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I have lots of chemistry horror stories to tell. This is the saddest one. Andi (not her real name) was one of my co-workers in chemistry grad school, one of the most prestigious in the USA. We arrived in the same incoming first year class. Most of the class was fresh-faced 21 year-olds straight out of their bachelor's degree. I had worked for a couple years in an industrial research lab, so I was a couple years older than most. Andi had been teaching high school science class and she was in her late 30's and single. Andi had that self-reliant spirit, and she was ambitious. She had something to prove to the world. She gladly took on a project involving a very difficult molecule to synthesize, a cyclic oligosaccharide. The yields are very low and you can only isolate milligram quantities if you're lucky. It's probably some of the most brutal organic chemistry out there. When we had our weekly group meetings, other students were able to list off their accomplishments easily, but Andi would usually come up short on results. I felt kind of bad for her, so I tried to help her out. She showed me that she had to keep her reaction temperature at -20°C, which is hard to maintain. It's too warm for dry ice but too cold for an ice bath. So she'd maintain the temperature using an acetone bath and periodically adding dry ice to maintain a constant temperature. And these reactions could take days. She would attend to her experiment like a nurse to a dying patient. So she was trapped in the laboratory. I had a few thermocouple-switched heaters I used for growing crystals very slowly. They're great, you can keep the temperature within a degree, and it could power a cooling or heating device when the temperature got out of range. You just dial in the temperatures, and it handles the boring stuff for you. And this was a well-funded lab, and our professor would get you whatever you needed for your work. I offered her the use of one of mine, so she could leave the lab and let the machinery do her job for her. She refused, she just didn't trust it. She had to do it herself. It was our second year in grad school, and I could tell Andi wasn't handling it very well. A postdoc co-worker and my girlfriend and I convinced her to get out of the lab one Friday night to have a double date at an Italian restaurant downtown. We had a great time, it was probably the most fun she'd had in months. Just one week later we got the news. Andi had died of cyanide poisoning. She didn't use cyanide as a reagent in her reactions; she didn't have to die. I would have done anything to help her keep a sane work/life balance. I had no idea she was that far down the black hole of nihilism. She tried to make it look like it was a laboratory accident. But I've worked with large quantities of cyanide and except for a fleeting whiff of HCN, it was just another reagent. I attended her funeral, and I confessed to her sister, this wasn't an accidental poisoning. This incident makes me sad and angry. How did my thesis advisor allow this to happen? Was there any way we could have intervened? Why did Andi try to disguise her suffering to everyone? Why wouldn't she accept help from a friend? We were all in a competitive environment, cranking out the publications at a breakneck pace. There are just so many unanswered questions.
I’m so sorry to hear this - mental health problems are a problem for everyone, and it’s important to keep that in mind any time we are upset at someone - we don’t know what people are going through, and we could be the force of good that keeps them pushing through the struggles of life 😢
Wow, that's a real shame. My heart breaks hearing about someone with such a great soul who got that depressed biting off more than they could chew. I'm sure we've all been burned by a project that beat our spirits. She probably would have made an outstanding chemist if she had had good mentorship to grow and learn rather than get sucked down the hole when stuck against an impossible task. Thank you for sharing her story. Let it remind all of us to jealously guard our mental health.
@@MrKotBonifacy Wow. This may legitimately be the most sexist screed I've seen in actual years. Given this is the internet, that takes some doing. I see why *you're* still single, obviously. Many reasons, in fact. You appear to have actually used the term "womenfolk" in an unironic manner. The typical joke here is to ask if you think women are a different species, but given the rest of your rant you may genuinely believe that. There are so, so many other things to point out in the horrific, noxious mess you spewed onto this webpage, but that's the one that jumped out at me first, really. Like how the KKK leaders called themselves "grand wizards" and similarly stupid things.
Had a guy walk in at the bar I work and order a double whiskey at 10am, i as him ‘do you wanna talk about it?’ Turns out his computer bricked and the hard-drive fragmented so he lost everything. This man was a PhD student and because he didn’t back up his thesis AND HIS DATA!?!? The man lost 2 years of research and wasted a 45k grant.
@@johndeaux8815no, they're in a superposition of both skive and dead. (actually theyre its was a thought experiment to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to apply particle physics to a macroscopic scale)
That dead cat story is definitely plausible. I have a friend who works in biology and through some weird circumstances I still don't fully understand, she ended up carrying a frozen horse head in a camping cooler.
Cat dissection is a real thing, I’ve had substitute teachers and bio teachers in high school mention needing to do it as well as adults mentioning it being part of advanced biology classes at the high school level. I’ve also heard they do whole pigs at an even higher level
I had a whole traumatic experience my senior year of high school in the Anatomy lab where my best friend and I had to pull fat out of a dead cat. This poor beast was so fat we were at least 3 days behind everyone else just because of how much fat we had to pull out to even remotely identify organs
my dad told me a story about how back in his college days in a food science focused microbio class, the professor was out of the room and he was getting frustrated with using a pipette bulb to move around some staphylococcus aureus cultures. therefore, he decided to mouth pipette them. this goes great until the professor comes in, goes “what the fuck are you doing,” and my dad in his surprise inhales a mouthful of densely populated s. aureus culture. the professor was like “usually i’d fail someone for doing something this dumb, but you’ll be getting enough punishment in about an hour and a half as it is. get some gatorade and brace yourself” nothing like a healthy dose of staph toxin to teach you to not mouth pipette ever again
It blows my mind that all these labs shut off their fumehoods automatically?? If they're worried that much about money, just make it coin operated lmao
My guess: worries about overtaxing resources spent on HVAC and electricity -- with as much consideration given to the fume hoods of chemistry as to the powered chalkboards in the mathematics department. (Nobody ever keeled over from a toxic number.) Is it against the law at universities to think?
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 Considering that there probably are regulations for labs saying you need a constant air flow when storing volatile compounds, it would be a pretty horrific fine if this was told a safety inspector
I thought as a kid that chemists and biologists work 24/5 in the lab and use the shower heads present in the lab as seen in a internet picture once to wash themselves for a bit then work again.
I've done some experiments like that, and we had a folding lawn chair to take naps in the lab. It's not the norm, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
This jogged another of my memories where lab glasses *did* save the day. I was helping a colleague clean some rhizon samplers, which basically consists of using a luer-lock syringe to backwash the rhizon with dilute nitric acid, followed by water. This requires fairly significant pressure on the syringe to do with any kind of efficiency. We had several hundred to do, so we were just sitting across the lab bench from one-another and chatting while we worked. At one point, she apparently didn't fully twist the luer-lock into place before pushing on the syringe, and it let go when she applied pressure. The thing went whizzing across the room like a rocket and missed my face by inches, spreading a fine mist in its wake. There was a moment of silence, followed by, "...was that the acid?" "...yeah." "Okay, then. I'm gonna go wash my face."
I have lots of chemistry horror stories to tell. Here's one of them. The guys down the hall were setting up a 20L tetrahydrofuran (THF) still in the fume hood with sodium metal and benzophenone, for use in their air-sensitive reactions. They kept on adding sodium and it kept getting "eaten up", which is usually a sign of a bad batch of THF with too much dissolved water. I would have dried it over molecular sieves first, but our big-brained heroes (one was a postdoc!) chose instead to add potassium metal to really get after the problem! I hope you all know what happens when you're heating sodium and potassium metal together. They melt to form NaK alloy, which is a liquid metal that's far more reactive than either by itself. It was so reactive that the whole freaking still detonated with a loud report that shook the building. Glass shrapnel, flaming THF and NaK flew everywhere, made worse because the fume hood window was up, not down. The still next to it went up in flames as well. Someone pulled the alarm, so I grabbed my notebooks and hustled outside. Then the fire department arrived, which is when hilarity ensued. There were balls of flaming NaK rolling all over the floor. Here's a bit of advice - when the fire fighters show up, you have to stay there and guide them, because they're not trained to deal with chemical fires, but hopefully you are. The fire fighters saw these flaming balls of NaK on the floor and decided to blast them with water. Of course, they would explode and divide into smaller balls of NaK, still on fire. Our heroes survived the incident, but it took quite a bit of surgery to remove the glass shrapnel and remediate the flame damage they took. I'm sure they really needed that clean THF right away, but they made a terrible choice. I've prepared plenty of dry, oxygen-free THF stills before without incident.
Good lord that last one is nuts. The lab management failed on so many levels there. Even if you _insist_ on automatically shutting off power to your lights and fume hoods at a set time, the _very least_ you could do to guarantee your lab workers' safety is to have the lab end well before that shutoff time. Forcing people to work until _just_ before the moment it suddenly gets very dangerous is just asking for horrible accidents. It's not hard to argue that the two most important things you need to work safely and effectively in a lab is 1) the ability to see what you're doing and 2) the ability to breathe safely and comfortably. Taking both of those things away simultaneously, not to mention suddenly like with a power cut, is going to mess up every single layer of your operation. I have no idea what could motivate someone to make a daft decision like that. Even if you don't give a toss about the health and safety of your lab workers (sadly an all too common occurrence), you're actively causing them to make mistakes by startling them, blinding them and gassing them all at the same time, inadvertently ruining hours, days or even weeks or months of work.
The sad thing is, I doubt that the automatic shutoff even saved much money. Some idiot manager was convinced by an idiot bean counter to prioritize saving a minimal amount of money over student, staff and faculty safety.
Oh God, there's a true horror story on MrBallen's channel about a dude who got trapped in an autoclave. I hated large autoclaves before, but now I super-hate them.
@@EvonixTheGreatest usual parameters in a microbiological autoclave are 121 deg c and maybe 30' if i remember right. i'd expect the lobster to be pretty mushy and bare any flavour. but hey, dont take my word, better give it a try and let me know!
Never underestimate the density of solvent vapor. If you stand in front of a fume hood with sash open, heavier toxic vapors like CS2 or C2N2 will escape. Also, multiple fume hoods in one room often conflict.
aren't lab air supposed to be balalanced, with more air in then hoods pull, so this would not happen? Otherwise they of course conflict. I am not a chemist, engineering only, I think chemists are supposed to be taught things like densities or their fume hoods work :) but ok, I do undestand, we mechies, were not taught enough chemistry :)
@@mechadrake That actually sounds reasonable. However I do wonder about the engineering of labs that are supposed to have fume hoods installed, whether the building engineers or architects even do the math. This would, to me, be a matter of building code that inspectors should be checking ("your HVAC isn't allowing enough fresh air for all those hoods"), but how many inspectors are familiar with this realm? And even if technically there was enough fresh air allowed by the HVAC, that doesn't mean that a certain arrangement of HVAC inlets and hoods couldn't still starve one another, as air does have some viscosity.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 My school's Chemistry Building was built for the 1902 "Exposition." In the mid 1970s, all the "new" (1967+) buildings were engineering (including the reactor) or medical.
this one doesn't involve me personally, but it happened at my workplace about 10 years ago I was working for a large cosmetics and toiletry manufacturer, who were getting into financial hard times, so they brought in a load of consultants (angels of death) to advise how best to save on expenditure at the time, bulk liquids (think, e.g. shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste etc., on a multi-ton scale) were mixed by the manufacturing department, and there was a separate pre-weigh department who weighed out all the ingredients for batches, received incoming deliveries of chemicals, maintained the tank farm (where bulk raw materials, e.g. sodium laureth sulphate, glycerine, mineral oil etc. were stored in 10- or 20-ton silos) and so on one of the consultants' big-brained ideas was to make the pre-weigh department redundant and have the manufacturing department do their job as well; this caused a lot of stress and overwork in manufacturing, and more than a few avoidable errors the situation came to a head when one of the manufacturers took a delivery of bulk raw material, but forgot to check the valve at the bottom of the tank was closed before pumping in the liquid net result: 8 tons of ammonium lauryl sulphate dumped into the tank farm - sticky, foamy, smelly and very messy needless to say, they got the pre-weighers back very soon after that
The 250 gallon reactor belching out 15,000 gallons of NH3 story is one of those basic mistakes we should all learn to guard against. I first saw it in college O-chem lab, with our introduction to Grignard chemistry. The students (mostly pre-med with a few chemistry majors) had all flame dried their flasks, added magnesium turnings, ether (not handed out until all flames were extinguished, since this was done on the bench, rather than in hoods), reflux condensers, drying tube, and addition funnel of alkylbromide. Despite explicit instructions and warnings to be sure the reaction had been initiated (with a few drops of alylbromide, iodine crystals and using a glass stirring rod to crunch up the Mg turnings) before slowly adding the remainder of the alkylbromide, about half of the students managed to add all of the alkylbromide without initiating the reaction. And, a few minutes later, all of those reactions erupted like a chain of volcanoes (small scale, so no injuries, but quite a few broken condensers and addition funnels and some stains on the ceiling). The use of slow addition of reagents to regulate the rate of highly exothermic reactions only works if the reaction is actually initiated, otherwise it creates a potential bomb.
@@Kirt44 This was a while back, fall of '78 or spring of '79, but if I remember correctly I think it was propyl bromide to give the propyl Grignard which was then reacted with acetophenone which would give 2-phenyl-2-pentanol.
