I was discussing the most efficient solvent for ethylene vinyl acetate foam (toluene being the most efficient) and realized that I had regular occupational exposure to almost all of those VOCs that aren't banned for commercial use, and how many still raise your risk of cancer and organ failure. That plus the lead and asbestos lurking in the old buildings I work in.
@@oatmealman1586 man, you name a substance, real or fictional, I've probably smoked, drank or snorted it. Especially things you'd REALLY not want to. Powdered diamonds tore the FUCK out of my frontal lobe.
@@katiebarber407 oh it gets worse, I found out from a video by the iilluminaughtii (she focuses on researching scams and shady business practices), that the No Child Left Behind act contained a clause allowing military recruiters to demand private information for students that didn't perform on their tests so they could target them for recruitment. Someone in congress got their panties in a twist because they interpreted schools wanting to protect their students as schools having a vendetta against the military. So they got that one added just to make sure schools couldn't say no. If I ever find out that happened to my personal info at my school, I'm going to try and sue the Military for invasion of privacy. Especially if that clause is still on the books. Its absolutely disgusting that poor kids were made to take a rigged test that favored rich kids, then targeted by the army because they were too poor to do well, and tricked into going to iraq and afghanistan to possibly die. Let alone closing or cutting funding for schools that couldn't improve, this last bit about the military pretty much threw me into a rage. Maybe there's honor in military service, but there's none whatsoever in tricking poor kids into joining up. And if someone else who's reading this thinks what I just described is okay, you're a dick.
I mean... it's not an automatic game over but that dude who vaped Americium may want to get screened for... lots of things. In a few years I expect him to be in a Chubbyemu video.
Blacksmith here: I once attempted to make mokome-gane with nickel and copper from quarters. (Basically Damascus nickel and copper) It turned out beautifully and I made several projects out of it but using quarters was expensive, so I tried to use nickels and pennies. Quarters are made from alloys of nickel with a copper core, whereas nickels and pennies are nickel, copper, around a zinc core. I ended up inhaling tons of zinc oxide fumes and was bedridden with metal fume fever for 2 weeks. 🤠
Wait, should I be worried about melting pennies? I did that all the time as a kid, and I was planning on doing it with my little sister for fun. Is it dangerous to melt pennies?
yeah , the least of my worries would be the the chemical toxicity. the alpha particle , if gotten inside the body would reap havoc on the internals. it's said to have close to the same radiotoxicity as polonium 210 .
I have a source that I've been too careful to remove out of this plastic/metal casing that it comes in inside a smoke detector. So it's still got about a 1/3ish of an inch gap of air when a GM tube/probe is pressed up against it, and it'll set off my ludlum 3 w/ a 44-9 probe at 110-120k CPM with that air gap.
Seconding your observation about other hazards - 'chemically inert" does not automatically mean 'harmless' . For example, any type of gas has the potential to asphyxiate. Asbestos, too, is basically inert, but has the ability to cause damage at the cellular level because of its mechanical properties. I saw in the news recently that titanium dioxide is proported to be harmful as a food addative, but I'm still skeptical about that one.
@@That_Chemist admittedly, I'm not a chemist. I did a little more Googling after your comment, and it SEEMS unlikely that the conditions in the stomach are capable of dissolving the TiO2, but I'm curious of your thoughts. EDIT: also, yeah, TiO2 is indeed less stable than I first suspected.
@@exstirpo8120 which, this actually highlights the first point really well - there may or may not be a chemical interaction with TiO2 within the body, but that doesn't rule out a hazard from extremely small particles, or particle shapes that have an unexpected biological effect.
If there's gonna be a dad joke at the end, I should submit my favorite chemistry dad...poem? "Billy was a chemist But Billy is no more. What Billy thought was H2O Was H2SO4"
Methyl mercaptan is *incredibly potent*. It can be smelled down to parts per trillion. I'm sure there's a large margin of safety until you get to toxic levels. When food rots, it produces things like ethyl and methyl mercaptan and it is very important that humans be able to detect it in very tiny quantities to warn if food is too far gone to eat.
you would be ok from the ricin as that would denature/be destroyed from the heat - you would be less ok from inhaling the fumes from the decomposing oil however 😂 Having said all that - id much rather inhale those castor fumes than 400+ year radioactive half-life Americium 😂
I did some work with Am-241 sources a few years ago, and in the course of doing the safety risk assessment document I found a US safety report about someone who had swallowed one and (fortunately) lived to tell the tale. Am-241 is expensive - $1500/gram, so the source foil is actually an alloy of Am-241 with gold, rolled out very thin and plated with silver on one side and palladium on the other. And thanks to the fact you can roll metal foils really thin, a single source costs less than a dollar!
@stuartkelly3106 no. The foil has 3 layers, pure gold or palladium, gold + americium oxide alloy, then a silver substrate. Unless you scratch or etch the top layer away or get the foil hot enough to melt the silver or gold, the americium is unlikely to leach out. But putting it in your vape is still incredibly stupid. I have such a source I use for calibating my gamma spectrometer, but it's epoxied to a 1mm thick aluminum business card laser etched with the trefoil warning symbol and "Am-241" in large letters, precisely to avoid it getting lost or flagrant stupidity.
My grandmother was a student back in the Soviet Union, and during a chemistry practical, a friend splashed her with sulfuric acid and burned holes in her new coat. So to get back at him she tricked him into tasting sodium chlorate at the qualitative analysis test by making him believe it was the chloride.
They use ethyl mercaptan as 'stench gas' which can be smelled at a level of 0.36 ppb according to wikipedia. The permissible dose is 10 ppm and the immediately hazardous level is 500 ppm. Seems that is a sufficiently wide range where you can have it be smelt unambiguously without actually poisoning people.
They otherwise omit the potential toxicity of the gas in any "training" session regarding it. Most people have no idea of the "second stage" where it smells sweet rather than rancid and could kill you rather quickly
Regarding the Copper Cyanide story, I wouldn't even use my fingers to clean a spatula from cooking. I'll normally wipe it off with paper towel or scrape it off on the side of the pan, then wash it. Maybe leaning proper kitchen etiquette could help people not do things like this in the lab? Idk, just a thought.
Kitchen safety test as a prerequisite to lab safety class sound like a great idea. If you can’t understand the point of best practices and PPE when handling boiling water or spicy peppers you shouldn’t even be given a chance to handle hazardous chemicals
I know I would clean it with my fingers or worst, my tongue, I chew my pills for fuck sake, thats why I am a programmer and star from labs. Didnt stop me to try to cook with ammonium chloride tho
@@sideways5153 I think making hot sauce or something would make an amazing ppe competency test. If you fail, you KNOW you failed. And you'll eventually be ok :)
In WW2, Soviets used CCl4 as a booze trap for Nazies. They were mixing it with enough ethanol to taste like booze and filling bottles labeled "Cognac" with the stuff (I guess it can be mistaken for that). Took the nazies a little to figure out what they were drinking!
@@joshhoover1202 Does it really? I don't feel bad about using it in the lab once in a while, I'm more worried about it's presence in drinking water and chronic exposure - that seems to be the problem, not its acute toxicity or occasional exposure. I read the IARC literature on chloroform again a while ago, and that was what I was taking away from it at least, it's carcinogenicity was discovered in the general population that was exposed to it and not specifically to people being exposed to it in the workplace, while the acute toxicity seems to be an issue if you use it as an anaesthetic. On the other hand, I'm working occasionally with it and Bis(chloromethyl)ether or an Aziridine product, so the chloroform is the most benign component of those reaction mixes. :D
@@stefangadshijew1682 It isn't the carcinogenicity of chloroform that I am most worried about, rather the hepatoxicity. I have the impression that it will mess up your liver almost as well as carbon tetrachloride. From what I read, a single anesthetic usage could lead to delayed liver failure. Up there with leaching and blue mass in terms of bad medical practices in my book.
@@joshhoover1202 once upon a time I was a great deal younger and dumber and worked in a lab before I resolved my issues with substance abuse. I somehow decided that abusing chloroform would be a good time, and not only was it not a good time, a 2 day binge absolutely wrecked my liver and I spent the next week in the hospital waiting to see if it'd fail or get better. So yeah. Chloroform's hepatotoxicity isn't a joke.
In german Highschool (12th and final year), we were supposed to shoot a video for new students who would potentially join the school (4th class). One experiment was pouring ethanol in a large metal tray, igniting it and then blowing magnesium powder from a glass rod into the fire. This whole demonstration was done in a fume hood. Our teacher told the guy who blew the magnesium into the flame to not put too much into the rod. He absolutely loaded that thing and the result was a temporarily blinding, around one cubic meter large fireball, luckily no one got hurt. In the same class, I once somehow got HCl into my eyes (I don’t know how) although I wore safety glasses. No problem because we had an eyewash which the teacher immediately used. Turns out, there was a whole somewhere in the hose, which, unbeknownst to me, flooded the room next door which was used for the storage of chemicals, fun times.
this is a story told me by my uncle, he was at industrial school in the '70, Italy, the professor demonstrate the violent reaction of metallic potassium in water, the classic little piece in a vial, the students liked it soo much they tried to steal a big chunk of potassium. the potassium was in a petrol filled container, one kid put his whole arm in the container for steal an orange of potassium, with no storage, he has the brilliant idea of putting it in his back pocket of his thighs jeans, then proceeded to wash his arm in the bathrooms for cleaning the petrol, whit no towel he dried his hands on his pants, sparking an extremely violent reaction setting him on fire, he was far away from the lab so no emergency showers, luckily the janitor, an old man, broke a glass bottle and cut away the jeans burning himself in the process. the kid survived with horrible burn scars on his whole body, the janitor saved his life and him too received horrible scars on the arms. after that the school started searching other students for other missing potassium, my uncle was in possession of some and fearing getting busted he made it disappear... tossing it from the window, outside was raining... luckily he only damaged a parked car and make a loud bang, he was not busted after all.
I still remember the very first time my sister did a lab project. She was in the third grade and right before spring break the teacher gave everyone in her class cocoons that were about to turn into butterflies. She watched her cocoon religiously (I don't think she even slept) until the day came that the butterfly began to emerge. Eventually the butterfly got the strength to start flying, mind you this was around the time we had gotten a new puppy. So this butterfly's time as a butterfly was cut short as it flew directly into the mouth of our puppy.
These stories might be a bit less exciting, but a lot of stuff happened at my high school: - Benzene was not allowed in the school at all. However, there were no rules about experiments outside of the school. Guess who had a vault of some banned chemicals in the forest next to the school? A teacher, who then proceeded to show us (safe) reactions with the stuff. - The school had to remove the nitric acid from the back of our classrooms. Why? Well, it got stolen at least once and more importantly some students in the back row thought it would be really funny to just mix up chemicals in a beaker until something happens. The beaker got warm, then a lot warmer, and they quickly dumped the brown liquid down a drain. The school never found out who did it, so no punishments there, but the nitric acid became a lot harder to access. - A teacher instructed us to put something on glass in a microwave (forgot what the chemical was). The glassware exploded. This happened twice before she realized that it might be a good idea to stop the experiment. Stuff that I heard from other schools: - Someone told the teacher and an unnamed student had placed several drops of bromine in the air vents. So, they escalated the situation and promptly evacuated a school of ~1300 people. Several experts came into the school and did a bunch of measurements. They found a ton of alarming stuff (mold in some bathrooms and the likes) but no trace of bromine anywhere.
another blacksmith here, i have two stories for you. First, when I was just starting out, I had a soup can forge (basically a soup can with the inside coated in ceramic). I was outside, in shorts and flip flops because i was dumb and 12. So im sitting there, waiting for the forge to heat up, and i move a piece of wood on the table i was using, only to find out a swarm of ants had it made their home and were now rapidly vacating the premises. I panicked, dropped the metal, kicked my legs, flip flops flew off, tried to run, then I *stepped* on the metal. If it werent still warming up, i'd probably be crippled. Second! I had a much better safety mind at this point, and was hot cutting a piece of metal with my brother. note that this was one of my first times using a hot cut chisel, and this specific chisel dulls very quickly. What had happened over the course of the cuts, is the edge had been so dulled that it was now round. Couple that with the now too-cold work piece, on the final hit, the work piece snapped free, shot across the shop and hit my brother in the leg. LUCKILY, he was wearing full length pants and it only bounced off. so yeah mandatory safety gear in my shop is now long sleeves, long pants, close toed shoes and non-flammable materials
In high school, the first lab of the year was "distillation of wood'. The apparatus consisted of a test tube loosely held in a spring clamp, with one hole stopper with latex tube leading to a filled inverted jar in a bowl of water. There was a liquid trap proceeding this. The process was to heat popsicle sticks in the tube with a bunsen burner to the point of char, separating and collecting the 3 phases of matter. Some students would allow the jar to rest on the tubing, pinching it (at first this was unintentional LOL), and the nearly red-hot test tube would pop the stopper, launching into flight with a tail of burning wood gas / liquid. We learned rather quickly that POP! from another lab station meant DUCK.
Stockroom lab tech told me a story once from her previous place of work. Maria worked in a lab with Johnny, who was a bit cookey and probably had no business being anywhere near a lab. One day she heard a loud crash from the other side of the room where Johnny had been working. She sees that a 4 L glass bottle had smashed on the floor and its contents were everywhere. Johnny begins trying to soak up the large spill of unknown substance as Maria evacuates the room immediately. From the doorway Maria asks Johnny, "What is that you spilled?", and with Johnny hunched over the chemical spill he reads the label from the broken bottle and says, "py-ruh-dy-nee". Maria repeats the word and asks herself what that could possibly be. Moments later realizes the chemical is pyridine. She immediately signaled for Johnny to get out and proceeded to call for help.
By the way: The word (chemical) "complex" comes from a conjugated form of the latin verb "complecere", wich means something like "to hug", "to embrace" or "to encircle".
Tobacco smoke has Radium in it from the phosphate fertilizer so I guess Americium vape guy basically just made up for lost time compared to cigarettes.
@@That_Chemist Upon further research, it turns out I was thinking of Polonium. CDC website says it’s Lead and Polonium 210 that are the main radioactive constituents. Polonium is really not any better than Radium though!
When I was in weld school, we where learning TIG welding. Part of that is to ball the tungsten before welding aluminum because we were using the old transformer based machines. Anyway, we had weld booths that we used as our work area, and the instructors said that pennies worked great for balling up our tungsten. Needless to say a student in front of me was getting carried away, as he was using newer pennies that are mostly ZINC. Now to ball the tungsten, you simply start the arc and pump the pedal to dump a large surge of current into the tungsten to ball the end. That is not what the guy I am mentioning did, HE VAPORIZED THE WHOLE PENNY and inhaled it because he had moved his vent away from where he was welding because it was pulling away his shielding gas. Needless to say he started throwing up and missed two weeks of class because of it. Also burning Zinc coats everything with white Zinc Oxide, the tell tale sign that what you are welding has a galv coating, also the zinc burned with an epic blue green flame because of the copper coating and zincs emissions.
For the stench measurement: the air handlers for the mines will be moving air at a certain mass flow rate, measurable by the electrical demand on the motor. From there it's a concentration problem. Alternatively, the idea of "toxic stinky gas is better than getting caught in a mine fire" might make them skip that step. I had a teacher who previously worked in lead mines in Idaho. The way he described it, they would "crack" open a container and dump it down the vents.
