I really dont understand why this guy is so productive, its crazy how fast he releases new videos, 'cos these stuff requires lots of work to be honest💙💚💛

"& then I have some isopropyl alcohol" swigs the alcohol

It's such a simple experiment but I've never seen it before. Awesome stuff!

I love this channel. So easy to perpetuate the misunderstanding that distillation etc allow for perfect separation; I love that the truth is mentioned without belaboring it.

When I was in prison my hustle was making "white lightning" (moonshine) out of my home made wine. When I got moved to a max security joint (for often getting caught from the distillation fumes) I found my self in a cell with some former chemist doing the rest of his life for making mdma. He taught me so many things about the wine making process but the best thing he taught me was how to use the salt to pull the booze to the top and then we would siphon the top layer off and have a much smaller amount of total liquid to distill to remove the salt flavor. It shortened the total distillation time and allowed me to get it in between counts and never get caught. We made enough money doing that to live like a king in there. We were able to sell our booze for the best food, weapons, drugs, tobacco, you name it. Thanks science!

"The blue beads are less dense than salt water but more dense than Alcohol and the white beads are more dense than alcohol but less dense than salt water"... You gave the same description for the two types of beads, but you said the same sentences in opposite order for each type of beads. Is it more precise to say that the white beads are a bit less dense than the blue ones, but they are both denser than alcohol yet less dense than salt water?

You continue to blow my mind with basic, yet brilliant experiments. I mean, you read this bonds with that etc. but seeing it visualized is just amazing.

I've seen this separation when I used isopropyl alcohol and salt to clean my.... glassware. Good to know this is what is happening!

And what's more is the videos are often very original, not just mere replicates of demonstrations seen a thousand times. I really like his perspective on things.

During the early days of COVID when there were severe shortages of sanitizer, I got some isopropyl alcohol that was 50/50 with water. It is not effective an an antiseptic below 60 percent alcohol, so I used the salting out method to get the concentration of isopropyl alcohol up, and then just drew off the top with syringe.

I somehow found beauty in both the visible separations taking place as well as in your explanations. Well done indeed! TY.

Love the way you visualize and display things. Masterful teaching. Even old concepts I'm well familiar with I feel relearned or gleaned a easier or renewed understanding from watching your videos. Keep on making people smarter and the world a better place.

Excellent presentation. I have never seen this before and I watch a lot of these videos. This demonstration was missed by my chemistry teacher. Thanks so much. Quite entertaining.

The visual explanations on this channel are so simple but so ridiculously effective

I’m learning about all of this in Organic Chemistry class in college! Very interesting!

As someone who studies chemistry I already knew this but the way this is presented makes it sound easy and more accessible to someone who is learning about it for the first time

fantastic demonstration! physics is so amazing, driving *everything* via energy potential differences.

Thanks- one of the most fascinating experiments I've ever seen!

That was a really great presentation. Thanks for being you👍🏻

Your description of distillation was more than averagely accurate for one so short. Nice.

Another awesome experiment!!! ActionLab your the best👍👍👍👍

I love how this experiment is done with stuff pretty much everyone has in their kitchen.👨‍🔬🧂💧🥃✍️

Hey action lab congratulation a question in JEE advanced 2021 which is considered the world's second toughest exam was very similar infact just as you explained in your video of reverse cartesian diver. i know that you too might have referred some research paper but your explanation helped a lot to solve the question

You need a Saturday morning TV show on the Science Channel.

In Dutch , chemistry goes by the name of "Scheikunde" which is a combination of the words "scheiden" (separate) and "kunde" (art). So , we call it "The Art of Separation" and this very nice video shows how we got to this name. I thought that by adding NaCl to the H2O one would increase the density of that water so as to allow for a better separation. The NaCl does not dissolve in the alcohol , so the top layer has the same density as before.

OMGGGG you dont know how this video helps me answer a question i've been wondering the whole evening!

