That's a wolf spider you showed, not a huntsman. I have half a dozen huntsman in my bedroom, only one of them is free, but he takes care of any mosquitos and cockroaches
@@magusperde365 no spiders will just decide to attack you (some spiders however have much lower standards when it comes to what is considered adequate reason to bite) but wolf spiders are very active spiders, they are genuinely cool when you look into them. they aren't super bitey though unless you attempt to handle them
The worst part is that, from what I understand, huntsman spiders are supposed to be the relatively chill ones. They also apparently have a habit of hiding under the sun visors in people's cars. Seriously, if I ever went to Australia, I'm confident I'd meet my end by getting into a car accident because I opened the sun visor and a giant spider plopped into my lap.
Not Australia so not a huntsman but one morning in England riding my motorcycle to work as I pulled off the motorway near my work around 20 miles from home a large spider dropped down in front of my face, it must have got into the helmet overnight and just waited.
@@alextopfer1068 Look, I have a spidermom with like 30 cute tiny spiderbros around her in the corner of my room _right now,_ but if a spider the size of my fucking face fell on me unexpectedly I'd still shit myself
"This one time, in the chemistry lab......" Seriously, this has become one of my favorite UA-cam sites of all time. I've got chemical horror stories going back to 1976, so one of these days I'd like to share some with you folks. Molten aluminum, HF, stuff like that.
My current boss told me a story where, in one of her undergrad chem labs, her lab mate asked her to move an unlabeled beaker to the fume hood and thinking it’s just water she did it. Turns out the beaker was full of HF 😭😭
I have no idea how I got here (all hail the algorithm, I guess), but now that I’m here I think I’m not going anywhere. These stories are fascinating. (In reality, it’s probably from having watched everything from USCSB which got a mention last video and from the overlap with Technology Connections which was mentioned two or three ago)
Ah yes trinitrofinger I remember I bought a small bottle of glycerine from the pharmacy to make some spicy oil I stored the glycerine for a couple months and when I decided to use it I found solids in it a quick search says glycerine freezes at 16c or lower temps depending on the concentration Turns out there was cosmetic additives in it (not included in the ingredients for som reason ) So when I added it to the nitration mix it instantly poofed into a shit ton of nitrogen dioxide and the mixture turned black Thankfully I had full ppe and some thickass gloves I instantly quenched it in ice water and never did spicy glycerine again
Well I would say a useful lesson learned always check your ingredients for contamination because any contamination can and will f up your reaction Also spicy oil uffff didn't it need water free glycerin for it reaction at first and the temperature control was also very important And I hope your have worn protective clothing and a gas mask I mean spicy oil vapour lowers the blood pressure really good and well skin absobtion is also quite high Ahhh just soo much that could go wrong in that reaction and you were lucky enough it did go wrong right at the start And why good damit there a many others substances that could do the same better at lower risk for your own safety and same are even cheaper and don't need such a "advanced" set up
@@TheLtVoss the ingredients said glycerine and water Didnt know you need water free glycerine tbh xD I was wearing full ppe and did proper cooling I'm quite aware of the blood thinning effects
I have a 450ml bottle of glycerine. NO ingredient list. It have an external use. It also have an internal use section (verbatim from the label): «Internal use : Adult : One to two teaspoonfulls (5 to 10 ml) to help relieve temporary and occasional irritating cough.»
Always check chemical compatibility before doing an experiment. Today my PI asked me to check the HOOH content of a reaction with HOOH dipsticks, the chemistry is air sensitive so We often do it in DCM or chloroform. My PI wanted me to test the dipsticks, designed for aqueous solvents, to see if they would work .They wanted me to make up stock solutions of HOOH, initially suggesting I should make them up in DCCl3 so I could confirm by NMR. Needless to say I checked to see if HOOH and Chloroform are compatible, and discovered a lovely paper from the 1930s saying that whilst not all the products of HOOH plus HCCl3 could be identified the characteristic smell of phosgene was detected. Sometimes a week in the lab saves an hour in the library but this time an hour in the library saved me a trip to hospital.
Speaking of radioactivity, I've got a strange story. In my town, there is a military base in which heavy equipment, like tanks and whatnot, is refitted and repaired. Also, we used to house a BIG milsurp store, that had actual (deactivated) tanks on sale, among other things. So one time, the base transferred some heavy military vehicle to the milsurp store after the latter bought it through a military agency. I forgot what specific vehicle it was, but I do remember one quality of it - its engine had a flywheel that was made of depleted uranium encased in a thin shell of steel (for whatever reason, I don't know). Since the powerpack of the vehicle was nearing its limit, the milsurp store had it replaced, and just offloaded the old engine to a local junkyard. Obviously, if they sent it off to be melted as scrap, it could've ended very badly. DU may not be particularly radioactive, but it is very toxic and can be pyrophoric... Fortunately, the junkyard owner is a very thorough guy, and is known to pick apart the stuff that ends up there in search of useful components for sale at a greater profit than the price of scrap. He noticed the flywheel was much, MUCH heavier than it would be were it made of steel. Having deduced it's not, in fact, made entirely of steel, he phoned the military base for advice. This caused an alarm at the base, because the military was supposed to provide precise guidance and oversight regarding the disposal of such components, but did no such thing. In the end, a hazmat team was called in to take the flywheel away, and a number of military officials at the base were punished. PS: I was also told that a similar issue happened some 25 years ago, when the military sold a T-55 AM tank to the milsurp store. They forgot to take one or two of the ERA plates that covered some parts of the vehicle off. For those who don't know, ERA plates are basically two pieces of steel with high explosives sandwiched between them. Considering the tank was later used as a tourist attraction (rides, etc) that's kinda scary.
More than one junkyard worker has died from radioactive materials (usually medical cobalt-60 sources) sold as scrap. Scary stuff. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 The military is almost paranoically protective them, or so I was told. Removing them involves three different units (explosives management and disposal, one of the refitting shops like the one in my town, and field military proper). All have to sign off on all the steps of the process, and store or destroy any plates taken off. The reasons for that, beyond the obvious danger of releasing mil grade explosives to the public, is that most of those ERA plates on our tanks are native designs and are strictly classified for this reason. Polish military, however, is prone to cock-ups... gives us mischief-makers hope :)
@@michaireneuszjakubowski5289 we can definitely hope to get our hands on some. Since the Russian military is so corrupt you could likely buy some from one of their officers. I just think they'd be cool to play with. See what they can and can't withstand. I highly doubt that someone could set one off by accident. To my knowledge it's really just a sheet of secondary explosive inside with no potentially sensitive primary. You'd likely have to try pretty hard to set one off.
There's a video around somewhere of a captured Russian tank covered with what are are supposed to be explosive armour plates, but are actually just filled with rubber. Judging by that, the Russians might not have any.
Huntsman are cute fluffy gentle spiders. They do feel a bit funny when they are crawling up on your face and both your hands are tied up holding something heavy. But they are not aggressive at all. I've had one that's been living in the vents of the ute for nearly a year and got quite large before disappearing.
