Smelly Chemistry - Periodic Table of Videos
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- Опубліковано 25 сер 2024
- Mercaptans - or Thiols - are some of the smelliest chemicals around. We didn't dare open the bottle.
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0:37 "le stink"
You guys make chemistry so interesting.
Fart in your general direction!!!!
On a "normal day" there are 8000 gas leak reports?!?!
I'd love to get my hands on a Tellurium based stink bomb.
Prof. Poliakoff is amazing.
I live in the city where the mercaptan leak happened, it was pretty bad..
"...to see how her hair compares to mine." I loved that argument. :)
the line "I fart in your general direction" springs to mind... ;)
Nice tie Professor
Anyone hear breaking glass @ 3:53?
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.
WE LOVE YOU PROFESSOR! KEEP THE VIDEOS COMING GUYS!
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.
"Professor Moody" lol did anyone else think of Harry Potter?
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.
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.
And then it would be a bit late.
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.
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!
Awesome content. I'm astonished by the amount of detail and the amount of interesting and useful information shared.
Major points for plugging the vibration theory of olfaction!
brady haran is like the johnny appleseed of UA-cam
spreading knowledge far and wide
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 ;-) )
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.
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).
You should do a video on chirality (left handed vs right handed molecules)
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. UA-cam's counting system stops at around 300, so it can add advertisements, if I remember that correctly.
You forgot about furfurylthiol! The coffee smell! :D
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 :)
excellent episode. thanks
I was expecting Brady to have a sniff test.
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.
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.
I've attended a *couple* of lectures that talked about the apparent quantum effects in smell (and other biological processes)!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for this wonderful video.
That is some quite good evolutionary psychology.
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.
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.
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. :)
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.
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.
This video reeks of great stories!
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
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?
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! :)
he has some good criticisms and additions.
The Prof. Should make a video explaining Right-handed vs. Left-handed molecules.
Glad to the that professor was on a good mood
I love these videos
Prof. Moody and Prof. Moriaty?
You're the best..
One of the best Chanels on UA-cam
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.
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!
A few months ago, the Japanese isolated a compound that smells like vanilla from cow manure. Indol is commonly used in perfume, but also contributes to making poop stink. A little thiol makes garlic and grapefruit smell good, a lot smells like rotten eggs. Chemistry is very strange.
As the prof said, many foodstuffs give off hydrogen-sulphides when they rot.
That's quite dangerous because if someone who genuinely smelled a gas leak had heard of the problem and didn't phone the gas company they could be in real danger.
He said the building HAD to be evacuated, that sounds more like "shit just hit the fan, run for your life" - carries a completely different meaning than "the smell was so bad that people evacuated the building" which is more like "I can't stand this smell, fuck this shit I'm out of here"
Does this mean that you can get rid of the smell from skunks with bleach?
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.
if he was my science teacher i would love science again
Your tie is awesome!
God, I love the professor!
That'd be butyric acid, or butanoic acid if systematic names are more your thing. It smells because there are receptors for it in our noses. We have these receptors because it occurs in rotten foods.
superb as usual.
Got ot love Prof. Poliakoff.
Martyn, you say you find it very unlikely that thiols' bad smell to humans is due to the vibration - you suggest instead an evolutionary explanation. I agree with your evolutionary explanation as the ultimate cause, but there must also be a proximate cause or mechanism (which I think is probably vibrational frequency).
For instance, (most) birds can fly: ultimately because flight was evolutionarily advantageous in the distant past, but proximately because they now have wings and so on.
I love that the selling point for psyfile is to compare his daughter's hair.
there's a guy who makes videos called thunderf00t, and he's been recently making references to periodic videos
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.
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.
The molecules wouldn't just escape. They get carried by the wind. A cloud of thiols would get more and more diffuse over time, but humans can smell thiols at very low concentrations: 10 parts per billion or 0,00001%.
I had a thought while watching this video about why these chemicals might all smell so bad. It occurred to me that the characteristic carbon-sulfur-hydrogen group was like a hook, and the various mercaptans would be different things hanging off that hook. Perhaps our sense of smell works analogous to a scale, "weighing" whatever's on that hook. This would explain why the selenium and tellurium analogs are worse, as well.
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.
Quite probably, the entire room and building would have to be evacuated until the smell was removed...perhaps via oxidation of the thiol?
PROFFESOR MOODY!!
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)...
i always love to see a gorgeous Schlenk Line!!!, keep bringing Organometallic Chemistry
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?
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....
Strawman argument, beautiful.
I like periodically glancing at his tie.
Thermonuclear fusion - that is, stars. This is not, strictly speaking, "according to the big bang". The big bang is the subject of the science of cosmology, and explains the expansion of space-time. The synthesis of heavy elements is the subject of physics and of nuclear chemistry.
mercaptans with selenium..... NOW that is a lovely smell
The methane doesn't have any smell. That's the reason why the put those thiols into the gas. You probably mean hydrogen sulfide which makes some natural gases (those from your body, too) smell.
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.
If the way molecules bond chemically has an effect on how they smell and their physical properties have as well, isn't it obvious that our nose uses a combination of both principles?
The idea of comparing hair with the proff did it for me! I'm off to "Go Compare, Go Compare"
thank you for the new channel recommendation
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!
Usually "R" denotes a hydrogen or a hydrocarbon side chain (of some length).
not a bad idea! Maybe a little bit of smoke of some sort? Or maybe something shiny?
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)
You win the Nobel Prize in Witty Wordplay
when he said that natural gas has no smell that includes methane. the smell you get from methane is from other types of gases.
I have a question for you. When the Snow melts where does the White go?