Strawberries make surprisingly GIANT Bubbles (Best DIY Bubble Recipes)

I have a lot of experience making very large bubbles and I might also be accused of some somewhat sketchy backyard science why not combine the two and make a giant bubble solution using freshly extracted strawberry DNA as a key ingredient it might even end up working better than I ever expected hi I'm Ben thanks for being here it has been 7 years since my last video about making giant bubbles and I've learned a lot in the meantime I have some brand new very slimy ingredients that need testing a suspicion that strawberry DNA might be the best of all of them and a very reliable giant bubble recipe that you can and should make for yourself straight away here are the details of how to make giant bubbles the basic recipe consists of liquid detergent and two dry ingredients which will all be mixed with hot water the type of dishwashing detergent that we use really matters and I found that the best options in the United States are Dawn Ultra which was recently rebranded as Dawn 50% less scrubbing or Dawn Platinum four cups of detergent are added to a bucket up next is the secret ingredient a Veterinary lubricant called J Lube which is what makes the bubbles strong enough to become Giants we'll talk more about this stuff and how it relates to Strawberry DNA later this recipe calls for 8 G of J Lube to be mixed with the detergent and I like stirring this in by hand to make sure it's really fully mixed and lump free the next ingredient is 14 G of baking powder and this time it's not so important to fully mix because baking powder is very easily dissolved by the final step the addition of 4 and 1/4 gallons of hot water my mixing bucket isn't quite large enough so I pour the solution back and forth between my water jug until everything is combined thorough early now I know that this must seem like a ridiculous supply of bubble solution but believe me as soon as a few kids get their hands on the Bubble Wands you use up all five gallons in no time and by the way I'll show how to make the giant Bubble Wands later in the video on this occasion I was making this bubble mix because I was asked to provide some entertainment at a friend's Cider Mill this is one of the easiest ways to become everyone's favorite person at an event a few bins of liquid and bubble is enough to entertain several hundred people over the course of a day just be sure to have a little boundary set up around the bubble making area to help kids restrain themselves inevitably they want to run up and pop them before the bubbles ever have any real chance to survive on this particular day the weather was actually quite bad for making bubbles it was surprisingly low humidity for a fall day in Michigan the higher the humidity the bigger the bubbles can get and the longer they will last these are sizable enough to impress a crowd but nothing like the largest bubbles I've ever made for that we'll have to do some experiments in more humid conditions and potentially with the help of new ingredients we'll be able to outdo everything I've done before okay so how do strawberries play into this the key ingredient for truly giant bubbles is J lube and this is like molecular spaghetti it's composed of super long chainlike molecules that tangle and weave together which adds strength to a film of soap the chain-like molecules which are called a polymer resist being pulled apart and so it gives the bubbles a stronger skin that doesn't so easily tear and Pop I was thinking about other ingredients that might behave in a similar way and it crossed my mind that I know of another chain-like molecule which is not terribly difficult to get my hands on DNA could legitimately be a very good ingredient for giant bubbles it is a super longchain molecule which dissolves in water and is fairly easy at least in theory to extract from organic material strawberries are a particularly good candidate for this because strawberry DNA is made up of eight sets of chromosomes compared to human DNA which only has two practically this means that a strawberry contains four times more DNA than a person or most other living things the procedure to collect DNA only requires a few simple steps which even a child could complete in an afternoon crush the berries add soap and salt filter chill and top with cold rubbing alcohol the DNA floats to the top and there we have it I soon discovered how capable I was of making this process much more difficult

