It's something that involves the use of Neil's cauldron.

So here it is.

This is a hemispherical analyzer from an old ex PS machine.

So x p s is X ray photoelectron spectroscopy.

Neela salvaged this piece of metal.

Andi added legs to it.

So he's 1,000,000 his own, which is Cold Rin, and we're going to do a reaction in it.

That really is going T o boil and bubble.

There are a few steps to this.

The first stage is actually to set up the lumps of charcoal, so we need to create a little barbecue in Neil's Lab.

So it was constructed a small barbecue grill, and he's got pieces of charcoal that he's made himself.

The cold run is filled with liquid oxygen.

Liquid oxygen boils 13 C above liquid nitrogen that's minus 183 C.

As always, you can see that the liquid oxygen is a nice, slight blue color to it, and the reason it's dangerous is that it's very concentrated oxygen and therefore it can make things burn very dramatically.

On dhe.

I was really quite worried about this experiment because I had seen cotton wool reacting with liquid oxygen on dhe.

You may have seen it on one of our videos pull.

And then we've also tried reacting charcoal with Gacy's Floren F two on that burst into flames pretty dramatically as well.

So I was quite worried about what would happen when you dropped red hot charcoal into liquid oxygen.

It's a beautiful reaction, so so free, you can actually see that start out glowing red, hot.

Then it was kind of orange, and it was getting hotter and hotter as the reaction progressed.

And so, by the end of it, that small lump off charcoal that remained was actually glowing white hot.

Because it was that in there is giving out a huge amount of heat.

You can see the Chalco.

It's glowing really red hot, so it means that reaction's going quite fast.

But it swims around on the surface almost peacefully, and I think the reason is because the charcoal is so hot it is not actually in contact with liquid but is floating as it were on the cushion of oxygen gas.

Rather the same thing that happens if you drop water onto a hot metal plate.

It runs around, but it vaporizes quite slowly.

So what you're actually seeing is the reaction of charcoal with oxygen in what turns out to be quite a nice controlled way.

Definitely go again.

In some ways, it's a much more satisfying reaction than an explosion, because an explosion happened so quickly that even with the high speed camera, you went to get a few frames.

But with this reaction, you see skittering around and you have time to think about what's happening on Dhe.

Anything that makes you think is good.

Yes, that's it, exactly.

That that's what we wanted to film as well.

Never gets old.

Well, I think his cauldron is really rather fun, and it might be quite interesting to try reacting some other things with liquid oxygen or other liquids gases.