It helps that you've got a factor of 10,000 between "you can smell the methyl mercaptan" (1 part per billion) and even the OSHA ceiling limit of 10 ppm, let alone the level where you're going to expect acute toxicity.
I remember in a college physics class we also used radioactive sources sealed in little plastic disks. We were told very clearly that if we were irresponsible and took them out of the lab we would be in huge trouble, including potentially being kicked out of college. Fortunately nobody in my class did that, but it made me wonder if there was some incident in years prior.
The only time I taught practicals for biology freshmen, one pair of students was... special. When it was time to do a simple acid-base titration, the students were supposed to use 50 mL burettes. The lab had tiny light chairs with a diameter of maybe 25 cm. From the other side of the lab, I saw the taller of the pair climbing on top of one of these chairs. Not good! Coming closer, I saw that he was holding the biggest pipette in the student set, and was proceeding to stick it into the burette. As tall as he was and standing on that puny chair, he was still pushing the burette, and was about to topple it over even if he managed to not fall over with his chair. I grabbed the burette before it got knocked over, told him to remove the huge pipette from the burette and get off the chair, and then asked for an explanation. "Well, you know how this is a quantitative experiment, and you explained how carefully we must read the initial and final positions on the burette?", why yes, I replied, "Well we were going to use the 25.00 mL burette twice to place exactly 50.00 mL into the burette". Obviously, detailed explanations had been provided about the initial level in the burette only having to be below the first gradation, not necessarily zero (that corresponded, of course, to 50 mL plus lord knows how much volume was below the last gradation). And obviously, long-winded explanations were promptly given again. BUT!!!!!! That same thing (well, almost the same) happened a second time!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not ten minutes had passed, and Mr. Tall Guy was on the tiny chair, with the biggest pipette in his hand, again! So I rushed over, asked him to step off, and asked for another explanation. The pair nonchalantly pointed to the burette, which they had topped up, as instructed, from a beaker with the help of a funnel, and said "You see, we've gone over the first gradation, so we must remove some solution".... O. M. G. The experience, for me, had transcended the realm of comedy and is just etched in my mind as one big WTF moment.
Dad tried blacksmithing for a while, had a forge and everything. He had to stop making things because as it turns out, when you live in a rural suburbia, your neighbors tend to not like the sound of you hitting metal, repeatedly, for hours on end. His quenching barrel was an old 5-gallon bucket filled with transmission fluid, which also stunk to high hell every time he used it.
over here in Bongland, methyl mercaptan and similar compounds are added to domestic gas supplies because their odours can be detected by the human nose at extremely low levels (as in, parts per billion), and if you can smell mercaptan-infused gas, that would otherwise be odourless, you can detect a gas leak long before it becomes dangerous with that in mind, your man's story about the mine at 2:19 makes perfect sense - a little stench gas goes a very long way funnily enough, the same is true of the mercaptan that acts as the principal flavouring/aroma agent in grapefruit; for some reason, the human nose is extraordinarily sensitive to it
Dad's chemistry lab (small highschool, student body of ~70) had a bunch of nasty chemicals left over from previous teachers. When the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) did a sweep, they discovered a rusty gallon can of carbon tetrachloride likely over 50 years old. It was only being held shut via a rusty bottle cap; stored in a cabinet at the back of the room. Coincidentally, it was where we also had all of our math and chemistry lectures; I'm not sure what we would have done if it happened to blow on a hot summer day.
Also, I'm fairly sure the main risk of Americium from a smoke detector if ingested/inhaled would be the radioactivity. This is because the amount of Am-241 is extremely tiny (290 nanograms) - not enough for chemical heavy-metal poisoning, but it's also extremely radioactive - a strong alpha particle emitter - 5 times more than Radium.
And it's gonna hang around once inhaled, too. If this is a true story, I'd be surprised if they make it a decade without lung cancer. As a former stoner, I can also totally see a stoner doing something like this. I never did anything nearly that unwise, but the whole, "taking stuff apart for no reason" I get. I just can't fathom why they thought it was a good idea to try to pry the disc out of its little holder. Had they not done that, no dust would've been generated and it would have been a _relatively_ safe activity. But creating dust? *-_-*
Blacksmithing story: I was in the 6th grade, and had taken up and interest in blacksmithing. I went to a local hardware store to pick up a bucket, a pipe for an air duct, and plaster of paris. I successfully built a small forge, and within two weeks, this happened. I had finished hammering down on a piece of round stock, and reached for my pliers to put it back in the forge, when, instead, my left hand landed on the (still piping hot) piece of round stock. The burn wasn't that big, but it hurt like nothing I'd ever experienced before. At least I had a good story for my classmates the following day. I also have a cannon/black powder story if you want to hear that.
Antimony metal gets way too much flack for being toxic. Elemental antimony and antimony oxide are fairly nontoxic and are not well absorbed into the body. It’s used in food safe (lead free) pewter. In high school, I blowtorched a bunch of antimony and cast into a nugget. I carried it around a lot with me in my pocket for years and frequently take it out and play with it.
Apparently in the 19th century, people used metallic antimony pills for constipation, Which you could fish out of your leavings and reuse. Supposedly they would last practically forever, and were sometimes handed down through generations
I think a lot of people confuse the biological effects of arsenic and antimony which might be the cause of this. Always confused me why people are so freaked out about antimony when, as the metal, it is much safer than lead.
One I like is people finding out Tiger's Eye, Nephrite Jade and Serpentinite are asbestos and getting freaked out because they don't understand what it is that makes asbestos dangerous or why having it in the form of a cut and polished stone presents no danger whatsoever (unless you deliberately crush and grind it up, which is incidentally almost impossible without special equipment in the case of nephrite, which can be carved very gradually by abrasion but is one of the most difficult naturally-occurring minerals to crush).
Work as a Sanitation worker at my college. We are currently cleaning dorm room bathrooms in prep for the students, and go through a lot of industrial cleaner while cleaning since a lot of students don't clean their bathrooms throughout the year. I wear my usual ppe (splash goggles, and gloves) while cleaning. After a month, my throat became really sore and I was coughing a lot. I thought I caught covid, so I took some time off until it went away, and when I came back, I was taken off of bathrooms and put on a painting crew. I was recently using the cleaner again to clean bathrooms and my cough just came back up, so I checked the bottle and whaddya know, its HCL. Needless to say, ill have to add a mask to my list of ppe to wear while cleaning, and recheck the MSDS to see if it says anything about breathing in fumes.
Yeah, HCL is used in a number of limescale removers, since you need acids to dissolve them. Also, #lfmf : don’t wipe metal surfaces down with dilute limescale remover solutions. The water in the thin film of solution will evaporate quickly, becoming more and more concentrated to the point it can damage the metal…
You just gave me a funny idea. A vape that "functions" as a smoke detector and for 5 seconds after a drag on a vape, it will start beeping like a smoke detector.
The Am241 in ion sources is apparently sputtered or smashed onto a metal substrate and then laminated over with something inert like gold, so as long as you're not scratching at it or heating it up substantially it's supposedly pretty stable. The source material doesn't look very disturbed, if he's lucky all that happened is it got hot enough to oxidize the surface of whatever the outer cladding layer is (or toast it if there's some lacquer coating on top) and all the Am stayed embedded. Would be interesting to have a before and after of the activity of the button.
yeah , I don't think he messes with the actual foil of gold mixed with Am241 dioxide. the 2 are pressed and heated together so unless you dissolve the gold you're not likely to get any Am241 out of it. also it has a top layer of foil ( on top of the other foil disk with Am241) which usually is palladium.
Agreed, the heat in burning chamber not enough to release Am241 from encapsulated state. Still, an eBay detector could pick up the small gamma component if source was deposited in lungs. A small price to pay for peace of mind. If present, the alpha decay would be deadly over time but could be located (by gamma signature) in a major hospital with Medical Physics Dept. and followed by lung surgery to remove. The Russians used alpha from Po210 to assainate a guy by injecting a pellet from the end of an umbrella. Bad way to go.
I think for the gas used in the mine, they have an incredibly low odour threshold, much lower than the exposure limits. And once you smell it, you should be leaving the mine, so the time of exposure is much less. That should overall make it much safer than a toxic gas, potentially at high concentrations, which you can't smell and therefore remain exposed to, or potentially explode.
I was in High School chemistry class and we had a lab about burning magnesium. this involved burning a few small pieces of magnesium, lithium and zinc ribbon/foil (~2-4mm) in a Bunsen burner flame to view atomic emission. We were all given glasses so we wouldnt go blind and told to keep them on the whole time. One girl decided to set a huge piece (like 4 inches folded on itself) on fire without her glasses on... She now has a permanent spot in her vision, and went blind temporarily.
@@janmelantu7490hat is the chemical equivalent of the popular safety phrase when working with high powered lasers: Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye...
Okay, so when I was in inorganic chem, one of my assignments was to make a green light-sensitive iron complex. It's used to... I guess measure how much light hits a surface? I don't really remember. It was pretty standard fare for a while, I precipitated the complex out of solution and poured the suspension through the filter paper to do a vacuum filtration. There was a nice, relatively dry green powder sitting at the bottom of the funnel, ready and raring to degrade under harsh light. Now, I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea, but instead of just pouring out the green powder like a sane person, i tried to... reach in with my finger and scoop the filter paper out of the funnel. With bare hands. I ended up spilling the complex all over the table and killing my yield, which had been pretty good up to that point. I'm a competent human person I promise.
"Not that radioactive" Americium IS THAT RADIOACTIVE! It isn't like Uranium with a half-life of millions or billions of years. It has a half-life of about 420 years IIRC. Which may SOUND like it should go in your vape but it is circa a 10 million times worse radioactivity than vaping DU.
😳 Americium vape juice?! I would run far away from the vape in question. Alpha particles will do the numbers on the inside (it's the soft innards that's much more vulnerable than the skins on your body).
In my first year of undergrad research, I had my own Schlenk Line so I could perform my air-sensitive polymerizations outside of the glovebox. It was really late one day, and being new and inexperienced I turned off the vacuum pump without lowering the liquid nitrogen dewar cooling the trap. The next morning I arrive in lab and figure out that I condensed about 500mL of liquid oxygen in the cold trap (I guess I had a leaky line), which essentially means that I made a bomb that could’ve blown up the whole lab and maybe even more. Thankfully my mentor was able to take care of the liquid oxygen, but only after he took a picture of it in the trap lol.
I work at a natural products lab. We run column chromatography every day and use a lot of solvents, including chloroform. So, I was distilling some impure chloroform and added 1 L of old chloroform (maybe over 10 years old) to the distillation flask. The fume hood was on, so I didn’t notice anything strange. After the distillation, I stored the chloroform on a 5 L gallon. The next day, I was alone in the lab and opened the gallon outside the fume hood, since my chromatographic column was too big for it. I was hit by a strong sweet and acidic smell; it was like a punch to the face. I started coughing immediately and felt like my throat was on fire. I run out of the lab to breathe some fresh air (in the emergency exit) still coughing and unable to breathe. When I recovered, I turned on a fan in the lab to get rid of the smell and sealed the gallon. On that day I learned that chloroform can turn to phosgene, a WWI chemical weapon and that I probably breathed some of it. It didn’t cause further consequences and I learned to never use old chloroform again.
Art isn’t typically seen as a high risk profession but I regularly work with cadmium and cobalt pigments and one of my professors is a sleep deprived state (not for teaching thankfully) decided to put some soft body (refers to the thickness of medium) cadmium into his airbrush. Cadmium pigments in a medium are pretty safe but in power form such as the actual pigment dust and soft pastels or if you aerosolize the pigment ups your likely of exposure a lot. So basically he probably is getting cancer just a bit quicker. Also basically every oil painter has almost passed out from solvent fumes once in their career.
The "stench gas" thing, it can basically be smelled at PPB but is only toxic at PPM. Compounds like that are usually common byproducts of putrefaction, and not necessarily abundant ones, just very specific. Thus our noses have evolved to detect the faintest whiff to prevent us from inadvertently poisoning ourselves by eating spoiled foods.
Thorium-232 is an alpha emitter and not that dangerous which is why I always make sure to work with it without a respirator. My skin will block the alpha particles anyways!
Yeah, I don't know why one would use methyl mercaptan in an alert system, sounds like a nice way to accidentally overshoot and cause CNS toxicity or death. Ethyl mercaptan seems to be way less toxic (NFPA 704), and in underground mining, they actually use it as a "stench gas" as an alert system in case of emergency. In fact, it is law in Ontario they use either ethyl mercaptan or an equivalent in an alert system.
Typical Am241 in a smoke detector (a modern one) is about one microCurie. If vaporized and inhaled, it would cause 166 times the maximum annual dose to bone surfaces, or if in a chemical form that didn’t absorb into bone surfaces, only 100 times the annual limit. Fortunately for the vaper, the boiling point for americium is over 2000 C.
At 1 microcurie, your body will become 123% more radioactive (the human body is about 0.8 microcuries, mainly from K-40 and C-14). If all of it is absorbed, this will lead to a slightly higher incidence of cancer, but nothing immediate or dramatic will happen. There is still absolutely no reason whatsoever to vape americium though.
