The Periodic Table of Videos Celebrates with Cake

Cake may normally fall under the purview of Food and Think, but I couldn't let them have these videos. Last week, The Periodic Table of Videos (I've shared their ytterbium and hydrogen videos in the past) celebrated one year on YouTube by baking a cake in the lab (first video) and then trying one of their favorite methods (blowing up liquid oxygen) to destroy it (second video). They couldn't eat the cake, of course, because it had been created in the lab. While once it may have been acceptable for chemists to create party drinks in the chemical vats, for example, they can't get away with stuff like that today for safety reasons. But blowing things up is a good alternative, I'd say.

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Sarah Zielinski is an award-winning science writer and editor. She is a contributing writer in science for Smithsonian.com and blogs at Wild Things, which appears on Science News.