I started by smushing a strawberry in a bag which resulted in most of it bursting out onto the table then a second attempt with a mortar and pestal which also proved difficult and then in a ridiculous change of Direction I decided to switch to bananas because the grocery store had old ones which would save me a few dollars in exchange for several days of frustration bananas should also be a good option for extracting DNA because they have six sets of chromosomes and are easy to blend into mush but they contain a ton of jellylike starch which makes a mess of everything and contaminates the results now to be fair my goal was to extract a lot more DNA than the simplest version of this experiment so some of my failed attempts were actually helpful for my learning process and to test the limits of the third blender I'll probably destroy this year the first method which finally gave me a good result was to Simply blend a whole container of strawberries when the blender started to bog down I topped it off with a bit of water and then filtered everything through a colander this catches the seeds and a fair bit of gooey pulp which might not be ideal because this stuff contains DNA to and so I saved this to add to the next batch the remaining liquid is fairly thick and so I dilute it with a bit more water and then add exactly this much dish soap the soap breaks down cell membranes and allows the DNA to spill out and dissolve in the water the next ingredient serves a more interesting purpose a small handful of table salt DNA has what's called a phosphate backbone the information to make living things is stored in the central adjoining units these rungs of the ladder but the thing that connects these together is an atom of phosphorus with a negative electrical charge since these atoms stick out all along the edge of the DNA molecule it causes a repulsive Force like two magnets pushing away from each other if this back bone gets near another copy of itself this prevents the DNA from clumping together or getting tangled that's very important because in the case of strawberry DNA just one strand is about 5 F feet long packed into a single cell which by the way is crazy to think about table salt messes all this up once added to my solution it causes positively charged sodium ions to stick to the phosphate backbone neutralizing the repulsive charge and allowing it to tangle and stick together with other DNA molecules it also makes the DNA less soluble in water which will make it easier to collect in the next step first we cool the liquid down by adding ice giving it plenty of time to get as cold as possible meanwhile I've had a bottle of rubbing alcohol chilling on ice as well between the salt and ice we've already made the DNA significantly less soluble in water and almost completely insoluble in alcohol when we pour the alcohol into the bowl the DNA immediately starts falling out of solution in my first tests I thought I had to be really careful to pour the alcohol in gently so that it floats on top of the water without mixing but I soon realized you really don't have to worry about it you can just dump the alcohol in and it'll rise to the Top by itself I didn't expect this but I guess the high salt concentration probably makes the water less available to easily mix with other chemicals almost instantly we can see the DNA forming into a gel at the boundary between the water and alcohol over the course of a few minutes it begins to separate and Float toward the surface how cool is that you can extract DNA with basically just stuff you can find in a grocery store I mean it is a really slimy and kind of gross substance but to be honest I got a little bit emotional the first time I was able to extract a tiny amount of DNA in my early tests it is an unbelievable thing that this even exists I mean this is an incredibly simplified model every part of it is simplified not even including the fact that it's way too short a strand of human DNA at this scale would be more than 50,000 M long enough to circle the entire Earth twice and for that whole distance it's just billions upon billions of these little units of information arranged in a neat little ladder how do you even think about something like that

now to make giant bubbles we're going to need to dry the DNA in order to accurately measure it I start by skimming it off the top of the solution and placing it into a separate cup a lot of the alcohol could be removed by allowing the DNA to float to the top of the second container and then skimming it off again but I realized it would be faster to just filter it so I emptied my large bowl set the colander back on top and this time lined it with a coffee filter the DNA was then transferred to the filter to drain into the now empty bowl the salt which was added to help disrupt the repulsive charge of the DNA's phosphate backbone can now be removed by washing the DNA in ethanol which dissolves away the salt and leaves pure DNA behind all that's left is to drain the alcohol off squeeze out the excess and then leave this to dry overnight meanwhile I repeated the whole process one more time and in this attempt I added the excess pulp from the last run into the blender and also the soap and salt directly into the blender as well this batch was Blended much more thoroughly until even the seeds seemed pulverized and then diluted with water without filtering it seems like it works fairly well to do things this way and I did end up with more DNA in the end although some of that is certainly due to the extra pulp added from the previous run and here we have it 7 G of dry strawberry DNA 2. 3 G from the first run and 4. 7 from the second quite a thing to look at I think I now have an obligation to follow in the footsteps of Nile red at this point and at least try a little bit to see what it tastes like oh gosh okay um a slight hint of dish soap literally that is the only flavor the slightest hint of dish soap and a very weird texture I'm happy to say that brilliant is my sponsor for this video providing thousands of interactive lessons in math data analysis programming and AI the thing I've appreciated most about the courses on brilliant is how good they are at allowing you to learn Concepts intuitively as you work through various problems and challenges for yourself instead of watching a drawn out lecture and trying to absorb all the information up front brilliant tries to give just the minimal amount of detail needed to start playing with the concepts in a Hands-On problem I've enjoyed a bunch of the science and data courses on brilliant and they just launched a bunch of new ones analyzing data from various case studies which really helps you to see the Practical value of what you learn as you work your way through to try everything brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days visit brilliant. org Nighthawk and that will also get you 20% off an annual premium subscription now before we use this in a bubble mix I just wanted to double check that the DNA I extracted in my two runs are approximately the same Purity the simplest way I could think to test that is to dissolve a small sample of each in the same amount of water and see if they both dissolve equally if one sample leaves behind more undissolved Gunk than the other I'll know that one is probably a lower Purity and after blending both samples they look pretty much the same a small amount of residue on the bottom of each so now the test I've prepared enough ingredients to make four 1gallon batches of bubble mix the first is a control this will just be dish soap neutralized by a little bit of baking powder and then three more batches each with different strengthening polymers J Lube is what I use in my normal mixture and then we have DNA which I've measured with a little bit of excess to make up for any impurities that don't dissolve and then the last batch we'll use PE po o this is an ingredient which I've used a lot in recent videos for the purpose of making cooling fabric peo is the active ingredient in J Lube so on the surface it's not so different from my standard mixture however it's quite different in practice remember that all of these are chainlike molecules and chains come in all sorts of different lengths the difference between J lube and this pure peo is that these molecular chains are about 10 times longer that makes this

