WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 1 00:00:00.089 --> 00:00:03.330 This is a packet and bottle of freeze-dried urine, 2 00:00:03.330 --> 00:00:07.620 and the United States government will sell it to you for $983, 3 00:00:07.620 --> 00:00:09.450 plus shipping. 4 00:00:09.450 --> 00:00:12.040 Which is perhaps the strangest sentence I've ever started a video with, 5 00:00:12.040 --> 00:00:13.040 but it’s true. 6 00:00:13.040 --> 00:00:16.910 What's even stranger is: that’s a pretty reasonable price. 7 00:00:16.910 --> 00:00:20.560 These are two of more than 1,000 Standard Reference Materials 8 00:00:20.560 --> 00:00:23.510 that are kept here at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. 9 00:00:23.510 --> 00:00:26.720 Here at NIST, we produce Standard Reference Materials 10 00:00:26.720 --> 00:00:28.680 or SRMs for short. 11 00:00:28.680 --> 00:00:32.300 SRMs are super characterised materials that our customers use 12 00:00:32.300 --> 00:00:35.870 to make sure their measurements on their materials and processes 13 00:00:35.870 --> 00:00:37.780 are accurate and reliable. 14 00:00:37.780 --> 00:00:39.750 When a customer buys one of our SRMs, 15 00:00:39.750 --> 00:00:43.530 they get both a unit of material and a certificate of analysis. 16 00:00:43.530 --> 00:00:46.170 Each property, whether it’s a chemical constituent 17 00:00:46.170 --> 00:00:49.489 or a physical characteristic of the material 18 00:00:49.489 --> 00:00:50.830 is a certified property 19 00:00:50.830 --> 00:00:53.059 and it's measured most accurately. 20 00:00:53.059 --> 00:00:57.489 The certificate of analysis is just as important as the material itself. 21 00:00:57.489 --> 00:01:01.260 Without the certificate and all the information that’s inside of it, 22 00:01:01.260 --> 00:01:03.820 the SRM is just another bottle of stuff. 23 00:01:03.820 --> 00:01:07.539 We have a variety of food materials in our SRM catalogue, 24 00:01:07.539 --> 00:01:09.030 so this is slurried spinach. 25 00:01:09.030 --> 00:01:11.889 When you slurry the spinach, it's nice and homogenous. 26 00:01:11.889 --> 00:01:15.899 You sample a little bit from the top, it’s the same as sampling from the bottom. 27 00:01:15.899 --> 00:01:19.259 We also have our infamous domestic sludge, 28 00:01:19.259 --> 00:01:21.939 from a waste water treatment process, 29 00:01:21.939 --> 00:01:28.289 that has been dried, ground up, homogenised into this nice, fine powder. 30 00:01:28.289 --> 00:01:29.289 We take this material. 31 00:01:29.289 --> 00:01:32.579 We certify various toxic elements within the sludge, 32 00:01:32.579 --> 00:01:34.700 that’s what it’s used for. 33 00:01:34.700 --> 00:01:40.630 We also have the microsphere slide that contains the space beads. 34 00:01:40.630 --> 00:01:44.079 They're 10 micron-wide, polystyrene spheres 35 00:01:44.079 --> 00:01:47.099 that were formed on the space shuttle in zero gravity. 36 00:01:47.099 --> 00:01:52.100 We have to store some of our more sensitive materials in cryocooled conditions. 37 00:01:52.100 --> 00:01:57.409 We have our peanut butter, right there in a glass jar. 38 00:01:57.409 --> 00:01:59.209 Oh, it’s crackling. 39 00:01:59.209 --> 00:02:03.600 Then, we have our whale blubber, organics in whale blubber. 40 00:02:03.600 --> 00:02:07.530 This is actually whale blubber tissue from a beached whale. 41 00:02:07.530 --> 00:02:12.150 It's for tracking organic contaminants in the environment, 42 00:02:12.150 --> 00:02:15.709 and whales are the end of the food chain. 43 00:02:15.709 --> 00:02:18.430 Every one of these reference materials has to be exactly the same, 44 00:02:18.430 --> 00:02:20.170 to an incredibly precise margin. 45 00:02:20.170 --> 00:02:24.100 They’ll be used by people around the world to calibrate and test machinery. 46 00:02:24.100 --> 00:02:27.360 Now, other places make reference materials too. 47 00:02:27.360 --> 00:02:31.780 It's just that everything in this warehouse has the US Government stamp of approval on it. 48 00:02:31.780 --> 00:02:37.700 Now, just to be clear, the vast majority of reference materials here are pretty dull. 49 00:02:37.700 --> 00:02:41.180 They're for industrial processes, so they're metal, or glass, or pure elements. 50 00:02:41.180 --> 00:02:46.180 There are three types of bauxite: from Suriname, Jamaica or the Dominican Republic. 51 00:02:46.180 --> 00:02:49.329 There's even really precise mixes of gases available, 52 00:02:49.329 --> 00:02:51.090 along with some radioactive elements. 53 00:02:51.090 --> 00:02:55.799 Sometimes, it takes us years to actually procure a new material 54 00:02:55.799 --> 00:02:58.200 that becomes an SRM a couple of years later. 55 00:02:58.200 --> 00:03:01.560 We buy industrial products directly. 56 00:03:01.560 --> 00:03:03.970 It comes from a different source each time we make it, 57 00:03:03.970 --> 00:03:05.459 but we make it the same way, 58 00:03:05.459 --> 00:03:07.709 and we characterise it in the same fashion. 59 00:03:07.709 --> 00:03:11.200 Either we determine the chemical composition or its physical characteristics, 60 00:03:11.200 --> 00:03:13.150 but we do that with accuracy. 61 00:03:13.150 --> 00:03:18.069 In other cases, we have SRMs that are used to determine how they break. 62 00:03:18.069 --> 00:03:21.219 We measure over and over again, with different methods, 63 00:03:21.219 --> 00:03:25.790 to ensure that what we're measuring is the true value in that particular material. 64 00:03:25.790 --> 00:03:27.849 The material itself is not precise. 65 00:03:27.849 --> 00:03:29.989 The measurements that characterise it are precise. 66 00:03:29.989 --> 00:03:31.810 So if you haven’t worked it out yet, 67 00:03:31.810 --> 00:03:35.030 the reason that freeze-dried urine is one of the reference materials 68 00:03:35.030 --> 00:03:39.159 is because there are folks out there with machines that test urine. 69 00:03:39.159 --> 00:03:40.930 They're either testing for drugs, 70 00:03:40.930 --> 00:03:44.129 so the Institute will sell you urine laced with exact amounts 71 00:03:44.129 --> 00:03:47.269 of the metabolites of cannabis or cocaine, 72 00:03:47.269 --> 00:03:50.409 or they're testing for poisons and toxic elements. 73 00:03:50.409 --> 00:03:52.769 So if you need to calibrate one of those testing machines, 74 00:03:52.769 --> 00:03:55.969 to make sure that the results are accurate, 75 00:03:55.969 --> 00:03:58.100 then the folks here are the ones you're going to call. 76 00:03:58.100 --> 00:04:01.389 Thank you to everyone here at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. 77 00:04:01.389 --> 00:04:03.840 Pull down the description for more about Standard Reference Materials 78 00:04:03.840 --> 00:04:05.020 and about their work.