Smelly Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos

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Mercaptans - or Thiols - are some of the smelliest chemicals around. We didn't dare open the bottle.
PsyFile: / psyfile
More chemistry at www.periodicvideos.com/
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From the School of Chemistry at The University of Nottingham: www.nottingham.ac.uk/chemistry...
Periodic Videos films are by video journalist Brady Haran: www.bradyharan.com/
Brady's other channels include:
/ psyfile (Psychology stuff)
/ sixtysymbols (Physics and astronomy)
/ numberphile (Numbers and maths)
/ deepskyvideos (Space stuff)
/ nottinghamscience (Science and behind the scenes)
/ foodskey (Food science)
/ backstagescience (Big science facilities)
/ favscientist (Favourite scientists)
/ bibledex (Academic look at the Bible)
/ wordsoftheworld (Modern language and culture)
/ philosophyfile (Philosophy stuff)

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Опубликовано:

29 янв 2013

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Комментарии : 386

@br0sRchill 11 лет назад

0:37 "le stink"

@AntiProtonBoy 11 лет назад

I'd love to get my hands on a Tellurium based stink bomb.

@fackingpos 9 лет назад

Fart in your general direction!!!!

@andreibusuable 11 лет назад

You guys make chemistry so interesting.

@karmakazi219 11 лет назад

On a "normal day" there are 8000 gas leak reports?!?!

@Obsidus 11 лет назад

Prof. Poliakoff is amazing.

@MichelDellaCompta 10 лет назад

I live in the city where the mercaptan leak happened, it was pretty bad..

@adfkjgvdjfvbdbvdkjvb 11 лет назад

the line "I fart in your general direction" springs to mind... ;)

@Mivalys 11 лет назад

"...to see how her hair compares to mine." I loved that argument. :)

@TheChemiKid 10 лет назад

Anyone hear breaking glass @ 3:53?

@SrikarManepalli 9 лет назад

Nice tie Professor

@pmarceau 11 лет назад

I find it interesting that a dog's sense of smell is so much more sensitive than ours, yet bad odors seem to bother them much less, if at all.

@mixolydian2010 11 лет назад

Brilliant love all these videos..it is my current favourite channel. Thank you all very much for your work on these productions and especially to the prof for his humble and clear explanations of the chemistry involved.

@SnowRaptor 11 лет назад

A few years ago, a truck carrying mercaptans tumbler over in São Paulo, triggering lots of phone calls to the firemen and to the gas company even from the other side of the city. One biker asked me in the car what happened and it took me some time to explain to him.

@pecfree 11 лет назад

WE LOVE YOU PROFESSOR! KEEP THE VIDEOS COMING GUYS!

@RokitScientist1987 11 лет назад

Awesome content. I'm astonished by the amount of detail and the amount of interesting and useful information shared.

@_starter 10 лет назад

And then it would be a bit late.

@heyandy889 11 лет назад

brady haran is like the johnny appleseed of RU-vid spreading knowledge far and wide

@DevilMaster 11 лет назад

Reason #1 is that the smell of grapefruit is not ONLY due to thiols. Reason #2 is that a substance can be perceived as having a different smell dipending on its concentration: for example indole, which smells like flowers at low concentrations, while it smells like shit (literally) at high concentrations.

@jbrowsingj 11 лет назад

Fantastic work again, Brady! I'm subscribed to all of your channels, and really excited to see where you'll take them. I really appreciate how non-technical you keep them, but could you post links or a full title of any papers that are discussed in the videos? Thanks!

@PINGPONGROCKSBRAH 10 лет назад

"Professor Moody" lol did anyone else think of Harry Potter?

@sazarod 11 лет назад

Major points for plugging the vibration theory of olfaction!

@PKFreezeBETA 11 лет назад

It doesn't really do anything chemical, it just fools your nose into not smelling the skunk spray as much. basically, what happens is your nose gets used to smelling the skunk smell, and after a while it stops smelling quite as strong, and the tomato juices more pleasant odour is enough to mask the skunk smell. to anyone who hasn't been around the smell for very long, it still smells awful. the process is called olfactory fatigue.

