállët reduction method, works every time.

Extractions: 6/10 Ire: 10/10

Ah foiled by chlorophyll. Classic. There's a reason I wanted to make a laser out of chlorophyll. That red glow is so lovely

"I wouldn't recommend this method, not that... why the fuck would you be doing this?"

Experiments like these are why we absolutely should have a sub-field in all the sciences for duplicating experiments, techniques, designs, etc. with bare minimum and maximum accessibility. Not only would that help with education and engaging people in the sciences but I bet there is some amazing discoveries to be had in simplifying techniques, possibly including bringing production costs down. For instance, The Thought Emporium using Gatorade as a replacement for extremely expensive cell culture media. Increased accessibility, increased simplicity, and decreased costs all at the same time.

I thought this channel would help me better understand my wife's chemistry work. Unfortunately, she's not Australian, so she's not quite on this level, yet.

If I were to make an uneducated guess I would say it would be because you got the olive oil from the store and not a chemical supplier

Neat, so you can deep-fry cadmium and selenium, and the crispy bits are quantum dots.

Little known fact but cadmium is delicious

One problem is that nanoparticles are "sticky" and will aggregate and settle out (they are never really in solution, it's just that 5-100nm will remain colloidally suspended for a long time). The TOPO used in most of the common preparative methods serves to cap the particles to prevent aggregation. So, I suspect that any NP you may have made aggregated and were spun off with the rest of the gunge. Some literature demonstrated surface passivation with free fatty acids (oleic, stearic, etc.) so maybe it would be best to try this with oil (or lard, in the case of stearic acid) that you have first separated into free fatty acids and glycerol (via treatment with acid or base). You were getting there (conceptually) with the sulfuric acid, but probably didn't make much free acid...also, there was probably loss of CdSO4, which is likely insoluble in non-polar solvents. It's been a very long time since I ran this reaction, but I seem to recall using sodium selenite (e.g. selenious acid) as a nice source of selenium--that doesn't seem difficult to either acquire or prepare. Best of luck, this one was satisfying (I mean, using a UV-VIS to calculate particle size?! Brus...) to pull off.

hi, spanish here. Just to mention, usually, when a olive oil is more expensive, it's less pure than the cheapest one. That's because the "virgen extra" denomination means that all the olive oil was extracted only using mechanical methods, which are less efficient to extract the olive oil. But, extracting in that way it keeps some of the hues thats makes it more valuable in cuisine. The refined oil, the cheapest one, it's obtain by a combination of methods (mechanical and chemicals, mainly) that makes it more pure, but have a bland flavour.

I show my father (a retired physical chemist) your videos when I visit him, and he always spends the whole time flipping back and forth between uneasy laughter and hand-wringing anxiety.

I can't overstate how much I love this channel. The juxtaposition of it all is perfect. You clearly know what you're talking about... but then also... all if your items on the chalkboard have smiley faces, and that fan is desperate to give you tetanus.

As this was what my research project for the past two years was, the title is terrifying. Looking forward to seeing your backyard shed version of my laboratory labors!

"full of spark plugs" I smell a precious metal extraction coming. I now have chemical burns in my lungs and 7 different cancers 😊

I can't imagine being the chemist who is tasked with producing lab grade olive oil.

Heck yeah, existential crisis chem man posted

The fact that Australians call their currency "dollary-doos" has to be the most unhinged thing to come out of the 21st century.

That solidified selenium olive oil goop is only halfway towards becoming some form of blursed homemade dandruff soap.

I've done some research on olive oil standards in Australia (riveting stuff) that may be of help. First off, the standard for extra virgin olive oil requires that there is no more than .8 grams of oleic acid per 100ml so the mono saturated fat line cant possibly be only oleic acid and can't help us, however you do still probably end up being correct that the fancy olive oil is worse for you because the cheap stuff was only olive oil, and that has a maximum oleic acid content of 1g per 100ml. Now the helpful part, there is a standard for "olive oil not fit for human consumption", and that specifically lists an oleic acid content higher than 3.3g per 100ml. I'm going to guess that the paper used that kind of oil, though if it came from Poland I have no idea what standards they set. If you really want to use store bought oil, "Ordinary Virgin Olive Oil" has an acid content of 2-3.3g per 100ml which is notably higher than the maximum content of US olive oil that is considered fit for human consumption at only 2g per 100ml. I would love to see this reaction work, olive oil chemistry is peak extractions and ire

I must be stupid because I've been watching this channel for years and only just now realized that... Extractions and Ire: things don't go well Explosions and Fire: things also don't go well but there's a happy ending.. maybe.. after 3-5 years

The issue with cheap olive oil is it's often cut with if not almost entirely canola oil

The only logical conclusion is that expensive olive oil is expensive because it already comes with quantum dots

Finally got to watch one of these immediately after drop instead of finding out weeks later when i check

Love the mic peaking in the first second of the video, it really sets the shed chemistry mood, lmao

Ugh, I remember doing CdSe quantum dots in aqueous solution and how difficult it was to get one successful run and all the failures also glowed red. And here you are with so many more, new ways for things to go wrong compared to what we dealt with. The paper we were using left out some important info on reagent amounts which is what our problem was, but like you pointed out, you have so many things that could be causing failure.

