tried to three people including twenty one teenage boys have died in a fire at an islamic boarding school in the malaysian capital kuala lumpur a fire broke the only exit to the dormitory which had its windows covered in metal grilles firefighters say to piers that building regulations were not properly followed two more one hundred muslims have drowned making the crossing from man law to bangladesh bring the number since the start of the crisis to eighty eight they died when a refugee boat capsized. researcher state rex tillerson is welcomed the recent sanctions imposed by the un security council on north korea he was speaking at a joint news conference in london with his british counterpart boris johnson it also says a full oil embargo is needed and that china would have to agree to that i think it's clear that with respect to all and a complete. embargo on all from the u.n. security council that's going to be very difficult in effect that is directed at

china alone because china supplies essentially all of north korea's all oil. and those you have non-science in a golden age is up next to you after that. between the eighth and fourteenth centuries there was a golden age of science when scholars from the sonic world introduced the rigorous experimental approach that laid the foundations of the modern scientific method they transformed the superstition of alchemy into the science of chemistry the chemical industry has of course reshaped the modern world giving us new fuel drugs and new materials but the methodology and principles of chemistry go back over

a thousand years. and jamal clearly and i've been researching the contributions of the scientists of the golden age i'll be tracing back the roots of modern chemistry to the scholars of the earliest slummy quo. this is doha the capital of qatar two decades ago none of this existed all this development has only been possible because of a huge investment of revenue from oil and gas in other words the chemical industry

. all. it was awful for much that we take for granted a daily life from fuel to plastics the medicines even the tama road i'm driving on the chemical plants over there is processing the gas and crude oil that exists in such abundance in the middle east. oil in its raw state is a mixture of many different chemicals and these are separated out through a process called fractional distillation. the crude oil is heated until it becomes a vapor the vapor rises up the distillation tower and separates into his different components as it cools the fractionating tower in a modern oil refinery is a high tech version of a piece of apparatus called an eleven dick used by the golden age scientists as

a distillation tool over a thousand years ago. that is one early pioneer of distillation it was the ninth century physician and chemist arathi amongst his many writings of the earliest known accounts of using distillation to produce substances like kerosene sulfuric acid and pure alcohol this wasn't for drinking but the use as a medical disinfectant. here in istanbul dr peter star studies the work of the scholars of the golden age has brought with him a limited still to show me how the early chemists used it for distillation. this one is made of copper. and there were others made of of glass for example glass and yes yes the important thing about a still is that there's a hot and and there's

a cold and so the whole turned is where the steam is produced then condenses. and is received into the receiver here. what we would need would be water. first of all usually distilled water you could use rainwater that this all day then flew and then we'll need whatever we're going to distill for example if you want perfect roses would be excellent rose petals up i'm sure the restaurant was mind blowing if not and so the water with the rose petals will be heated up here as the steam is given off it takes the scent of the roses it reaches the eleven bit queer it condenses back to a liquid and drips down here into this other container who are the people who are carrying out these things the chemistry i think there are two main names which stand out above all the others above all. but also other drowsy. but hey on a particular it's very early on in the golden age and he's regarded by many as the

first scientist of the golden age and the thing was he doing many of his chemical procedures are those which may still be used today. for example. or precipitation distillation job or about how yarn was a polymath who grew up in modern day iraq and vast work covers medicine music chemistry and much more there were thousands of manuscripts attributed to far more than a single man could actually have written it's believed that many latest on his wrote under his name because he was held in such high regard whatever the truth he is credited with applying an experimental based approach to chemistry. the scholars of the golden age began applying the scientific method to chemistry by which i mean there were conducting experiments in a way that was

a big leap from the pure philosophical thinking of the greeks but to conduct careful experiments they needed apparatus much of which hadn't even been invented at the time and for chemistry in particular they need to hone their skills at glass blowing and glass making and so i'm going to meet a man who's going to show me just how difficult or easy it is to actually carry out that skill. so i. asked. him be a. must to stumble e. of all. i there are some looks for. sure shook your head. ok.

time to fix a our form of government didn't help. that this is just. one . in the long run. along the left as are a number. of. the. other month although. if one high and was making l.m. bit back in late a century he certainly would have been doing it this way the sort of gloss they would have used one thousand years ago would have been very different they would have put this and in lead and all the other ingredients into these auburn's and just cook them and bake them until they melted so although they did have glass

blowing to shake the molten glass they didn't have something with such high temperature like this jets of gas here. should clinch. well that's pretty remarkable my own lembit. although job i'm high on and those like him performing experiments and perfecting apparatus the work they were doing was very much a mixture of chemistry and alchemy indeed the arabic. good for chemistry is. from which the word alchemy is derived but whereas modern chemistry is a rigorous exact science alchemy is associated with superstition a magic the alchemy main goal was to turn other metals into gold to his followers

job or even higher yarn was known as. the mystic because they believed his work was no different from sorcery even today some chemistry can seem like magic of those or chemistry student and she's going to help me with some demonstration that i guess could be used as part of a magic show i'm going to turn these colorless liquids black simply with the power of my mind. right think. and it to me. first of all you have to turn off the light. to go.

it's not hot so this is a chemical reaction this giving of light but no heat and for our final trick. of course for all these reactions we know that there's a chemical explanation for what's going on but what we call chemistry has its roots in the alchemy of the golden age. so. to what extent was there a real flaw and being done in amongst all this mysticism and alchemy. jim i don't see a contradiction between science and alchemy. rather i see a synergy the one feeds on the other quite often and that you could say about every period great period of scientific breakthroughs you said of the great. parts of lots of middle ages you could. believe it isaac newton was was involved in alchemy

the source of. the early alchemy squibs turning common less valuable metals into precious gold jobber have been high on a particular was obsessed with trying to dissolve metals and that led him to research all different kinds of acids but gold is notoriously difficult to design so i'm going to buy a small amount of it and see if it's possible. that it can have. been nothing. and then there's another. dozen or so we have how i live the head. of the next you know sentiment. that.

you didn't have a. coffee what island i'm going to last when. you go in. and look at the. ok to be. discovered. and i think it was. shallow and so i let this out. me through my experiments to dissolve is professor hell stuff about. what the hell i need your chemistry expertise here i've got this gold coin and i wonder is it possible to dissolve gold berry very difficult i don't like all noble metals is relatively unreactive but the active towards acids there's only one acids the can really do the job which is this one. which means kingly water and it's water because it's the only thing which is old skulled believe that job first

distilled it and it's a mixture of two s's nitric acid and hard to chloroplast yes and it's exceptionally corrosive and exceptionally react it sounds nasty it's very very nasty it's vicious so can you demonstrate it for me let's see if it works so we're going to pour into the baker i'm going to save your beautiful gold coin since you travel so far with it and use this rather more expendable piece of zinc. so off it goes you can see it bubbling away probably wouldn't react as fast as a certain it would dissolve away. and why would people want to do this why would they want to dissolve metals like go because you can purify it or you can refine your gold by dissolving it and then replace imitating. the metal i. know there was still the fumes are still coming up and i think that lump of zinc has been dissolved entirely in the liquid. we did leave a small piece of gold in aqua region although this takes

a lot longer to react but over an hour the gold gradually dissolves. neither of those acid on their own will dissolve gold but taken together they produce the right ions to do exactly that. but chemistry wasn't only about alchemy there was a practical side to it as well and many developments in chemistry was driven by islam. cleanliness was a religious requirement in islam for example the washing of the hands face and feet before prayer and this requirement for cleanliness quickly led to the development of whole industry for example the development of so the first of so were

found manufactured in the islamic world. wrote about the difference between. and the word alkali derives from the arabic. which means the ashes of. referring to the original source of substances and of course alkalis are used in so making. a hazmat runs a small business in jordan. chemical process is to manufacture so. that a nice thank you. ok. makes mixing

olive oil with an alkaline and then adding her. spices. this chemical process is called suppose. after cooling. and then left to dry for two. months or heard. this is this is but it is a good. and. for the here not for me too late. during the golden age making was commercialized and the process started to be developed on an industrial scale today

a bar of soap that remakes in two weeks can be produced in an industrial soap factory in just a few hours. this said factories in the united kingdom and jamie benton is in charge of the plant. was principally been made in the same way for centuries a mixture of oil and alkaline we've been making soap here for one hundred fifty years and one of our king gradients is in this big tank that's one hundred tons of caustic soda to react with the oil. on this site they produce about thirty tonnes of soap per day around one hundred thousand tonnes of industrialize soap making on this grand scale needs chemistry on a grand scale. and the critical factor is controlling the chemical reaction mixing carefully measured quantities in temperature controlled reactors so in this reactor we've got. we're adding coconut oil which is the part of the so that actually

creates the after that we're adding caustic soda. the mixture is constantly monitored as it reacts and about an hour later the reaction is complete as with remus process once it's reacted the next stage is to try the soak. in here is a vacuum spray dryer so the so that's really here we can create a vacuum and suck the water out of the so. bags of dried so pellets are sent from the factory all over the world where they are perfect and shaped into bars of so. has been made in basically the same way for centuries but modern technology like vacuum spray dryers and precisely controlled reactors have sped up the process. chemistry relies on being able