@@That_Chemist you'd think, but the way spiders' circulation works means that when spiders die they basically just shrivel up into like a fifth of their legspan. we get a big species of huntsmen in the american south that play relatively nicely with people but are still quite the scare to see when on the prowl.
This one will give you a moment of pause . It was from an acquaintance who was a hydrologist . He worked on projects involving groundwater pollution and one of these was a large and very old atomic research facility . This facility had an underground tank for storing radioactive liquid waste . It had been there for decades , and although it could hold tens of thousands of gallons , it was rather small compared to the rest of the complex . At some point in time , the guage that monitored the level in the tank broke and nobody noticed . FOR DECADES ! And for all these decades , waste was pumped to this tank with no thought of why the gauge never moved . So , a 50,000 gallon or so tank , made of steel , way back in the 1940s ,sat there , being constantly added to , with no working level gauge , and , at the mercy of the elements . Of course , it had corroded through years and years ago . Where DID this tank and it's contents sit ? Under an open field , initially , very close by a small oak tree . Flash forward 40 years and this once small oak is now a mature oak , and sits outside of cafeteria , giving shade to generations of workers and researchers , as they enjoyed their lunch . There , under the shade , just above this all but forgotten , nuclear waste , storage tank turned sieve . bon appetite .
Oh my god. I was listening in on my sisters chemistry lectures today, and since it was the first lab day, the professor was despising safety. She went over all the regular things that are usually gone over for a first lab class safety lecture, and then one of the students asked what the scariest thing to happen in the lab was. She said that in a chemistry 201 class (general chemistry 2, I think), they were doing an “unknown solution” lab, where the students were to identify an assigned reagent using several tests they had learned previously. One of these tests was a nitration test. The student was to take a drop of the solution and drop it into a small amount of nitric acid. Well, someone decided to make a new list of reagents that year, and one of the unknowns was glycerin… you can probably guess where this is going. Well, the poor student who got the glycerin did the nitration, and noticed their test tube suddenly got very not, and a white oil was now at the bottom of the test tube. The student asked if this was normal, and looking at what the unknown solution was, they went suddenly very pale, told the students to leave carefully, and pulled the fire alarm. Yes, they made nitroglycerin! And the bomb squad came, and then proceeded to dispose of it. The instructor ended by reinforcing her earlier point about letting someone know if something doesn’t feel right, as sometimes mistakes happen. And it isn’t just the students who make them!
My dad, an engineer, told me a great story about his roommate making nitroglycerin. They sparked small drops of it with a soldering iron, did a few other things, decided dropping the bottle out their 3rd story window onto the concrete plaza in definitely a bad idea, so they poured it very carefully down the sink in the bathroom down the hallway with copious amounts of water to keep any from staying trapped in the p trap and damaging the pipes. Engineering students unsupervised do stupid crap has been my takeaway from all his stories... 😂
Biology Student here, my worst chemical accident story occurred about 2 years back while I was working with Drosophila Melanogastor (Fruit flies), for an experiment testing overexposure to light and it’s impacts on insect lifespan. For those who don’t know, fruit flies are grown in cultures that we had to replace every 10 days or so. One day I stayed pretty late in the lab to move the fruit flies all into new cultures, and yes, unfortunately, I was alone. I was probably thinking something like “Oh, it’s just fruit flies, what could go wrong?”. Now I had done the procedure for transferring the fruit flies dozens of times before this with no issues. It involved anesthetizing the flies with triethylamine, separating them into males and females and putting the correct amount in each new culture vial. Well, someone had left something in the fume hood, and me, not wanting to mess someone’s project up, or deal with moving it out of the way, decided I wouldn’t use the fume hood. So I started like normal, I got the new culture vials set up, I got the vial of triethylamine, I got the fruit flies, etc. I then opened the vial of triethylamine and swabbed some of it up, and inserted the swab into the old vial to anesthetize the flies. After it was done, I discarded the swab and began sorting the flies. About 10 minutes into sorting, my eyes began to sting and water, like someone was cutting onions. At the time I didn’t think much of it, as that has happened sometimes, because occasionally the triethylamine can stick to some of the flies and then when you’re sorting them the vapors can get into your eyes and I wasn’t using the fume hood anyways, so a little getting in my eyes wasn’t out of the ordinary. I pushed onward, however the stinging got worse, eventually my throat began to sting, like I had swallowed something hot that was burning my throat. This was unusual, so finally I looked up from my fruit fly culture and noticed that my vision had an odd halo to it, on top of the burning and watering. Realizing something was wrong, I looked around, and realized, that I had somehow spilled a small puddle of the stuff about 8 inches from where I was sorting the flies. At this point, I had been breathing the stuff in for close to an hour. My lungs and throat burned and my eyes were on fire. I managed to clean up the spill before running out of the lab and gasping for air. I then notified the lab manager and told him what had happened. He recommended I head to the doctor to get checked out, however, being a broke college student and not having the money to pay for medical bills, I decided I would be fine and just went home. Well, the next day my eyes were STILL watering and I had the worse sore throat of my life. The watering eyes stopped after about a day, although my vision was still hazy for about 2 days, and the sore throat lingered for almost a week. Either way, I learned a valuable lesson, that no matter how trivial or mundane a task in the lab may seem, or how many times you have done it, it’s best to always have someone else in the lab with you, to avoid potentially dangerous accidents. As well as not being an idiot and always using a fume hood when needed. So basically, while trying to transfer fruit flies, I accidentally gassed myself with triethylamine vapors.
God when I worked in my uni’s fly lab, we didn’t have flynap so I learned to sort the mfs after just cooling them. I vaguely remembered my prof pushing cold sleep instead of the stuff. Knowing how much of a dumbass I was in uni… I would have probs gassed myself too
The huntsman spider story reminded me of an incident that has happened twice to me now. I own a car but don't really use it a whole lot, so it's pretty common for it to just be sitting undisturbed for possibly as long as a week. Anyway, one time I had been driving for about 20 minutes on a summer day after not using it for several days, so the engine was quite hot, hot enough that baby huntsman spiders, that were apparently in my car, had enough and started to crawl all over the windshield to cool off. A huntsman spider must have laid a clutch in the hood. I'm not that squeamish, so the drive went fine, except for the fact that i couldn't use my left side mirror because it was covered in spiders, but it sure gave me a big initial shock. Needless to say I gave the internals a very good pressure washing afterwards. Clearly it wasn't enough, though, because the same thing happened a few months later. On that note, here's a fact about huntsman spiders: They are very flat, they can squeeze into really tight spaces and clearances. I learnt this firsthand when I tried to catch one that ended up in my room when I was young, and it went under the floorboards through the small gap with the wall. I slept in that room, though I didn't really sleep much on that day.