Good to see you, Dr.

"Full of spark plugs" I honestly thought you were going to say it was full of spiders.

"Cheapest olive oil I can find" - during the year where olive oil prices are at record highs because of a bad harvest. Good timing, Tom!

i have a 4 hour ride to the airport this is a solid 40 mins worth of it

tom i just want you to know that everybody fully approves of your mustache

I work for a university, and we do this experiment with our freshmen. We use pure oleic acid as the solvent. It was pretty cool, one of our teams got a full set of quantum dots this year. Violet, blue, green qdots are always so difficult to collect as they only exist for a short period of time after the reaction starts. Wish I could post the picture here, they're beautiful.

Yes! My morning just got 100x better

One of my profs in university were doing quantum dots, and it's intrigued me since. Thanks for this!

"because then it'll sublime and i'll be asking 'where's the cadmium'" It's..in my lungs!!!

I work in a nano synth lab now. atmosphere, temperature, and moisture is really important. degass the olive oil first ( I have to degass the lab grade ODE, OLAc, OLAM...etc), get some sort of better temperature control and measurement (nanoparticles are highly sensitive to heating rates and maturation times), and lastly go back to using argon or N2. Oleic acid is a good surfactant and can help the seed mediated growth but you really dont need that much of it so dont worry about that. can use hexanes to wash the particles and the IPA to crash them out via centrifugation.

The science always works better when you change multiple variables at once. It makes it go faster

The olive Oil turns solid because of the high heat and selenium the cis double bonds in the fatty acids all turn trans. This makes the packing of the molecules much easier, and that's why it freezes at same temperature after extended heating

you planning to get the platinum and/iridium from them sparkplugs aren't you?

does melting test tube fall into the break glas category? at least it must count as a precursor....

Doctor Physics is back like benzene!

Just a tip, olive oil is yellow so be careful

I would love to see you make synthetic opal, its exactly half way between the last video and this one. All you need is water, ethanol, ammonia, and tetraethyl orthosilicate. It grows spheres just like the quantum dots, but the size is controlled by TEOS concentration.

Quite annoying that olive oil manufacturers don't list their products' propensity for dissolving cadmium and selenium.

Are we 100% sure that is actual olive oil? "It's reliably reported that 80% of the Italian olive oil on the market is fraudulent." and that's Italy, Australia rate is probably near 96% lol

I think the oil probably started polymerising at that temperature which is why it went solid

Platinum group metal recovery from spark plugs?

years watching this channel, never seen this man once follow his own advice and not fuck everything up for no reason, so fucking awesome

I live off your uploads been around for 4 years and i remember you buying and making some of the ingredients used. I love you!!!

Nile Red makes content for rich people in comparison to this program. E&I is out here repping the trailer park nerds messing around in the shed. Dont get me wrong i LOVE Nile Red. But the vibes here are TOP NOTCH mate! Thanks for explaining higher level chem in a down to earth way.

Test the PH value of the Olive Oil, On a cooking oil acidic scale, virgin Olive Oil is 6.6. Canola is about 0.071. Bee wax is listed between 17 & 36. I suspect the acidic level contributes to the formation of CdSe. Another option, might be to bubble some hydrogen into the oil, but you might get quantum dot margarine! Not sure how you make Olive oil more acidic, maybe add oxalic acid. Another option to try is linseed, which I think more acidic than Olive Oil.

Wow! What a privilege to have been allowed to follow your channel and your progression of learning over time. I've always loved your offbeat sense of humor, mate. And the way that you constantly push your boundaries. Safely, heh heh heh, always safely, of course!

Sincerely love your jank chemistry set ups

Now do it with palm oil

There are suspicions that many olive oils are adulterated. So, getting a source with a paper trail is reasonable for research purposes

Just to confirm what you were saying concerning the oleic acid content, generally the 'higher quality' of the oil, the lower concentration of free fatty acids. For our analysis method we had to spike an oil sample with oleic acid for use as a QC as most off the shelf oils from retail sources lacked the FFA concentration to be used as a valid QC.

