[tired_and_awake]

Yeah this is almost common at this point, specifically with carbon nano structures. The reason why is it is very expensive to manufacture specific structures but cheap and easy to make a ton of random structures. So yeah you "just" sort through the random ones, of course sorting through to find the desired structure can be fantastically difficult, but hey it works!

[colechristensen]

Half of chemistry/chemical engineering seems to be just various techniques of separation of the things you want from the thing you don’t want. Strong magnets might be unusual, but chemistry is full of doing strange things to get results.

I just watched the explosions and fire guy set fire to a mixture of things to synthesize something. If i remember correctly it was a glowing nanoparticle.