When I was in middle school, there was this kid, not the sharpest crayon in the box. He almost licked a chunk of lead but the teacher (we will get to him later) slapped the lead rod out of his hand. Why did he try to lick it? Because someone dared him to. About a year later, the same kid licked a piece of dry ice and chaos ensued. On a dare. Not the sharpest crayon in the box. Also in middle school, my science and fencing teacher took us outside for a demonstration. The demonstration was the reactivity of sodium in water. Instead of doing a bit in a beaker like a normal person, he just threw probably 50 grams of sodium into a feeding trough filled with water. Fwoomp. There are many more stories but those are the most notable. There is also the Jesus potassium incident but I don’t remember enough to tell it. Edit there is also the twenty second hairspray potato cannon. Fwoomp
20 years of some guy fucking with lasers and the safety guy getting his eyes practically cauterized is insanely scary to me. Like how did nobody realize he was this dangerous over the course of 20 years
@@virtualtools_3021 I can think of ways that could still go wrong, in some cases lasers can change their wavelength (the most common one is green lasers in cold environments transitioning to infrared and people thinking they're broken and staring into them, frying their retinas), it could go so far out of its normal wavelength range somehow that it ends up being outside of the range of the laser goggles.
As someone who has had an insect (worse, a german cockroach) in their ear, the bull ant story is painfully relatable. We got it out of my ear with baby oil, though.
I have an anecdote related to the LPG tank in the car. Another situation where it sounds sketchy, but apparently is fine. My grandpa drove a meat truck and lived in Minnesota. This was before you could plug in an engine heater over night, so on cold winter mornings, grandpa would start up some charcoal in the grill, then move it onto a pan right beneath the diesel tank to warm it up. Always sounded scary to me, but apparently it's fine.
Yeah, we've used burning firewood to warm up ATVs on cold mornings. I've heard stories about charcoal, but never actually seen it done. I am also Minnesotan, so I may have to try the charcoal trick when it's -30 out
The LPG Story reminded me of someone I know. Story happens in Belgium. It was his Birthday, and he had been gifted a bottle of williamine (an alcohol made from pears). He also had an ice-cream cornucopia, which he kept cold using dry ice. Wanting to cool the bottle down for same-day enjoyment at the party, he had the brilliant idea of opening the bottle, putting a piece of dry ice inside, and then closing the bottle again to shake it (for better cooling). Well, let's just say he never got to shake it, as the bottle exploded in his hand as soon as he had closed the bottle, spreading the content of said bottle everywhere. Luckily the bottle being new, the explosion was quite small, although glass shards cut his hand. Luckily it wasn't bad (didn't even need stitches), and that was it. The part that makes it funny, is that he only had 1-2 glasses of wine before, didn't really drink after, and so was still able to drive home. He however got pulled over to check if he was drunk, as part of a random check. A bottle of alcohol having exploded in his hand, his clothes were soaked and reeked of alcohol. He didn't have any other clothes with him, and so had to keep them on. So when he got pulled over and opened the window, of course, the whole car smelled of alcohol, which obviously made the police dubious, when he answered "no" to the question if he had drunk. It was only after blowing close to 0 on the breathalizer that he was let go. In the end a fun story without any serious consequences, and which is still used to poke a bit of fun at him.
Oh, my. Some of those were pretty scary! The radiological incident reminds me of something that happened decades ago, when I was a PhD student. Here's the context : This was a biochemistry department, and the folks in my lab were working under one supervisor on two different fields. I was working on sterol biosynthesis. The other research interest was visual transduction (the process that converts a photon of light into a nerve impulse). This occurrence mainly affected one guy, who was the postdoc working on visual transduction. Most of the proteins involved in visual transduction are light-sensitive (obvs), so the work all has to be conducted in a darkroom. Because the visual transduction process involves cascades of protein phosphorylation, the research group often used 32P-labelled ATP, with the radionuclide often being transferred as a phosphate group to one or more proteins in the system. 32P is a high-energy Beta emitter, so the most appropriate shielding is a light material such as perspex, at least 1 cm thick. (Heavy metals interacting with Beta radiation can lead to a secondary effect known as Bremsstrahlung radiation. ) The good thing about 32P is you can easily track its presence with a Geiger counter, even if only a tiny quantity is present. Standard practice is to check all surfaces once you've finished a piece of work, and deal with any contamination appropriately. The typical reach of the 32P radiation in air is about a metre. Anyhow, our supervisor had arranged a collaboration with a group from the University of Moscow, and several of the Russians came to visit for a month or so, and do some work in our labs. The day after they left, the postdoc came into the lab wanting to show me something. He took a Geiger counter and took me to the door of the darkroom. Having checked the door handle, he invited me to simply open the door. Without entering the room, the Geiger counter started crackling at about a thousand counts/second. Just a short way into the room, the counter's off-scale alarm sounded. We immediately retreated. The postdoc couldn't believe how screaming hot the darkroom was! What the hell had our friends from Moscow been doing in there?! Fortunately, 32P has a half-life of about a fortnight. The darkroom was off-limits for about four weeks, after which the postdoc was able to at least enter the room in reasonable safety and start cleaning it up.
Long time watcher first time commenter, So I went to pick up a huge collection of used glassware somewhere in London. When I arrived and explained what I would be using the glassware for (various low-skill reactions for fun), he remembered a "funny" story about one of the chemical companies he worked for. The company he worked for made chemicals to order at large quantities, so they had VATS of reagents you would not expect to exist in vat form. So one day this guy at his job was doing routine checks for contaminants and levels of the various chemicals, but they had the bare minimum overhead railing, so in order to open and close the half-lids to these tanks, he would stretch his entire body over the open top. So he fell into a vat of phenol. He got out and everybody was laughing, he cleared himself up and went to lunch covered in a crystal skin of phenol. He died at the lunch table. Scary story that he kept light-hearted as if there was going to be a funny moment with a valuable safety story, but he did get his point across: Saftey is rarely a joke. P.s. TC please limit spider pics, I beg.
The spider story sounds like something straight out of one of those video games where you shoot a big enemy and it spawns a bunch of little enemies. Bet he slept even worse after doing that!
You don't kill Huntsman spiders, they are harmless to you, they theoretically have a very painful bite but it's extremely rare that they'd bite you & they keep bugs & other spiders away.
As a bird man from Australia I can say the Huntsman are harmless. They're non-toxic and so timid that it's rare to be bitten... as mean as our wildlife looks, we have very similar crows as the rest of the world, and being swooped by an Australian magpie pales in comparison to crows swooping (which people likely repress due to trauma -- hence why we speak evil of magpies but not crows). To set the scene, I'm homeless, so I ride around on a pushbike with my everything... Imagine charged up battery packs, kerosene (with a bit of citronella, for a lantern), etc, all moving at 20mph with me, riding hands-free (as you do) at dusk, when a crow divebombs right in front of my face... My wild bird friends are such funny pranksters!
CO in high pressures is useful in many industrial applications, e.g. purifying nickel and other metals. Doesn't surprise me that there are labs playing with that stuff, but it is scary af.
0:45 Surely this could have been prevented had they worn adequate laser protection goggles. Why didn’t at least the safety observer wear them? That seems like it should be the first thing to do when working with high power lasers.
CO in an autoclave without other gases would typically be catalytic carbonylation, but I'm sure there's other stuff you can do with it too. The first reaction I ever ran at elevated pressure was a carbonylation and I have never been so damn paranoid about a reaction setup.
