Monthly Archives: January 2018

Red Hot Chili Peppers: Extractin’ the capsaicin

The young Canadian behind the NileRed Youtube channel loves chemistry, even more than most of us who spent years studying it.   Likewise Nurdrage, who may or may not be NileRed’s alter ego.  I have no idea how they get access to fume hoods, chemicals, rotary evaporators, and other bits of expensive labware.  And I similarly have no idea what would happen to any American who tried to have a home lab capable of such things.  Let us not forget the young man who got arrested just for bringing his science fair project to class.

Here’s how to extract the heat from chilies with a dandy introduction to the Soxhlet extractor.

Youtube Channel: NileRed

Giants of the Earth: Bethe, Dyson, and Knuth – oh, my!

The Web of Stories project finds legends of many disciplines and lets them speak at length about their lives and careers.   For years, one could only watch these on the project website and embed up to five videos.  This was an unfortunate limitation since these interviews are broken into well over a hundred short segments.  Now, WoS has uploaded a large fraction of its library to its Youtube channel with embeddable playlists.  Here are three leading lights of the past century, two of whom are still vigorous well into this one: Physicist Hans Bethe, polymath Freeman Dyson, and computer scientist Donald Knuth.  The breadth of their accomplishments and their constancy over decades is astonishing, their modesty likewise even though none  have anything to be modest about.

Youtube Channel: Web of Stories