His lifetime dose would be 4.4Sv if he somehow managed to vape the whole Am241 source... that's not very pleasant 🤣 his chances of cancer probably would go up 10 fold maybe 100 fold. That lifetime dose is equivalent to 44,000 chest x-rays for a lifetime or 367 full body CT scans for a lifetime.
in my last year of school (13th grade whatever that might be where you live), we had to do some sort of project, since our teacher was ill and/or absent for most of the schoolyear (we had about 4 lessons in a year total) my group decided to make a firecracker, so we made our own blackpowder and to test if we had something that works we got a little porcelain bowl (forgive my lack of vocabulary, english is not my first language and i only had chemestry in school), got under the fume hood, stuck a match into our powder blend and kaboom the result: 1 hole and 3 dents in the plexi glass and a porcelain shard that almost embedded itself in my hip, luckily i got away with a grazing wound moral: if you light something potentially explosive put at least 1 mm of steel, or simmilar, between you, destructible stuff and it edit: we also left a big spot on the school grounds (asphalt) from where we demonstrated our product, since one of the crackers burned down insted of exploding
Not blacksmithing but silverwork if i remember correctly. Some of my most unsafe moments not gonna lie I had a piece of metal i had been rolling out and after a heat treatment it wasn't glowing so i reflexively went to grab it with my bare hand. I actually left my fingerprint burnt onto the metal not just a smudge from where my skin touched it. And then a few years later i did something similar but instead the notable part about it was that instead of the smell of burning skin it smelled like eggs. Not rotten eggs like what I've been asked about whenever i told the story, just like eggs cooking normally which was interesting to say the least Another time i was refilling my butane torch which unknown to me had spilled a LOT of liquid butane onto the surface i was working on. When i went for the test light of the torch i got a fireball to the face and the front part of my hair was slightly on fire, and my nose hairs and eyebrows were a bit singed too but nothing serious Other than that there's not much else besides a few liquid metal spills where i got to see an interesting version of the leidenfrost effect where instead of a cool liquid on something hot it was a hot liquid metal on a wet surface. It acted very similar but it reminded me more of how sand falls on a smooth surface except it was a larger bead splitting into smaller ones on impact
for how they control the amount of "Scent alarm" in mines, I'd assume they meter out the release into the air getting pumped down into the mine that it's not going to cause issues. Most mine airflow goes from the entrance to the working face in terms of airflow, that way any airborne hazards (like hitting a gas pocket) don't go the same way as the people trying to escape the hazard. Either that or they have wire triggered stink bombs around the mines, but i'd bet they just meter it into the air intake as the vents handle the distribution (have to have full air circulation in a mine so you don't wind up with a pocket of bad air) and it'll do it pretty damn quick too as most mines use diesel equipment and thus have to have at least 0.6 m3/s of air for ever kilowat of diesel power they have underground. That isn't taking into account breathing air and other things like air powered tools which are used in some places to avoid needing to burn as much diesel. Edit: Storytime! Ok so in college i took forging as part of a required metallurgy course and during this we each got to sand cast, forge, and machine a chisel, wrench, and machinist's square. pretty basic stuff, make a ceramic mold to make the stock, fire it in the kiln, pour molten steel into the mold, let it cool, and then forge and grind to shape. Well, thanks to another classmate's forgetfulness, things got a bit... jumpy on me. We'll call him Dan. He did step 1 fine, but improperly fired his mold. Now, firing here does 2 things. It burns out the wax used to make the mold's internal shape, and most importantly it removes the water from the ceramic paste/slurry we used to make the mold. He only stuck his mold in the kiln when it was cooling off to melt out the wax. Those who have cast metal in the past can already see where this shitshow is going. Well, time comes to pour and we head out into the hot work area of the campus. Teacher is already out there and has us set our molds up in metal buckets of sand so they're nice and stable, and things cool at a good rate. I notice as I'm pouring sand around my mold that his looks a touch cracked, and is... crumbly? odd but i don't think much more of it because at this point everyone's molds were fired... right? My pour goes off without a hitch. If you ever get the chance to cast metal, do it. It's hard work but very fun, and if you're lucky you get a tool or something that'll last. everyone else's has been fine as well. Then it's Dan's turn. The instructor has to take a call, so he gets me and another student to supervise as we're the ones he didn't need to help with the pours. the other guy had experience casting before, and I'd seen enough videos to know how not to kill anyone. We'd also been helping the other students by that point. Well, we get set up and force Dan to put on his PPE (he was a massive vegan and hated wearing anything made of leather). Dan pulls out the crucible almost dropping it 3 times he was so nervous, so i take over as he's way too antsy to be handling molten metal. I line up the pour, and i watch through my face shield as the glowing yellow stream of liquid steel falls down towards the mold. Now, we're going to pause the story a moment so i can explain something. For those of you that don't know, molten steel is at a minimum of 2500°F or 1371°C. If there is any water left in the mold you're pouring it into, this water will flash boil at those temperatures and explode. With lead, as was the case in the story in the video, this will cause the lead to splatter around the room and that's only at around 320 - 600 celsius. In Dan's case, there was a LOT of water left trapped in the thick layer of unfired ceramic. The outer layer was dry, which probably saved my ass, but once the heat reached the damp layer that started turning to steam, creating pressure and a hissing noise. As soon as i heard this i stopped pouring and stepped back. Damn glad i did too because not a second later the contents of the bucket (including the molten steel) erupted loudly into the air sending everyone running. my PPE took the worst of it, but i still have a shiny spot on my arm where a bit of the steel made it through and burned me. I'm glad i was using one of the metal face shields, as the first plastic layer and the glass in the lens had been destroyed by something hitting them. Rung my bell pretty good too. 'course the instructor comes running out asking what happened and all i could reply was "I have no fucking idea. Also, some steel made it through the arm of the coat, where's the burn cream?" we figured it out after the ceramics instructor came in asking who left the wax in the bottom of the kiln as that should have burned off. Dan later profusely apologized, he had missed the class where we went over the procedure and thought that everyone was just putting their molds in the kiln to melt out the wax. He got one chance to redo it (under close supervision) and nailed it that time.
One of the first times I melted zinc was in a big spoon in a wood burning stove, it boiled, and I saw it making strings of oxides on contact with the air sucked in and thought "YIKES I don't want that in my lungs"
The mention of the inorganic lab reminded me of one of one of my inorganic labs. I had been sick with a viral infection the week before, and my hands were shaky. We were making a co[salen] complex. Just before collecting my sample after reflux (to activate the salen), my hands started shaking hard while moving it, and the salcomine splashed on me, the fume cupboard and some of the floor. After changing, I spent the rest of the lab cleaning up. As far as I know, it's still there.
Back in the 1940s there was a product supplied in gallon tins called Renewzit (spelling may not be correct) which was readily available It was carbon tetrachloride. This product was often used to remove stains.
Not exactly a blacksmith, but I do have a hobby of melting, cleaning and then pouring metals... And their story reminded me of my own. Often times I melt and pour metals into moulds to make cool shapes, artwork, or something I 3d printed... Anyways! Time for the part where I messed up... My dad works on cars a lot... So he often has a lot of scrap and material that I can melt for my art projects. So, I fell into a pretty comfortable flow of generally being able to assume that if the metal wasn't steel or copper, it was probably nickel or aluminum. Either way... Safe to melt. Usually there wasn't lead or anything else, and if there was we'd recognize it. Except for the time when we didn't... the water pump incident... So, you might not know but sometimes, a cars water pump will often times be a steel or aluminum case, which can have magnesium inside. I don't know it's purpose, but it's there. But neither me nor my dad knew this at the time. Anyways, with this being a place with many chemists, I'm sure you know what happens when you combine... Red hot or molten aluminum... With magnesium. Basically inside of my... furnace, in a white hot crucible... Full of molten metal, I accidentally made thermite! And then ignited it immediately. (I know... Uh oh, and uh oh indeed.) So, then there was molten aluminum sputtering upwards as high as 4-5 feet... I basically made an actual volcano in the garage, some of the metal cooled in air, and stuck itself to my ceiling. Other bits landed around the furnace... And I didn't know what to do for a split second. The surprise caught me bad. But then immediately I shut of the fuel lines so that if they were damaged, no molten aluminum could ignite the propane gas to that heat, and follow it back to the tank. For a few seconds it was terrifying, and I had to check myself for burns and to make sure no molten metal had gotten in my ppe. But after that, it was a relief, and there have been no more incidents like it. I've since been much more careful about the metals I get from cars, and realized that I can't assume the part is a cohesive unit. Surface tests don't tell me what it has inside. Now with car parts, I always look up the part number to check for magnesium or anything unexpected before it gets anywhere near my furnace
We had the CCl4 funsies, how about some phenol now? One funny observation with phenol can be made in molecular bio lab. We use a mixture of Chloroform, Phenol and Isoamyl Alcohol in DNA / RNA extraction protocol, it forms an OBVIOUS two phase system with phenol layer being the lower one, which is the part you're supposed to use in the protocol. Over the years we are yet to see a student who would not instinctively shake it to mix without even asking, which is exactly what they are not supposed to do :D We have to keep a hidden 2nd bottle of it in the fridge just to have a well separated one in case someone does it again. (It's not like the protocol won't work when using a shaken mixture but it's suboptimal yield / purity, and we keep the phenol under chloroform layer after mixing and saturation cause it preserves much better). Another semi-yikes story I can share is with preparing the phenol solution for this protocol. Pretty casual stuff, you just melt some phenol, wash it with EDTA buffer a few times, and right into the freezer it goes to prepare the chloroform mixture later. We usually do a bunch at once cause it's a pain, and small batches take just as long as large ones (still not a lot, in the order of 500-1000 mL at most which lasts for a few years). Anyway, for the separatory funnel mixing the PI told me to make sure the stopper fits the funnel, cause there are some bad ones, and to stop and wash my hands and get a better stopper if i feel it's getting wet. But thinking naah i have gloves, ain't nobody got time for that i just used a towel to hold the stopper end in case it'd get wet - of course i picked a crappy one and it had a tiny leak so it did get wet but i couldn't feel it in the gloves. What i didn't realize is that the nitrile gloves will get absolutely destroyed by the still warm phenol, and when i finally got to cleanup i had to wash off the disintegrated pieces of gloves off of my hands. ALWAYS ALWAYS check the glove compatibility if you're not sure :D if I did it bare handed i would at least know it's wet and stopped immediately, instead i had to deal with my hands reeking of phenol and skin being super dry cause of the ethanol i used to wash the phenol and glove pieces off. Also a fun idea if you have no clue what could be a wedding gift for mol bio researchers, the reason we make our own phenol solutions is my PI got 40 kilos of super high purity phenol as a wedding gift from his former boss in a reagent supply company. FR works much better than the premixes you can buy nowadays, especially for our own optimized protocols.
Obligatory not a chemist. I was in a microbiology lab during my undergrad and it was my first time working on tissue culture. They started me out with culturing rabbit kidney cells since they were easy to maintain and hard to screw up. Later on I was supposed to treat glioblastoma cells with temozolomide to generate a chemo-resistant cell line for a study. I was aspirating out some old media from the flask of cells and accidentally stabbed my arm with the aspirating needle, enough to puncture the skin. The professor was watching me do it and we just looked at each other and had an “oh shit” moment. We washed it off for several minutes, but luckily there weren’t any dangerous chemicals since it was basic DMEM. It only occurred to me later that day that if I were working on those glioblastoma cells, I might have exposed myself to chemo and more scarily inoculated myself with an aggressive form of brain cancer.
Probably way too late, but will try to contribute my part. So, obligatory, not a chemist, but a former electronics repair tech in a third world country, and had a fair share of accidents. 1) In one of the places i worked, a colleague tried to recover data from a damaged laptop, the battery has been holding it's structure just good enough to combust right after removal and smoke up the place in an unventilated room with no sand bucket, we both had to leave it burning there on the metal table and run out. All my cloth items stunk of burning lithium for the next month, luckily nobody was injured; 2) Had a fairly big blob of molten solder shoot out right into my eye, somehow reacted in time. Now i have a scar on my eyelid and a story to tell; 3) This is commonly overlooked, but this is why you don't wear flip-flops in commercial environments: a capacitor i was trying to remove from a board, exploded in a violent fashion, showering everything under it in boiling electrolyte, thankfully i had socks on; 4) Occasionally we had to melt plastic to make a patch or reinforce structure on some plastic parts, didn't really have any good methods of doing so, so a fair bit of it burned and the room had to be vented out; 5) Me, being stupid back then, tried to stop superglue from bonding by pouring acetone onto it. I think this is where i've got my persistent cough from, because i had a violent reaction for half an hour after smelling that; 6) Had a 10L canister of isopropyl alcohol knocked over in the shop right when the whole deal with the facemasks started, so basically had the floor accidentally perfectly disinfected; 7) Had several accidental acetone spills on the desk, that i've noticed only after an hour or so, when my arm was basically soaked in it; 8) Had several electrecution attempts from computer power supplies, still have small marks of electrical burns from some; Left the field last year because of professional growth aspirations, with some permanent damage and a lot of experience. Moral: try to think what you're doing, and have safety practices and equipment in place, because any of the incidents i've had could've been a lot worse if i was less lucky and/or careful. Considering the power supply experiences, it's a miracle i'm even alive. Gladly, moved to an industry where the worst i can do is accidentally bring down a website for about an hour.
Aluminum bronze is a fun metal to practice sand casting it melts at a rather low temp and it has a beautiful gold color to it when it's cleaned up. Ware the proper PPE. Casting metals you rarely get a second chance
I rusted a shelf with nitric acid once 😂. Also found a leak one time when I realized none of my battery devices stored in the immediate vicinity we're working. The batteries had some white dry marshmallow looking stuff leaking out of every single battery. The lid on my nitric acid was cracked.
Might share two short stories from my middle school - nothing major, but still, perhaps some folk can have a giggle at them In one of the classes, we were learning about sodium, and how it reacted with water. So, since I was one of the best students at chemistry at the time, I would often go to the teacher's desk to make small experiment. I simply cut a tiny chunk of sodium with a kitchen knife, and put it into a large glass bowl of water, to see its start reacting, nothing special. But the thing is, I didn't really know what a "tiny" chunk of sodium should be, so I made it bigger than I should've, and it ended up exploding after a while. The teacher then told us not to move and to carefully look for the chunk of sodium to take care of it. We couldn't find it on any desk or anywhere on the floor - and after I looked up, I found where it went. It launched vertically up, and ended up making a small crater in the ceiling. Nobody was hurt, but it's one of my most memorable moments of middle school chemistry classes. In fact, it's half of the reason why my username is what it is, I still have a thing for this metal. And - allegedly - the crater was never taken care of, since it wasn't *that* big, so it's in the ceiling to this day, a decade or so later. (In case you're curious, the other half is a short sci-fi story by Stanisław Lem that included sodium, but, I digress.) The other story is from my chemistry teacher herself. It happened back in the late 80s or early 90s, when some student told her that they have a bit of mercury in their house that was not in use by anyone, and they could bring it to the class, perhaps it could be used in some experiment. The teacher said, sure, she assumed it would be a tiny vial of mercury from a broken thermometer or something like that, nothing major, just a tiny amount that she could take, so it would at least not hang around in a random house. The next chemistry class, the student brings the mercury to her. And it was not a vial, they brought a bloody mason jar full of mercury, and a large one at that. She asked them where the heck did they get this stuff from - they didn't know, it was just, there, in their house, and they asked their parents, who said they could have it and bring it to chemistry classes. My teacher was still shocked a couple decades later, and when this happened, she was especially terrified that the jar's bottom might break off at any moment, since, y'know, mercury's pretty heavy. She handled it carefully, and handed it away to some laboratory her friends worked at to take care of it, since she was NOT keeping all that garbage around. Middle school chemistry classes are some of my fondest memories I've had from all my years of education, and these two stories are part of it.
The mine I worked at back in the 90's had pressurized bottles of ethyl mercaptan (remote electrical release/local manual release as a backup) on both the intake fan for the fresh air raise as well as on the header that ran from the compressor house to the underground workings. It was explained to me that they were sized such that they would fill the entire mine with a very easily detectable amount of gas, while still being below the danger threshold. Considering the alternatives (collapse, fire, explosion, SO2 & NOx, flooding), and the fact that the volume of the mine naturally increased over time, I'm sure they pushed up against the upper limit as much as could be considered practicable when they installed the system. Previous to it, there were glass bottles of mercaptan that the surface crew would throw into the intake fan, and those continued to be stored in both the shift bosses office in the headframe as well as in the security gatehouse, just in case.
I know this is quite boring but this sparked a hatred for acids that still remains years later. Once in year 7 chemistry, we were making copper sulfate. There were 3 groups at my table and I was by myself, the group next to me didn't add enough copper oxide to the sulfuric acid. Our teacher made it extremely clear to add enough so that there was extra copper oxide. After about 1 minute of their evaporating dish being on the Bunsen burner (that they left and I was tending to), I started getting a sore throat. After this, I had quite a bad cough for about 2 months and even had to go to the doctor (I hated the doctors office).