I had spider problem in my bedroom a few years ago. While not as big as Huntsmen, their legs would comfortably span from my bird fingertip to wrist and their bodies are about thumb-size. I have no idea why, but what creeps me out most about them is they are bald with a flesh tone I would characterize as dead human medium brown. That little bit of human look really freaks me out. They also seem to actively hunt at night and while fast are a little clumsy. So they would often fall off the ceiling and on to me while using the computer. One landed on my forehead with a life altering flesh-on-flesh plop. Another time I woke up to the sight of the largest one I have seen on the wall less than 30cm from my face. I tried catch and release but there were so many that never made a dent in the population. I have a cat who is as afraid of them as I am so he wasn't much help aside form morale support. He also has some dangerous form of epilepsy so I didn't want to spray pesticides. I achieved better living through chemistry by sealing the room and running UVC lights to fumigate with ozone. (The cat and I were outside until the ozone smell dissipated.) I do something similar to get rid of fleas, but one treatment was enough to terminate all of the spiders so I could RIP.
A few years ago I was replacing the filter drier on an old R22 residential air conditioning unit. I had recovered all the liquid R22 into a recovery cylinder using the compressor, but I couldn't get the compressor to pull the remaining gas pressure below about 20 PSIG, and I didn't have a recovery machine available. I wanted to avoid releasing the small amount of remaining HCFC into the atmosphere due to its high ozone depletion potential, so I figured incinerating it would be a better option. I was well aware that the products of decomposition of an HCFC would include HF, HCl, and some amount of phosgene; however, I figured these would be less detrimental to the atmosphere than the raw R22. I proceeded to connect the service port to one of the air inlets on my brazing torch, and purged the remaining gas into the torch flame, which burned a brilliant green color in the process. Despite the occasional whiff of halogenated combustion products, the whole process when very smoothly and I achieved my goal of avoiding significant HCFC release. The filter drier replacement went without issue as well. Needless to say, don't try this one at home, though!
saw the huntsman story and i have my own secondhand accounts: a close relative regularly works at a local home depot and it has an issue with brown recluse spiders hiding in the shelves or other dark places like gloves, boots, etc. She has been bitten by brown recluse spiders at-least 10-20 times and is still working at the same home depot at the ripe old age of 81.
I used to work as a Radiochemist in Nuclear Med. We regularly performed PET imaging using 18-Fluorodeoxyglucose (18-FDG), and used to "consume" quite a few megaBequerels worth daily. The Hot Lab was located over the entrance archway to the Hospital, and although our 18-FDG Dispensing system was heavily shielded on the top, and sides, the shielding on the bottom was "not so thick", presumably to allow the device to be at least somewhat luggable by ordinary folks. The problem was that the attenuation of the 511keV annihilation photons was "very incomplete", and anyone walking through the archway was getting a reasonable dose of gamma radiation (100 microSieverts/hour). We had to barricade the archway off when we were doing PET imaging (and that was fairly frequently!)
I JUST did my workplace’s cryogenic gas safety training this morning and they recommend to move containers like that CO autoclave by putting it in the elevator alone, posting a warning sign in front of the elevator, sending it up, taking the stairs, then taking it out of the elevator (thereby protecting it from both knocks in the stairs and you from asphyxiation in case of a leak in the elevator)
I had been considering moving to Australia after I graduate, but this video is making me rethink some things…. lol. I live on the east coast US, where we don’t really encounter many venomous creatures. That said, I was recently cleaning out a “doom bin” in my room, just a laundry basket full of clutter I haven’t found a place for yet. It was late, and this was basically the last thing I had planned to do that day. About halfway through the task, I pulled something out of the bin, and chillin right there at the bottom was a huge (by mid-atlantic US standards) brown spider. Now, my spider ID skills aren’t great, but that didn’t matter because the anxious part of my brain was extremely confident that it was a brown recluse (it probably wasn’t). I used an index card and a small jar to scoop the homie up, and then I loosely capped the jar. That was a big mistake; the little dude was FAST and he was crawling all over the walls and lid of the jar. I managed to keep it from escaping the jar without injuring it for long enough to get it outside, but when I opened the jar, it was dark outside and I just kinda shook it hard until I knew it was empty and ran away. I never saw where the spider went, and it took a while for me to get to sleep because I wanted to be super sure that he hadn’t crawled into my pant leg or clung onto my hair or something.
The Chlorine dioxide story looks like it came directly from styropiro's 1933 chemstry book, right beside the cold inhalant made of cloroform, formaldehyde, ether and isopropyl alcohol
My first year of chemistry, I had a really cool and laid back professor, but he was super super serious about safety too (i mean, as any professor should be). As his own “Suzy never wore her goggles, now she doesn’t need them” speech, he told us a story from when he worked at Tide detergents in North Carolina. He said that the enzymes they work with there are 650,000 times more concentrated than what goes into the bottles you buy at the store. These enzymes are also water activated. And North Carolina is very humid during the summer. One these humid summer days, one of the workers went to the restroom and failed to properly decontaminate himself before using the urinal. Within thirty minutes, the skin from the family jewels and his inner thighs had begun to slough off. We made sure we washed and cleaned all our lab equipment properly.
10 drops sodium chlorite and 10 drops HCl (using standard 2-part kit) in 1 litre of water is a reasonable use of aqueous ClO2 to kill infections; it should be mixed outdoors.
Oh, chemistry stories. I had a professor who would take massive nose hits of dichloromethane. Fast forward a few decades, he was arrested and hauled off campus in cuffs. Bipolar as frig too.
8:48 I think it's a terrible idea. While the engine itself shouldn't get hot enough to ignite LPG, IF the exhaust header ever has an issue, (which is very common, especially if old/rusty) such as the flange coming loose, and flames from the engine's exhaust come out, gas would ignite. Same thing if you picked up foreign debris, like a tree branch or grass, that ignites against the VERY hot exhaust header. Also, whatever the paperwork, I wouldn't trust a pressurized gas container to be safe in an environment where it's exposed to 140-220°F Considering this car was aftermarket tuned, it probably got MUCH hotter in places than it's factory equivalent.
My only chemical background is watching videos like this and dropping out of chem unis a couple of times (mostly due to a lack of motivation to do anything other than binge watching youtube), so I can't say that I have many stories, but here they are: There was one time back when I was in high school (2014-2016) when a guy teaching extracurricular chem/bio stuff (not in school, it was a completely separate thing) decided to have an extra lesson with real chemicals for everyone who was willing to chip in for reagents. During the lesson, I either broke the "dilute water with acid, not the other way around" rule, or added something else into the sulfuric acid test tube, which made it shoot out of the tube and onto the table. Thankfully no one was hit, especially since I don't remember if we had any safety gear, but trying to mop it up with paper towels, while they were slowly darkening and disintegrating was fun, and I left with no damage to my most likely unprotected skin. Also, since we only really used, like, 20% of what was bought, he let us take home a bunch of stuff. Don't really remember whether everything was up for grabs or not, but people were definitely scooping up lead nitrate, and I walked home with a plastic(?) tube of sulfuric acid, lol. At least it had a lid. Later on I used it to make a small amount of piranha on my windowsill by putting a small glass cup on the lamp part of a lava-lamp to heat it up, mixing said acid with 2% peroxide, and waiting for enough water to evaporate. It actually worked and when I dropped a piece of paper in there, it made a nice sizzle before disappearing :D I also used the same contraption to slowly dissolve zinc pieces of batteries in vinegar, and making the entire public staircase part of my commieblock smell like vinegar in the process. All while I was sitting right next to it and breathing all of it in, but my asthma took a day off that time I guess. I guess that's about it, washing chlorate out of hundreds of matches and lighting it on fire mixed with a bunch of sugar also happened, but seems tamer. Oh, and those couple times in unis, when during the whole "extract iodine from solution using DCM(?)" one time a girl said that a drop of it just got sucked up into her finger, and in another uni it was ok to mix up the contents by plugging up the test tube with your thumb and shaking it during this experiment. Guess that might not be too bad, since it's only a drop of solvent at the bottom of the tube under all that water, but still feels a bit off.