Not really that related but way back when I was in middle school I was obsessed with exotic thermite reactions. One day I decided to grind up a pound of sand box sand (I took from school),aluminum and KNO3 to boost the heat of the reaction. I wanted to make elemental silicon. I lit it off during my moms dinner party in the barbecue which I had converted into the thermite pit. It shot off really pretty purple flames and a cloud of smoke bigger than several houses composed of potassium and aluminum oxides was blown across the neighborhood. I definitely freaked out my grandpa when the whole backward was shrouded in smoke. I did recover elemental silicon which I still have to this day, I was a wild and dumb kid. I also made metallic chromium, iron, silicon and boron through the same method. (Also broke a bromine ampoule one time). On another occasion I dumped a bag of iron (ii)(iii) oxide on the carpet at my dads, a large black stain still remains to this day and my dad still is salty.
I've shared this one before but I feel like it fits this format very well. So there's a story a lab supervisor once told me. Two undergrad students were performing an experiment for the physical chemistry course. I don't know if it's a general thing but at my university, physchem experiments tend to be tedious and boring like measuring the surface tension of bubbles. I suppose it's part of the reason why the supervisor tends to leave you and your lab mate alone in the lab for a couple of hours and come back when you're finished. Now, the flaw here is you trust undergrads to not get into any weird shit, which backfired that day, because guess what, they got bored too. So the supervisor comes back and walks in on one of the students with his pants down and his d*ck on the analytical balance. I can't imagine that any amount of solvent will wash away the PTSD of working with this balance ever again.
I've heard of guys comparing length measurement of their manhood, but not weight. I have measured mine (no I won't give numbers), but not in a group setting. Besides, I don't think you're going to get an accurate weight unless you cut it off, which, I don't think most guys are going to do.
In our first o-chem lab I had to distill a bunch of acetyl chloride for the whole group. This went quite well and the flasks were stoppered, sealed with parafilm, wrapped in aluminium foil, put in bowls and then stored in the freezer. The problems arose when it came time to clean up about one month later. Opening the freezer I noticed that despite the parafilm, all of the aluminium foil had turned into a weird grey sludge at the bottom of the bowls and the metal clips securing the stoppers had all become green and extremely brittle. Despite wearing gloves I was hesitant to touch the grey goo, which made handling the flasks a bit difficult. The stopper on the last flask (still about half full) was stuck so when I pulled on it without properly holding the flask, I got a bunch of acetyl chloride all over my hands and part of my forearms. As soon as I began washing it off I felt a sharp stinging in my nose and this disgusting wave of vinegar hit me. My skin was perfectly fine but both the lab and my lab coat smelt like vinegar for a few days.
more time in a lab is less time in a car! :D I still hold cars great danger to life, despite other dangers, lol (despite that my job is now driving tractors and cars)
9:50 June 1988 - Workers in a plating plant in Auburn, Indiana were cleaning a tank containing zinc cyanide when someone decided to use hydrochloric acid. Sadly, the result was 4 Dead, and 20 injured.
My undergrad biochem professor was an interesting guy. He's old enough to remember when mouth pipetting was apparently common!? Also, he told us that chloroform tastes green.
Secondhand story, so take with a grain of salt. Our x-ray crystallographer's previous workgroup used to work on extremely sensitive stuff and they noticed recurring contamination in all reactions when they used diethyl ether. Now, scientists that they were, after finding the problem's source, they tried to identify what was inhibiting their reactions to try and rectify it. The contamination was only trace amounts, so they took a whole bunch of the diethyl ether, rotovap'd it to concentrate the impurity to dryness and found what they ended up with to be crystalline. Having an x-ray specialist available, they naturally took the crystals there and had him check. Turns out they had ended up with about 100mg of peroxide crystals formed from unstabilized Et2O. Needless to say, the crystallographer wasn't too pleased about an explosive crystal sitting in the center of his half-a-million dollar x-ray diffractometer. Nothing happened, but I was told they were rather apprehensive of moving the flask after finding out and called the disposal specialist immediately. Lesson to take away from this: Careful when working with unstabilized ethers, and don't try to concentrate the residue if you're not certain of what said residue might be.
A few years back we got an emergency call from an industrial complex with multiple small companies on it. The ventilation system caught fire and it spread to the building. That was all the info give to us, so we arrived and started to pry open the doors as the only other guys there at night were security and they had no keys for the building. For the next part keep in mind we have no idea what the building is for and we are volunteer firefighters without any chemistry background. We went in and started to extinguish the fire while the others opened the roll doors and set up lighting etc. With all the smoke we couldnt see anything so we didn't notice the burned IBC containers in the back. I was on the second rotation inside and when we had to return to get new air we noticed something odd. The rubber on our boots was melting and the traffic cone we placed in the middle of the room for our radio repeater was also melting. While wondering why the other guys where pulling multiple empty burned looking ibc containers out of the hall. Turns out the guys working didnt care much for the security protocol. Instead of storing their chemicals in the warehouse with a automatic fire extinguishing system and warning signs on the building that there are chemicals inside they just kept it all in their working area. In the end we learned that there where 3x 1000 L IBC's with concentrated sodium hydroxide solution which turned itself into an aerosol trough the heat. And a mix of about ten different chemicals which combined where another 1200 liters. The guys of us that were inside where mostly fine since we had our own air, but the others outside where not so lucky. We used big fans to clear the smoke out of the building not knowing that the air was full of chemicals. All the guys outside had to be treated for chemical burns in their airway, 4 had severe symptoms and where moved to the ER immediately and18 had mild chemical burns in their throat & airway. This could have gone way worse if we didn't immediately created an hazard zone once we noticed it. And all of that just because some industrial chemists were to lazy to move their chemicals every day in the morning and before closing. The company went bankrupt after it, they had to pay for the removal of the contaminated soil around the building and multiple fines. Including fines for the wrong storing, endangering others, decontaminating all out firefighter equipment + vehicles and more.
If you’re just going to turn the fume hoods off at a curfew time, at least have the decency to set hungry attack dogs loose in the halls to attack chemists for being in the building too late. Cutting off fume hood usage doesn’t send a clear enough message, and any chemists that get hurt or die will probably damage lab equipment in the process. With my proposal, you can at least pretend to be following the same logic of dissuasion as the death penalty instead of just waiting for pointless, preventable accidents to happen
The dogs with bees in their mouths who spit bees out when they bark at you... I'm training several now and they're only $100,000 per year licensing fee - put your deposit in my mailbox today, men need not apply.
I kind of agree that DCM smells minty in small amounts in a large space since I had a small accident like that as well but not quite as bad, I smelled it and soon left the room to let it dissipate out the window. I occasionally do home chem. Cant wait for collage!!!
I did cat dissections in bio so that is certainly possible. It was actually quite interesting since they were all cats who had been suffering from terminal health problems and we got to see the affects on gross anatomy. I wish we had had time to do histological examinations but we did not.
My dad has a story from when he was in college. It was a long time ago and he wasn't super involved with it so I don't know any specifics. Apparently some idiot left his experiment with nitrates running while he went to get lunch at Wendy's. He blew out a wall and through the whole building a loud phoomf sound could be heard. Luckily no one was there when it happened and the reaction blew itself out, but I can't imagine coming back from lunch to see several emergency vehicles convening on your lab.
I appreciate how edited the warning on the box in the thumbnail by crossing out the NUTS and replacing it with CATS? even though the text is so small it's illegible without zooming in
@@That_Chemist To do that, go to Layers -> Rotate/Zoom and roll the little sphere around. Or input numbers manually. Though the text would still be too small to read unless you made the box waaay bigger haha
hm delicious cancer i mean chromic acid a thing i didnt tell when i told the NaOH story is that a single drop fell in my arm, i didnt notice it, there is a small little hole still healing unrelated to the this NaOH story but once i got a NaOH burn in my finger, i think 1-2 months ago, small burn, again, apparently still didnt fully heal, or both are scars to remind me of the importance safety and ppe, forever once i tought i would maybe would have to workeitu cyanide for a future project, fortunatelly i dont
I got NaOh solution under my wedding ring somehow, I assume there must have been a hole in my glove. Strong bases burn you faster and worse than acids.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 thankfully i never got an acid burn or a really bad chemical burn but that's interesting hopefully i dont end up finding out how fast acid burns skin or eyes edit: i already know how NaOH under my nails, in my fingers, in my mouth and in my eyes feel i dont need anymore my god
The worst experience I had in a lab was when one group was having trouble getting samples prepared for analysis, so I was asked to help out for a week. I was new, and not fully trained, so I was happy to help out and learn something new. Turns out this group was processing pig tissue samples to determine if the compound, or it's metabolites, were being distributed in the pig and if they were building up or being cleared. In order to track the chemical and concentration accurately, if was fairly radioactive. I can't remember how radioactive, I just remember it was much higher than what is I was normally working with to dose cultured cells. When I found this out, I figured there would be some highly specialized machinery in a hood to pulverize the samples, or we would be cutting then into smaller pieces and using chemicals for the rest. But no, we were just blending them on bench with cheap Walmart blenders and and food processors. The roughly 1 to 3 cubic inch chunks of pig had to be blended while frozen so that the later tests would be accurate. Thus, I found myself pouring liquid nitrogen over radioactive chunks of pig, putting it into a blender with dry ice (to keep it frozen during blending, it would sublimate of in the freezer) and praying the cheap carafe wouldn't crack open as I felt the chunks violently strike the side of the carafe as they broke down. Thankfully, they say least used metal carafes. This mostly worked, except for the skin samples (with the hair and fat still attached). The fat just didn't fully freeze, so the dull blades would get like 2mm in the cube and jam. So for every 3 seconds of blending you would have to stop and try to pry the fat off the blade with probably 20lbs to 30lbs of force or more while trying not to have any shoot off onto you once it released. This slowed things way down, and the person I was helping was extremely inpatient. It was not uncommon for me to see poofs of powdered dry ice shoot out of her carafe (hopefully with no sample) as she was rushing to do this, and she sometimes would splash solvents when cleaning out the carafe between each of the hundreds of samples. After a few long days of this, and her not getting any better despite warnings from me and several supervisors, I told my boss I had had enough, I wasn't hired to this, and that I'd never process samples like this again. I know that it can be done this way safely, but only when being careful and not rushed. Moral of the story: always say you're busy until you know what you're getting into. That probably goes for any job, but especially this. PS The person I was helping was moved to another group, one that didn't work with radiolabeled compounds.
Getting high on solvents? I've heard it from someone I know using paint stripper in a closed off room on tiled walls or something. He proceeded to put a cig in his mouth and was hit by his colleague before he burned the place down. He got some fresh air and they finished without incident from that moment.
Most expensive mistake I ever heard of was an undergrad not being 100% sure that there was no triton-X (soap used to lyse cells) is his sample used for DNA sequencing. Turns out triton-X bricks the 500.000€ sequencing machine… this is why you listen to your TA’s prior to lab work.
Ah, the bit about autoclaving Stuff Not Meant To Be Autoclaved reminds me of why my cheap cautery pen (medicine, not chemistry, not a professional/student in either of those...) got trashed. They're meant to be single-use sterile and disposable, but the body is aluminum and the end caps and switch are Nylon 66 so they're safe to autoclave and reuse, and they sell replacement nichrome tips for them for a reason. Likewise, they take a standard alkaline AA battery which can also be autoclaved along with them (you have to use a slow cooldown not a rapid vent so the electrolyte doesn't boil and rupture, but it's otherwise safe to autoclave them) but I accidentally left the battery IN the cautery pen instead of in the bag WITH it and discovered that while Nylon 66 doesn't MELT in the autoclave, it definitely SOFTENS and the spring pressure from the battery contacts was enough to push out and permanently ruin BOTH end caps while the nylon was soft and malleable. Damn things cost 12 whole dollars and keep disappearing in shipping cause USPS thinks they're vape pens half the time...
@@That_Chemist It's a cautery pen, for cauterizing/sealing blood vessels during surgery, small wounds in first aid, or for removing skin tags and warts and such. It's basically a AA battery with a push button and a piece of nichrome wire that gets hot, so you can cauterize things while having something that's portable, cordless, sterile, and heats up/cools down fast. Definitely a lot nicer than heating up paper clips with a Bic lighter anyway, but tends to chew through cheap grocery store batteries pretty fast.
That DCM comment reminded me of this. May or may not have used a pasteur pipette head and air nozzle at the central bench (at just the right angle) to quickly finish my lower ochem tasks since the goal was to get samples for melting. We had a vacuum line at the hoods but it was my understanding from my biotech training (that happened at the same time) to use a trap with the vacuum and I didn't want to slowly gas whatever basement the pump would be exhausting into or contaminate the pump by being stupid. Any sort of recrystallization or salting out procedure on our side of the lab (2 hoods, 4 students) without being stopped by the TA, other than certain procedures where we were explicitly told to keep doing what we're doing in the hood. The procedure was fast enough to freeze our gloves to the flask sometimes, but it did save a lot of time compared to the hotplate alternative. I don't feel anything necessarily guilty about what happened, but those tubes just barely reached the bottom of the hood sash, and it's really whoever cut those tubes or designed this hybrid lab where the lines only work at the bench who indirectly taught a room what DCM smelled like...