In my freshman year of high school, I had a physical science teacher who was, shall we say, a little crazy. There were no less than three unintended fires over the course of that school year. For one of those, he was showing off the reactivity of the alkali metals. Starting off with lithium, which just did what lithium does. He wanted to go on to sodium, but, as he said, "The chemistry teacher has all of my sodium, so we'll just move on to potassium." He meant to get just a tiny bit of it, but ended up tossing in what amounted to a tablespoon of it into the sink, which produced a pillar of flame instantly. We were all amazed at it, and near the end of the period, he happened to look up to see the ceiling above the sink was charred. He simply said, "Uh... If anyone asks, that was already there." On another occasion, he had decided to perform an experiment just for our class. According to him, he had done it before in college and it produced a boom so loud that it shook all the windows in the science wing and security thought that a bomb had gone off. It was electrolysis of water to collect the hydrogen into a bottle and set it on fire. When he had done it in college, it was a one liter bottle. For us, it was a three liter bottle and he had had it running overnight with zero supervision, just sitting there on his desk. After he finished explaining it to us, he pulled out what I can only assume was the longest spark igniter in the world and attempted to light it. After four or five sparks, it just gave off a gentle "whoom" sound. No boom, so he tried again. And again. And again, each time producing nothing more than that gentle "whoom." He stands there, thinking for a moment, before stopping mid-thought and saying, "Oh. Nobody light a match, and someone open the windows. See, uh... Plastic, while we might see it as rather solid, can be quite porous and is definitely not completely airtight. On top of that, hydrogen atoms are very small, so there's possibly a bunch of hydrogen in the room." Our first interaction with him was just him playing "Guess the Gas," where he was running some sort of gas through a bubble solution, scooping up a handful of it, and then lighting it on fire... Directly in front of students' faces, going up and down the aisle, asking, "What gas is this?" I certainly didn't want a fireball in my face, and I could feel the heat of it from across the room, so, just before he got to my seat, I raised my hand and said, "It's methane?" Giving the correct answer, thankfully, got him to stop. If anyone is a mad scientist in today's day and age, it's him, hands down.
As for stories about myself... Well, I am not a clever man. I have been known to just taste unknown items, as, to me, it's rather effective at identifying them. As a curious child with access to even basic tools, that resulted in me finding out what dry cell battery acid tastes like. If you want to know for yourself, lick a Switch cartridge. Just recently, I found a mystery liquid on the floor of the back room at work. I was training someone that night, so she was right behind me as I was trying to figure out what it was. On one of the shelves nearby, we stored motor oil, but it was a translucent, yellowish liquid, so I assume it might've been synthetic oil. I dipped two of my fingers in it and rubbed it a bit with my thumb, and it felt oily, so my assumption felt on track. I proudly announced to my trainee that I was going to taste it, to which she said, "You're going to taste the mystery floor liquid?" "Yes." "Wouldn't it be smarter to trace it back to its source in case it's something dangerous?" "... Probably." Well, I did that, instead. Sure enough, it was not synthetic oil. It was sodium hydroxide drain cleaner, which would've ravaged my mouth and throat, because, mm mm lye. I was 30. While pet sitting for a friend, she had a package arrive that was food for her snake and one of her lizards. Just some frozen mice. I took them out of the package and saw a white brick inside the package, so I grabbed it with my bare hands and held it up, looking it over. "Why does it feel like my hands are burning?" I continued to hold the suspicious brick. "Why does it have some sort of cloud falling off of it?" I continued to hold the brick for a minute or two before it clicked: "Oh. It's dry ice." I was 26. While washing my clothes, specifically my whites, I accidentally splashed a bit of bleach onto my hand. Doing as any person does, I just wiped it onto the tank top I was wearing and went about my business until I noticed the pattern it bleached into it. I thought it looked neat, so, instead of taking it off and applying it to that, I continued to splash bleach onto my hand and smearing it onto my shirt. After a while, I wondered, "Why does my chest feel like it's burning? Oh, well," and continued to do what I was doing. For 15-20 minutes. Then it finally sunk in: "It's bleach, which is a base. My chest is burning because it's a chemical burn." I took off the tank top, thoroughly rinsed my hands and chest in the sink, and then "safely" splashed bleach onto the shirt using the cap. Okay, maybe not the safest thing, but safer than applying it directly to my skin. I was 20 at the time.
I have a boneheaded story. Last video, I shared a story involving chlorine. The theme hasn't changed... I was in middle school (7th grade I believe) and I read about mixing acid and bleach. Of course, with me being the dumb teen I was, I decided to mix them together. I got a hundred mLs each of vinegar and bleach (damn that rhymed) and mixed them together. A few seconds afterward, it gave off a small amount of green gas, then it picked up steadily. Soon it looked like I had an XXXL size smoke bomb burning. My dad came home, and he saw the cloud of chlorine. He flipped his lid, and I still hear about it to this day.
2:52 To answer you question about how much methyl mercaptan - The human nose can detect such compounds at extremely low concentrations. And the gap between stinking everyone out of the mines and actual harm to humans in parts per billion/million is Huge. Plus, Organosulfide compounds are used, _not_ H2S. Organosulfides = All the Stench of H2S without the toxicity at low concentrations. MeSH Odor Threshold: 0.002 ppm: IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health): 150 ppm - 75,000x concentration difference.
I'd say they could just approximate amount of the methyl mercaptan in the mine. That stuff is VERY stinky at low concentrations and the difference between stinky and toxic levels are huge
One of the Chem videos I was watching mentioned Diethyl Ether, and now I can't get the "die potato" asdf animation out of my head with the "die thyl ether" in the potatoes' place. I blame you for making me think of chemistry on a daily basis.
@@tolyan9756 Personally, I like uranium. Different radioactive elements give different buzzes, but uranium’s is simply [chef’s kiss] delectable. Francium’s the worst though, weak compared to it’s volume.
I also hav egot quite some stories: - One time in the building next to us (which was a different school) They did something involving bromine where the teacher thought it would be a good idea to let a student hold a Beaker with Bromine and do the reaction... the slipped and dropped the beaker which resulted in the school being shut down for 2 weeks. - another time i was helping our chem teacher sorting the chem cabinet and we found some very interesting chemicals there like half a fucking Kilogramm of Potassium permanganate and like a completely oxidized block of sodium and some carbon tet - Once there was an "explosion" in the acid cabin because someone didnt ventilate the pure nitric acid and the No2 blew the cap off and blew the bottle into smithereens
when you mentioned the correct dose of memethyl mercap, wasnt there a story in a previous episode that a mine just poured a 10lb bottle into the ventilation to raise the alarm
I have a story from when I was a dumb young student who didn’t take lab seriously. Allergies were getting to my eyes, and I had been lifting my goggles all day to rub them. We were working with concentrated H2SO4 (16m I think) and I didn’t think much of it. I was about to rub my eyes again after I tested pH. With one hand I grabbed litmus paper and the other I lifted my goggles. At the last second I noticed the paper was bright red from the insane amount of acid my gloves. I think I should be blind, thank god I randomly looked before doing something that stupid
Amateur blacksmith and metallurgist here. Years ago I was melting brass bullet casings with an electric foundry and forgot to properly preheat my little cast iron ingot mold. I poured the molten brass in and immediately there was a steam explosion, which resulted in it flinging a gobbet of molten brass into my mouth. Thankfully the Leidenfrost effect is a thing, so it ended up vaporizing all the saliva in my mouth first which gave me time to spit it back out before it actually seriously burned me. All that ended up happening was that I needed some water, and my tongue felt like I burned it on a hot drink. You'd better believe I'm a heck of a lot more careful these days.
Professional Stank Juice is detectable at such low levels that by the time it caused a risk of asphyxiation/toxicity, you'd already be functionally disabled by the extreme nausea of such high concentrations.
I read up on the methyl mercaptan thing and it seems like there is an "anti-stench" that neutralises the stench gas before the wintergreen extract is released as an "all clear" signal, but I wasn't able to find exactly what the "anti-stench" is. The safety side seems a bit insane to me but if the anti-stench is effective at chemically neutralising the methyl mercaptan maybe it isn't so bad, or at least not as bad as hiding the warning smell behind wintergreen.
Equivalent of high school, we had a chemistry club as an extra curricula thing where we would do some of the more fun experiments one could do. One was filling a 2 litre carbonated beverage bottle with hydrogen and oxygen mix and igniting our new rocket :D, now only the staff or the students in the final year of school that were technically adults actually got to handle this contraption, so yeah, I was handling it. So we I the bottle, take it out to the school tennis courts where all but the one igniting is behind a chain link fence. When doing this we used a Bunsen Burner Tripod as a launch stand. I set it up, lit it, and well, I'm pretty sure the mix was perfect 2:1 ratio as there were 3 bits of tripod rocketing horizontally across the tennis courts as it blew out the welds. No-one hurt, one bounced off the fence and due to lighting between the legs none came my way, but from then on new policy was to use the tripods where the top was a single piece of metal rather than formed from 3 pieces or bent metal welded together.
Blacksmith here. One thing a lot of newer blacksmiths do is look for free or cheap steel to forge stuff out of. This is all fine and dandy, recycling and all that, but a lot of people aren't aware of galvanized steel (prevents rust from forming, really useful stuff) and that's where issues can arise. When galvanized steel is heated to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit it'll begin to create zinc fumes, which really aren't the greatest to inhale. Causing what we refer to as "heavy metal fever", flu like symptoms and feeling terrible etc. Welders are typically warned about this stuff too, at least I was when I was taking classes. So for any of you new smiths out there, be aware of galvanized steel.
Can't speak for the world at large, but by my experience with the mining sector in Chile, their standards to not accidentally poison workers are probably along the lines of "it'll be fine".
Not a blacksmith but a former welder. I think most chemists would be shocked at the normalization of toxic fume exposure, especially to things like chromium (from stainless) and aluminum vapors. I was always very careful and wore a respirator, but we basically never used fume extraction. we theoretically had a couple of portable extractors around the shop, but they were huge and always stored in inconvenient locations because the layout of the shop had not been designed with their use in mind, so no one used them. because we were using processes with inert gas shielding, no one liked to keep the bay doors open either except on really hot days because the drafty air would mess up our gas. As a result, the air in that shop would become thick with welding fumes. The aluminum always smelled the worst. Once or twice I remember welding aluminum when I had forgotten my respirator and ending up with blueish-black aluminum oxide in my boogers when I went to blow my nose later. Other guys weren't nearly as careful as me though. There was a saying that they didn't need a respirator because everything was filtered through a cigarette, or that tar built up in the lungs would protect against fumes. Many of my coworkers were old and many had health problems - one guy had COPD, but it didn't stop him from smoking like a fish and wearing no respirator.
when I was doing blacksmithing as a hobby, I had a VERY scuffed forge. made it myself from an old charcoal grill, a hairdryer and a bunch of pipe sections. got steel white-hot so it worked well. one day I was working on something and on my upswing the head of my hammer broke off and time slowed. I had hot metal in my left hand and the handle in my right, so I did the thing any genius would. tried catching the head with my arm. 3lb head proceeded to hit the fuck out of my right forearm and cause a hairline fracture that I didn't go to the doctor for. all in all, made a few fugly-yet-functional knives
Melting point of AM241 is 1100° C. The source is plated in gold foil I think, and so it should be reasonable stable being heated under 220° may not get lung cancer after all....may...
I worked in a place and needed some solvent, I went to the flammables cabinet to get it and noticed there were bottles of acid stored alongside the flammable solvents so I immediately raised it with the manager in charge of the lab and he told me.... "The safety office told me I had to store the acids in there." (I could rant here... but you can draw your own conclusions.)
2:50 I’m too lazy to look up the actual concentrations used, but the reason for using mercaptans is that our noses are _insanely_ sensitive to them. It takes extremely minute concentrations for us to notice them, which is why we add them to fuel gases (propane, natural gas, etc) so we can easily detect leaks before they are explosion hazards. We can detect them at concentrations below 1ppb.
2:54 Methyl mercaptan is insupportable smelly in incredible tiny amounts, it is the gas used to give propane and butane smell so we can detect gas leaks. Once here in São Paulo, Brazil where I live (here in bottled gas we use a mix of butane/propane as the piped gas is natural gas) a tank truck filled with methyl mercaptan overturn in a main highway, the gas company and the firefighter received thousands of calls, some from people 10km away from the accident. At those concentrations is very improbable it will be toxic.
Guys, when I commented "Top 50 vape flavors" under the toxic gas tier list I was trying to make a joke, not a suggestion.
@@Stormstyker damn all 73?
I was discussing the most efficient solvent for ethylene vinyl acetate foam (toluene being the most efficient) and realized that I had regular occupational exposure to almost all of those VOCs that aren't banned for commercial use, and how many still raise your risk of cancer and organ failure. That plus the lead and asbestos lurking in the old buildings I work in.
@@oatmealman1586 man, you name a substance, real or fictional, I've probably smoked, drank or snorted it. Especially things you'd REALLY not want to. Powdered diamonds tore the FUCK out of my frontal lobe.
Ye, Amaricium-241 is preety nice taste, but I personally prefer Uranium -239.
@@Bemajster I personally prefer my Curium-242, Oganesson-294 is pretty sweet tho. 🫠
these videos are like 30% funny, 30% scary, and 40% reminding me that public education is an unmitigated disaster
Doesn't have to be if american culture would just get its shit together.
Edit: *crosses out American and replaces it with modern*
Young people always did stupid things and feel invincible. It's just they used to be private, that's the difference
if only it was properly funded and certain private institutions would stop trying to sabotage it
@@katiebarber407 oh it gets worse, I found out from a video by the iilluminaughtii (she focuses on researching scams and shady business practices), that the No Child Left Behind act contained a clause allowing military recruiters to demand private information for students that didn't perform on their tests so they could target them for recruitment. Someone in congress got their panties in a twist because they interpreted schools wanting to protect their students as schools having a vendetta against the military. So they got that one added just to make sure schools couldn't say no.
If I ever find out that happened to my personal info at my school, I'm going to try and sue the Military for invasion of privacy. Especially if that clause is still on the books. Its absolutely disgusting that poor kids were made to take a rigged test that favored rich kids, then targeted by the army because they were too poor to do well, and tricked into going to iraq and afghanistan to possibly die. Let alone closing or cutting funding for schools that couldn't improve, this last bit about the military pretty much threw me into a rage. Maybe there's honor in military service, but there's none whatsoever in tricking poor kids into joining up. And if someone else who's reading this thinks what I just described is okay, you're a dick.
@@AnimeShinigami13 Nah it's America
I mean... it's not an automatic game over but that dude who vaped Americium may want to get screened for... lots of things. In a few years I expect him to be in a Chubbyemu video.
I look forward to it!
A man vaped Americium. This is what happened to his lungs.
It tasted funny, but that's normal for new vape pens, he thought.
Nothing will happen to him cuz its fake
☝... presenting to the emergency room, where we are now.
Blacksmith here: I once attempted to make mokome-gane with nickel and copper from quarters. (Basically Damascus nickel and copper) It turned out beautifully and I made several projects out of it but using quarters was expensive, so I tried to use nickels and pennies. Quarters are made from alloys of nickel with a copper core, whereas nickels and pennies are nickel, copper, around a zinc core. I ended up inhaling tons of zinc oxide fumes and was bedridden with metal fume fever for 2 weeks. 🤠
Pre-1982 pennies are solid copper. :)
@@Greeev this is true, but I definitely didn't use those 😛
@@DogsaladSalad oh I figured, just figured that information might come in handy in case you ever wanted to reattempt it.
Terrifying!
Wait, should I be worried about melting pennies? I did that all the time as a kid, and I was planning on doing it with my little sister for fun. Is it dangerous to melt pennies?
With Americium, the most dangerous hazard is almost certainly the fact that it's insanely radioactive. Moreso than pure radium.
yeah , the least of my worries would be the the chemical toxicity. the alpha particle , if gotten inside the body would reap havoc on the internals.
it's said to have close to the same radiotoxicity as polonium 210 .