Ive also nitrated my fingers once. I had to make a nitrating mix for a home chemistry project but was out of nitric acid so I had to make some more. I was too lazy to do a distillation, so I had the genius idea of using calcium nitrate with an exces sulfuric acid and filtering off the insoluble calcium sulfate. I thought the calcium sulfate would just settle to the bottom and I would be able to decant it through a filter paper, but there was no separation, it was more like a paste. So I decided to just try to filter the paste and try to get some of the liquid out of it. It was really slow, about a drop every second. At some point, the rubberband that I used to held the filter broke, probably because it has been exposed to acids for a while, so I instinctively grabbed the filter with my bare hands. I didnt know what to do with it, I did not want to drop it and have to restart the filtration since it was so slow. The nitrating mix continued dripping on my hands until it started burning, thats when I decided to just drop it in and ran to the sink. I still have pictures of my yellow hands if anyone is interested to see them.
Correction about thorium: it has EXTREMELY high intensity radiation, but it isn’t that penetrating (goes through very thin lead but radiation greatly reduced) Edit: my story is that I didn’t know what thorium was a few years ago, so I casually had a sample of it tucked away in a safe in my room somewhere. I found it yesterday, and just realized that I was lucky it was tucked away in a thick safe. Another story was that I forgot I wasn’t wearing gloves, and touched antimony with my bear hands. Was not pleasant after.
I'm no chemist but I have a chemical related story from working in a plastics moulding factory. While training with the machine setters we were doing a plastic change, purge the old plastic out, put special purging plastic in and purge it out to clean the barrel then add the new plastic; easy, I'd done it dozens of times before, on other machines... I climbed up the machine (about 6' high), perched precariously on a hydraulic cylinder and leaned over to unclip the hopper lid; why there isn't an actual access platform up there I don't know. What nobody told me was that this machine used different plastic, it used acetal, which when left in a hot barrel degrades and releases formaldehyde gas. I pop the seal on the hopper lid and lift the fairly heavy assembly away only to be hit with a facefull and lungfull of the gas. Somehow, completely blinded, eyes watering, coughing with my throat burning I managed to climb down off the machine without breaking anything or going flying over some part and stumble into the toilets that were mercifully right beside the machine. Head in the sink and run the tap into my eyes (because of course none of the eye wash stations had been restocked in a decade). 20 minutes or so later I was okay and years on I've learned that in future if I end up training an apprentice I should probably warn them about the toxic gas clouds before *they* stick their head in one.
LPG installations are quite common in my home parts, and generally if you have engine in the front, you put the bottle in the rear, as far away as possible. There are of course various regulations for safety, to make it reasonably nearly as safe as a car with petrol tank, but I'm also aware that SO MANY people have "fake" certifications, or rather "bought" ones. However, mounting the bottle WITH THE ENGINE is just driving around in a car bomb with an impact fuse at the end...
How can someone make chlorine dioxide and not notice immediately it's toxic? I made some chlorine with Ca(ClO)2 yesterday, just a small amount made me so uncomfortable and my nose feel so not nice I had to take my gas mask, and I can barely even smell anything because for some reason my nose is fucked up for awhile now, and that was just a bit, I havent even made a ton, and I was outside (although it wanst windy How did he make it inside and didnt immediately regret?
Australian here, can confirm bullants are terrible. Where I grew up we had lots of them, I was stung many times, the last time it happened my thumb became swollen and my hand numb. They can get quite aggressive, I remember accidentally disturbing nests and having to run away as hundreds of bullants poured out of the ground.
Responding to Robert LaPointe's comment (the one about the eye irritation): I dunno why y'all chemists don't keep a few cleansuits (think HAZMAT suits) and full-face Supplied Air Breathing Apparatuses (SABAs) [with the requisite air supply equipment being installed in the lab] or Self-Contained Breathing Apparatuses (SCBAs) around at all times (plus ensure ALL OF YOU are trained/ready to use them if required)... that way, if something goes south by emitting irritating/asphyxiating/toxic vapours or gases, everyone can clear the area, then a couple people can don a cleansuits + SABA/SCBAs and go deal with it while themselves being safe from the airborne hazard. If y'all were to have someone fall unconscious or otherwise be incapacitated due to toxic gases/vapours, that'd be especially critical - because rescuing them as quickly as possible is essential (mere minutes of delay could make the difference between life and death with many airborne hazards), but you can't safely do that if no one can enter the area without being affected. To me, having that kind of backup plan in place is a HUGE part of safety - in fact, I'd say the largest part. I'd argue those kinds of things are MUCH more important than the paperwork side of safety. You should ALWAYS have a backup plan - and preferably a backup plan for your backup plan.
On the topic of chlorine, back in 11th grade we were making some chlorine gas in chemistry class to demonstrate its bleaching properties, but the problem is because this was in Croatia school had no funding for any sort of PPE or other safety equipment so we just put the starting compound (i don't remember what it was, but it was probably some chlorate) in a petri dish with the colored fibers and put the lid on, but because i was an idiot i occasionally removed the lid and let it spread throughout the room with the windows closed because reasons. During the next class i discover I've given myself and most of the class mild chlorine poisoning due to the nausea, headache and feeling like the upper respiratory system is burning off. All in all, a 7/10 experience, would recommend. Also had some silver nitrate spill on my fingers one time and had silver in my skin for about 3 weeks.
I routinely use CO in an autoclave (25/ 200 mL) as part of a CO/H2 syngas mixture for the Rh catalyzed hydroformylation of olefins, but at least we leak check it with N2 every time and never take it in the elevator.
Someone telling a guy to repeat the thing that got someone else eye injured without wearing eye protection sounds like something that will inevitably end up like that.
The chlorine dioxide stuff is sold as "Miracle Mineral Solution." Professional chemist and youtuber powerm1985, (Myles Power), has done some really good work covering the stuff and the associated pseudoreligious quackery that is associated with it. It's bad in every way. I'd highly recommend his channel if you're into that sort of thing (debunking alt medicine and bad science in general).
as someone with mechanical experience, that car with the LPG tank under the hood is INSANE, if it were my project id likely try for the trunk and surround it with heavy metal as a fire wall, at the VERY least put some type of barrier between the engine and tank for obvious reasons
Speaking about cyclotrons, look up a related but not identical device to a cyclotron, called the Therac. Unlike a cyclotron it is a linear particle accelerator and it caused a disgusting series of radiation incidents.
