Name: 【TED-Ed】How do we separate the seemingly inseparable? - Iddo Magen
Uploaded: 2016-05-23T06:33:53.000Z
Duration: 4 min 25 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Your cell phone is mainly made of plastics and metals.

It's easy to appreciate  the inventive process

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by which those elements are made to add up to something so useful and entertaining.

But there's another story  we don't hear about as much.

How did we get our raw ingredients in the first place

from the chaotic tangle of materials that is nature?

The answer is a group of clever hacks known as separation techniques.

They work by taking advantage of the fundamental properties of things

Simple separation techniques apply to many physical scenarios,

or even sifting out flecks of gold from river sand.

But not all mixtures  are so easy to unravel.

we can exploit the differences between physical properties within a mixture,

a mixture of different  types of hydrocarbons.

and others make good raw materials for generating electric power.

To separate them, experts rely on one important feature:

different hydrocarbons boil  at different temperatures.

During the boiling process, each type vaporizes at a precise point,

then gets separately funneled  into a container

Separation techniques  also take us to the sea.

the ocean is the only  available water source.

But of course, humans can't drink salt water.

is to remove salt from sea water  with reverse osmosis,

a process that separates  water's ingredients by size.

A membrane with pores  bigger than water particles,

transforming what was once undrinkable into a life saver.

blood tests are a vital tool  for evaluating a person's health,

but doctors typically  can't examine blood samples

until they've separated  the solid blood cells

from the liquid plasma  they're dissolved in.

To do that, a powerful rotational force is exerted on the test tube,

causing heavier substances  with higher density,

Meanwhile, lighter substances  with lower density,

and the blood cells and liquid plasma can be tested independently.

But sometimes, unlike oil, seawater, and blood,

the parts of mixtures  that we want to separate

In these cases, the only way to isolate  ingredients is by chemical separation,

a complex process that relies  on unique interactions

between components within a mixture and another material.

a tool forensic scientists use  to examine crime scenes.

They dissolve gathered evidence in a gas,

and can monitor  and analyze the ingredients

as they separate  and move at varying speeds

That information then tells scientists precisely what was present at the scene,

Separation techniques are not just about industry,

One of the most technically ambitious projects in human history

is a separation technique aimed at answering the fundamental question,

By accelerating particles  to extremely high speeds

we can break them into  their constituent parts ever so briefly.