@@AlChemicalLife dudes be giving themselves lung cancer for fun
@@hcolider2817 People have been doing that a long time before we started vaping radioactivity LMAO
@@hcolider2817 it’s not for fun, it’s for self expression
I have a source that I've been too careful to remove out of this plastic/metal casing that it comes in inside a smoke detector. So it's still got about a 1/3ish of an inch gap of air when a GM tube/probe is pressed up against it, and it'll set off my ludlum 3 w/ a 44-9 probe at 110-120k CPM with that air gap.
Seconding your observation about other hazards - 'chemically inert" does not automatically mean 'harmless' .
For example, any type of gas has the potential to asphyxiate. Asbestos, too, is basically inert, but has the ability to cause damage at the cellular level because of its mechanical properties. I saw in the news recently that titanium dioxide is proported to be harmful as a food addative, but I'm still skeptical about that one.
it is a lewis acid - what would most metal oxides do in HCl?
@@That_Chemist admittedly, I'm not a chemist. I did a little more Googling after your comment, and it SEEMS unlikely that the conditions in the stomach are capable of dissolving the TiO2, but I'm curious of your thoughts.
EDIT: also, yeah, TiO2 is indeed less stable than I first suspected.
@@That_Chemist TiO2 will react in hot sulfuric acid and in HF, HCl is not reacting with it.
Fear mongering. Stop.
@@exstirpo8120 which, this actually highlights the first point really well - there may or may not be a chemical interaction with TiO2 within the body, but that doesn't rule out a hazard from extremely small particles, or particle shapes that have an unexpected biological effect.
If there's gonna be a dad joke at the end, I should submit my favorite chemistry dad...poem?
"Billy was a chemist
But Billy is no more.
What Billy thought was H2O
Was H2SO4"
Oh yes, a classic
literally lol!
Methyl mercaptan is *incredibly potent*. It can be smelled down to parts per trillion. I'm sure there's a large margin of safety until you get to toxic levels. When food rots, it produces things like ethyl and methyl mercaptan and it is very important that humans be able to detect it in very tiny quantities to warn if food is too far gone to eat.
Sure, let's inhale a vaporized alpha emitter. What could go wrong? Next, let's try vaping castor beans?
vape morning glory seeds next
@@virtualtools_3021 That’s actually decent tho
you would be ok from the ricin as that would denature/be destroyed from the heat - you would be less ok from inhaling the fumes from the decomposing oil however 😂
Having said all that - id much rather inhale those castor fumes than 400+ year radioactive half-life Americium 😂
@@mduckernz 1 the flavor
2 wouldn't vaping it destroy the lsa\lsh
‘Feeling under the weather? like you’ve got the flu? That would be the ricin I gave you, I slipped it in to that vape shit your always smoking’
I did some work with Am-241 sources a few years ago, and in the course of doing the safety risk assessment document I found a US safety report about someone who had swallowed one and (fortunately) lived to tell the tale. Am-241 is expensive - $1500/gram, so the source foil is actually an alloy of Am-241 with gold, rolled out very thin and plated with silver on one side and palladium on the other. And thanks to the fact you can roll metal foils really thin, a single source costs less than a dollar!
Wow!
Can AM241 easily leech from the foil?
@@stuartkelly3106 It wasn’t highlighted as a risk in the safety reports that I read.
its not fortunately since it will take a lot to be deadly comparing to other isotope
@stuartkelly3106 no. The foil has 3 layers, pure gold or palladium, gold + americium oxide alloy, then a silver substrate. Unless you scratch or etch the top layer away or get the foil hot enough to melt the silver or gold, the americium is unlikely to leach out. But putting it in your vape is still incredibly stupid. I have such a source I use for calibating my gamma spectrometer, but it's epoxied to a 1mm thick aluminum business card laser etched with the trefoil warning symbol and "Am-241" in large letters, precisely to avoid it getting lost or flagrant stupidity.
My grandmother was a student back in the Soviet Union, and during a chemistry practical, a friend splashed her with sulfuric acid and burned holes in her new coat. So to get back at him she tricked him into tasting sodium chlorate at the qualitative analysis test by making him believe it was the chloride.
crazy ivans
@@jhoughjr1 isnt ivan a boys name
Average soviet lab shenanigans
@@theviolenceenjoyer "ay blyat, Dimitri drank the ethanol again"
@@cybersentient4758 the auto-translate for this is absolutely broken lmao
I feel like the more you learn about chemistry, the more scared you know you should be of chemistry.
They use ethyl mercaptan as 'stench gas' which can be smelled at a level of 0.36 ppb according to wikipedia. The permissible dose is 10 ppm and the immediately hazardous level is 500 ppm.
Seems that is a sufficiently wide range where you can have it be smelt unambiguously without actually poisoning people.
Cool cool
They otherwise omit the potential toxicity of the gas in any "training" session regarding it. Most people have no idea of the "second stage" where it smells sweet rather than rancid and could kill you rather quickly
Regarding the Copper Cyanide story, I wouldn't even use my fingers to clean a spatula from cooking. I'll normally wipe it off with paper towel or scrape it off on the side of the pan, then wash it. Maybe leaning proper kitchen etiquette could help people not do things like this in the lab? Idk, just a thought.
Hate it when I mix up my lab etiquette and cake batter etiquette and lick the spatula with chemicals on it :/
Cooking is chemistry. It all started with beer and wine. The main difference is that 99% of cooking is safe. 99% of chemistry is trying to kill you.
Kitchen safety test as a prerequisite to lab safety class sound like a great idea. If you can’t understand the point of best practices and PPE when handling boiling water or spicy peppers you shouldn’t even be given a chance to handle hazardous chemicals
I know I would clean it with my fingers or worst, my tongue, I chew my pills for fuck sake, thats why I am a programmer and star from labs. Didnt stop me to try to cook with ammonium chloride tho
@@sideways5153 I think making hot sauce or something would make an amazing ppe competency test. If you fail, you KNOW you failed. And you'll eventually be ok :)
In WW2, Soviets used CCl4 as a booze trap for Nazies. They were mixing it with enough ethanol to taste like booze and filling bottles labeled "Cognac" with the stuff (I guess it can be mistaken for that). Took the nazies a little to figure out what they were drinking!
I used a bit of CCl4 as a solvent for application of coatings on IR detectors back in the cowboy days, but washing your hands wins hands down.
I have never had to use CCl4, but have used chloroform a number of times. Honestly that seems bad enough.
@@joshhoover1202 Does it really? I don't feel bad about using it in the lab once in a while, I'm more worried about it's presence in drinking water and chronic exposure - that seems to be the problem, not its acute toxicity or occasional exposure. I read the IARC literature on chloroform again a while ago, and that was what I was taking away from it at least, it's carcinogenicity was discovered in the general population that was exposed to it and not specifically to people being exposed to it in the workplace, while the acute toxicity seems to be an issue if you use it as an anaesthetic.
On the other hand, I'm working occasionally with it and Bis(chloromethyl)ether or an Aziridine product, so the chloroform is the most benign component of those reaction mixes. :D
@@stefangadshijew1682 It isn't the carcinogenicity of chloroform that I am most worried about, rather the hepatoxicity. I have the impression that it will mess up your liver almost as well as carbon tetrachloride.
From what I read, a single anesthetic usage could lead to delayed liver failure. Up there with leaching and blue mass in terms of bad medical practices in my book.
@@joshhoover1202 once upon a time I was a great deal younger and dumber and worked in a lab before I resolved my issues with substance abuse. I somehow decided that abusing chloroform would be a good time, and not only was it not a good time, a 2 day binge absolutely wrecked my liver and I spent the next week in the hospital waiting to see if it'd fail or get better. So yeah. Chloroform's hepatotoxicity isn't a joke.
In german Highschool (12th and final year), we were supposed to shoot a video for new students who would potentially join the school (4th class). One experiment was pouring ethanol in a large metal tray, igniting it and then blowing magnesium powder from a glass rod into the fire. This whole demonstration was done in a fume hood. Our teacher told the guy who blew the magnesium into the flame to not put too much into the rod. He absolutely loaded that thing and the result was a temporarily blinding, around one cubic meter large fireball, luckily no one got hurt. In the same class, I once somehow got HCl into my eyes (I don’t know how) although I wore safety glasses. No problem because we had an eyewash which the teacher immediately used. Turns out, there was a whole somewhere in the hose, which, unbeknownst to me, flooded the room next door which was used for the storage of chemicals, fun times.
Haha
this is a story told me by my uncle,
he was at industrial school in the '70, Italy, the professor demonstrate the violent reaction of metallic potassium in water, the classic little piece in a vial, the students liked it soo much they tried to steal a big chunk of potassium.
the potassium was in a petrol filled container, one kid put his whole arm in the container for steal an orange of potassium, with no storage, he has the brilliant idea of putting it in his back pocket of his thighs jeans, then proceeded to wash his arm in the bathrooms for cleaning the petrol, whit no towel he dried his hands on his pants, sparking an extremely violent reaction setting him on fire, he was far away from the lab so no emergency showers, luckily the janitor, an old man, broke a glass bottle and cut away the jeans burning himself in the process.
the kid survived with horrible burn scars on his whole body, the janitor saved his life and him too received horrible scars on the arms.
after that the school started searching other students for other missing potassium, my uncle was in possession of some and fearing getting busted he made it disappear... tossing it from the window, outside was raining... luckily he only damaged a parked car and make a loud bang, he was not busted after all.
the janitor is a fucking hero.. i feel like 2020s janitor would just stand and watch it happen.
@@sealteamsix1784they would record it on their phone and do commentary
I still remember the very first time my sister did a lab project. She was in the third grade and right before spring break the teacher gave everyone in her class cocoons that were about to turn into butterflies. She watched her cocoon religiously (I don't think she even slept) until the day came that the butterfly began to emerge. Eventually the butterfly got the strength to start flying, mind you this was around the time we had gotten a new puppy. So this butterfly's time as a butterfly was cut short as it flew directly into the mouth of our puppy.
That's just natural selection. If not for the pup, it probably would've flown into a foxes mouth or spider web or something.
Hahaha
And thus she got another lesson
Nature is cruel and often short
These stories might be a bit less exciting, but a lot of stuff happened at my high school:
- Benzene was not allowed in the school at all. However, there were no rules about experiments outside of the school. Guess who had a vault of some banned chemicals in the forest next to the school? A teacher, who then proceeded to show us (safe) reactions with the stuff.
- The school had to remove the nitric acid from the back of our classrooms. Why? Well, it got stolen at least once and more importantly some students in the back row thought it would be really funny to just mix up chemicals in a beaker until something happens. The beaker got warm, then a lot warmer, and they quickly dumped the brown liquid down a drain. The school never found out who did it, so no punishments there, but the nitric acid became a lot harder to access.
- A teacher instructed us to put something on glass in a microwave (forgot what the chemical was). The glassware exploded.
This happened twice before she realized that it might be a good idea to stop the experiment.
Stuff that I heard from other schools:
- Someone told the teacher and an unnamed student had placed several drops of bromine in the air vents.
So, they escalated the situation and promptly evacuated a school of ~1300 people. Several experts came into the school and did a bunch of measurements. They found a ton of alarming stuff (mold in some bathrooms and the likes) but no trace of bromine anywhere.
Boss fight: ChemVault vs Chempit
"thought it would be funny to just mix chemicals in a beaker until something happens"
That right there is how you die.
Teacher with the ChemVault is based.
Okay wait a minute, judging by the kids I've dealt with in school thus far, I'm fucked when chem comes around
bromine person just wanted to get out of class lol
another blacksmith here, i have two stories for you.
First, when I was just starting out, I had a soup can forge (basically a soup can with the inside coated in ceramic). I was outside, in shorts and flip flops because i was dumb and 12. So im sitting there, waiting for the forge to heat up, and i move a piece of wood on the table i was using, only to find out a swarm of ants had it made their home and were now rapidly vacating the premises. I panicked, dropped the metal, kicked my legs, flip flops flew off, tried to run, then I *stepped* on the metal. If it werent still warming up, i'd probably be crippled.
Second!
I had a much better safety mind at this point, and was hot cutting a piece of metal with my brother. note that this was one of my first times using a hot cut chisel, and this specific chisel dulls very quickly. What had happened over the course of the cuts, is the edge had been so dulled that it was now round. Couple that with the now too-cold work piece, on the final hit, the work piece snapped free, shot across the shop and hit my brother in the leg. LUCKILY, he was wearing full length pants and it only bounced off.
so yeah mandatory safety gear in my shop is now long sleeves, long pants, close toed shoes and non-flammable materials
Don't people usually have like a thick leather apron or something similar when doing this kind of work?
@@jannikheidemann3805 yes
Oh hi dad
@@621Tomcat oh hai mark
In high school, the first lab of the year was "distillation of wood'. The apparatus consisted of a test tube loosely held in a spring clamp, with one hole stopper with latex tube leading to a filled inverted jar in a bowl of water. There was a liquid trap proceeding this. The process was to heat popsicle sticks in the tube with a bunsen burner to the point of char, separating and collecting the 3 phases of matter. Some students would allow the jar to rest on the tubing, pinching it (at first this was unintentional LOL), and the nearly red-hot test tube would pop the stopper, launching into flight with a tail of burning wood gas / liquid. We learned rather quickly that POP! from another lab station meant DUCK.
Imagine the stories people dont get to tell
Stockroom lab tech told me a story once from her previous place of work. Maria worked in a lab with Johnny, who was a bit cookey and probably had no business being anywhere near a lab. One day she heard a loud crash from the other side of the room where Johnny had been working. She sees that a 4 L glass bottle had smashed on the floor and its contents were everywhere. Johnny begins trying to soak up the large spill of unknown substance as Maria evacuates the room immediately. From the doorway Maria asks Johnny, "What is that you spilled?", and with Johnny hunched over the chemical spill he reads the label from the broken bottle and says, "py-ruh-dy-nee". Maria repeats the word and asks herself what that could possibly be. Moments later realizes the chemical is pyridine. She immediately signaled for Johnny to get out and proceeded to call for help.
ah, that's just nitro-benzene, its kind of a pesticide, isn't it ?
totally fine
By the way: The word (chemical) "complex" comes from a conjugated form of the latin verb "complecere", wich means something like "to hug", "to embrace" or "to encircle".
Encompassing?
🥰
also, compound comes from Latin compōnō (thru French compondre) meaning to arrange.
oh, and complex actually comes from complector.
I was wondering about that, since I learned that a complex is simply a organic molecules that binds to a metal via at least 2 separate bridges.
I always likened it in my head to a complex of buildings, like several related and close-proximity facilities.
Tobacco smoke has Radium in it from the phosphate fertilizer so I guess Americium vape guy basically just made up for lost time compared to cigarettes.
tobacco mostly has radioactive lead and cadmium iirc
@@That_Chemist Upon further research, it turns out I was thinking of Polonium. CDC website says it’s Lead and Polonium 210 that are the main radioactive constituents. Polonium is really not any better than Radium though!
@@pialamode Yup, radon daughters :)
So rather than directly having radium in the tobacco you have the radon progenies instead 🙂
well if tobacco does, so does pretty much everything we eat too.