@HolyBookProductions 11 лет назад

One of the best Chanels on RU-vid

@djmussy18 11 лет назад

Thank you for this wonderful video.

@claaaaams 11 лет назад

excellent episode. thanks

@vgoj 11 лет назад

superb as usual. Got ot love Prof. Poliakoff.

@mauroprovatos 11 лет назад

I was expecting Brady to have a sniff test.

@callumwatson7582 11 лет назад

I love these videos

@BeastOfTraal 11 лет назад

You should do a video on chirality (left handed vs right handed molecules)

@bojor7 11 лет назад

i always love to see a gorgeous Schlenk Line!!!, keep bringing Organometallic Chemistry

@TheWanderingChemist 11 лет назад

You forgot about furfurylthiol! The coffee smell! :D

@dflxxhunterxx2 11 лет назад

Hey periodic Videos! I happen to work in an oil refinery in Germany, where we actually remove naturally occurring Mercaptans from Propane and Butane using NaOH to bind them and then oxidize them with air (and some catalytic wizardry ;-) )

@ltericdavis2237 11 лет назад

If your confused, numberphile (a show made by the same guy who produces these videos, in case you don't know), made a video explaining that. RU-vid's counting system stops at around 300, so it can add advertisements, if I remember that correctly.

@urost032 11 лет назад

Good question. The most amazing fact about some thiols is that you can actually smell some of them in very highly diluted forms, and when in low concentrations they tend to smell quite nice(just to give you the perspective of how diluted they have to be in order to smell good(this is not in general): 1 mg of thiol per 10000000 dm3 of H2O! Amazing, ha!) Also, grapefruit contains some other compunds which give smell to it(mostly esters).

@KoenigNord 11 лет назад

I used thiols for a long time, since they bind on elemental gold very well. with this, you can create amazingly useful functional surfaces. Luckily my thiols were to big to smell :)

@killzonia 11 лет назад

They're talking about optical isomerism, or chirality, which involves molecules that are non-superimposable mirror images of one another (put one of your hands on top of the other; they are the same shape but are non-superimposable). They are identical in most ways apart from a few, such as how they rotate plane polarised light or, more relevantly, how they interact with biological receptors, i.e. how they smell, taste, etc.

@MichaelZola 11 лет назад

thank you for the new channel recommendation

@KialraOfDeath 11 лет назад

Strawman argument, beautiful.

@Gibbsbc1 11 лет назад

That is some quite good evolutionary psychology.

@qwaqwa1960 11 лет назад

I've attended a *couple* of lectures that talked about the apparent quantum effects in smell (and other biological processes)!

@MasterFPunkt 11 лет назад

A new science channel ?? Great Scott !

@TheWildHaggis 11 лет назад

This video reeks of great stories!

@Nikolaii2571 11 лет назад

Mercaptans are also used to synthesize a sedative-hypnotic called "SULFONAL" and "TRIONAL" which were widely in use a century ago.. Sulfonal was a condensation reaction of Ethyl mercaptan and Acetone.

@Jnashalt 10 лет назад

An introduction to an eduational kit employing the sense of smell for teaching chemistry developed by Simon Rees, Rebecca Edwards, and Jacob Cox through the Royal Society of Chemistry, Educational Techniques Group and Durham University.

@rcdude29 11 лет назад

YAAAAAAY! New Video of periodicvideos :))))))

@dodgevipr44 11 лет назад

I've heard that the texture on the surface of the mentos permits the carbonation of the drink somewhere to attach, and it makes the soda fizz up.

@tybo09 11 лет назад

Sorry for another question: Is the mercaptan's mercury capturing ability related to the sulfur atom? I ask because we have mercury spill kits in our equipment shop and they all contain powdered sulfur.

@adavewiley 11 лет назад

My high school biology teacher wanted to teach us why asparagus pee smelled the way it did. He opened a bottle of methyl mercaptan in the fume hood without noting the boiling point. It boiled away immediately, went up the fume hood, across the roof, and back down in the windows. We had to stand outside for a few hours, but I never forgot asparagus's secret ingredient.

