Yanhao Deng of Chenzhou, Hunan, made 1.428 moles of solid sodium chloride, about 83 grams of table salt, in three minutes in NoBook Lab, a virtual chemistry lab app, starting from an empty workbench. On a tablet, Yanhao sets out a 1,000 mL beaker, tweezers, sodium metal and concentrated hydrochloric acid, reacts the sodium in the acid and tips the white salt into a test tube in two batches; the tube's readout lists sodium chloride with small amounts of five other substances and no liquid. RecordSetter matched a phone video of the tablet and a smartwatch stopwatch with the tablet's own screen recording: the tube reaches 1.428 moles at 2:56 on the stopwatch and still reads 1.428 as the stopwatch passes 3:00. Table salt, the hard way.