to weigh and measure accurately and that's something we can trace back to the golden age. one of the reasons we regard the scholars of the golden age as the first true sciences is their obsession with accuracy is the reason why we think of job. as the first true chemists and here's an example of why this beautiful set. scales it was built by a scholar by the name of a higher than in the twelfth century scored a heckuva and is said to be accurate to one part in sixty thousand if you look very carefully along the army can see very precise graduations giving us the distance from the center and as the cups are hanging from different lengths it's basically the principle of moments as they move out there will pull it down the balance is achieved when the diamond shape in the middle is exactly vertical it's very very

precise but apart from that it's actually a beautiful work of art as well. in measurement allowed early chemists like java have been hired to be more rigorous in their experiments and their approach to all aspects of chemistry and this included the way he looked at materials grouping and categorizing them categorizing substances enables us to navigate our way around the scientific world just like in this bizarre over here i find. over here like this and after the lights textiles and over here ceramics. one job i've been high on did that was different was categorized substances not

according to arbitrate factors but according to the way they behaved in experiment this was a huge change in what had come before. back in the lab i wanted to find out what hell as a modern chemist thought of jobbers early attempts at categorizing acts i want to show you this extracts from a manuscript of his so this is translated from arabic it's a latin into english it says here among all bodies of whatsoever kind we find soul which is gold. to be burned by sulfur to lease reacted with sulfur to the next to this least burned is jupiter which is there lou no which is silver and he goes on and he ends with and mars which is ion by reason of the only ad geneive sulphur is most easily burned it's all very obscure in fact the word jibberish actually comes from jobbers knowing that if you write something too obscurely it's jibberish it's like job but what he has here seems to me the beginnings of the reactivity series

of metals listing them in order of how easily they react with sulfur yes how how correct was this well there was a couple little inaccuracies in it but he was way ahead of his time because showing reactivity herself is often quite difficult so what i thought we'd do is we're going to compare and contrast of the activities of certain metals with water iron for example which he mentions we all know the i and russ so that's a slow reaction but we're going to compare and contrast a triumvirate of metals and see how fast they react and they are potassium sodium and copper. i thought we'd start with the most reactive this is potassium and it's very soft and malleable and you can easily cut it with a knife so three to one. and all larry and present lie look flame. and popping around because. we're going to move on to our next metal sodium sodium chloride is common source

that sodium has got very very different properties it's again a metal you can cut with a knife three to one in a case that's buzzing around it and then pretty it's going to melt because of the heat of the reaction. here it is hissing away out of a wasp in a bottle so it's lasting longer in the water not reacting so quickly. and by way of comparison just eliminate all the variables this is copper and found we don't need that now we don't need this because couples do absolutely nothing it's very unreal active and that's why the coins in your pocket don't catch fire if you put in the washing machine working to get them wet and so this order of just how reactive metals are i mean by modern standards of chemistry jobber been hay on didn't get it quite right he had metals in the wrong order in that series but how impressive was that given that we're talking you know over

a thousand years ago it's exception impressive because each didn't know what he was looking for he didn't know what to expect we know these things because we look at the periodic table so you would call that chemistry not alchemy i think it's definitely chemistry. jobber been high on was starting to apply the scientific method deriving his conclusions from experiments later chemists like al-kindi and razi also basing their work on careful experiments and observations and the way we do chemistry today organizing and ordering the elements and looking for trends in their properties well just like the reactivity series that's what job or first started to do. next time we travel to some of the most cutting edge medical facilities in the middle east today they wanted to know him and you know west sequence in ten years now we can sequence the human genome within six to ten days. we look back at how one scholar from the golden age challenge to accepted ideas to

explain the human heart this is the primary circulation that is the discovery it's now obvious but it was back. and see how texts from islam it quote was so influential in medical science across the globe a century this science tend to be a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. in the next episode of science in a golden age i'll be exploring the contributions made by scholars during the medieval islamic period in the field of medicine. science tend to be a good subject to bring different people from all over the world together. to such like a magical and the more i learn about the more. i respect science in a golden age with professor jim miller at this time on

a. i just want to make sure all of our audience is on the same page where they're on line and what produced the u.s. citizens here and what puts people of iraq by one in the same or if you join us on sat i was never put a file then looked at differently because i'm dr that all the people that i'm a watch this is a dialogue tweet us with hash tag a.j. stream and one of your pitches might make the next show join the global conversation this time on al-jazeera russian filmmaker under a necklace of continues his journey across his homeland to discover what life is

like under putin during his travels he meets christians and muslims patriots and separatists i told you the locals in the southeast were on our side when i arrived i don't do something completely different someone to leave petitions russia but for others a russian passport means hope and the chance of happened in search of putin's russia at this time on al-jazeera. north korea and libya dominate the agenda at a meeting between the u.s. secretary of state but his british counterpart in london. are in tatters is out is there live from london also coming up.