@xnax1993 11 лет назад

God, I love the professor!

@ThinkingSpeck 11 лет назад

As I understand it, we evolved that revulsion because spoiled food tends to contain thiols. It's not that the thiols themselves are toxic in those quantities - it's just that they're very easy to detect and they tended to be associated with other chemicals which were dangerous to us.

@khajiit92 11 лет назад

elements heavier than iron come from that explosion you just mentioned. our sun is a second generation star, the heavier elements in our solar system come from an older star that exploded.

@KennyTheB 11 лет назад

I can't speak explicitly for that particular compound, but generally, compounds that utilize heavier elements in this manner tend to become pretty toxic pretty quickly.

@Nexus2Eden 11 лет назад

How funny you should do this video now. I was just talking with a friend about how Skunk smell (from a dead Skunk - road kill). I was commenting on how the odor, like Camphor, sticks like glue and lasts so long. I postulated it was because they are aromatic rings, and quite stable. So the phenol compound would persist and must be highly reactive. ...and here is video on it, brilliant! :D

@jmrdelorean 11 лет назад

being a chemist the worst thiol I had to deal with was the diester of thiol succinic acid. You had the wonderful sweet smell of the ester with the rottenness of the thiol. It was awful. If even a trace was spilled you'd smell it for weeks.

@boboblaw 11 лет назад

BRADY!!! why must you make more channels for me to subscribe to????? i already have 188!!!!.......189 now guh, damn you and your ability to know exactly what i want to watch.

@WolfDOuka 11 лет назад

I think you should do a video on the chemicals in the brain and what their function is. One interesting video could be also what if the chemicals in the human body are not balanced. :)

@hunnis12 11 лет назад

Prof. Moody and Prof. Moriaty? You're the best..

@freysi007 11 лет назад

Yay new video ! :)

@Bsgetsreal 11 лет назад

Your tie is awesome!

@akkudakkupl 11 лет назад

Probably the same way we make heavy atoms - colisions. Also its not just - out of H start fusing He, out of He start to fuse Li. Because then we would end up with mostly even atomic numbered elements.

@Syltibob 11 лет назад

Does this mean that you can get rid of the smell from skunks with bleach?

@justrockthisworld 11 лет назад

i smelt it :( a lot of the alarms in the city went crazy :)) i'm happy that now i know exactly what it was. thank you! :)

@ltericdavis2237 11 лет назад

Thank you for explaining. It has been a while since I saw the vid. It appears I forgot some details.

@CaptTerrific 11 лет назад

Any chance we could see a followup to the sodium/water video, where you make better use of that amazing phantom camera? Thunderfoot made some very interesting observations about your theories, and the potential for the Periodic Videos to actually contribute to a new scientific discovery, instead of simply giving demos, would be amazing!

@astaiannymph 11 лет назад

I love that the selling point for psyfile is to compare his daughter's hair.

@heyandy889 11 лет назад

the professor did say something about that. apparently natural gas/methane has no smell, so something, like one of these thiols, is added in order to let people detect the gas.

@MakuziTheInuk 11 лет назад

if he was my science teacher i would love science again

@therobotFrom94 11 лет назад

Do the Selenium/Tellurium compounds have similar, but worse, smells to thiols? or are they different and worse

@awesomemattg 11 лет назад

Is this a similar reason as why necrotic or burning flesh has a terrible stench, like when you have electro-surgery or smell dead animals?

@johmedis 11 лет назад

You win the Nobel Prize in Witty Wordplay

@splitinfinitives 11 лет назад

I already knew about psyfile bit when I heard him say new channel I just thought 'really Brady? ANOTHER CHANNEl?'

@PatoPatoEloElo 11 лет назад

Glad to the that professor was on a good mood

@nowiecoche 11 лет назад

I wouldn't name "2,2-dimethyl-ethanethiol" b/c the parent chain should be named with the longest number of carbons, which is propane. But the difference between "2-methyl-2-propanethiol" and "2-methyl-2-thiol-propane", I don't know. The thiol and propane belong to two different functional groups so it has to do with that.