16:35 That definitely sounds like a money-related problem. Penny-pinchers in accounting have been given authority over everything else, while the senior chem department staff are too busy defending the department from layoffs to have the time and political capital to also defend lab safety practices.
A combination of timers and motion sensing switches might help if the concern was to avert wasting HVAC resources. As long as students are still in the room, the lights should stay on and the fume hoods keep going. And the fume hoods should go back on in time to clear the air for the first class in the morning.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 That's awful complicated for people who only see and care about the numbers on the power bill. More importantly, it's difficult for the accountants to verify and enforce if it is being "wasted" as far as they're concerned. "Turn on at 8am, turn off at 10pm something something you should've finished up and locked up the lab before 10 pm anyway." is much easier to enforce than actually trying to figure out if using it late in the night was actually necessary.
One of my fellow undergrad students told me he tried pippeting 30mL of concentrated HCl with his mouth, because he saw it in a documentary and wanted to try it himself. I still don't know why he thought it was a good idea.
Funny the title of this reminds me of this old chestnut of a joke.. So Heisenberg, Schrodingerer and Ohm are in a car, They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?" "No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies. The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!" The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?" "We do now, asshole!" shouts Schrodinger. The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists.
A story from hobby. I was doing some wet photographs. You know,, the ones that are physically exposed with light to photographic paper from film. I was doing some selenium protection for some. I knocked over a dish with couple liters of (probably sodium selenide) liquid. Being all over the floor and feet, you cannot escape being wet with it. After only a couple of seconds there was a weird and very strong metallic taste in my mouth. No other effects but the moments of thinking "is this dangerous" were not that great. [Note to myself: do not work in socks only with chemicals] I also had once a old bottle of sulphide toner for photos that I opened. You probably guessed it already. The most strong smell of H2S I've ever had. A quick retreat and treating the waste later on outside, just to be safe. Great that I never open any canisters near me. It is always a good habbit. Also knowing the first second what the smell was could have been very valuable.
In the third or so lab we did in undergrad, meant for all those, who haven't had lab experience before to get to know equipment and procedures, we (15 students) rotated through the different tasks each week. One of the tasks was working with gas generators, cooling mixtures and the fumehood. We should generate SO2 (bp -10°C) by decomposition of Na2S2O5 in H2SO4, make a cooling mixture by combining 400g of ice and 133g of NaCl (about -21°C, cool enough to liquify SO2), and then liquify the SO2 in an U-tube using the mixture. Our pretty strict and unfriendly supervisor always checked if we were building the apparatus right before we started, and then left to work in her office across the hall. After a while, while working on a different task, I suddenly feel a weird pressure sensation in my chest and start coughing a little, but go back to work without saying anything. After five more minutes everyone is coughing so the supervisor comes back in kind of a panic, because she heard us. Turns out the girl built her apparatus perfectly, but made the cooling mixture from 400g of NaCl and 133g of ice, all while not turning on the fumehood. So the supervisor switched on every fumehood in the lab and sent us outside. We still had to come back finish the rest.
Okay, I think I'm going to throw my hat in the ring as well. Back when I was in my second semester of chemistry (four years ago now) and I had an accident with sodium hydroxide at home. I had bought some NaOH for an acid base extraction I wanted to perform at home. Additionally I used it to clean occasionally. Nothing bad ever came of that or my extraction. Later however, my girlfriend at the time complained about our clogged pipe in our shower, and I thought why not just use the NaOH. Since I've used it at the university and in my previous experiments I've known that NaOH likes to cake together, which I really didn't want to happen in our pipes. So I got my magnetic stirrer, got a huge glass jug throw a large stirrbar into it and started to dissolve the NaOH. I then went out of the kitchen to watch an episode of a show we were watching. I made three mistakes right there. 1. Was that I left my caustic solution unattended in a kitchen. 2. The experienced chemist might have already caught on to. 3. I forgot to turn the heating element of the magnetic stirrer off. As there wasn't a thermometer plugged in, and it was a rather old one it just started heating at full blast. At the end of the episode I went back into the kitchen to get the hydroxide and pour it down the drain, I then noticed that there was sizzling on the heating plate. I noticed that it was hot and wanted to lift the glass up and away from the heat. I didn't even really think about why it was sizzling, but as soon as I lifted the glass I was rudely reminded that sodium hydroxide dissolves glass, especially hot sodium hydroxide, one Liter of which was now flooding my kitchen as the entire bottom of the Maßkrug just plopped out of there. The next hour or so I was frantically trying to get the pH of my kitchen under 10 again, using every towel I could find. I basically ran from where the sodium hydroxide was intended to go - the shower, to the kitchen and back. Filling the towels with my aqueous catastrophe and then trying to clean the towels and myself. Mind you almost naked with the exception of a pair of eye protection and my boxer briefs as I took a shower every five minutes or so (human-fat-soap already included). Luckily I didn't get any sort of permanent damage. My skin was itchy for two days or so, but frequent moisturizing helped with that. The biggest damage I took from this was the financial one as parts of the lacquer of kitchen cabinets started to dissolve in that time and formed an in my opinion very nice streaky pattern. My landlord wasn't as ecstatic. So to anyone trying to store sodium hydroxide solution in a glass container: Don't.
(years ago) we have stored 1litre of NaOH solution in a PET bottle in the robotics lab. We needed that to clean 3D prints. PET is quite soluble in dilute NaOH, also it have turned out that our floor was quite soluble too! The circular mark is still visible in the floor.
Years ago I used to work in a soil and water extraction lab where most of the extractions used DCM, but some used MTBE, ether, or hexane. We used gallons of DCM on a daily basis. To me, I wouldn't say that DCM smells minty, but it is more like getting a whiff of ammonia gas where you get something like a cooling sensation. Maybe that's what the person was referring to when they said DCM smells minty?
Anytime someone shares a story of some part of the chem building "shutting down for the night" like that my first thought every time is "Heh heh. Time to casually drop a threat of lawsuit on the university~"
16:18 Yeah... it seems downright irresponsible for fume hoods to be allowed to shut off on a schedule if there is ever going to be anything in them overnight.
If this is in the US, it is likely not legal (after the passage of CFR1910). Without knowing the details of the setup, I can't say more than 'likely', though. 1910 is generally the strongest rule set involved until DEA or ATF rules come into play.
Re dead cats in the bio lab. Some years ago, I was the laboratory director at a very small college, which meant I was in charge of getting waste, both chemical and biological, picked up by the appropriate contractors. Now, I’m a physical chemist and I’m much more comfortable handling hideously toxic chemical waste than biohazard stuff, so I let the bio researchers and students take care of packing their waste most of the time, and I just called the service when their bins were full. One day, the maintenance crew was cleaning out a storage room, and one of the guys comes over to me with a big cardboard box and says “I think this is your department.” He hands me the box, and I open it, and there was a vacuum packed tom cat sprawled on its back in the box, and clearly the seal had been compromised because the cat was completely green in the bag.I threw the box across the hall and spent the next ten minutes retching in the bathroom. Fortunately for me, the bio department got their own lab manager shortly after that, and I didn’t have to deal with dead cats any more.
A few lab events regarding sharps in various biology labs: I was performing a buffer exchange for some antibody I had purified using column chromatography. I was in a rush, and so I grabbed a length of dialysis tubing, grabbed a razor, and held it up and sliced through it like I was using a samurai sword. It wasn't until the buffer I was exchanging into began turning red that I realized I had sliced through my glove, significantly through my ring finger by the middle knuckle. It was deep, but it was such a clean cut that it healed very quickly (still have a scar though). In my third year of grad school, the entire building I worked in had to be retrained on sharps disposals. Apparently someone(s) had been putting used razors and uncapped needles directly in the trash, and several janitorial staff had been injured. I was working in a biological hood and I labeled some tubes with an extra fine sharpie. I capped the sharpie and, without looking, decided to ensure it was closed by slamming the cap down with my thumb. It was, in fact, still uncapped. I felt the sharpie point hit bone.
Yoicks about the janitorial staff, not just cut but exposed to heaven knows what. It's not terribly hard to do the right thing even without the dedicated official sharps containers. Thick plastic jugs like detergent jugs, with their caps duct taped on and labeled, will work, per the EPA produced instructions I got from a veterinarian when I had to administer fluids at home through a needle to an ailing pet. Those can go in the normal trash, assuming it isn't something super dire like COVID-19.
My most visible home chemistry mishap happened when a syringe got clogged and the potassium permanganate solution went everywhere! I was in clothes I specially intended to use for chemistry, so it was not a very big deal that I have covered them in brown spots. The interesting part of the story is that I was only 8 at the time!
This story happened when I was a 3-year undergrad: I had to do some cleaning after some reaction I did. As you'd expect, there was a plenty of tar left which did not dissolve in any organic solvent (mainly, acetone). So I did what I was instructed to do by my supervisor (first year PhD student) - dissolve everything in piranha (conc sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide). I had done it before so it was not a big of a deal. So everything is cleaned except for a glass filter. Me and my supervisor were trying to clean it up by pouring piranha onto the filter and sucking the solution with the water aspirator. It is then my supervisor says "Weird, I see some flames", however, I did not notice anything. The filter was still not clean enough so we poured more piranha. At this moment my supervisor says "I got it. It is an acetone peroxide!". Turned out we did not wash the glassware from acetone properly before pouring the piranha. And we poured all the piranha after washing the glassware into one 2L beaker (there was about 100-200 ml of liquid at this moment). My supervisor was holding the filter on outstretched hand above the 2L beaker. After no more than 5 seconds after she told about the acetone peroxide the loud "BAM! as from a petard happened, the fume hood was covered in smoke. The filter that my supervisor was still holding was all covered in blue flames while there was a giant hole in the beaker. The aftermath cleaning took us a few more hours, but luckily, no one was hurt and no glassware except for this 2L beaker was destroyed. After that incident I always wash glassware with excess of water before pouring any strong inorganics. TL;DR - never ever mix piranha with acetone, even with some trace amounts.
Yikes, the story about the wound reminds me of that incident where a student accidently injected DCM into their finger and didn't seek any medical attention immediately. It's insane how quickly the injection site went from looking relatively harmless to horrific in a few days. It's fairly well known so you'll find some articles if you look it up and might already know about it, though the pictures are not for the lighthearted, would have been cool if the lecturer I learnt this from at least warned us that he was basically going to show us pictures of rotting fingers...
Yeah, I do remember using exactly the same system for storing our n-BuLi. If you were working with it you generally had 20 ml schlenk, which you'd titrate to check molarity preferably before every reaction. Anyway, the place I worked at had crappy syringes, mine spilt a few lm of around 2.3 M BuLi down my hand (leaked from the back side, their plungers are bad). It's not as flammable as expected, just got a slight warm sensation which ceased pretty quickly (if you ever played with flammable aerosauls and lighters, you may have had a similar experience). I just dropped the needle in sand bucket next to me. Really glad I wasn't wearing gloves though, that might have ended a bit less fun.
The fume hood extractor fan in 'my' high school lab has been making a bad roaring sound for a year now. Fan's way off balance, so much is clear. Bearings probably also shot. You can hear the thing (which is way up high on top of an elevator shaft) throughout the whole school yard. But it's just not getting fixed. It still moves plenty of air, but i guess that until it catastrophically fails, popping the breaker or simply catching fire, it won't get fixed at all. Whenever i hear the roar when i arrive at work, i know my chemistry coworker is already at the lab.
DCM smells like pain. It just burns in the nose. On another note it tastes rather nice, beeing sweet not dissimilar to some sugary alcohol beverage. Edit: Just got to the point where the person got DCM in their mouth. Yep, its a realy nice taste.
Oh I remember something In highschool our teacher was demonstrating a electrolysis reaction that produced hydrogen gas so she put a Ballon over the output and we watched it fill slowly. When it was full she grabbed it and held a lighter to it what you have to know about blowing up hydrogen Ballons is that pure hydrogen ain't that bad because there isn't enough oxygen for a good explosion but water electrolysis produces what we in German so lovingly call Knallgas or in English boom gas because it goes boom. Our ears were ringing for the rest of the lessons and our teacher is smart enough not to blow up Ballons in her hands
@@NoLongerBreathedIn I agree. We also worked in a clean room with an autoclave during pharmaceutical technology classes, to make sterile medications. We were asked upfront to leave phones, wallets, keys et cetera outside in a locker.
@@eier5472 I mean, the other stupid mistake in this case was to put any lab class in a clean room that didn't 100% have to be there in the first place.
One of my chem lab professors told the story of when he did research in Russia. Apparently at the time the chemists were a bit slack when it came to lab safety. They both pipetted by mouth and smoked in THE ORGANIC LAB. For those that don’t know, organic compounds are often very flammable. These people were lucky they didn’t cause an explosion.
There would have been smoking allowed everywhere. I think I have seen couple of old professors on youtube that said that. Dangers on so many levels...imagine working in bio lab and accidentally tasting the cultures on a cig :D or spicy toxic organics, or maybe inorganic uranium salts
It’s actually hard to start a fire with a cigarette - some channel demonstrated this with gasoline and a lit cigarette - smoking in labs used to be extremely common
@@That_Chemist That's true. The lighter or match you use to light the cigarette, OTOH, is another story. And for a lot of smokers, lighting the next cigarette after you finish one is done automatically, with very little thought. I have been told by many people, but never tried it myself, that if you drop a lit cigarette into liquid gasoline, it will just go out. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true 99 times out of a hundred, but that hundredth time would be really bad, and if you strike a match or fire a lighter anywhere with a flammable concentration of gasoline vapor, you're going to get a big fire very quickly.