When I was in weld school, we where learning TIG welding. Part of that is to ball the tungsten before welding aluminum because we were using the old transformer based machines. Anyway, we had weld booths that we used as our work area, and the instructors said that pennies worked great for balling up our tungsten. Needless to say a student in front of me was getting carried away, as he was using newer pennies that are mostly ZINC. Now to ball the tungsten, you simply start the arc and pump the pedal to dump a large surge of current into the tungsten to ball the end. That is not what the guy I am mentioning did, HE VAPORIZED THE WHOLE PENNY and inhaled it because he had moved his vent away from where he was welding because it was pulling away his shielding gas. Needless to say he started throwing up and missed two weeks of class because of it. Also burning Zinc coats everything with white Zinc Oxide, the tell tale sign that what you are welding has a galv coating, also the zinc burned with an epic blue green flame because of the copper coating and zincs emissions.
For the stench measurement: the air handlers for the mines will be moving air at a certain mass flow rate, measurable by the electrical demand on the motor. From there it's a concentration problem.
Alternatively, the idea of "toxic stinky gas is better than getting caught in a mine fire" might make them skip that step.
I had a teacher who previously worked in lead mines in Idaho. The way he described it, they would "crack" open a container and dump it down the vents.
It helps that you've got a factor of 10,000 between "you can smell the methyl mercaptan" (1 part per billion) and even the OSHA ceiling limit of 10 ppm, let alone the level where you're going to expect acute toxicity.
"Air handlers"
I will use that over ventilation technician that's our actual work title hahaha.
I remember in a college physics class we also used radioactive sources sealed in little plastic disks. We were told very clearly that if we were irresponsible and took them out of the lab we would be in huge trouble, including potentially being kicked out of college. Fortunately nobody in my class did that, but it made me wonder if there was some incident in years prior.
There is always a reason for every safety warning. 🤷♂️
The only time I taught practicals for biology freshmen, one pair of students was... special. When it was time to do a simple acid-base titration, the students were supposed to use 50 mL burettes. The lab had tiny light chairs with a diameter of maybe 25 cm. From the other side of the lab, I saw the taller of the pair climbing on top of one of these chairs. Not good! Coming closer, I saw that he was holding the biggest pipette in the student set, and was proceeding to stick it into the burette. As tall as he was and standing on that puny chair, he was still pushing the burette, and was about to topple it over even if he managed to not fall over with his chair. I grabbed the burette before it got knocked over, told him to remove the huge pipette from the burette and get off the chair, and then asked for an explanation. "Well, you know how this is a quantitative experiment, and you explained how carefully we must read the initial and final positions on the burette?", why yes, I replied, "Well we were going to use the 25.00 mL burette twice to place exactly 50.00 mL into the burette".
Obviously, detailed explanations had been provided about the initial level in the burette only having to be below the first gradation, not necessarily zero (that corresponded, of course, to 50 mL plus lord knows how much volume was below the last gradation). And obviously, long-winded explanations were promptly given again. BUT!!!!!! That same thing (well, almost the same) happened a second time!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not ten minutes had passed, and Mr. Tall Guy was on the tiny chair, with the biggest pipette in his hand, again! So I rushed over, asked him to step off, and asked for another explanation. The pair nonchalantly pointed to the burette, which they had topped up, as instructed, from a beaker with the help of a funnel, and said "You see, we've gone over the first gradation, so we must remove some solution"....
O. M. G. The experience, for me, had transcended the realm of comedy and is just etched in my mind as one big WTF moment.
Dad tried blacksmithing for a while, had a forge and everything. He had to stop making things because as it turns out, when you live in a rural suburbia, your neighbors tend to not like the sound of you hitting metal, repeatedly, for hours on end. His quenching barrel was an old 5-gallon bucket filled with transmission fluid, which also stunk to high hell every time he used it.
over here in Bongland, methyl mercaptan and similar compounds are added to domestic gas supplies because their odours can be detected by the human nose at extremely low levels (as in, parts per billion), and if you can smell mercaptan-infused gas, that would otherwise be odourless, you can detect a gas leak long before it becomes dangerous
with that in mind, your man's story about the mine at 2:19 makes perfect sense - a little stench gas goes a very long way
funnily enough, the same is true of the mercaptan that acts as the principal flavouring/aroma agent in grapefruit; for some reason, the human nose is extraordinarily sensitive to it
Yeah the thiol for grapefruit is a really strong one!
funny enough there's people who can't detect it. I'm apparently one.
Dad's chemistry lab (small highschool, student body of ~70) had a bunch of nasty chemicals left over from previous teachers. When the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) did a sweep, they discovered a rusty gallon can of carbon tetrachloride likely over 50 years old. It was only being held shut via a rusty bottle cap; stored in a cabinet at the back of the room. Coincidentally, it was where we also had all of our math and chemistry lectures; I'm not sure what we would have done if it happened to blow on a hot summer day.
Also, I'm fairly sure the main risk of Americium from a smoke detector if ingested/inhaled would be the radioactivity. This is because the amount of Am-241 is extremely tiny (290 nanograms) - not enough for chemical heavy-metal poisoning, but it's also extremely radioactive - a strong alpha particle emitter - 5 times more than Radium.
And it's gonna hang around once inhaled, too. If this is a true story, I'd be surprised if they make it a decade without lung cancer. As a former stoner, I can also totally see a stoner doing something like this. I never did anything nearly that unwise, but the whole, "taking stuff apart for no reason" I get. I just can't fathom why they thought it was a good idea to try to pry the disc out of its little holder. Had they not done that, no dust would've been generated and it would have been a _relatively_ safe activity. But creating dust? *-_-*
Fair
Blacksmithing story: I was in the 6th grade, and had taken up and interest in blacksmithing. I went to a local hardware store to pick up a bucket, a pipe for an air duct, and plaster of paris. I successfully built a small forge, and within two weeks, this happened. I had finished hammering down on a piece of round stock, and reached for my pliers to put it back in the forge, when, instead, my left hand landed on the (still piping hot) piece of round stock. The burn wasn't that big, but it hurt like nothing I'd ever experienced before. At least I had a good story for my classmates the following day. I also have a cannon/black powder story if you want to hear that.
If a video starts with "today we have a story where someone vaped americium", I'm immediately watching until the end.
Antimony metal gets way too much flack for being toxic. Elemental antimony and antimony oxide are fairly nontoxic and are not well absorbed into the body. It’s used in food safe (lead free) pewter. In high school, I blowtorched a bunch of antimony and cast into a nugget. I carried it around a lot with me in my pocket for years and frequently take it out and play with it.
👀
Apparently in the 19th century, people used metallic antimony pills for constipation, Which you could fish out of your leavings and reuse. Supposedly they would last practically forever, and were sometimes handed down through generations
I think a lot of people confuse the biological effects of arsenic and antimony which might be the cause of this. Always confused me why people are so freaked out about antimony when, as the metal, it is much safer than lead.
One I like is people finding out Tiger's Eye, Nephrite Jade and Serpentinite are asbestos and getting freaked out because they don't understand what it is that makes asbestos dangerous or why having it in the form of a cut and polished stone presents no danger whatsoever (unless you deliberately crush and grind it up, which is incidentally almost impossible without special equipment in the case of nephrite, which can be carved very gradually by abrasion but is one of the most difficult naturally-occurring minerals to crush).
@@subverted yea soluble antimony compounds are scary but insoluble ones and the metal are surprisingly safe considering they're right below arsenic
Work as a Sanitation worker at my college. We are currently cleaning dorm room bathrooms in prep for the students, and go through a lot of industrial cleaner while cleaning since a lot of students don't clean their bathrooms throughout the year. I wear my usual ppe (splash goggles, and gloves) while cleaning. After a month, my throat became really sore and I was coughing a lot. I thought I caught covid, so I took some time off until it went away, and when I came back, I was taken off of bathrooms and put on a painting crew. I was recently using the cleaner again to clean bathrooms and my cough just came back up, so I checked the bottle and whaddya know, its HCL. Needless to say, ill have to add a mask to my list of ppe to wear while cleaning, and recheck the MSDS to see if it says anything about breathing in fumes.
Yeah, HCL is used in a number of limescale removers, since you need acids to dissolve them. Also, #lfmf : don’t wipe metal surfaces down with dilute limescale remover solutions. The water in the thin film of solution will evaporate quickly, becoming more and more concentrated to the point it can damage the metal…
You just gave me a funny idea. A vape that "functions" as a smoke detector and for 5 seconds after a drag on a vape, it will start beeping like a smoke detector.
The Am241 in ion sources is apparently sputtered or smashed onto a metal substrate and then laminated over with something inert like gold, so as long as you're not scratching at it or heating it up substantially it's supposedly pretty stable. The source material doesn't look very disturbed, if he's lucky all that happened is it got hot enough to oxidize the surface of whatever the outer cladding layer is (or toast it if there's some lacquer coating on top) and all the Am stayed embedded. Would be interesting to have a before and after of the activity of the button.
yeah , I don't think he messes with the actual foil of gold mixed with Am241 dioxide.
the 2 are pressed and heated together so unless you dissolve the gold you're not likely to get any Am241 out of it. also it has a top layer of foil ( on top of the other foil disk with Am241) which usually is palladium.
Agreed, the heat in burning chamber not enough to release Am241 from encapsulated state. Still, an eBay detector could pick up the small gamma component if source was deposited in lungs. A small price to pay for peace of mind. If present, the alpha decay would be deadly over time but could be located (by gamma signature) in a major hospital with Medical Physics Dept. and followed by lung surgery to remove.
The Russians used alpha from Po210 to assainate a guy by injecting a pellet from the end of an umbrella. Bad way to go.
Yes, though he likely got very little, there may still have been some Am that got inhaled. It's a good idea to go to a hospital to get it checked.
I think for the gas used in the mine, they have an incredibly low odour threshold, much lower than the exposure limits.
And once you smell it, you should be leaving the mine, so the time of exposure is much less.
That should overall make it much safer than a toxic gas, potentially at high concentrations, which you can't smell and therefore remain exposed to, or potentially explode.
I was in High School chemistry class and we had a lab about burning magnesium. this involved burning a few small pieces of magnesium, lithium and zinc ribbon/foil (~2-4mm) in a Bunsen burner flame to view atomic emission. We were all given glasses so we wouldnt go blind and told to keep them on the whole time. One girl decided to set a huge piece (like 4 inches folded on itself) on fire without her glasses on... She now has a permanent spot in her vision, and went blind temporarily.
Carol never wore her safety glasses…now, she doesn’t need them
1000%
@@janmelantu7490hat is the chemical equivalent of the popular safety phrase when working with high powered lasers:
Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye...
Okay, so when I was in inorganic chem, one of my assignments was to make a green light-sensitive iron complex. It's used to... I guess measure how much light hits a surface? I don't really remember.
It was pretty standard fare for a while, I precipitated the complex out of solution and poured the suspension through the filter paper to do a vacuum filtration. There was a nice, relatively dry green powder sitting at the bottom of the funnel, ready and raring to degrade under harsh light.
Now, I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea, but instead of just pouring out the green powder like a sane person, i tried to... reach in with my finger and scoop the filter paper out of the funnel. With bare hands. I ended up spilling the complex all over the table and killing my yield, which had been pretty good up to that point.
I'm a competent human person I promise.
"Not that radioactive"
Americium IS THAT RADIOACTIVE!
It isn't like Uranium with a half-life of millions or billions of years. It has a half-life of about 420 years IIRC. Which may SOUND like it should go in your vape but it is circa a 10 million times worse radioactivity than vaping DU.
@@aysnov 🤣
470 years ...
but yeah I agree 👍
😳 Americium vape juice?! I would run far away from the vape in question. Alpha particles will do the numbers on the inside (it's the soft innards that's much more vulnerable than the skins on your body).
In my first year of undergrad research, I had my own Schlenk Line so I could perform my air-sensitive polymerizations outside of the glovebox. It was really late one day, and being new and inexperienced I turned off the vacuum pump without lowering the liquid nitrogen dewar cooling the trap. The next morning I arrive in lab and figure out that I condensed about 500mL of liquid oxygen in the cold trap (I guess I had a leaky line), which essentially means that I made a bomb that could’ve blown up the whole lab and maybe even more. Thankfully my mentor was able to take care of the liquid oxygen, but only after he took a picture of it in the trap lol.
Haha
I work at a natural products lab. We run column chromatography every day and use a lot of solvents, including chloroform. So, I was distilling some impure chloroform and added 1 L of old chloroform (maybe over 10 years old) to the distillation flask. The fume hood was on, so I didn’t notice anything strange. After the distillation, I stored the chloroform on a 5 L gallon. The next day, I was alone in the lab and opened the gallon outside the fume hood, since my chromatographic column was too big for it. I was hit by a strong sweet and acidic smell; it was like a punch to the face. I started coughing immediately and felt like my throat was on fire. I run out of the lab to breathe some fresh air (in the emergency exit) still coughing and unable to breathe. When I recovered, I turned on a fan in the lab to get rid of the smell and sealed the gallon. On that day I learned that chloroform can turn to phosgene, a WWI chemical weapon and that I probably breathed some of it. It didn’t cause further consequences and I learned to never use old chloroform again.
That is terrifying
Wow. I don't even know what to say. People are scary...
These chempilations are fascinating. Also, I like the adjustment.
thanks!
Art isn’t typically seen as a high risk profession but I regularly work with cadmium and cobalt pigments and one of my professors is a sleep deprived state (not for teaching thankfully) decided to put some soft body (refers to the thickness of medium) cadmium into his airbrush. Cadmium pigments in a medium are pretty safe but in power form such as the actual pigment dust and soft pastels or if you aerosolize the pigment ups your likely of exposure a lot. So basically he probably is getting cancer just a bit quicker. Also basically every oil painter has almost passed out from solvent fumes once in their career.
The "stench gas" thing, it can basically be smelled at PPB but is only toxic at PPM. Compounds like that are usually common byproducts of putrefaction, and not necessarily abundant ones, just very specific. Thus our noses have evolved to detect the faintest whiff to prevent us from inadvertently poisoning ourselves by eating spoiled foods.
Thorium-232 is an alpha emitter and not that dangerous which is why I always make sure to work with it without a respirator. My skin will block the alpha particles anyways!
I hope this was a joke ..
Yeah, I don't know why one would use methyl mercaptan in an alert system, sounds like a nice way to accidentally overshoot and cause CNS toxicity or death.
Ethyl mercaptan seems to be way less toxic (NFPA 704), and in underground mining, they actually use it as a "stench gas" as an alert system in case of emergency. In fact, it is law in Ontario they use either ethyl mercaptan or an equivalent in an alert system.
Typical Am241 in a smoke detector (a modern one) is about one microCurie. If vaporized and inhaled, it would cause 166 times the maximum annual dose to bone surfaces, or if in a chemical form that didn’t absorb into bone surfaces, only 100 times the annual limit. Fortunately for the vaper, the boiling point for americium is over 2000 C.
At 1 microcurie, your body will become 123% more radioactive (the human body is about 0.8 microcuries, mainly from K-40 and C-14). If all of it is absorbed, this will lead to a slightly higher incidence of cancer, but nothing immediate or dramatic will happen. There is still absolutely no reason whatsoever to vape americium though.
His lifetime dose would be 4.4Sv if he somehow managed to vape the whole Am241 source... that's not very pleasant 🤣
his chances of cancer probably would go up 10 fold maybe 100 fold.