In the 1970s, I made some ClO2 by adding cold H2SO4 to some KClO3, in a test-tube, as per the method described in "Mellor's Modern Inorganic Chemistry." The dense, yellow gas rose slowly up in the test-tube, then, "POW!" Gee, "Mellor's..." didn't mention THAT! Fortunately, the tube didn't break. I later discovered that various methods for making certain other chemicals weren't exactly safe, despite being published in reputable texts and reference works.
The Huntsman spider one... Bloody hell. Oh good grief, all those baby spiders. Aaagh! I don't like spiders. I know Huntsmen aren't deadly, but bloody hell they are scary. The ant in the kid's ear as well, that sounded terrifying but damn he's lucky it didn't sting him. The LPG tank above the car engine? Who's damn fool stupid idea was that? The engine heats it up, so the pressure builds, plus its next to a hot ignition source. Just... Just no!
Chlorine dioxide _is_ good at clearing your lungs, if and only if you're referring to the removal of your lungs that will take place when you inevitably need a transplant /hj
Story time... in one of our undergraduate labs we were working with a product dissolved in petrol 40-60. Most of us headed over to the Buchi to vac it down but, naturally, there weren't enough for the class so one bright spark headed over to stores and signed out a Bunsen burner. On the open bench they clamped the 250ml RB flask (full to the brim) onto a stand and moved it over the Bunsen flame. As expected the petrol boiled almost immediately and then caught fire. They had the presence of mind to turn the Bunsen off but everything after that was a disaster. Now you might be surprised to know that the fire was, at this point, surprisingly tame. There was a flame about 1.5m high coming out the top of the flask but that was it. The ceilings in this lab were very high so there was no real danger to the lab at that time. The danger was actually added by the lecturer that was running the lab. For some reason I will never understand he grabbed a carbon dioxide extinguisher, held it 10cm from the side of the flask and pulled the trigger. In a surprised to absolutely no one this cracked the flask and sent burning petrol all over the bench and the floor. Now this was nearly 30 years ago and in those days we kept glass bottles of solvent and other chemicals on shelves at the back of the bench, these were now all covered in burning petrol and the tops were starting to dance about. Two lab techs then rushed in with more extinguishers and were able to mostly control the fire. Control here means extinguishing some of the fire while chasing most of the burning petrol into a sink when it eventually went out. The guy that signed out the Bunsen was permanently banned from the labs and Bunsens were removed from then stores.
My first year of teaching I had a student in Gen Chem 1 who decided that, rather than go through the bother of using a striker to light his Bunsen burner, he would use a faster, more efficient method. He proceeded to grab a wad of paper towels from the dispenser, stick them into the lit burner of the student next to him, and light his burner with his improvised torch. To top it all off, he then threw the flaming paper towels on the ground and stamped them out with his feet. The students around him screamed and scattered. He did this so quickly that I didn't have time to say anything, and after it was all done I was literally shocked speechless. Apparently he had taken chemistry previously in a foreign country; he told me that that was how they did it there.
Australian here, huntsmans are our friends, I just don't like them in my bed. They eat the mosquitoes and they're non-venomous. I don't want a million babies in my house though.. They're big spiders, but at least they don't want to kill us. It's a breath of fresh air.
I've seen a LPG malfunction. The tank was in the back of the car. The tank ruptured. The car got completely shredded. The hood got bent and had a few tears in it. Even the front bumper sustained some damage. Using ClO2 to cure your cold ? It may cure you from your breathing habit and from your heart beat.
Ah, the story at 4:00 really hits home, because I too made some "skin nitrate" as I called it at the time but I think I was lucky it wasn't a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids, just nitric, although it wasn't 68% it was white fuming, 98% + which you obviously don't want to handle with nitrile or latex gloves, and I didn't have butyl rubber gloves at the time so I just did it bare handed and got a little bit on my finger. It didn't hurt, just turned it hard yellow/orange which took over a month to go away, but no lasting anything whatsoever. Then fast forward a few years and I see Nile Red demonstrate himself pouring fuming nitric acid on his finger as if it was no big deal, so I guess it really isn't a big deal due to passivation effect (though it's cringeworthy to think of fuming HNO3 having a "pacifying effect" on your skin!) I was like 15, trying to make some forbidden nitrate esters, what can I say? *edited to add: Did anyone ever figure out WHY anyone needs CO in an autoclave??
I sorta nitrated my left hand once. I was making silver fulminate in a 10ml graduated cylinder and was holding it still with one hand while adding the alcohol and nitric acid with the other. It got a little bit angry and spewed the contents of the aforementioned cylinder all over the hand holding it. I wasn't wearing gloves because fuming nitric acid, so I quickly walked to the bathroom and rinsed it off. No injury, but my skin and a couple of fingernails were yellow for a couple of weeks.
The weirdest chem story I have is in junior year chemistry we were doing an experiment to measure the amount of calories in different nuts by poking them onto a thumbtack and lighting them on fire. Said thumbtack was glued to a wooden block, then poked through aluminum foil for fireproofing. Experiment went on as usual but somehow my friend and I managed to light the flame retardant coating of the aluminum foil on fire. We called our teacher over because hey this number is gonna be way higher, what do we do and he just stared at the flaming aluminum foil and asked how the hell we did that And that's how I learned that there's over 126 calories in a single cashew! Science is incredible.
I don't have any really crazy stories but I do remember a strange one from early high school: My class had a science test on some topic (I think it was atomic structure and bonding ), which was divided into two sections: Theory, and practical. And how it worked was that one half of the class would be at the front of the room doing the theory whilst the rest of them were doing the practical at the back. Anyway, so one of my friends (who is... not very smart) was on a question which said to: separate the mixture of salt that is dissolved in water (something simple like that) and as I was walking to my desk after I finished my practical to go do the theory, I saw him with a burning match in his hand and failing to open the gas tap because he was not pushing it down, so being the great friend I was, I got his attention and motioned pushing downwards and turning the gas tap. And as I turned around to check on his progress, I witness him finish processing what I suggested him to do (open the gas tap properly). Then the match burned uncomfortably close to his hand so he put it out by shaking vigorously, he then opens the gas tap successfully. After he accomplished this feat, he realizes that his match is no longer lit so he picks up the match box and strikes it again (And by then I had realized what was going to happen but it was already too late). And as he stuck the match on the match box, it lit, and thus igniting the butane that spent the last 10 seconds diffusing into the room from the bunsen burner. Luckily, the fireball didn't hurt anyone because it was relatively small and burned very quickly, but it gave him a hell of a scare and from that point on, he never touched a gas tap or a bunsen burner ever again. And quick PSA to some dumb students, light the match before opening the gas tap.