On the other hand, leaving the fumehoods off would mean there's a selection pressure against coming too early. And I think people who are chipper in the morning _should_ be selected against.
9:00 at the time I didn't personally have much experience huffing solvents. That Chemist: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN? That got me chuckling, the way its delivered is brilliant. When I used DCM in D&T back in ye olde days, I remember it didn't really smell of much. It had a vaguely chemically smell, but it was unpleasant to breathe in. Definitely not minty to me. However, it was not pure DCM, it was mixed with other stuff and it was gloopy, sort of custard consistency but sticky and heavy. Used it for bonding acrylic together, which it did very well.
That story at 15:09 is a clusterfuck of bad decisions. Why are you working with volatiles without adequate ventilation? Why are you working at night? (nothing inherently wrong with that, but it often means fewer people around to help in case of accidents) Why are you using enough pressure to turn the column into a missile, and why is it not reasonably secured? Why is your column setup not in a fumehood? Why are you not wearing eye protection? WHY
I cant remember where inheard this story. Lab was using acids to identify an unknown substance. One student had a problem so the teacher looked up his substance. It was glyceryn.
In my high school, a chemistry teacher demonstrated a reaction of copper and nitric acid to produce brown nitrogen dioxide gas. All the students gathered in front of him. After adding the copper and the nitric acid into a test tube, he used his thumb as a stopper to cover it and then shook it. The reaction generated some brown nitrogen dioxide gas as expected. He then moved the test tube, still covered with his thumb, to the front of the students closely to show them the result. "See! This is nitrogen dioxide" he said. He got promoted to the principal before I started my more advanced chemistry class, so I had another chemistry teacher. However, because he loved teaching, he took any chances that my teacher was away to teach my class chemistry. Luckily, there were no experiments.
Yeah I can‘t really smell DCM or Chloroform either, but one time when I had filtered a DCM solution, i foolishly just messed around with the still wet filter paper outside the fumehood (I don‘t remember why but it most certainly was not a good reason). The smell it gave off was quite weird but indeed very minty. Most of the smell just came from what was dissolved in the DCM though, so not even sure that is actually its odor. I‘ve heard people describe the smell of the chlorinated solvents as sweet, but they‘ve never smelled sweet at all to me. One time I blew compressed air through a pasteur pipette that I had used to fill an NMR tube with CDCl3 (I was trying to blow out a piece of cotton that I used to filter it), another absolutely moronic idea. That was the only time chloroform has ever smelled like anything to me but the closest thing to compare it with would have been lighter fluid, definitely not sweet. Idk smell is weird.
Why would anyone poke a head into a fume hood if anyone ELSE was using the hood for ANYTHING? Even as a vent for a lab procedure going on outside of it? Should a sign be taped to the front of the hood "Hood being used as vent -- stay out"?
n-BuLi catching fire? i highly doubt that tbh. The needle flying off and content spraying everywhere also happened to me a few times with the standard 2.5M solution. I even got it on my skin once. Other than stinking and turning hot it doesn't do too much. I often use a mid sized beaker to spray n-BuLi leftovers from the syringe in it and leave it in there. Never in my life have i seen it catching fire, even when in contact with water. Might be the concentration being too low but i dont usually see higher concentrations being used. sec- and t-BuLi (and other things like Me2Zn solutions) are a whole different story though
Alright, not nearly as complex or horrifying as most of these, but here's my favourite story from college. In chem, I sat opposite the labs' doors, which had the stereotypical little window of reinforced glass allowing me to see through into the corridor and further, through the lab opposite's own little glass window. During a lecture I happened to glance out of said window, and Oh Dear Gods. What I _heard_ was the most ungodly whirring, like fifty three giant hornets being shaken violently in an urn. Then a scream, followed shortly afterwards by the sound of glass shattering. What I SAW was a blur of motion past the door windows, and then a container of miscellaneous orange SOMETHING exploding like a paintball against the wall. I started giggling a bit hysterically, because What, that's some looney tunes bs right there, and quickly explained what had just happened to the class who didn't get the visuals on top of the audio, to which the professor sighed and went, in the most deadpan voice imaginable, "Ah. Centrifuge." If the class hadn't been laughing before, we were cackling at that point, and we could hear the lab next door doing the same. Obviously, the professor and a couple of techs left to go assist with the damage control, and I think it was the first real bonding experience my class had together so early in the year. I was mostly terrified of whoever had the strength to yeet a tube of orange mystery liquid with _that much force_ to begin with, so the explanation was actually somewhat of a relief, but... STILL. What I want to know is how on earth this was such a plausible incident that the professor was so unphased by it?! You'd think someone would keep an eye on that after the first MULTIPLE INCIDENTS lmao. Those machines are Expensive and notoriously easy to not balance properly, and when they're in use usually either lecturer or assistant fucking apparate beside it and stand guard like it's their sworn duty, which I mean... Yeah. I guess it kinda is. All I can say is that whoever left the chem students unattended frankly had it coming, worst decision-making skills on the market, clearly. Nobody was hurt, and I found out later from my friend in the lab responsible that the professor had stepped out momentarily to visit storage and someone had just assumed that they should go ahead with their experiment without assistance. It's a relief theirs was the only tube in the machine, as everybody else was reluctant to join in unattended.
11:00 I think its not a good idea not to use cyanide in teaching labs. When are the students supposed to learn how to handle toxic compunds like cyanide if not during their studies?
Have the students handle smelly or intensely coloured compounds instead. It is still possible to notice mistakes in handling, but a mistake will only cause discomfort and humiliation instead of ER trips, permanent injury and death.
@@BlurbFish Yeah that works for really inexperienced students in the first semester but at some point they really should learn to handle the actual dangerous stuff while still being supervised. They are supposed to be experts in handling chemicals. You cant be an expert without real experience. On another note: I cant really think of many instances were someone got crippled or died because of an incident in the lab were the person harmed was not at fault. I dont think its a good idea to deny students in general important experience because of the carelessness of some those few.
@@Seorful I'd think wise experts won't do it unless all the proper ducks are in a row, including non-lame fume hoods and detectors for reasonably expected toxic gases. If a burst of cyanide gas comes out into the room in spite of documented cautions, and the student can't smell it (only some can), an alert should still go off in time to allow an evacuation of the room. Inadequate equipment is as stupid as hazing in a lab. I do assume that none of this is going on in the third world (unlike the bogus papers that TC shows under the "Toxic" heading).
As a beginner student a fellow student was making acetone peroxide for some upcoming day were fireworks were common. The lab supervisor walked to him with an angry face. He did not know what the student was doing and reminded him to wear safety glasses. Always wear your safety glasses! I guess it was common stuff back then. When doing my undergrad labs there was bottle clearly marked as 3 membered acetone peroxide on the shelf. "Only about" 50 or 100g or so but I never went near it or any of the bottles near it. I was also told why the gas bottles had chain around them. Supposedly someone knocked over a full oxygen tank that lost it's regulator. You can guess the rest I presume. I think safety has improved a lot from back then and for a good reason.
This was less than a year ago. For the last year of high school in our chem lessons a friend and I tried to make the loudest explosion with hydrogen as possible, but our chemistry rooms were currently being renovated so we had no supply to hydrogen gas. Everyone knew the experiment, where you fill a tin can completely with hydrogen, you put a small hole in the can and then put some source of fire next to the hole. Then the hydrogen escaping the tin can reacts with the air, generating a hissing sound for about 10 seconds, after which enough air will have gotten into the tin can, allowing the flame from the little hole to strike back into the tin can, making it explode and flying through the air. As we had no hydrogen we had to generate our own. For that we used electrolysis, as we had run out of HCl, which I would normally have used in combination with magnesium, as it is easier. So we generate the hydrogen with electrolysis and run it through a tube into the tin can. Then my friend pulls of the tape from the tin can, opening the hole and I quickly put a glowing splint next to the hole and there instantly was the explosion. No time for us to get back and cover our ears. I hear the loudest PENG I have ever heard in my life and hopefully ever will. And after that peng there first was loud beeping, as if you were flashbanged in a game, followed by complete silence for what felt like an eternity. After 30 seconds i was able to hear like I had just gotten out of a disco. During these 30 seconds I was just like damn, I hope I am not deaf now. My friend was more lucky and only had the problems on one ear. Another friend of mine, who uses to hunt, told me it was certainly louder than a gunshot. After that my friend and I went to the doctor. Both of us luckily still have 100% on both ears and we only had acoustic shocks. The only explaination I can come up with is, that we messed up putting pure hydrogen into the tin can in such way, that we actually had a close to optimal hydrogen to air ratio inside of the tin can. I would like to add though, that we tried to avoid that, by calculating how many mL of the water should have been split into H2 and O2, to fill the tin can with only H2. We even doubled the amount of H2 produced to be on the save side. It probably just took us too long and gave the H2 in the tin can enough time to mix/react with air. Long story short: Got me and a friend an acoustic shock trying to experiment with hydrogen.
I have lots of chemistry horror stories to tell. This is the saddest one.
Andi (not her real name) was one of my co-workers in chemistry grad school, one of the most prestigious in the USA. We arrived in the same incoming first year class. Most of the class was fresh-faced 21 year-olds straight out of their bachelor's degree. I had worked for a couple years in an industrial research lab, so I was a couple years older than most. Andi had been teaching high school science class and she was in her late 30's and single.
Andi had that self-reliant spirit, and she was ambitious. She had something to prove to the world. She gladly took on a project involving a very difficult molecule to synthesize, a cyclic oligosaccharide. The yields are very low and you can only isolate milligram quantities if you're lucky. It's probably some of the most brutal organic chemistry out there. When we had our weekly group meetings, other students were able to list off their accomplishments easily, but Andi would usually come up short on results.
I felt kind of bad for her, so I tried to help her out. She showed me that she had to keep her reaction temperature at -20°C, which is hard to maintain. It's too warm for dry ice but too cold for an ice bath. So she'd maintain the temperature using an acetone bath and periodically adding dry ice to maintain a constant temperature. And these reactions could take days. She would attend to her experiment like a nurse to a dying patient. So she was trapped in the laboratory.
I had a few thermocouple-switched heaters I used for growing crystals very slowly. They're great, you can keep the temperature within a degree, and it could power a cooling or heating device when the temperature got out of range. You just dial in the temperatures, and it handles the boring stuff for you. And this was a well-funded lab, and our professor would get you whatever you needed for your work. I offered her the use of one of mine, so she could leave the lab and let the machinery do her job for her. She refused, she just didn't trust it. She had to do it herself.
It was our second year in grad school, and I could tell Andi wasn't handling it very well. A postdoc co-worker and my girlfriend and I convinced her to get out of the lab one Friday night to have a double date at an Italian restaurant downtown. We had a great time, it was probably the most fun she'd had in months.
Just one week later we got the news. Andi had died of cyanide poisoning. She didn't use cyanide as a reagent in her reactions; she didn't have to die. I would have done anything to help her keep a sane work/life balance. I had no idea she was that far down the black hole of nihilism. She tried to make it look like it was a laboratory accident. But I've worked with large quantities of cyanide and except for a fleeting whiff of HCN, it was just another reagent. I attended her funeral, and I confessed to her sister, this wasn't an accidental poisoning.
This incident makes me sad and angry. How did my thesis advisor allow this to happen? Was there any way we could have intervened? Why did Andi try to disguise her suffering to everyone? Why wouldn't she accept help from a friend? We were all in a competitive environment, cranking out the publications at a breakneck pace. There are just so many unanswered questions.
I’m so sorry to hear this - mental health problems are a problem for everyone, and it’s important to keep that in mind any time we are upset at someone - we don’t know what people are going through, and we could be the force of good that keeps them pushing through the struggles of life 😢
Wow, that's a real shame. My heart breaks hearing about someone with such a great soul who got that depressed biting off more than they could chew. I'm sure we've all been burned by a project that beat our spirits. She probably would have made an outstanding chemist if she had had good mentorship to grow and learn rather than get sucked down the hole when stuck against an impossible task. Thank you for sharing her story. Let it remind all of us to jealously guard our mental health.
@@MrKotBonifacy Wow. This may legitimately be the most sexist screed I've seen in actual years. Given this is the internet, that takes some doing. I see why *you're* still single, obviously. Many reasons, in fact.
You appear to have actually used the term "womenfolk" in an unironic manner. The typical joke here is to ask if you think women are a different species, but given the rest of your rant you may genuinely believe that.
There are so, so many other things to point out in the horrific, noxious mess you spewed onto this webpage, but that's the one that jumped out at me first, really. Like how the KKK leaders called themselves "grand wizards" and similarly stupid things.
Yikes...not a good way to go. It is so hard for me to even guess why she did it. Take care man.