People have already said about the olive oil being a blend, but if you're wondering why it was turning solid at higher than normal temperatures, oils tend to congeal easier with heavier impurities, you generally see thid in old frying oil. Though because you were using heavier elements it was happening faster. Also based on that light yellow/cream color you may have been emulsifying the oil with any moisture in the air given how long at a time you were using the stir bar for. Not a chemist, speaking with my experience in culinary school and working in the food industry.

Are you aware of this recent technological innovation called a hat?

Australian man goes wild again and creates quantum dots that spawn Kangaroos from the 4th dimension.

techno selection was top notch. Most of the tracks we heard in this episode sounded like they were from Richie Hawtin's Minus label. Top grooves

I know zero, zip, nada, even nada 3 about chemistry, I know some elements and that’s about it, and that being said it’s a lot easier to follow your videos and understand them than a lot of other people on RU-vid that do this, awesome videos !

Problem is most "olive oil" these days simply isn't. It's a blend of different oils.

22:53 You mentioning your PhD is on fluorescence is funniest shit ever.

Congrats Dr!

I watched this while on the treadmill and had to pause every time that music with the high pitched ticking went on because I thought the motor was going out on it.

FUCK I LOVE SCIENCE AND THE INTERNET YESSS

Bisexual quantum dot lighting

I think it may be the paperclip causing the issue, maybe the iron from the paperclip, or the nickel reacting with the elements. (they're usually nickel coated so it prevents it from rusting over time) For my setup, I took some of the ptfe tubing and shoved an iron rod in it with the ends rounded over and then used a torch to heat the tubing while twisting it to close the ends off around the iron bar and melt it to seal it up and encapsulate the iron bar inside the teflon tubing.

I love learning AND feeling smarter than my teacher at the same time. Thank you. 😘

would be cool if you explained what quantum dots are, their potential usage, why they might be important and so on.

TiL that EVOO is a solvent. Was finally able to get the funk out of the French press I forgot coffee in and boiling water couldn’t clear. Thanks m8 for being a role model for kitchen cleanliness.

please, don't give up! please make more videos about it^-^! we know you can do it.. :D !

The trick to not getting things to stick with olive oil is to preheat the pan

Great video. Love to see science youtubers make new cocktails like quantum shots with cadmium.

The algorithm has blessed me with this timeless masterpiece. 🙏🏅🙌 Great job, keep it up!

yes you should do the precious metals (I'm guessing iridium?) extraction from sparkplugs videos that sounds quite fun lol

Its a good day when i get a video of Australian shed chemistry!

Man I love your videos, they are just so rewatchable

Great video man!

I started listening to Aphex Twin again, thanks to you, Tom. Come here to learn, enjoy the music...

2:15 Obi-Wan: "That's... why I'm here"

Selenium -who fucking ripped ass in here?!

Everyone’s talking about the olive oil and im over here tensing up over the centrifuge

I would be very interested in your various montage-playlists.

As much as I miss the meme heavy editing I love that your humor is still present. The bit about "the science appreciating it when you commit to a bit" was hilarious

Hi Tom, I haven’t seen that much Alkyne chemistry on RU-vid and german Wikipedia says that propiolic acid forms an explosive silver salt. The synthesis seems alright so maybe you’d want to check out that molecule :D

I remember making candles from stearic and palmic acid drops that came in a big bucket from an arts and crafts store. Maybe converting white Marseille soap back to the acid would be a fun experiment. 😅

Hey btw, part of the reason I love this channel is because you tend to do everything from home hardware. Love seeing you struggle, don’t be afraid to stick with the silly bits!

As a Manganese nanochemist (Lies i'm an out of depth biochemist) I work with manganese oleate reductions for crystal growth and can vouch firsthand for their ease of production (and low toxicity compared to cadmium) - Have you considered using surfactants for nanoparticle growth and shape limitation perhaps?

It's so sweet that you didn't know the olive oil hardening on cooling is just what happens to fats :')

just did my ap chemistry exam a week ago, you were a huge inspiration, thank you for everything (and shoutout cadmium)

You don't happen to remember which specific Aphex Twin tracks you used? The one you used whilst crushing the selenium was a bop.

man, there was some really good music in this episode.

I was working on a product once and ran across a paper detailing a non-invasive level sensing method for a container of liquid by measuring the resonance of the container. It was from a Spanish university and they were experimenting specifically to measure vats of olive oil

thank you for giving it the effort anyway, maybe I should get some olive oil from Aldrich.. How did you clean it up? Generally interested! Cheers!

Excract iridium from the spark plugs

“Where did the cadmium go?” The scariest line I’ve ever heard from a RU-vid chemist.