I can tell you how to remove baby spiders. You need a pair of women's hose or tights, a rubber band, and a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachment. Stretch a part of the hose/tights tightly over the end of the vacuum tube and rubber band it in place. Don't use the toe because you don't want them potentially getting through the seam. You don't want the fabric to be loose and have it sucked into the vacuum. You can cut a small piece out of the fabric to use if you don't plan to wear them again. After the fabric is secure, turn on the vacuum and vacuum up the spiders. This works on most adult spiders too as long as you don't live in, "Everything Wants You Dead Land." Once you have all of the arachnids trapped, turn off the vacuum and quickly remove the fabric. You'll want to have the wand end pointing up so you don't lose any spiders. If you grab the fabric edges and pull quickly you should be able to turn the fabric inside out making a little pouch you can take outside. If that idea freaks you out too much then get your still running vacuum to an outside door, open it, tilt the wand end upwards so no spiders fall, quickly disconnect the tool/tube and toss it outside. Go back in 30 minutes to retrieve it and all spiders should be long gone.
Lead can be a dangerous shielding material to use with high energy beta emitters, as the bremsstrahlung radiation due the the electrons rapidly decelerating when they interact with the lead causes x-ray emission, this is actually how x-ray machines work, they get ~10kV of potential difference across a vacuum tube with an angled tungsten plate in the centre, they heat the cathode and emitted electrons hit the plate and change direction, all the energy they lose from that acceleration is emitted as photons, since their initial energy was 10kV, the photon energy is 10kv minus their kinetic energy after collision, and the direction of the emitted x-ray is determined by the angle of the plate.
Lpg tank above hot egine. In theory it's fine. Still not something I would do. Running away seems a bit of an over reaction. The tank had been in there for a while.
Something for all of you to look up: American Airlines flight 132. Basically an unlabeled, undeclared drum containing both hydrogen peroxide solution (in an illegal concentration!) and a sodium orthosilicate-based mixture was placed on its side inside a plane's cargo hold. The two mixtures ended up reacting, causing a fire that burned hot enough to melt part of the cabin floor.
One time, while concentrating hydrogen peroxide from the 500ml 3% solution, and had reduced the volume of water by painstakingly watching the temperature of the water bath, as I wanted it to decompose as little as possible. After doing a few successful runs, I decided to prepare to build an iodine still by putting a glass tube through a rubber stopper. I had no way to grease it and it had to be a tight fit, so I twisted it and pressed it in there. Next thing I know I have half the glass tube lodged in between my index finger and middle. After pulling the tube out and in my race to manage the wound, I grabbed the enriched peroxide. Enriched to about 15-25% by volume. I dumped it on the cut. It cauterized the wound and there was a whooshing sound and I felt a ton of heat, and my hand was totally bleached for days. I had reduced 500ml of 3% peroxide down to 50mL
One time i tried to clean pennies with bleach and vinegar, whoops that makes chlorine gas. Luckily i don’t think i was really effected by it because i didn’t really breathe all that much in.
I just remembered back when I was 18 and worked at a metrology laboratory. We calibrated multiple types of viscosimeters with the Cannon™ Silicone Standards that wouldn't wash out with just soap and water. So we used gasoline. And acetone. Lots and lots of gasoline and acetone with no fumehood, inside a maybe 5x6 meter room with a single window. Ah, funny times.
I once emptied a small test tube the volume of about a pinky of chlorine gas synthesized by electrolysis during a lesson because of a stupid bet i made with a friend and it had me coughing and sneezing the whole day and torched my throat. Despite all that it still wasn't as bad as breathing in the fumes from a vinegar flavored Lays chips can
That's a wolf spider you showed, not a huntsman. I have half a dozen huntsman in my bedroom, only one of them is free, but he takes care of any mosquitos and cockroaches
When he showed that I tossed my phone across the room.
If I'm not wrong the difference is that Huntsman will mostly chill in their spot and wold spiders might just decide to attack you right ??
@@magusperde365 no spiders will just decide to attack you (some spiders however have much lower standards when it comes to what is considered adequate reason to bite)
but wolf spiders are very active spiders, they are genuinely cool when you look into them. they aren't super bitey though unless you attempt to handle them
@@magusperde365 Wolf spiders are small compared to huntsmans, but they are fast and active.
LOL
The amount of radiation incidents discussed on this channel are scary.
Haha
It's a procedure rich environment. People forget pretty important steps and skip them to save time.
@@luke144 based on how many incidents I’ve heard of; sounds about right.
The worst part is that, from what I understand, huntsman spiders are supposed to be the relatively chill ones. They also apparently have a habit of hiding under the sun visors in people's cars.
Seriously, if I ever went to Australia, I'm confident I'd meet my end by getting into a car accident because I opened the sun visor and a giant spider plopped into my lap.
:(
Huntsmen spiders are fine. They don't bite you unless you really piss them off, they're not dangerous, and they're happy to hang around eating bugs
@@alextopfer1068 Yeah I know but if one falls into my lap my immediate reaction isn't likely to be particularly rational
Not Australia so not a huntsman but one morning in England riding my motorcycle to work as I pulled off the motorway near my work around 20 miles from home a large spider dropped down in front of my face, it must have got into the helmet overnight and just waited.
@@alextopfer1068 Look, I have a spidermom with like 30 cute tiny spiderbros around her in the corner of my room _right now,_ but if a spider the size of my fucking face fell on me unexpectedly I'd still shit myself
"This one time, in the chemistry lab......" Seriously, this has become one of my favorite UA-cam sites of all time. I've got chemical horror stories going back to 1976, so one of these days I'd like to share some with you folks. Molten aluminum, HF, stuff like that.
My current boss told me a story where, in one of her undergrad chem labs, her lab mate asked her to move an unlabeled beaker to the fume hood and thinking it’s just water she did it. Turns out the beaker was full of HF 😭😭
@@Bludgeoned2DEATH2 What's the problem?
Don't act like a moron, don't get hurt.
Weird chemistry stories is truly a niche I didn't know I needed.
I have no idea how I got here (all hail the algorithm, I guess), but now that I’m here I think I’m not going anywhere. These stories are fascinating.
(In reality, it’s probably from having watched everything from USCSB which got a mention last video and from the overlap with Technology Connections which was mentioned two or three ago)
You'll be binge watching these for the next couple of hours
Ah yes trinitrofinger
I remember I bought a small bottle of glycerine from the pharmacy to make some spicy oil
I stored the glycerine for a couple months and when I decided to use it I found solids in it a quick search says glycerine freezes at 16c or lower temps depending on the concentration
Turns out there was cosmetic additives in it (not included in the ingredients for som reason )
So when I added it to the nitration mix it instantly poofed into a shit ton of nitrogen dioxide and the mixture turned black
Thankfully I had full ppe and some thickass gloves I instantly quenched it in ice water and never did spicy glycerine again
Well I would say a useful lesson learned always check your ingredients for contamination because any contamination can and will f up your reaction
Also spicy oil uffff didn't it need water free glycerin for it reaction at first and the temperature control was also very important
And I hope your have worn protective clothing and a gas mask I mean spicy oil vapour lowers the blood pressure really good and well skin absobtion is also quite high
Ahhh just soo much that could go wrong in that reaction and you were lucky enough it did go wrong right at the start
And why good damit there a many others substances that could do the same better at lower risk for your own safety and same are even cheaper and don't need such a "advanced" set up
@@TheLtVoss the ingredients said glycerine and water
Didnt know you need water free glycerine tbh xD
I was wearing full ppe and did proper cooling
I'm quite aware of the blood thinning effects
I have a 450ml bottle of glycerine. NO ingredient list. It have an external use. It also have an internal use section (verbatim from the label):
«Internal use : Adult :
One to two teaspoonfulls (5 to 10 ml) to help relieve temporary and occasional irritating cough.»