5:15 "It's called salting out" ... that happens a lot in video games also

Bro you are kidding me how i didn't know about this 💀 action lab I love how your videos always show me things I didn't know about as a chemist

This is so much important to me now! Especially since I have to study Organic Chemistry and about Azeotropic solutions

Thanks for the detailed breakdown

Super easy way to separate organic compound from water Thanks for this information

Love this stuff. Keep it up, please!

Awesome man , keep em coming

As always, crazy awesome videos. You're the best!

That was awesome. Thanks man.

Thanks, I enjoy all of your videos.

Title gives it away right? Well, kinda! But the video was so interesting from the get-go that it had me scratching my head anyway! Keep pumping them out my dude! Love watching your content.

I learned something, thank you sir!

Your channel is my favourite channel about science and physics

Wow has that been helpful - as a "Pre-Still" process adding salt would wash the alcohol as well. This is so helpful - in the still it's all the yucky flavours in the water you need to get rid of and after you can use it as weed kill. I Liked this The Action Lab demo

Best channel on KZfaq! Period!

This is amazing. I’m a boat mechanic and we deal with water in gas conditions all the time. I’m not about to dump salt into a gas tank but this could be helpful in a fuel sample experiment with alcohol in the mix.

Fascinating video, thanks!

I just had my Science paper and this could have really helped me

Our science teacher showed this to us once, but the connection to salting out I've never thought of!

James:how to separate water and alcohol ? Me : of sanitizers also

Thank you, this will help me in my work💪💪💪

This is pretty amazing. I'm tempted to mix my Everclear with water to see if I can turn it back into Everclear.

I watched this video a year ago out of the usual curiosity. But for the last month and a half I started resin 3D printing and alcohol is used a lot in washing the prints from the residual resin (when your print is finally pulled out of the resin vat). The alcohol quickly becomes dirty with resin though and soon needs some sort of filtration. Luckily resin and alcohol don't bond together so it's a matter of gravity separation and or passing them thru a filter. But gravity separation usually takes very long (unless you have a lot of alcohol and rotate the batches clean-dirty-clean... etc...) ... unless you turn up the Gravity to the max :) I mean you can use a centrifuge to increase gravity few thousand times. From what I found a waste oil centrifuge type seems best, because it's the simplest can process larger amounts of fluid without spinning it all at once ... the only problem is that the commercially available ones are super expensive (at the bottom range of the tiny lab centrifuges). Anyway this type of centrifuge uses a cylinder (imagine cooking pot) that has a lip on the top (several cm). The heavier pollutants stick to the walls of the cylinder while the clean alcohol is pushed "up" and flows over that lip. When the process is over if you turn off the machine you'll have the pollutants and the amount of fluid that fits in the volume below that top lip. Pollutants however are very small volume, and there still a lot to be extracted from that volume. So my first thought was to use water which is ~21% heavier to displace the alcohol, and then I'll only have water dirty with resin (and tiny amount of alcohol in it). But the H-bond water and alcohol make put a kink in my otherwise flawless plan :D So seeing that we can separate water and alcohol with salt came as a god sent! :) How clean is the alcohol after such separation?

Thank you so much for this video

Why is the density different with different colored beads? Do other colored beads dropped into the same solution separate the same way? What is the difference in density between the beads? I understand the water/alcohol solution, but am left with more questions about the beads.

Wow, this is amazing! 👍🏼😀

Finally a non-gimmicky Action Lab video. Good work.

Thank u so much for this video.. This is gonna be my sci project

thanks for making this video, it is so cool

44 years learning something new everyday :D

this is really cool! thank you

Fantastic, do more chemistry classes like that and children would one day become scientists 👨‍🔬

Ahh this is why Neil Red adds salts to some of his solutions.

This is a cool trick, I am gonna show it to my son. Thank you for your amazing vid.

