MAKING TAURINE, MEETING "MESOHUNTER", AND GENERAL UPDATES

For a while now, I've been wanting to make taurine (a common energy drink ingredient...and the one urban legends say come from bull testicles lol), and I'm happy to say the synthesis has been going pretty well! The first step was making 2-bromoethylamine hydrobromide, which might sound complicated, but was as simple as refluxing hydrobromic acid and ethanolamine for several hours with breaks to distill off water as it formed. Taking away the water helps push the reaction forward, because having less product in solution makes the reverse reaction less favorable...Le Chatelier's principle in action! The image above shows the freshly dried product, which I reacted with sodium sulfite to form taurine and sodium bromide. The chemistry is pretty simple, but very clean and high yielding (a nice change for me lol), and now I just need to work up the crystallized taurine/bromide mix to get pure taurine (apparently, this involves washing with hydrochloric acid, boiling down the filtered acid solution, and crashing out the taurine with ethanol).

On a completely different note, today I also learned that another storm chasing YouTuber (MesoHunter, with about 20K subscribers: https://www.youtube.com/@MesoHunterWX ) has been living down the street from me for almost four years! So after texting, I paid my neighbor a visit, and we talked for most of the afternoon about our storm chasing experiences. He's a great guy all-round, and I'm definitely planning to do some chasing with him this fall and next spring!

Alright...big update time. Not "big update" as in "I HAVE BIG NEWS", more like "I haven't really posted a concise update on my ongoing projects for a while, and now I'm dumping it all at once". For simplicity, I'll just put down each project as a bullet point. This is honestly more for me, so I can see what I have to do and actually think about how I'm going to finish each of my unfinished YouTube side quests lol:

• Coca Cola: I just mailed Vince from "Neptunium" another cola sample to analyze, but overall, I'm pretty much done with the recipe...still one or two iterations to go; I'm on version 85! This will probably be a later project, since it's HUGE, doesn't have a sponsor-related deadline, and still requires a lot of filming and scripting. Plus I need to interview Vince, send the final version to "Mass Spec Everything", and get test subjects to taste it!

• Nikethamide (banned performance enhancer from bug spray): this is basically done, and I sent the product to Vince to have it tested for purity. However, I'm working out a sponsorship deal with FlexiSpot, so it may be a month before I post it.

• Plasma gun: it's...coming along. It's hard to know where to start with designing this thing's shape/body...I'm better at designing and building chemicals and molecules, not as much objects...but I have some ideas. The parts are all ordered, including the $1,000 15kJ capacitor bank, and it's looking like this might be a fairly large collab video. "Plasma Channel" will likely be building something for the gun (maybe the power source?), James Hoopman is helping me with the designs, and a generous donor basically paid for the capacitor bank. The video release date is...idk, but some time this year. Maybe later in the fall, depending on other projects that need to come first. It will be a fairly complex one for me to make though!

• Tornado probe: I can't really guarantee a better tornado intercept this year, so for all intensive purposes, filming is done. I need to get this one edited pretty soon, since JLCPCB sponsored the CNC'd aluminum top, and I told them the video would be done in July...oof. Technically, I paid for the top and they'll just be reimbursing me though, so it's not a huge sponsor-related rush. Still need to get it done though, hopefully by September before nikethamide.

• Taurine: this one isn't urgent, but has potential to do quite well I think, so I want to get it done this year if possible. Other priority videos come first though!

• Filler videos: these are chemical syntheses that weren't used in larger videos, but could still be made into shorter videos when I'm out of ideas and haven't posted in a while. These include Butamben (the benzocaine analog I made as a precursor to novocaine), diethylaminoethanol (another novocaine precursor), telluroacetone, sodium azide, antimony pentachloride, and maybe one other.

I have other video idea...I always do lol...but I think I'll hold off filming more until these other projects are finally done. 2025 has been a crazy year for LabCoatz, and I'm graduating from OU in the spring, so there's a lot on my plate. Wish me luck!