stuff incredibly gooey and the difference will become very obvious once all of these are combined with the rest of the bubble solution each bucket starts with one cup of dawn platinum and then the J lube and peo are added directly to the detergent and mixed in it's important to do things in this order because these polymers have a hard time dissolving directly into water without forming clumps but that issue is avoided by first making sure they're well distributed in the soap after this 3 and 1/2 gr of baking powder can be added to neutralize each of the solutions and for the DNA I decided to go with a slightly different process because I think it's a little less soluble to begin with and I feared that it may not dissolve into the soap at all so I premixed it with water and blended it thoroughly until it was lump free this then goes into the bucket and everything else is done the same from there 3 1/2 G of baking powder is stirred in and the same is now done for the control each bucket gets one gallon of water to top it off to the same line and once mixed these bubble Solutions are complete just look at how ridiculous this peo solution is if this incredibly slimy stuff can make giant bubbles I will be very surprised it's also interesting to notice that the DNA mixture Chang changed to a green color and it doesn't seem like that's only because the pure DNA was a little bit pink maybe strawberries have a bit of a pH indicator in them that got carried over through my extraction process I'm not exactly sure now to test these fairly I need to make four separate Bubble Wands that are exact the same size I like to use braided cotton clothesline for the loops but it needs a little bit of preparation first this type of cloth line often has a synthetic fiber core which needs to be removed so I measured and cut four equal lengths and then began removing the core it's easy to pull out the first few feet and then the cotton becomes bunched up and you need to work a little bit to disperse the bunch section further along toward the other end it does take a bit of work especially if you're trying to remove the core from a very long piece of clothesline but for these small sections it only takes about a minute each in my case I then double checked that the length of all four lines was still exactly the same and it wasn't so I trimmed off the uneven ends before tying each into a closed loop all sorts of things can work as the sticks for a bubble wand but I found that bamboo staks from a hardware store are an easy option to attach the loops I like using a pair of zip ties because other things tend to slip once they get covered in soap I measured each of my Loops against each other as I added the other stick to make four identical Bubble Wands each of the wands is soaked in its individual bucket and I'll start by testing my standard mix no surprise the J Lube Works well now on to the peo which you can tell just by how it comes off the bottom of the wand how ridiculously gooey it is to my astonishment it actually does make bubbles and about as well as the J Lube I have to admit that I did test this mixture previously on the day before doing Bubbles at The Cider Mill so I have some earlier footage of my first experience with it and it is absolutely disgusting forming these wet flying spiderwebs when the bubbles pop the film is actually so stringy that a few times I noticed bubbles forming from a film that stretched above the top of the loop not even connected to anything on the top Edge super weird and I don't like it is very gross yeah dick so now we get to the moment of truth how does strawberry DNA compare to these other polymers the answer is that it does surprisingly well the first few bubbles had a fairly short life but once the wand became properly saturated I started having some excellent results that's unbelievable the control also gave me some surprisingly good results considering I didn't expect to make any giant bubbles with this one but compared to all three others the film popped faster and the bubbles are shorter lived the DNA is definitely an improvement and

