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  • We started up loading periodic videos 10 years ago.

  • We never thought it would go on for more than a few weeks.

  • But here we are, 10 years on on Brady's allowed me to choose my favorite 10 videos as long as I don't talk about them too much.

  • Number one, I think.

  • Video of rubidium, Neil's ingenious apparatus for smashing a veil of rubidium and dropping it into water containing an indicator.

  • It's really good.

  • I think it typifies.

  • His ingenuity with operators are enthusiasm for these videos on dhe.

  • The unexpected things that we learn.

  • We didn't expect rubidium to react so strongly.

  • Number two.

  • The accidental reaction where I poured potassium permanganate.

  • It's purple into hydrogen peroxide, which is colorless, and the purple color just disappeared, and I went on and on and on.

  • Pouring it on the color just kept on disappearing it.

  • So this is actually much better than I intended because I was going to make it purple.

  • Make it clear, and here you can see I'm pouring in the Purple Solution and it's disappearing.

  • I've never done it before.

  • I haven't got it to work so well since it was an absolutely wonderful demonstration number three, the video that made me look really stupid.

  • I was doing a reaction of chromium trioxide with ethanol produces a huge flame.

  • And after the flame and as the smoke was going up, Brady else may whether I'd arranged for the fire alarm to be switched off, I said, Yes, you can smoke alarm.

  • Oh, yeah, You forgot to switch it off.

  • Number four pumpkins for Halloween.

  • I smashed the pumpkin with liquid nitrogen.

  • Pete and Neal did the thermite reaction in a pumpkin hunting went white.

  • Hot, molten iron came out.

  • My grandson has watched it many, many times.

  • Come along, Martin, when you think you're aren't enough.

  • Number five was one of our very first slow motion videos.

  • It was prompted by a viewer who suggested we should let off a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in a balloon.

  • Try burning a balloon filled with a proper mixture of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen, so we compared a balloon with hydrogen and the balloon with hydrogen oxygen.

  • Number six.

  • Many people ask me how I thought of making periodic videos.

  • It was Brady who thought of the idea and the video he made for the BBC really explains how the idea came about and what we've done.

  • For all his celebrated work as a research chemist and university professor, Martin Polyakov didn't become a celebrity till he got on the Internet.

  • Number seven is hammering red Hot Platinum.

  • We made this video at the Johnson Matthey Platinum Refinery, and I could hardly believe my eyes as they hammer the platinum to make the bar thinner.

  • It gets hotter and hotter and hotter, and I've never seen such a wonderful demonstration of converting mechanical energy into heat.

  • Number eight is an experiment I've always wanted to see done, dropping heavy ice that's frozen detour oh, into ordinary water to see if it would float.

  • And it was amazing, and I'm hoping it sinks.

  • It sank, but then it rose up again on Dhe.

  • I think now this was due to the density of the water, but I came up with a different theory at the time.

  • Number nine was a video that I also wanted to see, which was putting flesh in tow.

  • Hydrofluoric acid, H F, which dissolves flesh.

  • We couldn't use human flesh, so we used a chicken lake and I've never seen anything looking as dead as the chicken leg after it had sat overnight in Hydrofluoric acid.

  • Number 10 is perhaps my all time favorite video.

  • It was our first video about Element 108.

  • Hossam and Brady recorded me saying that I knew nothing about hasem and asking whether we should make something up.

  • I assume finding nothing about how soon should we make something up.

  • However, the power of the periodic table is that by looking at the periodic table, I can say, Well, it's chemistry has got to be a bit like iron Now.

  • The really interesting thing is that research that's been done in the last few years since we started periodic videos suggests that with these really super heavy elements, you may not be able to predict their properties by looking down the periodic table because of relativistic events in the atoms.

  • Make them behave differently.

  • From what you might expect, I would be really interested to hear from you, perhaps in the comments which in your top 10 of our videos, because it's really nice to be reminded of some of these videos on dhe.

  • I hope you will enjoy watching them.

  • Thanks so much for watching.

  • If you'd like to see full length versions of the videos that professor listed, I'll have links in the description and here on the screen, including a playlist so you can watch them all in order.

  • If you'd like to know what my top 10 is.

  • I've also made a video about that, and I'll also put links to that in all the usual places.

  • Thank you so much for watching over the last 10 years, and here's toe 10 more.

We started up loading periodic videos 10 years ago.

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