@@MrKotBonifacy jesus
7:35 "he had glass shards and blood all over his face" *reads it in a calm voice*
"and i lost 3 months of research " *reads in panic and fear*
hahaha
best reading practice. He could read horror stories
Had a guy walk in at the bar I work and order a double whiskey at 10am, i as him ‘do you wanna talk about it?’ Turns out his computer bricked and the hard-drive fragmented so he lost everything. This man was a PhD student and because he didn’t back up his thesis AND HIS DATA!?!? The man lost 2 years of research and wasted a 45k grant.
@@MrKotBonifacy simetimes notm some things are lost, financing and timing not available, it might even be worse than months
Anyone who's taken a chemistry class at any level will know the horror of even thinking about losing progress on a research project.
“As long as we don’t check, it might be a box of ALIVE cats still!”
100%
Yeah I caught that one too! Very clever what he did there.
@@That_Chemist50%
@@johndeaux8815 well no theyre its schrodingers cat
@@johndeaux8815no, they're in a superposition of both skive and dead. (actually theyre its was a thought experiment to demonstrate how ridiculous it is to apply particle physics to a macroscopic scale)
That dead cat story is definitely plausible. I have a friend who works in biology and through some weird circumstances I still don't fully understand, she ended up carrying a frozen horse head in a camping cooler.
:(
I guess someone needed some encouragement.
Cat dissection is a real thing, I’ve had substitute teachers and bio teachers in high school mention needing to do it as well as adults mentioning it being part of advanced biology classes at the high school level.
I’ve also heard they do whole pigs at an even higher level
I had a whole traumatic experience my senior year of high school in the Anatomy lab where my best friend and I had to pull fat out of a dead cat. This poor beast was so fat we were at least 3 days behind everyone else just because of how much fat we had to pull out to even remotely identify organs
@@liamlundergan2751 you got Garfield, huh
my dad told me a story about how back in his college days in a food science focused microbio class, the professor was out of the room and he was getting frustrated with using a pipette bulb to move around some staphylococcus aureus cultures. therefore, he decided to mouth pipette them. this goes great until the professor comes in, goes “what the fuck are you doing,” and my dad in his surprise inhales a mouthful of densely populated s. aureus culture. the professor was like “usually i’d fail someone for doing something this dumb, but you’ll be getting enough punishment in about an hour and a half as it is. get some gatorade and brace yourself”
nothing like a healthy dose of staph toxin to teach you to not mouth pipette ever again
oh my god bruh, did he publish his new weight-loss method?
Pipette bulbs are indeed frustrating, I'm very glad to have electric pipette pumps in my lab.
@@save-scum life hack ✨
@@MeneltirFalmaro oh same, pipette guns are life savers
I knew someone was gonna come in with a biology mouth pipetting story. Gaaaaaaah
It blows my mind that all these labs shut off their fumehoods automatically?? If they're worried that much about money, just make it coin operated lmao
lmao
My guess: worries about overtaxing resources spent on HVAC and electricity -- with as much consideration given to the fume hoods of chemistry as to the powered chalkboards in the mathematics department. (Nobody ever keeled over from a toxic number.) Is it against the law at universities to think?
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 Considering that there probably are regulations for labs saying you need a constant air flow when storing volatile compounds, it would be a pretty horrific fine if this was told a safety inspector
Yeah this is the first time I've heard of this, it seems like an obviously terrible and probably illegal idea.
"at the time I didn't personally have much experience huffing solvents" is my favourite part
I thought as a kid that chemists and biologists work 24/5 in the lab and use the shower heads present in the lab as seen in a internet picture once to wash themselves for a bit then work again.
I've done some experiments like that, and we had a folding lawn chair to take naps in the lab. It's not the norm, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.
I've never actually seen that hours/days formart used with anything other than 24/7
@@RyanTosh Same. It short circuited my brain because I thought they were talking about a time signature at first.
least overworked orgchem grad student
This jogged another of my memories where lab glasses *did* save the day. I was helping a colleague clean some rhizon samplers, which basically consists of using a luer-lock syringe to backwash the rhizon with dilute nitric acid, followed by water. This requires fairly significant pressure on the syringe to do with any kind of efficiency. We had several hundred to do, so we were just sitting across the lab bench from one-another and chatting while we worked. At one point, she apparently didn't fully twist the luer-lock into place before pushing on the syringe, and it let go when she applied pressure. The thing went whizzing across the room like a rocket and missed my face by inches, spreading a fine mist in its wake. There was a moment of silence, followed by, "...was that the acid?" "...yeah." "Okay, then. I'm gonna go wash my face."
👀
lmao that short exchange
protective equipment for the win
I have lots of chemistry horror stories to tell. Here's one of them.
The guys down the hall were setting up a 20L tetrahydrofuran (THF) still in the fume hood with sodium metal and benzophenone, for use in their air-sensitive reactions. They kept on adding sodium and it kept getting "eaten up", which is usually a sign of a bad batch of THF with too much dissolved water. I would have dried it over molecular sieves first, but our big-brained heroes (one was a postdoc!) chose instead to add potassium metal to really get after the problem! I hope you all know what happens when you're heating sodium and potassium metal together. They melt to form NaK alloy, which is a liquid metal that's far more reactive than either by itself. It was so reactive that the whole freaking still detonated with a loud report that shook the building. Glass shrapnel, flaming THF and NaK flew everywhere, made worse because the fume hood window was up, not down. The still next to it went up in flames as well.
Someone pulled the alarm, so I grabbed my notebooks and hustled outside. Then the fire department arrived, which is when hilarity ensued. There were balls of flaming NaK rolling all over the floor. Here's a bit of advice - when the fire fighters show up, you have to stay there and guide them, because they're not trained to deal with chemical fires, but hopefully you are. The fire fighters saw these flaming balls of NaK on the floor and decided to blast them with water. Of course, they would explode and divide into smaller balls of NaK, still on fire.
Our heroes survived the incident, but it took quite a bit of surgery to remove the glass shrapnel and remediate the flame damage they took. I'm sure they really needed that clean THF right away, but they made a terrible choice. I've prepared plenty of dry, oxygen-free THF stills before without incident.
Oh my gosh - that is terrible
Woooow...bad choices on bad choices. I bet they learned their lesson though...God I hope so...
Good lord that last one is nuts. The lab management failed on so many levels there. Even if you _insist_ on automatically shutting off power to your lights and fume hoods at a set time, the _very least_ you could do to guarantee your lab workers' safety is to have the lab end well before that shutoff time. Forcing people to work until _just_ before the moment it suddenly gets very dangerous is just asking for horrible accidents.
It's not hard to argue that the two most important things you need to work safely and effectively in a lab is 1) the ability to see what you're doing and 2) the ability to breathe safely and comfortably. Taking both of those things away simultaneously, not to mention suddenly like with a power cut, is going to mess up every single layer of your operation. I have no idea what could motivate someone to make a daft decision like that. Even if you don't give a toss about the health and safety of your lab workers (sadly an all too common occurrence), you're actively causing them to make mistakes by startling them, blinding them and gassing them all at the same time, inadvertently ruining hours, days or even weeks or months of work.
The sad thing is, I doubt that the automatic shutoff even saved much money. Some idiot manager was convinced by an idiot bean counter to prioritize saving a minimal amount of money over student, staff and faculty safety.
@@russlehman2070 It seems the worse safety concerns happen just to save a couple bucks, I swear.
as long as no microbiologists got autoclaved ... LOL
lmao
Oh God, there's a true horror story on MrBallen's channel about a dude who got trapped in an autoclave. I hated large autoclaves before, but now I super-hate them.
@@00muinamir That sounds like a truly horrific way to go out.
If you autoclave a lobster does it taste good?
@@EvonixTheGreatest usual parameters in a microbiological autoclave are 121 deg c and maybe 30' if i remember right. i'd expect the lobster to be pretty mushy and bare any flavour. but hey, dont take my word, better give it a try and let me know!
8:10
Dead cat dissection is actually a fairly common lab that is done at the high school, or collegiate level. I’m 100% sure that was legit.
Never underestimate the density of solvent vapor. If you stand in front of a fume hood with sash open, heavier toxic vapors like CS2 or C2N2 will escape. Also, multiple fume hoods in one room often conflict.
aren't lab air supposed to be balalanced, with more air in then hoods pull, so this would not happen? Otherwise they of course conflict. I am not a chemist, engineering only, I think chemists are supposed to be taught things like densities or their fume hoods work :)
but ok, I do undestand, we mechies, were not taught enough chemistry :)
@@mechadrake That actually sounds reasonable. However I do wonder about the engineering of labs that are supposed to have fume hoods installed, whether the building engineers or architects even do the math. This would, to me, be a matter of building code that inspectors should be checking ("your HVAC isn't allowing enough fresh air for all those hoods"), but how many inspectors are familiar with this realm? And even if technically there was enough fresh air allowed by the HVAC, that doesn't mean that a certain arrangement of HVAC inlets and hoods couldn't still starve one another, as air does have some viscosity.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 My school's Chemistry Building was built for the 1902 "Exposition." In the mid 1970s, all the "new" (1967+) buildings were engineering (including the reactor) or medical.
@@mechadrake Usually okay with both hoods' sashes closed. With one person working is each open hood, then "negative eddies" can occur.
this one doesn't involve me personally, but it happened at my workplace
about 10 years ago I was working for a large cosmetics and toiletry manufacturer, who were getting into financial hard times, so they brought in a load of consultants (angels of death) to advise how best to save on expenditure
at the time, bulk liquids (think, e.g. shampoo, conditioner, toothpaste etc., on a multi-ton scale) were mixed by the manufacturing department, and there was a separate pre-weigh department who weighed out all the ingredients for batches, received incoming deliveries of chemicals, maintained the tank farm (where bulk raw materials, e.g. sodium laureth sulphate, glycerine, mineral oil etc. were stored in 10- or 20-ton silos) and so on
one of the consultants' big-brained ideas was to make the pre-weigh department redundant and have the manufacturing department do their job as well; this caused a lot of stress and overwork in manufacturing, and more than a few avoidable errors
the situation came to a head when one of the manufacturers took a delivery of bulk raw material, but forgot to check the valve at the bottom of the tank was closed before pumping in the liquid
net result: 8 tons of ammonium lauryl sulphate dumped into the tank farm - sticky, foamy, smelly and very messy
needless to say, they got the pre-weighers back very soon after that
Oh no!
that doesn't sound like an angle
So now we've found the real Schrödinger's cat ?!
The 250 gallon reactor belching out 15,000 gallons of NH3 story is one of those basic mistakes we should all learn to guard against. I first saw it in college O-chem lab, with our introduction to Grignard chemistry. The students (mostly pre-med with a few chemistry majors) had all flame dried their flasks, added magnesium turnings, ether (not handed out until all flames were extinguished, since this was done on the bench, rather than in hoods), reflux condensers, drying tube, and addition funnel of alkylbromide. Despite explicit instructions and warnings to be sure the reaction had been initiated (with a few drops of alylbromide, iodine crystals and using a glass stirring rod to crunch up the Mg turnings) before slowly adding the remainder of the alkylbromide, about half of the students managed to add all of the alkylbromide without initiating the reaction. And, a few minutes later, all of those reactions erupted like a chain of volcanoes (small scale, so no injuries, but quite a few broken condensers and addition funnels and some stains on the ceiling). The use of slow addition of reagents to regulate the rate of highly exothermic reactions only works if the reaction is actually initiated, otherwise it creates a potential bomb.
😂what where u making
@@Kirt44 This was a while back, fall of '78 or spring of '79, but if I remember correctly I think it was propyl bromide to give the propyl Grignard which was then reacted with acetophenone which would give 2-phenyl-2-pentanol.
Not really that related but way back when I was in middle school I was obsessed with exotic thermite reactions. One day I decided to grind up a pound of sand box sand (I took from school),aluminum and KNO3 to boost the heat of the reaction. I wanted to make elemental silicon. I lit it off during my moms dinner party in the barbecue which I had converted into the thermite pit. It shot off really pretty purple flames and a cloud of smoke bigger than several houses composed of potassium and aluminum oxides was blown across the neighborhood. I definitely freaked out my grandpa when the whole backward was shrouded in smoke. I did recover elemental silicon which I still have to this day, I was a wild and dumb kid. I also made metallic chromium, iron, silicon and boron through the same method. (Also broke a bromine ampoule one time). On another occasion I dumped a bag of iron (ii)(iii) oxide on the carpet at my dads, a large black stain still remains to this day and my dad still is salty.
Lmao that’s an amazing one
That is the coolest thing I've read in a while. Please make a video and show off your silicon!!
I've shared this one before but I feel like it fits this format very well.
So there's a story a lab supervisor once told me. Two undergrad students were performing an experiment for the physical chemistry course. I don't know if it's a general thing but at my university, physchem experiments tend to be tedious and boring like measuring the surface tension of bubbles. I suppose it's part of the reason why the supervisor tends to leave you and your lab mate alone in the lab for a couple of hours and come back when you're finished. Now, the flaw here is you trust undergrads to not get into any weird shit, which backfired that day, because guess what, they got bored too. So the supervisor comes back and walks in on one of the students with his pants down and his d*ck on the analytical balance. I can't imagine that any amount of solvent will wash away the PTSD of working with this balance ever again.