Can you make a Video with the topic angular momentum please? Thank you!

very cool. thank you very much. God bless you

Nice video, no idea why it showed up in my suggestions, but I liked it :) @5:17 Indeed, I do use salt frequently in the lab to precipitate DNA out of its solution, then centrifuge to pellet it followed by washing in ~70% ethanol to remove some of the salt and other contaminants. Then centrifuge again, dry the pellet and dissolve in water. It's actually pretty easy. In the animation, by the way, I see you haven't depicted a 3 carbon-backbone for isopropyl-alcohol, but a single carbon-backbone which would make it a methyl-alcohol.

Good vid. Better than older ones.

I always learn so much from you, but I sometimes feel so cheated because it's never what I think it was :( But I still love you ActionLab chan ^^

that was really great .... thank you very much

You can use a freezer to separate the mixture. The water will freeze, but alcohol will not. This technique is used to concentrate Apple Jack.

Love your channel

so, you have to get the water to it's saline saturation point, and it's separating along the gradient. neat!

I really like your channel, why you only have 3M like you deserve better

Awesome. Thank you.

This type of systems (ethanol+water+NaCl) are called aqueous two-phase systems (ATPS). I am currently doing research on the nonaqueous analogues of ATPS for my master degree.

That was really cool mr. Wizard kind of stuff there

I get excited for every experiment.

Very interesting. Thanks!

Great explanation

lovely visual demonstration! Your explanation is only half right... but that's how it goes with communicating chemistry concepts on a youtube video!

Thanks for the video

Thanks for sharing

Great Demonstration

This would be really interesting for a Weird Science activity at the nursing home where I work!

Really interesting experiment. 👍

Bam! Now my mind is in a phase with more clarity than confusion in it.

If you have made video of separating alcohol from sanitizer earlier this would have been helped many Indians

so simple yet so cool

Love you and your videos

Man u come up with a lot of cool videos

I'm 26 yrs old with 3 years of pharmaceutical work experience.... I still regret not having this guy as my science teacher.... 😂

4:58 - "The blue beads are less dense than salt water, but more dense than alcohol. And the white beads are more dense than alcohol, but less dense than salt water." Those are the same things just said in reverse order, but I get what you're trying to say. Maybe the better way to phrase that is, when the alcohol and salt water phases are thoroughly mixed, the white beads are less dense than the solution and the blue beads are more dense. So they immediately begin to separate; the blue sink to the bottom and the white float to the top. Then the alcohol and salt water themselves begin to separate; the salt water sinking to the bottom and the alcohol floating to the top. As this happens the white beads begin to sink since they are more dense than the alcohol phase, and the blue beads begin to float since they are less dense than the salt water phase. And so the beads eventually meet up in the middle where the two phases have an interface. As for why the white beads have a different density than the blue beads...idk. I guess that's just a result of how they're made or something. I swear I've seen him use these beads once before in a previous experiment though, but I can't remember when or if he explained their difference in densities in that video.

I our school we learnt about separating ethanol and water using fractional distillation so that’s another way!

Alcohol to salt : wanna bond? Salt : na bro only h2O

How does this technique help separate organic compounts? Amazing video! As always...

Wish if I my chemistry teacher was this energetic

For the first minute I was like ‘WTF HOW’

I love science experiment, but this is so cool… i haven't seen anything like this before 😲

thanks!!

Great I watch your all videos and really great videos lots of love from india and keep making videos

Awesome. So distillation is not necessary anymore how awesome!!!

You can also just freeze the bottle to separate them. Water and alcohol freeze at different temps. You'll end up with ice floating on alcohol.

Liked the clip. These subtle techniques can be real moneymakers, I would guess. Or you can use the general approach and do the reverse; to enhance the miscibility of a small volume of water (in a car's gas tank --- the water will settle on the tank's bottom, thereby increasing the odds of gas-line freezing during colder weather), if you use the proper alcohol, isopropyl alcohol. ... 91% gotten from the local pharmacy will work just fine, in my experience. About a cup per tank full of gas.