@awimachinegun 11 лет назад

he has some good criticisms and additions.

@Jotto999 11 лет назад

I've read the series throughout, grew up on it. I was thinking how it'd be during the series, I probably because I've been reading HP:MOR lately.

@dragonbalism 11 лет назад

I like periodically glancing at his tie.

@danieljryba 11 лет назад

The Prof. Should make a video explaining Right-handed vs. Left-handed molecules.

@krazyking424 11 лет назад

Is it possible that there is a mechanism in the nose to isolate the sulphur-hydrogen bond from the triols? Then we would just be recognizing that bonded pair. I guess the issue would be if that bod was stable and how much energy would go into isolating it (also if that is actually how it's done)...

@ExtrasAreOrdinary 11 лет назад

Usually "R" denotes a hydrogen or a hydrocarbon side chain (of some length).

@rasanjadampriya 11 лет назад

Do a video about superconductor metals and how they work

@1999Kimi 11 лет назад

Can you please explain the diet coke and mentos reaction?

@neverXuploadXvideos 11 лет назад

Can someone explain to me the nomenclature of 2-methyl-2-propanethiol? The compound looks like it ought to be called 2-methyl-2-thiol-propane. or 2,2-dimethyl-ethanethiol

@inventorOz84 11 лет назад

what about Betamercaptoethanol which we use as a reducing agents in the biochem?

@knockdoun 11 лет назад

My Paramedical Biology Teacher once brought Durian fruit to show the class, the moment she took it out of the plastic the pungent smell filled the room and lots of people in the school thought there was a gas leak.

@melekhthechanger88 11 лет назад

I have made grapefuirt mercaptan before from pulegone and H2S :) it really really smells bad as I had to make 17grams of it!

@123456789robbie 11 лет назад

there's a guy who makes videos called thunderf00t, and he's been recently making references to periodic videos

@nagromgreen 11 лет назад

So are mercaptans part of the compound beta-mercaptoethanol? We used that in intro BCEM but alas I am not a chemist.

@glenwoofit 11 лет назад

The idea of comparing hair with the proff did it for me! I'm off to "Go Compare, Go Compare"

@TheGhostbuster1989 11 лет назад

sometimes, where the chemical is faceing is very important, especially when dealing with drugs. look for some thing called enantiomers (if i try to explain it, it would take me days)

@mathmusicminecraft 11 лет назад

PROFFESOR MOODY!!

@MelindadelosSantos 11 лет назад

You got me at 'sulpher'...! :D

@stepb24 11 лет назад

We use 2-mercaptoethanol in the lab and that stuff is stinky! Another stinky smell is anaerobic bacteria. It is amazing how such a tiny thing could stink so badly!

@en4rab 11 лет назад

There is a talk from TED.com on youtube here: watch?v=yzOcvINn8Iw in which Luca Turin talks about why he believes we smell vibrational frequency's and a possible mechanism for it and how he founded a company making scents for the perfume industry based on this. I found it quite compelling.

@Leibniz97 11 лет назад

Well yea I know that stars fuse light elements in order to create heavier elements, put this only happens up to a point. When the core of the star starts to contain too much iron, it explodes. Therefore we can only get elements up to iron from the stars. But where did elements heavier than iron come from?

@salvatoreshiggerino6810 11 лет назад

I once had the displeasure of working as an orderly in a mental institution where an inmate had been shitting all over his cell. I emptied a whole bottle of sodium hypochlorite solution all over the place and almost killed myself with the fumes, but it was all worth it. I'm a huge fan of hypochlorites.

@rurichek1 8 лет назад

What chemical is responsible for the fecal smell?

@Nordzumu 11 лет назад

Oh, come on, open that bottle. We were all waiting for that.

@ImRichRu 11 лет назад

mercaptans with selenium..... NOW that is a lovely smell

@UnicornStarShip 11 лет назад

When you talk about "left hand" and "right hand" compounds- are you talking about cis and trans isomers? One of the few things I still remember from a university chemistry class 10+ years ago....