Funny story, but I couldn’t ever put this in a video lol
I've heard of guys comparing length measurement of their manhood, but not weight. I have measured mine (no I won't give numbers), but not in a group setting. Besides, I don't think you're going to get an accurate weight unless you cut it off, which, I don't think most guys are going to do.
In our first o-chem lab I had to distill a bunch of acetyl chloride for the whole group. This went quite well and the flasks were stoppered, sealed with parafilm, wrapped in aluminium foil, put in bowls and then stored in the freezer. The problems arose when it came time to clean up about one month later. Opening the freezer I noticed that despite the parafilm, all of the aluminium foil had turned into a weird grey sludge at the bottom of the bowls and the metal clips securing the stoppers had all become green and extremely brittle. Despite wearing gloves I was hesitant to touch the grey goo, which made handling the flasks a bit difficult. The stopper on the last flask (still about half full) was stuck so when I pulled on it without properly holding the flask, I got a bunch of acetyl chloride all over my hands and part of my forearms. As soon as I began washing it off I felt a sharp stinging in my nose and this disgusting wave of vinegar hit me. My skin was perfectly fine but both the lab and my lab coat smelt like vinegar for a few days.
Wow! Amazing that we chemists sometimes live to retirement age. These stories are scary but also educational.
more time in a lab is less time in a car! :D I still hold cars great danger to life, despite other dangers, lol (despite that my job is now driving tractors and cars)
9:50 June 1988 - Workers in a plating plant in Auburn, Indiana were cleaning a tank containing zinc cyanide when someone decided to use hydrochloric acid. Sadly, the result was 4 Dead, and 20 injured.
So unfortunate :(
My undergrad biochem professor was an interesting guy. He's old enough to remember when mouth pipetting was apparently common!? Also, he told us that chloroform tastes green.
Well I guess Schrödinger finally got a concrete answer
Who knew that Schrödinger’s cat was wet?
Yes! DCM does smell minty and even has that mint cooling effect on my eyes.
Secondhand story, so take with a grain of salt. Our x-ray crystallographer's previous workgroup used to work on extremely sensitive stuff and they noticed recurring contamination in all reactions when they used diethyl ether. Now, scientists that they were, after finding the problem's source, they tried to identify what was inhibiting their reactions to try and rectify it. The contamination was only trace amounts, so they took a whole bunch of the diethyl ether, rotovap'd it to concentrate the impurity to dryness and found what they ended up with to be crystalline.
Having an x-ray specialist available, they naturally took the crystals there and had him check. Turns out they had ended up with about 100mg of peroxide crystals formed from unstabilized Et2O. Needless to say, the crystallographer wasn't too pleased about an explosive crystal sitting in the center of his half-a-million dollar x-ray diffractometer. Nothing happened, but I was told they were rather apprehensive of moving the flask after finding out and called the disposal specialist immediately.
Lesson to take away from this: Careful when working with unstabilized ethers, and don't try to concentrate the residue if you're not certain of what said residue might be.
we have seen vids from down under (Ex&F), would hate getting explosive crystels on 100mg scale or more..
I’m pretty sure that diethyl ether peroxide is an oil, not crystalline (although other ethers form crystalline peroxides)
A few years back we got an emergency call from an industrial complex with multiple small companies on it.
The ventilation system caught fire and it spread to the building.
That was all the info give to us, so we arrived and started to pry open the doors as the only other guys there at night were security and they had no keys for the building.
For the next part keep in mind we have no idea what the building is for and we are volunteer firefighters without any chemistry background.
We went in and started to extinguish the fire while the others opened the roll doors and set up lighting etc.
With all the smoke we couldnt see anything so we didn't notice the burned IBC containers in the back.
I was on the second rotation inside and when we had to return to get new air we noticed something odd.
The rubber on our boots was melting and the traffic cone we placed in the middle of the room for our radio repeater was also melting.
While wondering why the other guys where pulling multiple empty burned looking ibc containers out of the hall.
Turns out the guys working didnt care much for the security protocol.
Instead of storing their chemicals in the warehouse with a automatic fire extinguishing system and warning signs on the building that there are chemicals inside they just kept it all in their working area.
In the end we learned that there where 3x 1000 L IBC's with concentrated sodium hydroxide solution which turned itself into an aerosol trough the heat.
And a mix of about ten different chemicals which combined where another 1200 liters.
The guys of us that were inside where mostly fine since we had our own air, but the others outside where not so lucky.
We used big fans to clear the smoke out of the building not knowing that the air was full of chemicals.
All the guys outside had to be treated for chemical burns in their airway, 4 had severe symptoms and where moved to the ER immediately and18 had mild chemical burns in their throat & airway.
This could have gone way worse if we didn't immediately created an hazard zone once we noticed it.
And all of that just because some industrial chemists were to lazy to move their chemicals every day in the morning and before closing.
The company went bankrupt after it, they had to pay for the removal of the contaminated soil around the building and multiple fines.
Including fines for the wrong storing, endangering others, decontaminating all out firefighter equipment + vehicles and more.
If you’re just going to turn the fume hoods off at a curfew time, at least have the decency to set hungry attack dogs loose in the halls to attack chemists for being in the building too late.
Cutting off fume hood usage doesn’t send a clear enough message, and any chemists that get hurt or die will probably damage lab equipment in the process. With my proposal, you can at least pretend to be following the same logic of dissuasion as the death penalty instead of just waiting for pointless, preventable accidents to happen
perfectly resonable proposal, MrBurnsRealeaseTheHounds(TM) system saves money in every uni it is implemented in!
Lmfao
The dogs with bees in their mouths who spit bees out when they bark at you... I'm training several now and they're only $100,000 per year licensing fee - put your deposit in my mailbox today, men need not apply.
I kind of agree that DCM smells minty in small amounts in a large space since I had a small accident like that as well but not quite as bad, I smelled it and soon left the room to let it dissipate out the window. I occasionally do home chem. Cant wait for collage!!!
Oh...are you doing a collage for college?
I did cat dissections in bio so that is certainly possible. It was actually quite interesting since they were all cats who had been suffering from terminal health problems and we got to see the affects on gross anatomy. I wish we had had time to do histological examinations but we did not.
we had an exam in intro bio and they just had a giant jar full of dead cat fetuses :(
My dad has a story from when he was in college. It was a long time ago and he wasn't super involved with it so I don't know any specifics. Apparently some idiot left his experiment with nitrates running while he went to get lunch at Wendy's. He blew out a wall and through the whole building a loud phoomf sound could be heard. Luckily no one was there when it happened and the reaction blew itself out, but I can't imagine coming back from lunch to see several emergency vehicles convening on your lab.
Yikes!
I appreciate how edited the warning on the box in the thumbnail by crossing out the NUTS and replacing it with CATS? even though the text is so small it's illegible without zooming in
I did the thumbnail in paint.net and I couldn’t do a 3D rotation - I settled for a bad angle :(
@@That_Chemist To do that, go to Layers -> Rotate/Zoom and roll the little sphere around. Or input numbers manually.
Though the text would still be too small to read unless you made the box waaay bigger haha
hm delicious cancer i mean chromic acid
a thing i didnt tell when i told the NaOH story is that a single drop fell in my arm, i didnt notice it, there is a small little hole still healing
unrelated to the this NaOH story but once i got a NaOH burn in my finger, i think 1-2 months ago, small burn, again, apparently still didnt fully heal, or both are scars to remind me of the importance safety and ppe, forever
once i tought i would maybe would have to workeitu cyanide for a future project, fortunatelly i dont
I got NaOh solution under my wedding ring somehow, I assume there must have been a hole in my glove. Strong bases burn you faster and worse than acids.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 thankfully i never got an acid burn or a really bad chemical burn but that's interesting
hopefully i dont end up finding out how fast acid burns skin or eyes
edit: i already know how NaOH under my nails, in my fingers, in my mouth and in my eyes feel i dont need anymore my god
The worst experience I had in a lab was when one group was having trouble getting samples prepared for analysis, so I was asked to help out for a week. I was new, and not fully trained, so I was happy to help out and learn something new. Turns out this group was processing pig tissue samples to determine if the compound, or it's metabolites, were being distributed in the pig and if they were building up or being cleared. In order to track the chemical and concentration accurately, if was fairly radioactive. I can't remember how radioactive, I just remember it was much higher than what is
I was normally working with to dose cultured cells.
When I found this out, I figured there would be some highly specialized machinery in a hood to pulverize the samples, or we would be cutting then into smaller pieces and using chemicals for the rest. But no, we were just blending them on bench with cheap Walmart blenders and and food processors. The roughly 1 to 3 cubic inch chunks of pig had to be blended while frozen so that the later tests would be accurate. Thus, I found myself pouring liquid nitrogen over radioactive chunks of pig, putting it into a blender with dry ice (to keep it frozen during blending, it would sublimate of in the freezer) and praying the cheap carafe wouldn't crack open as I felt the chunks violently strike the side of the carafe as they broke down. Thankfully, they say least used metal carafes.
This mostly worked, except for the skin samples (with the hair and fat still attached). The fat just didn't fully freeze, so the dull blades would get like 2mm in the cube and jam. So for every 3 seconds of blending you would have to stop and try to pry the fat off the blade with probably 20lbs to 30lbs of force or more while trying not to have any shoot off onto you once it released.
This slowed things way down, and the person I was helping was extremely inpatient. It was not uncommon for me to see poofs of powdered dry ice shoot out of her carafe (hopefully with no sample) as she was rushing to do this, and she sometimes would splash solvents when cleaning out the carafe between each of the hundreds of samples. After a few long days of this, and her not getting any better despite warnings from me and several supervisors, I told my boss I had had enough, I wasn't hired to this, and that I'd never process samples like this again. I know that it can be done this way safely, but only when being careful and not rushed.
Moral of the story: always say you're busy until you know what you're getting into. That probably goes for any job, but especially this.
PS The person I was helping was moved to another group, one that didn't work with radiolabeled compounds.
Hahaha
I think the only experiment being done there was trying to turn some lab students into pig-themed superheroes lol
Aaaaa gross! Oof, I don't want to imagine inhaling radioactive pig dust lol
Getting high on solvents? I've heard it from someone I know using paint stripper in a closed off room on tiled walls or something. He proceeded to put a cig in his mouth and was hit by his colleague before he burned the place down. He got some fresh air and they finished without incident from that moment.
Most expensive mistake I ever heard of was an undergrad not being 100% sure that there was no triton-X (soap used to lyse cells) is his sample used for DNA sequencing. Turns out triton-X bricks the 500.000€ sequencing machine… this is why you listen to your TA’s prior to lab work.
Ah, the bit about autoclaving Stuff Not Meant To Be Autoclaved reminds me of why my cheap cautery pen (medicine, not chemistry, not a professional/student in either of those...) got trashed.
They're meant to be single-use sterile and disposable, but the body is aluminum and the end caps and switch are Nylon 66 so they're safe to autoclave and reuse, and they sell replacement nichrome tips for them for a reason. Likewise, they take a standard alkaline AA battery which can also be autoclaved along with them (you have to use a slow cooldown not a rapid vent so the electrolyte doesn't boil and rupture, but it's otherwise safe to autoclave them) but I accidentally left the battery IN the cautery pen instead of in the bag WITH it and discovered that while Nylon 66 doesn't MELT in the autoclave, it definitely SOFTENS and the spring pressure from the battery contacts was enough to push out and permanently ruin BOTH end caps while the nylon was soft and malleable. Damn things cost 12 whole dollars and keep disappearing in shipping cause USPS thinks they're vape pens half the time...
Why do you need batteries for a pen?
@@That_Chemist It's a cautery pen, for cauterizing/sealing blood vessels during surgery, small wounds in first aid, or for removing skin tags and warts and such. It's basically a AA battery with a push button and a piece of nichrome wire that gets hot, so you can cauterize things while having something that's portable, cordless, sterile, and heats up/cools down fast. Definitely a lot nicer than heating up paper clips with a Bic lighter anyway, but tends to chew through cheap grocery store batteries pretty fast.
That DCM comment reminded me of this.
May or may not have used a pasteur pipette head and air nozzle at the central bench (at just the right angle) to quickly finish my lower ochem tasks since the goal was to get samples for melting. We had a vacuum line at the hoods but it was my understanding from my biotech training (that happened at the same time) to use a trap with the vacuum and I didn't want to slowly gas whatever basement the pump would be exhausting into or contaminate the pump by being stupid.
Any sort of recrystallization or salting out procedure on our side of the lab (2 hoods, 4 students) without being stopped by the TA, other than certain procedures where we were explicitly told to keep doing what we're doing in the hood. The procedure was fast enough to freeze our gloves to the flask sometimes, but it did save a lot of time compared to the hotplate alternative.
I don't feel anything necessarily guilty about what happened, but those tubes just barely reached the bottom of the hood sash, and it's really whoever cut those tubes or designed this hybrid lab where the lines only work at the bench who indirectly taught a room what DCM smelled like...
16:35 That definitely sounds like a money-related problem. Penny-pinchers in accounting have been given authority over everything else, while the senior chem department staff are too busy defending the department from layoffs to have the time and political capital to also defend lab safety practices.
