"The laboratory is a wondrous place where experiments are put to test," sings UC Berkeley senior Glory Liu while beakers bubble and Muppet-esque puppets investigate chemical reactions in "The Safety Song," the latest music video from campus musical group Sounds of Science.

"The Safety Song" is the second song released by the group, which consists of Liu and fellow students Ryan Miyakawa, Dave Carlton and Patrick Bennett, as well as Nola Klemfuss, a recent graduate.

The video already has gained 40,000 hits on YouTube since its release several weeks ago. The group's first video, "The Nano Song," has more than half a million hits and won it $1,000 in a contest sponsored by the American Chemical Society.

The group is currently working on a longer musical about science, which is set to be released spring 2010.

The Sounds of Science got its start early last summer when Miyakawa learned of an online contest asking for video submissions that could explain nanotechnology to a layperson.

"Most of the entries were pretty dull," he said.

So Miyakawa decided to do something a little more interesting and asked Liu to star in a video for the contest.

"Ryan came up to me and he and was like, 'Hey Glory, I think I want you to be the star in this movie and it's going to start out with you reading a story ... and then you'll break out in this Broadway show tune,'" Liu said.

Liu signed on, and with Miyakawa writing lyrics, Bennett directing and Klemfuss and Carlton constructing the puppets and providing extra manpower, they were ready to begin shooting.

After searching for the necessary equipment and spending hours filming and editing, the group finished the video and entered it in the contest.

The group then used the money it won to produce "The Safety Song."

The song outlines lab safety

practices-again featuring Liu singing with puppets-but this time the group got more ambitious, said Bennett.

Bennett put more complicated special effects like explosions into the video, and the grand finale consists of puppets playing the electric guitar and drums.

However, the newest song has sparked some controversy.

"'The Safety Song' actually got a fair amount of criticism of the accuracy of the song," Miyakawa said. "People were like, 'She just spilled radioactive fluid, I can't believe you're cleaning it up with a paper towel. You didn't evacuate the puppets.'"

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory said it would have liked to show the group's video as part of a safety demo, Miyakawa said. But due to the treatment of radioactive material in the video and the fact that Liu used safety glasses rather than goggles, it was unable to do so.

Bennett said the group plans to reshoot parts of the video to fix the

inaccuracies.

Tags: YOUTUBE, AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY