MIT Chemistry Behind the Magic: Death of a Gummy Bear
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| Number of Parts | 13 | |
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| License | CC Attribution - NonCommercial - ShareAlike 4.0 International: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal and non-commercial purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor and the work or content is shared also in adapted form only under the conditions of this | |
| Identifiers | 10.5446/42561 (DOI) | |
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00:00
DeathBearing (mechanical)Chemical reactionKohlenhydratchemieChemistryWine tasting descriptorsCandyComputer animation
00:36
FireStorage tankSmoking (cooking)Carbon dioxideWaterCandyChemical experiment
01:49
Chemical reactionChemical experiment
01:58
Chemical experiment
02:04
Chemical experiment
02:20
CobaltoxideKaliumchloridChloratePotassiumBearing (mechanical)
03:14
Chemical experiment
03:42
Process (computing)KohlenhydratchemieWine tasting descriptorsBearing (mechanical)ProteinChemical reactionExplosionCombustibilityCarbon (fiber)IonenbindungCobaltoxideSetzen <Verfahrenstechnik>Library (computing)Organische ChemieChemical structureSystems biologyChemical elementCarbon dioxideMetabolic pathwayPotenz <Homöopathie>Water
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:07
Hi, I'm Jessica, and I'm going to be talking about a chemical demonstration today that I like to call death of a gummy bear. We eat these little guys all the time, and our bodies break down the sugar
00:21
in a series of chemical reactions. But what happens when you break down the sugar in a gummy bear outside of our bodies? Well, MIT's Dr. John Dolan is going to show us. Here he is at the Cambridge Science Festival at MIT. Now, I'm going to actually be combusting a gummy candy.
00:43
And my wife said, please don't tell them it's a bear. Guess what? It's a bear. And I'm going to eat one right now. And I'm eating a gummy candy. It's sugar. And I'm going to chew on it and eat it.
01:02
And what do you think is going to happen to it? It's going to break down into carbon dioxide. Tomorrow I'm going to be breathing out CO2. I'm going to be perspiring. Water is going to be coming out. And I'm going to make a lot of energy. And I'm going to take that energy and store it up as ATP.
01:24
And it's going to help me clean all these dishes tomorrow. I don't want to think about that, but I'm going to need the energy. And now I'm going to do this same reaction inside of a test tube. And I want you to compare what you just saw.
01:42
You didn't see a lot of smoke and fire coming out of my mouth, did you? Not yet? OK. All right. So Clifton, you can, Clifton going to play a little rondo music while I set this reaction up.
02:29
So what is Dr. Dolan doing? First, he puts some solid potassium chlorate in a test tube and heated it up. The heat causes the solid to melt and become a liquid.
02:47
So this little triangle means heat. It turned from a solid to a liquid. As it's being heated, the liquid potassium chlorate immediately starts breaking down into two products, potassium chloride and oxygen. Now, potassium chloride
03:02
is a solid, and the oxygen is a gas. Looks like this. Now let's see what happens when Dr. Dolan adds the gummy bear.
03:42
All right, so let's break down what just happened. The sugar from the gummy bear and oxygen react to produce carbon dioxide and water, releasing a lot of energy as heat and light. This is what that looks like. And I'm going to draw sucrose, or sugar, in red, because it's from the gummy bear.
04:08
This reaction is probably familiar to you. It's a combustion reaction, which is when a fuel reacts with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water, and at the same time releasing a bunch of energy. So why is so much energy released,
04:21
and where does it come from? To show you, I'm going to draw the structures. Now, if you're unfamiliar with organic chemistry notation, each of the lines between the elements that I'm going to draw represents a covalent bond, which is the sharing of two electrons between two atoms. So let me draw those.
04:48
So here are the reactants, and here are the products. Now, by looking at the number of bonds and the type of bonds, so a carbon bonded to an oxygen or a carbon bonded to a carbon, and a single bond
05:01
versus a double bond, you can calculate the energy difference between the left side of the reaction, the reactants, and the right side, or the products. Now, all combustion reactions have more energy stored in the reactants than the products. So as the reaction progresses, this energy has to go somewhere, and it's released as heat and light.
05:21
Now, the amount of energy released from this explosion is exactly the same as the amount of energy that would be released in my body when I eat this gummy bear. The difference is that proteins in my body are set up in pathways that extract the energy in small, manageable bundles. So I power my everyday activities like dancing and running, but I don't explode.
05:42
Evolution has trained biological systems to efficiently extract energy from our environment. All right, that's it for me today. I'll see you next time.
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