A combination of timers and motion sensing switches might help if the concern was to avert wasting HVAC resources. As long as students are still in the room, the lights should stay on and the fume hoods keep going. And the fume hoods should go back on in time to clear the air for the first class in the morning.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 That's awful complicated for people who only see and care about the numbers on the power bill. More importantly, it's difficult for the accountants to verify and enforce if it is being "wasted" as far as they're concerned. "Turn on at 8am, turn off at 10pm something something you should've finished up and locked up the lab before 10 pm anyway." is much easier to enforce than actually trying to figure out if using it late in the night was actually necessary.
Somehow I'm suprised and completely unsurprised that there are so many of these stories...
yeah same
One of my fellow undergrad students told me he tried pippeting 30mL of concentrated HCl with his mouth, because he saw it in a documentary and wanted to try it himself.
I still don't know why he thought it was a good idea.
consmi was lucky they were working with DCM that day. Imagine spreading diethylether throughout the entire lab instead. BOOM
Funny the title of this reminds me of this old chestnut of a joke..
So
Heisenberg, Schrodingerer and Ohm are in a car,
They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"
"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.
The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"
The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"
"We do now, asshole!" shouts Schrodinger.
The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists.
A story from hobby. I was doing some wet photographs. You know,, the ones that are physically exposed with light to photographic paper from film. I was doing some selenium protection for some. I knocked over a dish with couple liters of (probably sodium selenide) liquid. Being all over the floor and feet, you cannot escape being wet with it. After only a couple of seconds there was a weird and very strong metallic taste in my mouth. No other effects but the moments of thinking "is this dangerous" were not that great. [Note to myself: do not work in socks only with chemicals]
I also had once a old bottle of sulphide toner for photos that I opened. You probably guessed it already. The most strong smell of H2S I've ever had. A quick retreat and treating the waste later on outside, just to be safe. Great that I never open any canisters near me. It is always a good habbit. Also knowing the first second what the smell was could have been very valuable.
Yikes!!
In the third or so lab we did in undergrad, meant for all those, who haven't had lab experience before to get to know equipment and procedures, we (15 students) rotated through the different tasks each week. One of the tasks was working with gas generators, cooling mixtures and the fumehood. We should generate SO2 (bp -10°C) by decomposition of Na2S2O5 in H2SO4, make a cooling mixture by combining 400g of ice and 133g of NaCl (about -21°C, cool enough to liquify SO2), and then liquify the SO2 in an U-tube using the mixture. Our pretty strict and unfriendly supervisor always checked if we were building the apparatus right before we started, and then left to work in her office across the hall. After a while, while working on a different task, I suddenly feel a weird pressure sensation in my chest and start coughing a little, but go back to work without saying anything. After five more minutes everyone is coughing so the supervisor comes back in kind of a panic, because she heard us. Turns out the girl built her apparatus perfectly, but made the cooling mixture from 400g of NaCl and 133g of ice, all while not turning on the fumehood. So the supervisor switched on every fumehood in the lab and sent us outside. We still had to come back finish the rest.
That’s slightly terrifying
Okay, I think I'm going to throw my hat in the ring as well.
Back when I was in my second semester of chemistry (four years ago now) and I had an accident with sodium hydroxide at home.
I had bought some NaOH for an acid base extraction I wanted to perform at home. Additionally I used it to clean occasionally. Nothing bad ever came of that or my extraction. Later however, my girlfriend at the time complained about our clogged pipe in our shower, and I thought why not just use the NaOH. Since I've used it at the university and in my previous experiments I've known that NaOH likes to cake together, which I really didn't want to happen in our pipes. So I got my magnetic stirrer, got a huge glass jug throw a large stirrbar into it and started to dissolve the NaOH. I then went out of the kitchen to watch an episode of a show we were watching.
I made three mistakes right there.
1. Was that I left my caustic solution unattended in a kitchen.
2. The experienced chemist might have already caught on to.
3. I forgot to turn the heating element of the magnetic stirrer off. As there wasn't a thermometer plugged in, and it was a rather old one it just started heating at full blast.
At the end of the episode I went back into the kitchen to get the hydroxide and pour it down the drain, I then noticed that there was sizzling on the heating plate. I noticed that it was hot and wanted to lift the glass up and away from the heat. I didn't even really think about why it was sizzling, but as soon as I lifted the glass I was rudely reminded that sodium hydroxide dissolves glass, especially hot sodium hydroxide, one Liter of which was now flooding my kitchen as the entire bottom of the Maßkrug just plopped out of there. The next hour or so I was frantically trying to get the pH of my kitchen under 10 again, using every towel I could find. I basically ran from where the sodium hydroxide was intended to go - the shower, to the kitchen and back. Filling the towels with my aqueous catastrophe and then trying to clean the towels and myself. Mind you almost naked with the exception of a pair of eye protection and my boxer briefs as I took a shower every five minutes or so (human-fat-soap already included).
Luckily I didn't get any sort of permanent damage. My skin was itchy for two days or so, but frequent moisturizing helped with that. The biggest damage I took from this was the financial one as parts of the lacquer of kitchen cabinets started to dissolve in that time and formed an in my opinion very nice streaky pattern. My landlord wasn't as ecstatic.
So to anyone trying to store sodium hydroxide solution in a glass container: Don't.
(years ago) we have stored 1litre of NaOH solution in a PET bottle in the robotics lab. We needed that to clean 3D prints.
PET is quite soluble in dilute NaOH, also it have turned out that our floor was quite soluble too! The circular mark is still visible in the floor.
got a bit sad i didnt have any worthy stories, but that's probably a good thing
Years ago I used to work in a soil and water extraction lab where most of the extractions used DCM, but some used MTBE, ether, or hexane. We used gallons of DCM on a daily basis. To me, I wouldn't say that DCM smells minty, but it is more like getting a whiff of ammonia gas where you get something like a cooling sensation. Maybe that's what the person was referring to when they said DCM smells minty?
Anytime someone shares a story of some part of the chem building "shutting down for the night" like that my first thought every time is "Heh heh. Time to casually drop a threat of lawsuit on the university~"
16:18 Yeah... it seems downright irresponsible for fume hoods to be allowed to shut off on a schedule if there is ever going to be anything in them overnight.
100%
If this is in the US, it is likely not legal (after the passage of CFR1910). Without knowing the details of the setup, I can't say more than 'likely', though. 1910 is generally the strongest rule set involved until DEA or ATF rules come into play.
I got intimately familiar with the smell and feel of HCl during my chemistry training. The description given is on point.
Re dead cats in the bio lab. Some years ago, I was the laboratory director at a very small college, which meant I was in charge of getting waste, both chemical and biological, picked up by the appropriate contractors. Now, I’m a physical chemist and I’m much more comfortable handling hideously toxic chemical waste than biohazard stuff, so I let the bio researchers and students take care of packing their waste most of the time, and I just called the service when their bins were full.
One day, the maintenance crew was cleaning out a storage room, and one of the guys comes over to me with a big cardboard box and says “I think this is your department.” He hands me the box, and I open it, and there was a vacuum packed tom cat sprawled on its back in the box, and clearly the seal had been compromised because the cat was completely green in the bag.I threw the box across the hall and spent the next ten minutes retching in the bathroom.
Fortunately for me, the bio department got their own lab manager shortly after that, and I didn’t have to deal with dead cats any more.
😭
A few lab events regarding sharps in various biology labs:
I was performing a buffer exchange for some antibody I had purified using column chromatography. I was in a rush, and so I grabbed a length of dialysis tubing, grabbed a razor, and held it up and sliced through it like I was using a samurai sword. It wasn't until the buffer I was exchanging into began turning red that I realized I had sliced through my glove, significantly through my ring finger by the middle knuckle. It was deep, but it was such a clean cut that it healed very quickly (still have a scar though).
In my third year of grad school, the entire building I worked in had to be retrained on sharps disposals. Apparently someone(s) had been putting used razors and uncapped needles directly in the trash, and several janitorial staff had been injured.
I was working in a biological hood and I labeled some tubes with an extra fine sharpie. I capped the sharpie and, without looking, decided to ensure it was closed by slamming the cap down with my thumb. It was, in fact, still uncapped. I felt the sharpie point hit bone.
Yoicks about the janitorial staff, not just cut but exposed to heaven knows what. It's not terribly hard to do the right thing even without the dedicated official sharps containers. Thick plastic jugs like detergent jugs, with their caps duct taped on and labeled, will work, per the EPA produced instructions I got from a veterinarian when I had to administer fluids at home through a needle to an ailing pet. Those can go in the normal trash, assuming it isn't something super dire like COVID-19.
@@SeekingTheLoveThatGodMeans7648 yeah, we even had the red disposal boxes specifically for sharps in the labs. It was pretty bad.
:(
Yeah the needles in the garbage thing has been an issue everywhere I worked too
My most visible home chemistry mishap happened when a syringe got clogged and the potassium permanganate solution went everywhere! I was in clothes I specially intended to use for chemistry, so it was not a very big deal that I have covered them in brown spots. The interesting part of the story is that I was only 8 at the time!
This story happened when I was a 3-year undergrad:
I had to do some cleaning after some reaction I did. As you'd expect, there was a plenty of tar left which did not dissolve in any organic solvent (mainly, acetone). So I did what I was instructed to do by my supervisor (first year PhD student) - dissolve everything in piranha (conc sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide). I had done it before so it was not a big of a deal.
So everything is cleaned except for a glass filter. Me and my supervisor were trying to clean it up by pouring piranha onto the filter and sucking the solution with the water aspirator. It is then my supervisor says "Weird, I see some flames", however, I did not notice anything. The filter was still not clean enough so we poured more piranha. At this moment my supervisor says "I got it. It is an acetone peroxide!". Turned out we did not wash the glassware from acetone properly before pouring the piranha. And we poured all the piranha after washing the glassware into one 2L beaker (there was about 100-200 ml of liquid at this moment).
My supervisor was holding the filter on outstretched hand above the 2L beaker. After no more than 5 seconds after she told about the acetone peroxide the loud "BAM! as from a petard happened, the fume hood was covered in smoke. The filter that my supervisor was still holding was all covered in blue flames while there was a giant hole in the beaker.
The aftermath cleaning took us a few more hours, but luckily, no one was hurt and no glassware except for this 2L beaker was destroyed. After that incident I always wash glassware with excess of water before pouring any strong inorganics.
TL;DR - never ever mix piranha with acetone, even with some trace amounts.
That is terrifying
Yikes, the story about the wound reminds me of that incident where a student accidently injected DCM into their finger and didn't seek any medical attention immediately. It's insane how quickly the injection site went from looking relatively harmless to horrific in a few days. It's fairly well known so you'll find some articles if you look it up and might already know about it, though the pictures are not for the lighthearted, would have been cool if the lecturer I learnt this from at least warned us that he was basically going to show us pictures of rotting fingers...
It looks terrible - someone posted it in the discord a while back and holy moly was it bad
Yeah, I do remember using exactly the same system for storing our n-BuLi. If you were working with it you generally had 20 ml schlenk, which you'd titrate to check molarity preferably before every reaction. Anyway, the place I worked at had crappy syringes, mine spilt a few lm of around 2.3 M BuLi down my hand (leaked from the back side, their plungers are bad). It's not as flammable as expected, just got a slight warm sensation which ceased pretty quickly (if you ever played with flammable aerosauls and lighters, you may have had a similar experience). I just dropped the needle in sand bucket next to me. Really glad I wasn't wearing gloves though, that might have ended a bit less fun.
Yikes!
The fume hood extractor fan in 'my' high school lab has been making a bad roaring sound for a year now. Fan's way off balance, so much is clear. Bearings probably also shot. You can hear the thing (which is way up high on top of an elevator shaft) throughout the whole school yard.
But it's just not getting fixed. It still moves plenty of air, but i guess that until it catastrophically fails, popping the breaker or simply catching fire, it won't get fixed at all.
Whenever i hear the roar when i arrive at work, i know my chemistry coworker is already at the lab.
Groan. Better to fix it when there's a choice of when the downtime will be, which shouldn't be in the middle of an experiment.
Bug your teacher to fix it and get your parents to complain to the school admin!
I've learned how much I enjoy the cringe I received from this. Now I'm questioning my "normal" mind.
haha
DCM smells like pain. It just burns in the nose. On another note it tastes rather nice, beeing sweet not dissimilar to some sugary alcohol beverage.
Edit: Just got to the point where the person got DCM in their mouth. Yep, its a realy nice taste.
why toxic things taste good?
lead acetate tastes sweet, CCl4 supposedly tastes kinda sweet, and now DCM?
what's up with toxic things tasting nice?
@@VerbenaIDK Its a trap. Everything nice is deadly on principle.
@@Seorful yeah
and i hate that.
@@VerbenaIDK According to OSHA, dimethylmercury smells sweet. I'm extremely concerned for the person who had to smell that stuff.
@@RamiSlicer i saw that on wikipedia
my first thought was "Who the fuck smelled it and why?"
idk if they lived or not by why
You know, sharing fume hoods is probably the most Yikes thing chemists regard as cool and normal.