That lifetime dose is equivalent to 44,000 chest x-rays for a lifetime or
367 full body CT scans for a lifetime.
in my last year of school (13th grade whatever that might be where you live), we had to do some sort of project, since our teacher was ill and/or absent for most of the schoolyear (we had about 4 lessons in a year total)
my group decided to make a firecracker, so we made our own blackpowder and to test if we had something that works we got a little porcelain bowl (forgive my lack of vocabulary, english is not my first language and i only had chemestry in school), got under the fume hood, stuck a match into our powder blend and kaboom
the result: 1 hole and 3 dents in the plexi glass and a porcelain shard that almost embedded itself in my hip, luckily i got away with a grazing wound
moral: if you light something potentially explosive put at least 1 mm of steel, or simmilar, between you, destructible stuff and it
edit: we also left a big spot on the school grounds (asphalt) from where we demonstrated our product, since one of the crackers burned down insted of exploding
Not blacksmithing but silverwork if i remember correctly. Some of my most unsafe moments not gonna lie
I had a piece of metal i had been rolling out and after a heat treatment it wasn't glowing so i reflexively went to grab it with my bare hand. I actually left my fingerprint burnt onto the metal not just a smudge from where my skin touched it.
And then a few years later i did something similar but instead the notable part about it was that instead of the smell of burning skin it smelled like eggs. Not rotten eggs like what I've been asked about whenever i told the story, just like eggs cooking normally which was interesting to say the least
Another time i was refilling my butane torch which unknown to me had spilled a LOT of liquid butane onto the surface i was working on. When i went for the test light of the torch i got a fireball to the face and the front part of my hair was slightly on fire, and my nose hairs and eyebrows were a bit singed too but nothing serious
Other than that there's not much else besides a few liquid metal spills where i got to see an interesting version of the leidenfrost effect where instead of a cool liquid on something hot it was a hot liquid metal on a wet surface. It acted very similar but it reminded me more of how sand falls on a smooth surface except it was a larger bead splitting into smaller ones on impact
I haven't set myself on fire for like two years to let the record show, it used to be more often back then but maybe I'm just less flammable now
Americium? Personally I only go for Radium in my vape since it glows so nicely.
for how they control the amount of "Scent alarm" in mines, I'd assume they meter out the release into the air getting pumped down into the mine that it's not going to cause issues. Most mine airflow goes from the entrance to the working face in terms of airflow, that way any airborne hazards (like hitting a gas pocket) don't go the same way as the people trying to escape the hazard.
Either that or they have wire triggered stink bombs around the mines, but i'd bet they just meter it into the air intake as the vents handle the distribution (have to have full air circulation in a mine so you don't wind up with a pocket of bad air) and it'll do it pretty damn quick too as most mines use diesel equipment and thus have to have at least 0.6 m3/s of air for ever kilowat of diesel power they have underground. That isn't taking into account breathing air and other things like air powered tools which are used in some places to avoid needing to burn as much diesel.
Edit: Storytime! Ok so in college i took forging as part of a required metallurgy course and during this we each got to sand cast, forge, and machine a chisel, wrench, and machinist's square. pretty basic stuff, make a ceramic mold to make the stock, fire it in the kiln, pour molten steel into the mold, let it cool, and then forge and grind to shape. Well, thanks to another classmate's forgetfulness, things got a bit... jumpy on me. We'll call him Dan.
He did step 1 fine, but improperly fired his mold. Now, firing here does 2 things. It burns out the wax used to make the mold's internal shape, and most importantly it removes the water from the ceramic paste/slurry we used to make the mold. He only stuck his mold in the kiln when it was cooling off to melt out the wax. Those who have cast metal in the past can already see where this shitshow is going.
Well, time comes to pour and we head out into the hot work area of the campus. Teacher is already out there and has us set our molds up in metal buckets of sand so they're nice and stable, and things cool at a good rate. I notice as I'm pouring sand around my mold that his looks a touch cracked, and is... crumbly? odd but i don't think much more of it because at this point everyone's molds were fired... right?
My pour goes off without a hitch. If you ever get the chance to cast metal, do it. It's hard work but very fun, and if you're lucky you get a tool or something that'll last. everyone else's has been fine as well. Then it's Dan's turn.
The instructor has to take a call, so he gets me and another student to supervise as we're the ones he didn't need to help with the pours. the other guy had experience casting before, and I'd seen enough videos to know how not to kill anyone. We'd also been helping the other students by that point. Well, we get set up and force Dan to put on his PPE (he was a massive vegan and hated wearing anything made of leather). Dan pulls out the crucible almost dropping it 3 times he was so nervous, so i take over as he's way too antsy to be handling molten metal. I line up the pour, and i watch through my face shield as the glowing yellow stream of liquid steel falls down towards the mold.
Now, we're going to pause the story a moment so i can explain something. For those of you that don't know, molten steel is at a minimum of 2500°F or 1371°C. If there is any water left in the mold you're pouring it into, this water will flash boil at those temperatures and explode. With lead, as was the case in the story in the video, this will cause the lead to splatter around the room and that's only at around 320 - 600 celsius.
In Dan's case, there was a LOT of water left trapped in the thick layer of unfired ceramic. The outer layer was dry, which probably saved my ass, but once the heat reached the damp layer that started turning to steam, creating pressure and a hissing noise.
As soon as i heard this i stopped pouring and stepped back. Damn glad i did too because not a second later the contents of the bucket (including the molten steel) erupted loudly into the air sending everyone running. my PPE took the worst of it, but i still have a shiny spot on my arm where a bit of the steel made it through and burned me. I'm glad i was using one of the metal face shields, as the first plastic layer and the glass in the lens had been destroyed by something hitting them. Rung my bell pretty good too. 'course the instructor comes running out asking what happened and all i could reply was "I have no fucking idea. Also, some steel made it through the arm of the coat, where's the burn cream?"
we figured it out after the ceramics instructor came in asking who left the wax in the bottom of the kiln as that should have burned off. Dan later profusely apologized, he had missed the class where we went over the procedure and thought that everyone was just putting their molds in the kiln to melt out the wax. He got one chance to redo it (under close supervision) and nailed it that time.
One of the first times I melted zinc was in a big spoon in a wood burning stove, it boiled, and I saw it making strings of oxides on contact with the air sucked in and thought "YIKES I don't want that in my lungs"
The mention of the inorganic lab reminded me of one of one of my inorganic labs. I had been sick with a viral infection the week before, and my hands were shaky. We were making a co[salen] complex. Just before collecting my sample after reflux (to activate the salen), my hands started shaking hard while moving it, and the salcomine splashed on me, the fume cupboard and some of the floor. After changing, I spent the rest of the lab cleaning up. As far as I know, it's still there.
bruh vaping americium sounds like a fun time, gonna try that soon
Back in the 1940s there was a product supplied in gallon tins called Renewzit (spelling may not be correct) which was readily available It was carbon tetrachloride. This product was often used to remove stains.
Not exactly a blacksmith, but I do have a hobby of melting, cleaning and then pouring metals... And their story reminded me of my own.
Often times I melt and pour metals into moulds to make cool shapes, artwork, or something I 3d printed...
Anyways! Time for the part where I messed up... My dad works on cars a lot... So he often has a lot of scrap and material that I can melt for my art projects.
So, I fell into a pretty comfortable flow of generally being able to assume that if the metal wasn't steel or copper, it was probably nickel or aluminum.
Either way... Safe to melt. Usually there wasn't lead or anything else, and if there was we'd recognize it. Except for the time when we didn't... the water pump incident...
So, you might not know but sometimes, a cars water pump will often times be a steel or aluminum case, which can have magnesium inside. I don't know it's purpose, but it's there.
But neither me nor my dad knew this at the time. Anyways, with this being a place with many chemists, I'm sure you know what happens when you combine... Red hot or molten aluminum... With magnesium.
Basically inside of my... furnace, in a white hot crucible... Full of molten metal, I accidentally made thermite! And then ignited it immediately.
(I know... Uh oh, and uh oh indeed.)
So, then there was molten aluminum sputtering upwards as high as 4-5 feet... I basically made an actual volcano in the garage, some of the metal cooled in air, and stuck itself to my ceiling.
Other bits landed around the furnace... And I didn't know what to do for a split second. The surprise caught me bad.
But then immediately I shut of the fuel lines so that if they were damaged, no molten aluminum could ignite the propane gas to that heat, and follow it back to the tank.
For a few seconds it was terrifying, and I had to check myself for burns and to make sure no molten metal had gotten in my ppe.
But after that, it was a relief, and there have been no more incidents like it.
I've since been much more careful about the metals I get from cars, and realized that I can't assume the part is a cohesive unit. Surface tests don't tell me what it has inside.
Now with car parts, I always look up the part number to check for magnesium or anything unexpected before it gets anywhere near my furnace
that methanethiol mine alarm thing is something i’ve heard about in lots of places. supposedly it’s a very widespread solution.
Americium? more like America- um im dying
We had the CCl4 funsies, how about some phenol now?
One funny observation with phenol can be made in molecular bio lab. We use a mixture of Chloroform, Phenol and Isoamyl Alcohol in DNA / RNA extraction protocol, it forms an OBVIOUS two phase system with phenol layer being the lower one, which is the part you're supposed to use in the protocol.
Over the years we are yet to see a student who would not instinctively shake it to mix without even asking, which is exactly what they are not supposed to do :D We have to keep a hidden 2nd bottle of it in the fridge just to have a well separated one in case someone does it again.
(It's not like the protocol won't work when using a shaken mixture but it's suboptimal yield / purity, and we keep the phenol under chloroform layer after mixing and saturation cause it preserves much better).
Another semi-yikes story I can share is with preparing the phenol solution for this protocol. Pretty casual stuff, you just melt some phenol, wash it with EDTA buffer a few times, and right into the freezer it goes to prepare the chloroform mixture later. We usually do a bunch at once cause it's a pain, and small batches take just as long as large ones (still not a lot, in the order of 500-1000 mL at most which lasts for a few years).
Anyway, for the separatory funnel mixing the PI told me to make sure the stopper fits the funnel, cause there are some bad ones, and to stop and wash my hands and get a better stopper if i feel it's getting wet. But thinking naah i have gloves, ain't nobody got time for that i just used a towel to hold the stopper end in case it'd get wet - of course i picked a crappy one and it had a tiny leak so it did get wet but i couldn't feel it in the gloves.
What i didn't realize is that the nitrile gloves will get absolutely destroyed by the still warm phenol, and when i finally got to cleanup i had to wash off the disintegrated pieces of gloves off of my hands.
ALWAYS ALWAYS check the glove compatibility if you're not sure :D if I did it bare handed i would at least know it's wet and stopped immediately, instead i had to deal with my hands reeking of phenol and skin being super dry cause of the ethanol i used to wash the phenol and glove pieces off.
Also a fun idea if you have no clue what could be a wedding gift for mol bio researchers, the reason we make our own phenol solutions is my PI got 40 kilos of super high purity phenol as a wedding gift from his former boss in a reagent supply company. FR works much better than the premixes you can buy nowadays, especially for our own optimized protocols.
Obligatory not a chemist.
I was in a microbiology lab during my undergrad and it was my first time working on tissue culture. They started me out with culturing rabbit kidney cells since they were easy to maintain and hard to screw up. Later on I was supposed to treat glioblastoma cells with temozolomide to generate a chemo-resistant cell line for a study. I was aspirating out some old media from the flask of cells and accidentally stabbed my arm with the aspirating needle, enough to puncture the skin. The professor was watching me do it and we just looked at each other and had an “oh shit” moment. We washed it off for several minutes, but luckily there weren’t any dangerous chemicals since it was basic DMEM. It only occurred to me later that day that if I were working on those glioblastoma cells, I might have exposed myself to chemo and more scarily inoculated myself with an aggressive form of brain cancer.
this guy microdosing on cancer to get stronger
Probably way too late, but will try to contribute my part.
So, obligatory, not a chemist, but a former electronics repair tech in a third world country, and had a fair share of accidents.
1) In one of the places i worked, a colleague tried to recover data from a damaged laptop, the battery has been holding it's structure just good enough to combust right after removal and smoke up the place in an unventilated room with no sand bucket, we both had to leave it burning there on the metal table and run out. All my cloth items stunk of burning lithium for the next month, luckily nobody was injured;
2) Had a fairly big blob of molten solder shoot out right into my eye, somehow reacted in time. Now i have a scar on my eyelid and a story to tell;
3) This is commonly overlooked, but this is why you don't wear flip-flops in commercial environments: a capacitor i was trying to remove from a board, exploded in a violent fashion, showering everything under it in boiling electrolyte, thankfully i had socks on;
4) Occasionally we had to melt plastic to make a patch or reinforce structure on some plastic parts, didn't really have any good methods of doing so, so a fair bit of it burned and the room had to be vented out;
5) Me, being stupid back then, tried to stop superglue from bonding by pouring acetone onto it. I think this is where i've got my persistent cough from, because i had a violent reaction for half an hour after smelling that;
6) Had a 10L canister of isopropyl alcohol knocked over in the shop right when the whole deal with the facemasks started, so basically had the floor accidentally perfectly disinfected;
7) Had several accidental acetone spills on the desk, that i've noticed only after an hour or so, when my arm was basically soaked in it;
8) Had several electrecution attempts from computer power supplies, still have small marks of electrical burns from some;
Left the field last year because of professional growth aspirations, with some permanent damage and a lot of experience.
Moral: try to think what you're doing, and have safety practices and equipment in place, because any of the incidents i've had could've been a lot worse if i was less lucky and/or careful. Considering the power supply experiences, it's a miracle i'm even alive.
Gladly, moved to an industry where the worst i can do is accidentally bring down a website for about an hour.
Aluminum bronze is a fun metal to practice sand casting it melts at a rather low temp and it has a beautiful gold color to it when it's cleaned up. Ware the proper PPE. Casting metals you rarely get a second chance
I rusted a shelf with nitric acid once 😂. Also found a leak one time when I realized none of my battery devices stored in the immediate vicinity we're working. The batteries had some white dry marshmallow looking stuff leaking out of every single battery. The lid on my nitric acid was cracked.
:(
Might share two short stories from my middle school - nothing major, but still, perhaps some folk can have a giggle at them
In one of the classes, we were learning about sodium, and how it reacted with water. So, since I was one of the best students at chemistry at the time, I would often go to the teacher's desk to make small experiment. I simply cut a tiny chunk of sodium with a kitchen knife, and put it into a large glass bowl of water, to see its start reacting, nothing special. But the thing is, I didn't really know what a "tiny" chunk of sodium should be, so I made it bigger than I should've, and it ended up exploding after a while. The teacher then told us not to move and to carefully look for the chunk of sodium to take care of it. We couldn't find it on any desk or anywhere on the floor - and after I looked up, I found where it went. It launched vertically up, and ended up making a small crater in the ceiling. Nobody was hurt, but it's one of my most memorable moments of middle school chemistry classes. In fact, it's half of the reason why my username is what it is, I still have a thing for this metal. And - allegedly - the crater was never taken care of, since it wasn't *that* big, so it's in the ceiling to this day, a decade or so later.
(In case you're curious, the other half is a short sci-fi story by Stanisław Lem that included sodium, but, I digress.)