maybe just as good as the J Lube mix to know for sure we'll need to scale up the experiment so using a pair of fishing poles I set out making the largest bubble wand I've ever made so far using a single zip tie to hold the loop in place allows easy adjustment of the dimensions for this enormous bubble wand I think this is about the largest size Loop that I can physically make AG so I woke up pretty early this morning I'm trying to catch the highest levels of humidity that I can and that is typically in the middle of the night or as early in the morning as possible usually it would be about 100% humidity this time of year in Michigan at least this early in the morning but we're in the middle of a drought right now so it's only about 70% even now so still not ideal conditions but that should be high enough to still make some giant bubbles I'm just waiting for the sun to get a little higher because the light is a little too dim for my other cameras right now I have this bottle launcher thing that I use to scare off crows when they're making too much noise as I film I'm a little bit worried that I attracted an army oh my gosh what I set out my four buckets for this test and I only made the one giant Loop so between tests I'll ring out the excess solution as best as I can to prevent cross-contamination what I'll do is I'll start with my standard bubble solution it's really a pain to get a loop this big to make it into a tiny little bucket like this I should have used larger buckets I didn't want to waste so much bubble solution if one of these mixtures didn't work here we go a little bubble with this giant wand wind is changing direction let's close the loop come on make it a I nearly had a completed bubble wind direction is a bit of a difficulty especially when wielding such a giant Loop the J Lube mix did make fairly large bubbles when I could properly face my back to the wind I have to say I'm a little bit disappointed as large as these bubbles are I hoped they would have a longer lifespan we'll see if the super gooey peo mix can do any better okay now this first bubble with the peo solution it takes uh so long for the solution to uh soak into the rope that this first bubble is kind of a write-off we'll see if it works or not but oh yeah wow that was good the first and second tests were both decent both times I was almost able to close the loop and make a free floating bubble but not quite that seems awfully similar to The Standard batch in any case we've seen a good Baseline now to compare the standard performance of a bubble mix under these conditions to the one that I'm especially curious about all right here is my favorite part of this project I have really high hopes for this strawberry DNA bubble mix test one oh please work I want you to work so well oh come on all right that's a better

result that was better okay so these results are fair certainly the DNA is close in performance to the other mixes I'm just not entirely happy to only see the results in less than perfect weather I know that all of these can do better if I'm willing to wait all right we have a different situation this morning 97% humidity these are the ideal conditions for giant bubbles I'm hoping we can make some monsters today hopefully the biggest bubbles that I've ever made again this is the biggest Loop I've ever used it's an enormous pain to actually dip it into the solution and well for my wrists it's extremely difficult I'm hoping it pays off this morning all right test one well it doesn't work so good if it touches the camera does it do it again for the geese and call this the first test with the J Lube mixture can I get two bubbles off the same Loop here's my last test of the J Lube solution and then we're going to move on to the peo test three closed it I think that was definitely the largest freestanding separated bubble I've ever made this made all the difference at almost 100% humidity the bubbles now last long enough that I was able to close several of them in just the first few minutes peo that only popped because it hit the bucket I feel like in the cold weather the bubbles pop more slowly I mean I guess that's almost certainly true the viscosity of the liquid is higher in cold weather honestly the weather is still not ideal because the bubbles are now actually freezing instead of drying out but it's certainly better conditions than day one both the standard J Lube solution and the peo worked similarly well the peo being significantly less gross than it was in my early tests I think it becomes a bit less spider Webby in the cold and now back to the strawberry DNA test one here we go o that was pretty long lasting let's see if I can make this one a oh I want to close it come on now my first two attempts on this particular morning were cut a little short by touching the grass but on the third attempt I think we achieved a record freestanding come on yes that was a freestanding fully disconnected bubble made from DNA a second one maybe oh man there we go yeah I don't think anyone else has ever made bubbles this big using DNA I think it's fair to claim that world record I'm afraid that the camera is not going to convey how truly enormous these

bubbles are it's almost an optical illusion I think I've learned a lesson that perhaps a wand of this size doesn't make bubbles as visually striking as a smaller one these giant mostly spherical bubbles don't seem to reflect the light or move around quite as much as the small ones I guess I can consider this very good news because my forearms and wrists do not appreciate this it is a much more pleasant experience to use the small bamboo sticks in the end the DNA mix performed very well if the standard and peo mixes performed better I could just barely tell I think the standard J Lube recipe still comes out on top not because it made the largest bubbles but because there's just something about it that makes it feel easier to use like the soap film is less fragile and requires less concentration to successfully closed the loop the biggest surprise for these tests with the giant Loop was my control solution now I know from a lot of experience that a simple mixture of soap and water with no other additives will not work for giant bubbles however this control solution which only included the addition of baking powder to neutralize the pH performed surprisingly well I was not able to actually close a giant bubble with this oversized Loop but I was able to make some very large tubes during both days of testing that's a much better result than I expected if I'm away from home without access to other ingredients I might even consider just trying simple detergent neutralized by baking powder for a basic giant bubble mix definitely this control solution makes bubbles with a more fragile film but it would still entertain a crowd with that I think it's time to get back to more serious projects I think the next one will be another entry in the radiative cooling series but some other projects have struck my interest as well as always please leave me comments especially if you have topics you'd like to see explored here in my workshop I still read every comment you leave on these videos though I can't keep up to replying to everyone I really appreciate hearing from you if you'd like to support me and the things that I'm trying to do through this channel directly please check out my patreon page I'd really appreciate it thank you so much for watching I'll see you next time