You’re not wrong
I do not know half of what is being said here but I still find the content enjoyable.
great :)
Oh I remember something
In highschool our teacher was demonstrating a electrolysis reaction that produced hydrogen gas so she put a Ballon over the output and we watched it fill slowly. When it was full she grabbed it and held a lighter to it what you have to know about blowing up hydrogen Ballons is that pure hydrogen ain't that bad because there isn't enough oxygen for a good explosion but water electrolysis produces what we in German so lovingly call Knallgas or in English boom gas because it goes boom.
Our ears were ringing for the rest of the lessons and our teacher is smart enough not to blow up Ballons in her hands
Yikes!
That first one with "undergrads make mistakes" I mean yeah but not fucking phone in the *autoclave* like how.
I mean there are people who think you can charge your phone by dialing 999
The mistake is bringing the phone into the room in the first place.
@@NoLongerBreathedIn I agree. We also worked in a clean room with an autoclave during pharmaceutical technology classes, to make sterile medications. We were asked upfront to leave phones, wallets, keys et cetera outside in a locker.
@@eier5472 I mean, the other stupid mistake in this case was to put any lab class in a clean room that didn't 100% have to be there in the first place.
One of my chem lab professors told the story of when he did research in Russia. Apparently at the time the chemists were a bit slack when it came to lab safety. They both pipetted by mouth and smoked in THE ORGANIC LAB. For those that don’t know, organic compounds are often very flammable. These people were lucky they didn’t cause an explosion.
There would have been smoking allowed everywhere. I think I have seen couple of old professors on youtube that said that. Dangers on so many levels...imagine working in bio lab and accidentally tasting the cultures on a cig :D or spicy toxic organics, or maybe inorganic uranium salts
@@mechadrake freshly baked yellow cake!
Woodward would smoke like an old steam train when in the lab
It’s actually hard to start a fire with a cigarette - some channel demonstrated this with gasoline and a lit cigarette - smoking in labs used to be extremely common
@@That_Chemist That's true. The lighter or match you use to light the cigarette, OTOH, is another story. And for a lot of smokers, lighting the next cigarette after you finish one is done automatically, with very little thought. I have been told by many people, but never tried it myself, that if you drop a lit cigarette into liquid gasoline, it will just go out. I wouldn't be surprised if this is true 99 times out of a hundred, but that hundredth time would be really bad, and if you strike a match or fire a lighter anywhere with a flammable concentration of gasoline vapor, you're going to get a big fire very quickly.
Technically, the cats in the box are both dead AND alive until you open it.
On the other hand, leaving the fumehoods off would mean there's a selection pressure against coming too early. And I think people who are chipper in the morning _should_ be selected against.
>:(
duh. it was obviously a box of schrodinger's cats....
I think they need to run a lot of thermal analysis for scale ups with DSC and such
Autoclaving undergrads phones and wallets is golden. We take containment srs
9:00 at the time I didn't personally have much experience huffing solvents.
That Chemist: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?
That got me chuckling, the way its delivered is brilliant.
When I used DCM in D&T back in ye olde days, I remember it didn't really smell of much. It had a vaguely chemically smell, but it was unpleasant to breathe in. Definitely not minty to me. However, it was not pure DCM, it was mixed with other stuff and it was gloopy, sort of custard consistency but sticky and heavy. Used it for bonding acrylic together, which it did very well.
Xenon compounds? My life is a lie.
That story at 15:09 is a clusterfuck of bad decisions.
Why are you working with volatiles without adequate ventilation?
Why are you working at night? (nothing inherently wrong with that, but it often means fewer people around to help in case of accidents)
Why are you using enough pressure to turn the column into a missile, and why is it not reasonably secured?
Why is your column setup not in a fumehood?
Why are you not wearing eye protection?
WHY
Exactly!
I cant remember where inheard this story. Lab was using acids to identify an unknown substance. One student had a problem so the teacher looked up his substance. It was glyceryn.
I hope he wasn't using nitric acid.
The hydrogen cyanide story was nuts
In my high school, a chemistry teacher demonstrated a reaction of copper and nitric acid to produce brown nitrogen dioxide gas. All the students gathered in front of him. After adding the copper and the nitric acid into a test tube, he used his thumb as a stopper to cover it and then shook it. The reaction generated some brown nitrogen dioxide gas as expected. He then moved the test tube, still covered with his thumb, to the front of the students closely to show them the result. "See! This is nitrogen dioxide" he said. He got promoted to the principal before I started my more advanced chemistry class, so I had another chemistry teacher. However, because he loved teaching, he took any chances that my teacher was away to teach my class chemistry. Luckily, there were no experiments.
Covering a test tube with your thumb is such a boomer chemistry move
8:20 literally a Schrodinger joke
16:17 Jesus christ, you would think they would fix that gassing issue, holy hell is that ever dangerous!
I guess we don't really know if the cats are dead or alive until we observe the open box.
Schrödinger delivers now?
Schrodingër's cat, but it is not in superposition
"it sure would be nice if the air was breathable". couldnt agree more
>is a microbiology
>persons phone gets autoclaved
>is drunk
>dies laughing
And now we know the solution to Schrodinger's cat! The cat is always dead! Just shake the box a little!
Yeah I can‘t really smell DCM or Chloroform either, but one time when I had filtered a DCM solution, i foolishly just messed around with the still wet filter paper outside the fumehood (I don‘t remember why but it most certainly was not a good reason). The smell it gave off was quite weird but indeed very minty. Most of the smell just came from what was dissolved in the DCM though, so not even sure that is actually its odor. I‘ve heard people describe the smell of the chlorinated solvents as sweet, but they‘ve never smelled sweet at all to me. One time I blew compressed air through a pasteur pipette that I had used to fill an NMR tube with CDCl3 (I was trying to blow out a piece of cotton that I used to filter it), another absolutely moronic idea. That was the only time chloroform has ever smelled like anything to me but the closest thing to compare it with would have been lighter fluid, definitely not sweet. Idk smell is weird.
Huffing solvents?! Who the heck does that?!
People in need of support
Why would anyone poke a head into a fume hood if anyone ELSE was using the hood for ANYTHING? Even as a vent for a lab procedure going on outside of it? Should a sign be taped to the front of the hood "Hood being used as vent -- stay out"?
If anybody lives in Alaska and orders a dead cat box, I'm take the bones when you're done
👀
n-BuLi catching fire? i highly doubt that tbh.
The needle flying off and content spraying everywhere also happened to me a few times with the standard 2.5M solution. I even got it on my skin once. Other than stinking and turning hot it doesn't do too much. I often use a mid sized beaker to spray n-BuLi leftovers from the syringe in it and leave it in there. Never in my life have i seen it catching fire, even when in contact with water. Might be the concentration being too low but i dont usually see higher concentrations being used.
sec- and t-BuLi (and other things like Me2Zn solutions) are a whole different story though
10 M definitely catches fire upon exposure to air, so maybe that was what they were using? Or maybe the lab was super humid?
IIRC the n-BuLi was dissolved in hexane. Hexane is pretty close to gasoline, in terms of flamability.
Alright, not nearly as complex or horrifying as most of these, but here's my favourite story from college. In chem, I sat opposite the labs' doors, which had the stereotypical little window of reinforced glass allowing me to see through into the corridor and further, through the lab opposite's own little glass window. During a lecture I happened to glance out of said window, and Oh Dear Gods. What I _heard_ was the most ungodly whirring, like fifty three giant hornets being shaken violently in an urn. Then a scream, followed shortly afterwards by the sound of glass shattering. What I SAW was a blur of motion past the door windows, and then a container of miscellaneous orange SOMETHING exploding like a paintball against the wall. I started giggling a bit hysterically, because What, that's some looney tunes bs right there, and quickly explained what had just happened to the class who didn't get the visuals on top of the audio, to which the professor sighed and went, in the most deadpan voice imaginable, "Ah. Centrifuge."
If the class hadn't been laughing before, we were cackling at that point, and we could hear the lab next door doing the same. Obviously, the professor and a couple of techs left to go assist with the damage control, and I think it was the first real bonding experience my class had together so early in the year.
I was mostly terrified of whoever had the strength to yeet a tube of orange mystery liquid with _that much force_ to begin with, so the explanation was actually somewhat of a relief, but... STILL.
What I want to know is how on earth this was such a plausible incident that the professor was so unphased by it?! You'd think someone would keep an eye on that after the first MULTIPLE INCIDENTS lmao. Those machines are Expensive and notoriously easy to not balance properly, and when they're in use usually either lecturer or assistant fucking apparate beside it and stand guard like it's their sworn duty, which I mean... Yeah. I guess it kinda is. All I can say is that whoever left the chem students unattended frankly had it coming, worst decision-making skills on the market, clearly. Nobody was hurt, and I found out later from my friend in the lab responsible that the professor had stepped out momentarily to visit storage and someone had just assumed that they should go ahead with their experiment without assistance. It's a relief theirs was the only tube in the machine, as everybody else was reluctant to join in unattended.
They took Schrodingers thought experiment seriously.
Me: Where's the product?
Impurities: You wouldn't get it
11:00 I think its not a good idea not to use cyanide in teaching labs. When are the students supposed to learn how to handle toxic compunds like cyanide if not during their studies?
Those that survive will be much more careful!
gradually increase the toxicity as they get more competent
Have the students handle smelly or intensely coloured compounds instead. It is still possible to notice mistakes in handling, but a mistake will only cause discomfort and humiliation instead of ER trips, permanent injury and death.
@@BlurbFish Yeah that works for really inexperienced students in the first semester but at some point they really should learn to handle the actual dangerous stuff while still being supervised. They are supposed to be experts in handling chemicals. You cant be an expert without real experience.
On another note: I cant really think of many instances were someone got crippled or died because of an incident in the lab were the person harmed was not at fault. I dont think its a good idea to deny students in general important experience because of the carelessness of some those few.
@@Seorful I'd think wise experts won't do it unless all the proper ducks are in a row, including non-lame fume hoods and detectors for reasonably expected toxic gases. If a burst of cyanide gas comes out into the room in spite of documented cautions, and the student can't smell it (only some can), an alert should still go off in time to allow an evacuation of the room.
Inadequate equipment is as stupid as hazing in a lab. I do assume that none of this is going on in the third world (unlike the bogus papers that TC shows under the "Toxic" heading).
0:24 oh my sin is i didnt autoclave
Dam Schrödinger's experiments really went down hill
As a beginner student a fellow student was making acetone peroxide for some upcoming day were fireworks were common. The lab supervisor walked to him with an angry face. He did not know what the student was doing and reminded him to wear safety glasses. Always wear your safety glasses!
I guess it was common stuff back then. When doing my undergrad labs there was bottle clearly marked as 3 membered acetone peroxide on the shelf. "Only about" 50 or 100g or so but I never went near it or any of the bottles near it.
I was also told why the gas bottles had chain around them. Supposedly someone knocked over a full oxygen tank that lost it's regulator. You can guess the rest I presume.
I think safety has improved a lot from back then and for a good reason.
You can find videos on youtube of exploding cylinders - it’s absolutely terrifying
I've always thought that chloroform smelled like...*thud*
"We'll never know if the cats were dead or alive!"
reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
“Does anyone feel light-headed?”
Top ten things you don’t want to hear from someone in a chemistry lab
This was less than a year ago.
For the last year of high school in our chem lessons a friend and I tried to make the loudest explosion with hydrogen as possible, but our chemistry rooms were currently being renovated so we had no supply to hydrogen gas.
Everyone knew the experiment, where you fill a tin can completely with hydrogen, you put a small hole in the can and then put some source of fire next to the hole. Then the hydrogen escaping the tin can reacts with the air, generating a hissing sound for about 10 seconds, after which enough air will have gotten into the tin can, allowing the flame from the little hole to strike back into the tin can, making it explode and flying through the air.
As we had no hydrogen we had to generate our own. For that we used electrolysis, as we had run out of HCl, which I would normally have used in combination with magnesium, as it is easier.
So we generate the hydrogen with electrolysis and run it through a tube into the tin can.
Then my friend pulls of the tape from the tin can, opening the hole and I quickly put a glowing splint next to the hole and there instantly was the explosion. No time for us to get back and cover our ears. I hear the loudest PENG I have ever heard in my life and hopefully ever will. And after that peng there first was loud beeping, as if you were flashbanged in a game, followed by complete silence for what felt like an eternity. After 30 seconds i was able to hear like I had just gotten out of a disco. During these 30 seconds I was just like damn, I hope I am not deaf now.
My friend was more lucky and only had the problems on one ear. Another friend of mine, who uses to hunt, told me it was certainly louder than a gunshot.
After that my friend and I went to the doctor. Both of us luckily still have 100% on both ears and we only had acoustic shocks.
The only explaination I can come up with is, that we messed up putting pure hydrogen into the tin can in such way, that we actually had a close to optimal hydrogen to air ratio inside of the tin can.
I would like to add though, that we tried to avoid that, by calculating how many mL of the water should have been split into H2 and O2, to fill the tin can with only H2. We even doubled the amount of H2 produced to be on the save side. It probably just took us too long and gave the H2 in the tin can enough time to mix/react with air.
Long story short: Got me and a friend an acoustic shock trying to experiment with hydrogen.
Yikes! Hydrogen can still be dangerous, as you learned!!