The other story is from my chemistry teacher herself. It happened back in the late 80s or early 90s, when some student told her that they have a bit of mercury in their house that was not in use by anyone, and they could bring it to the class, perhaps it could be used in some experiment. The teacher said, sure, she assumed it would be a tiny vial of mercury from a broken thermometer or something like that, nothing major, just a tiny amount that she could take, so it would at least not hang around in a random house. The next chemistry class, the student brings the mercury to her. And it was not a vial, they brought a bloody mason jar full of mercury, and a large one at that. She asked them where the heck did they get this stuff from - they didn't know, it was just, there, in their house, and they asked their parents, who said they could have it and bring it to chemistry classes. My teacher was still shocked a couple decades later, and when this happened, she was especially terrified that the jar's bottom might break off at any moment, since, y'know, mercury's pretty heavy. She handled it carefully, and handed it away to some laboratory her friends worked at to take care of it, since she was NOT keeping all that garbage around.
Middle school chemistry classes are some of my fondest memories I've had from all my years of education, and these two stories are part of it.
The mine I worked at back in the 90's had pressurized bottles of ethyl mercaptan (remote electrical release/local manual release as a backup) on both the intake fan for the fresh air raise as well as on the header that ran from the compressor house to the underground workings. It was explained to me that they were sized such that they would fill the entire mine with a very easily detectable amount of gas, while still being below the danger threshold. Considering the alternatives (collapse, fire, explosion, SO2 & NOx, flooding), and the fact that the volume of the mine naturally increased over time, I'm sure they pushed up against the upper limit as much as could be considered practicable when they installed the system. Previous to it, there were glass bottles of mercaptan that the surface crew would throw into the intake fan, and those continued to be stored in both the shift bosses office in the headframe as well as in the security gatehouse, just in case.
I love the internet because no one ever lies or makes up ridiculous stories about their life.
I know this is quite boring but this sparked a hatred for acids that still remains years later. Once in year 7 chemistry, we were making copper sulfate. There were 3 groups at my table and I was by myself, the group next to me didn't add enough copper oxide to the sulfuric acid. Our teacher made it extremely clear to add enough so that there was extra copper oxide. After about 1 minute of their evaporating dish being on the Bunsen burner (that they left and I was tending to), I started getting a sore throat. After this, I had quite a bad cough for about 2 months and even had to go to the doctor (I hated the doctors office).
In my freshman year of high school, I had a physical science teacher who was, shall we say, a little crazy. There were no less than three unintended fires over the course of that school year.
For one of those, he was showing off the reactivity of the alkali metals. Starting off with lithium, which just did what lithium does. He wanted to go on to sodium, but, as he said, "The chemistry teacher has all of my sodium, so we'll just move on to potassium." He meant to get just a tiny bit of it, but ended up tossing in what amounted to a tablespoon of it into the sink, which produced a pillar of flame instantly. We were all amazed at it, and near the end of the period, he happened to look up to see the ceiling above the sink was charred. He simply said, "Uh... If anyone asks, that was already there."
On another occasion, he had decided to perform an experiment just for our class. According to him, he had done it before in college and it produced a boom so loud that it shook all the windows in the science wing and security thought that a bomb had gone off. It was electrolysis of water to collect the hydrogen into a bottle and set it on fire.
When he had done it in college, it was a one liter bottle. For us, it was a three liter bottle and he had had it running overnight with zero supervision, just sitting there on his desk.
After he finished explaining it to us, he pulled out what I can only assume was the longest spark igniter in the world and attempted to light it. After four or five sparks, it just gave off a gentle "whoom" sound. No boom, so he tried again. And again. And again, each time producing nothing more than that gentle "whoom."
He stands there, thinking for a moment, before stopping mid-thought and saying, "Oh. Nobody light a match, and someone open the windows. See, uh... Plastic, while we might see it as rather solid, can be quite porous and is definitely not completely airtight. On top of that, hydrogen atoms are very small, so there's possibly a bunch of hydrogen in the room."
Our first interaction with him was just him playing "Guess the Gas," where he was running some sort of gas through a bubble solution, scooping up a handful of it, and then lighting it on fire... Directly in front of students' faces, going up and down the aisle, asking, "What gas is this?"
I certainly didn't want a fireball in my face, and I could feel the heat of it from across the room, so, just before he got to my seat, I raised my hand and said, "It's methane?" Giving the correct answer, thankfully, got him to stop. If anyone is a mad scientist in today's day and age, it's him, hands down.
As for stories about myself...
Well, I am not a clever man.
I have been known to just taste unknown items, as, to me, it's rather effective at identifying them. As a curious child with access to even basic tools, that resulted in me finding out what dry cell battery acid tastes like. If you want to know for yourself, lick a Switch cartridge. Just recently, I found a mystery liquid on the floor of the back room at work. I was training someone that night, so she was right behind me as I was trying to figure out what it was. On one of the shelves nearby, we stored motor oil, but it was a translucent, yellowish liquid, so I assume it might've been synthetic oil. I dipped two of my fingers in it and rubbed it a bit with my thumb, and it felt oily, so my assumption felt on track. I proudly announced to my trainee that I was going to taste it, to which she said, "You're going to taste the mystery floor liquid?"
"Yes."
"Wouldn't it be smarter to trace it back to its source in case it's something dangerous?"
"... Probably." Well, I did that, instead. Sure enough, it was not synthetic oil. It was sodium hydroxide drain cleaner, which would've ravaged my mouth and throat, because, mm mm lye. I was 30.
While pet sitting for a friend, she had a package arrive that was food for her snake and one of her lizards. Just some frozen mice. I took them out of the package and saw a white brick inside the package, so I grabbed it with my bare hands and held it up, looking it over. "Why does it feel like my hands are burning?" I continued to hold the suspicious brick. "Why does it have some sort of cloud falling off of it?" I continued to hold the brick for a minute or two before it clicked: "Oh. It's dry ice." I was 26.
While washing my clothes, specifically my whites, I accidentally splashed a bit of bleach onto my hand. Doing as any person does, I just wiped it onto the tank top I was wearing and went about my business until I noticed the pattern it bleached into it. I thought it looked neat, so, instead of taking it off and applying it to that, I continued to splash bleach onto my hand and smearing it onto my shirt. After a while, I wondered, "Why does my chest feel like it's burning? Oh, well," and continued to do what I was doing.
For 15-20 minutes.
Then it finally sunk in: "It's bleach, which is a base. My chest is burning because it's a chemical burn." I took off the tank top, thoroughly rinsed my hands and chest in the sink, and then "safely" splashed bleach onto the shirt using the cap.
Okay, maybe not the safest thing, but safer than applying it directly to my skin. I was 20 at the time.
I have a boneheaded story. Last video, I shared a story involving chlorine. The theme hasn't changed...
I was in middle school (7th grade I believe) and I read about mixing acid and bleach. Of course, with me being the dumb teen I was, I decided to mix them together. I got a hundred mLs each of vinegar and bleach (damn that rhymed) and mixed them together. A few seconds afterward, it gave off a small amount of green gas, then it picked up steadily. Soon it looked like I had an XXXL size smoke bomb burning. My dad came home, and he saw the cloud of chlorine. He flipped his lid, and I still hear about it to this day.
2:52 To answer you question about how much methyl mercaptan - The human nose can detect such compounds at extremely low concentrations. And the gap between stinking everyone out of the mines and actual harm to humans in parts per billion/million is Huge. Plus, Organosulfide compounds are used, _not_ H2S. Organosulfides = All the Stench of H2S without the toxicity at low concentrations.
MeSH Odor Threshold: 0.002 ppm: IDLH (Immediately Dangerous to Life and Health): 150 ppm - 75,000x concentration difference.
I'd say they could just approximate amount of the methyl mercaptan in the mine. That stuff is VERY stinky at low concentrations and the difference between stinky and toxic levels are huge
One of the Chem videos I was watching mentioned Diethyl Ether, and now I can't get the "die potato" asdf animation out of my head with the "die thyl ether" in the potatoes' place.
I blame you for making me think of chemistry on a daily basis.
What other heavy metals can be vaped 🤔
Mercury, surely
@@tolyan9756 Personally, I like uranium. Different radioactive elements give different buzzes, but uranium’s is simply [chef’s kiss] delectable. Francium’s the worst though, weak compared to it’s volume.
I also hav egot quite some stories:
- One time in the building next to us (which was a different school) They did something involving bromine where the teacher thought it would be a good idea to let a student hold a Beaker with Bromine and do the reaction... the slipped and dropped the beaker which resulted in the school being shut down for 2 weeks.
- another time i was helping our chem teacher sorting the chem cabinet and we found some very interesting chemicals there like half a fucking Kilogramm of Potassium permanganate and like a completely oxidized block of sodium and some carbon tet
- Once there was an "explosion" in the acid cabin because someone didnt ventilate the pure nitric acid and the No2 blew the cap off and blew the bottle into smithereens
when you mentioned the correct dose of memethyl mercap, wasnt there a story in a previous episode that a mine just poured a 10lb bottle into the ventilation to raise the alarm
yeah but I can't believe that they just yeet a bottle and assume that it's safe
@@That_Chemist those systems move a absolutely stupid amount of air so I'm assuming the sheer volume let's them use a dose about yae |----| big.
I have a story from when I was a dumb young student who didn’t take lab seriously. Allergies were getting to my eyes, and I had been lifting my goggles all day to rub them. We were working with concentrated H2SO4 (16m I think) and I didn’t think much of it. I was about to rub my eyes again after I tested pH. With one hand I grabbed litmus paper and the other I lifted my goggles. At the last second I noticed the paper was bright red from the insane amount of acid my gloves. I think I should be blind, thank god I randomly looked before doing something that stupid
You are indeed very fortunate!
Amateur blacksmith and metallurgist here. Years ago I was melting brass bullet casings with an electric foundry and forgot to properly preheat my little cast iron ingot mold. I poured the molten brass in and immediately there was a steam explosion, which resulted in it flinging a gobbet of molten brass into my mouth.
Thankfully the Leidenfrost effect is a thing, so it ended up vaporizing all the saliva in my mouth first which gave me time to spit it back out before it actually seriously burned me. All that ended up happening was that I needed some water, and my tongue felt like I burned it on a hot drink.
You'd better believe I'm a heck of a lot more careful these days.
Professional Stank Juice is detectable at such low levels that by the time it caused a risk of asphyxiation/toxicity, you'd already be functionally disabled by the extreme nausea of such high concentrations.
As if vapes didn't contain enough heavy metals already
I read up on the methyl mercaptan thing and it seems like there is an "anti-stench" that neutralises the stench gas before the wintergreen extract is released as an "all clear" signal, but I wasn't able to find exactly what the "anti-stench" is. The safety side seems a bit insane to me but if the anti-stench is effective at chemically neutralising the methyl mercaptan maybe it isn't so bad, or at least not as bad as hiding the warning smell behind wintergreen.
Equivalent of high school, we had a chemistry club as an extra curricula thing where we would do some of the more fun experiments one could do. One was filling a 2 litre carbonated beverage bottle with hydrogen and oxygen mix and igniting our new rocket :D, now only the staff or the students in the final year of school that were technically adults actually got to handle this contraption, so yeah, I was handling it. So we I the bottle, take it out to the school tennis courts where all but the one igniting is behind a chain link fence. When doing this we used a Bunsen Burner Tripod as a launch stand. I set it up, lit it, and well, I'm pretty sure the mix was perfect 2:1 ratio as there were 3 bits of tripod rocketing horizontally across the tennis courts as it blew out the welds.
No-one hurt, one bounced off the fence and due to lighting between the legs none came my way, but from then on new policy was to use the tripods where the top was a single piece of metal rather than formed from 3 pieces or bent metal welded together.
From what I've learned in this channel, tetra-anything is usually a surefire way to damage oneself.
1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane ain't so bad, they use it cans of air duster
Blacksmith here.
One thing a lot of newer blacksmiths do is look for free or cheap steel to forge stuff out of. This is all fine and dandy, recycling and all that, but a lot of people aren't aware of galvanized steel (prevents rust from forming, really useful stuff) and that's where issues can arise.
When galvanized steel is heated to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit it'll begin to create zinc fumes, which really aren't the greatest to inhale. Causing what we refer to as "heavy metal fever", flu like symptoms and feeling terrible etc. Welders are typically warned about this stuff too, at least I was when I was taking classes.
So for any of you new smiths out there, be aware of galvanized steel.
Can't speak for the world at large, but by my experience with the mining sector in Chile, their standards to not accidentally poison workers are probably along the lines of "it'll be fine".
Ah... radioactive isotopes! Mmmmm!
Working in chemistry labs is the modern day natural selection oh lord
Not a blacksmith but a former welder. I think most chemists would be shocked at the normalization of toxic fume exposure, especially to things like chromium (from stainless) and aluminum vapors. I was always very careful and wore a respirator, but we basically never used fume extraction. we theoretically had a couple of portable extractors around the shop, but they were huge and always stored in inconvenient locations because the layout of the shop had not been designed with their use in mind, so no one used them. because we were using processes with inert gas shielding, no one liked to keep the bay doors open either except on really hot days because the drafty air would mess up our gas. As a result, the air in that shop would become thick with welding fumes. The aluminum always smelled the worst. Once or twice I remember welding aluminum when I had forgotten my respirator and ending up with blueish-black aluminum oxide in my boogers when I went to blow my nose later. Other guys weren't nearly as careful as me though. There was a saying that they didn't need a respirator because everything was filtered through a cigarette, or that tar built up in the lungs would protect against fumes. Many of my coworkers were old and many had health problems - one guy had COPD, but it didn't stop him from smoking like a fish and wearing no respirator.
Thats metal, in your lungs!
when I was doing blacksmithing as a hobby, I had a VERY scuffed forge. made it myself from an old charcoal grill, a hairdryer and a bunch of pipe sections. got steel white-hot so it worked well.
one day I was working on something and on my upswing the head of my hammer broke off and time slowed. I had hot metal in my left hand and the handle in my right, so I did the thing any genius would. tried catching the head with my arm. 3lb head proceeded to hit the fuck out of my right forearm and cause a hairline fracture that I didn't go to the doctor for.
all in all, made a few fugly-yet-functional knives
Melting point of AM241 is 1100° C. The source is plated in gold foil I think, and so it should be reasonable stable being heated under 220° may not get lung cancer after all....may...
I worked in a place and needed some solvent, I went to the flammables cabinet to get it and noticed there were bottles of acid stored alongside the flammable solvents so I immediately raised it with the manager in charge of the lab and he told me....
"The safety office told me I had to store the acids in there."
(I could rant here... but you can draw your own conclusions.)
That safety officer doesn’t sound very safe
2:50 I’m too lazy to look up the actual concentrations used, but the reason for using mercaptans is that our noses are _insanely_ sensitive to them. It takes extremely minute concentrations for us to notice them, which is why we add them to fuel gases (propane, natural gas, etc) so we can easily detect leaks before they are explosion hazards. We can detect them at concentrations below 1ppb.
I've vaporized zinc out of brass but that's about the most exciting thing I've done with metalworking
2:54 Methyl mercaptan is insupportable smelly in incredible tiny amounts, it is the gas used to give propane and butane smell so we can detect gas leaks. Once here in São Paulo, Brazil where I live (here in bottled gas we use a mix of butane/propane as the piped gas is natural gas) a tank truck filled with methyl mercaptan overturn in a main highway, the gas company and the firefighter received thousands of calls, some from people 10km away from the accident. At those concentrations is very improbable it will be toxic.