Is this just about the order you add things? I remember reading not to add water to acid as it could heat violently.
@@oliverbroad4433 if you don't know why the reaction could go wrong then maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place
Always check chemical compatibility before doing an experiment. Today my PI asked me to check the HOOH content of a reaction with HOOH dipsticks, the chemistry is air sensitive so We often do it in DCM or chloroform. My PI wanted me to test the dipsticks, designed for aqueous solvents, to see if they would work .They wanted me to make up stock solutions of HOOH, initially suggesting I should make them up in DCCl3 so I could confirm by NMR. Needless to say I checked to see if HOOH and Chloroform are compatible, and discovered a lovely paper from the 1930s saying that whilst not all the products of HOOH plus HCCl3 could be identified the characteristic smell of phosgene was detected. Sometimes a week in the lab saves an hour in the library but this time an hour in the library saved me a trip to hospital.
Speaking of radioactivity, I've got a strange story.
In my town, there is a military base in which heavy equipment, like tanks and whatnot, is refitted and repaired. Also, we used to house a BIG milsurp store, that had actual (deactivated) tanks on sale, among other things.
So one time, the base transferred some heavy military vehicle to the milsurp store after the latter bought it through a military agency. I forgot what specific vehicle it was, but I do remember one quality of it - its engine had a flywheel that was made of depleted uranium encased in a thin shell of steel (for whatever reason, I don't know). Since the powerpack of the vehicle was nearing its limit, the milsurp store had it replaced, and just offloaded the old engine to a local junkyard.
Obviously, if they sent it off to be melted as scrap, it could've ended very badly. DU may not be particularly radioactive, but it is very toxic and can be pyrophoric...
Fortunately, the junkyard owner is a very thorough guy, and is known to pick apart the stuff that ends up there in search of useful components for sale at a greater profit than the price of scrap. He noticed the flywheel was much, MUCH heavier than it would be were it made of steel. Having deduced it's not, in fact, made entirely of steel, he phoned the military base for advice.
This caused an alarm at the base, because the military was supposed to provide precise guidance and oversight regarding the disposal of such components, but did no such thing. In the end, a hazmat team was called in to take the flywheel away, and a number of military officials at the base were punished.
PS: I was also told that a similar issue happened some 25 years ago, when the military sold a T-55 AM tank to the milsurp store. They forgot to take one or two of the ERA plates that covered some parts of the vehicle off. For those who don't know, ERA plates are basically two pieces of steel with high explosives sandwiched between them. Considering the tank was later used as a tourist attraction (rides, etc) that's kinda scary.
More than one junkyard worker has died from radioactive materials (usually medical cobalt-60 sources) sold as scrap. Scary stuff.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_orphan_source_incidents
I'd love to get my hands on some ERA plates. I'm sure I could come up with some good experiments with them.
@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 The military is almost paranoically protective them, or so I was told.
Removing them involves three different units (explosives management and disposal, one of the refitting shops like the one in my town, and field military proper). All have to sign off on all the steps of the process, and store or destroy any plates taken off.
The reasons for that, beyond the obvious danger of releasing mil grade explosives to the public, is that most of those ERA plates on our tanks are native designs and are strictly classified for this reason.
Polish military, however, is prone to cock-ups... gives us mischief-makers hope :)
@@michaireneuszjakubowski5289 we can definitely hope to get our hands on some. Since the Russian military is so corrupt you could likely buy some from one of their officers. I just think they'd be cool to play with. See what they can and can't withstand. I highly doubt that someone could set one off by accident. To my knowledge it's really just a sheet of secondary explosive inside with no potentially sensitive primary. You'd likely have to try pretty hard to set one off.
There's a video around somewhere of a captured Russian tank covered with what are are supposed to be explosive armour plates, but are actually just filled with rubber. Judging by that, the Russians might not have any.
Huntsman are cute fluffy gentle spiders. They do feel a bit funny when they are crawling up on your face and both your hands are tied up holding something heavy.
But they are not aggressive at all.
I've had one that's been living in the vents of the ute for nearly a year and got quite large before disappearing.
But when they die they must just leave a massive dead spider corpse
That Chemist I've found some pretty big huntsman bodies INSIDE THE HOUSE.... makes me wonder what size creature killed it 😵
@@That_Chemist you'd think, but the way spiders' circulation works means that when spiders die they basically just shrivel up into like a fifth of their legspan. we get a big species of huntsmen in the american south that play relatively nicely with people but are still quite the scare to see when on the prowl.
@@CoolAsFreya you know the saying “There is always a bigger fish”? Yea, spiders are applicable to that also.
I wouldnt wanna see onenin person or I better have a rocket sitting by my aide so I can send myself to LEO
That "2,4,6-trinitrofinger" got me laughing till I cried.
hahaha
This one will give you a moment of pause .
It was from an acquaintance who was a hydrologist .
He worked on projects involving groundwater pollution and one of these was a large and very old atomic research facility .
This facility had an underground tank for storing radioactive liquid waste .
It had been there for decades , and although it could hold tens of thousands of gallons , it was rather small compared to the rest of the complex .
At some point in time , the guage that monitored the level in the tank broke and nobody noticed .
FOR DECADES !
And for all these decades , waste was pumped to this tank with no thought of why the gauge never moved .
So , a 50,000 gallon or so tank , made of steel , way back in the 1940s ,sat there , being constantly added to , with no working level gauge , and , at the mercy of the elements .
Of course , it had corroded through years and years ago .
Where DID this tank and it's contents sit ?
Under an open field , initially , very close by a small oak tree .
Flash forward 40 years and this once small oak is now a mature oak , and sits outside of cafeteria , giving shade to generations of workers and researchers , as they enjoyed their lunch .
There , under the shade , just above this all but forgotten , nuclear waste , storage tank turned sieve .
bon appetite .
They'd better watch that tree closely for development of eyes, tentacles, etc.
I hope they don't ever cut it down ,but if they do, I want some of the wood,
that wood would make a really *rad* desk!
This place wouldn't happen to be in Pa? Or NY?
Bong apple tea
Oh my god. I was listening in on my sisters chemistry lectures today, and since it was the first lab day, the professor was despising safety. She went over all the regular things that are usually gone over for a first lab class safety lecture, and then one of the students asked what the scariest thing to happen in the lab was.
She said that in a chemistry 201 class (general chemistry 2, I think), they were doing an “unknown solution” lab, where the students were to identify an assigned reagent using several tests they had learned previously. One of these tests was a nitration test. The student was to take a drop of the solution and drop it into a small amount of nitric acid.
Well, someone decided to make a new list of reagents that year, and one of the unknowns was glycerin… you can probably guess where this is going.
Well, the poor student who got the glycerin did the nitration, and noticed their test tube suddenly got very not, and a white oil was now at the bottom of the test tube. The student asked if this was normal, and looking at what the unknown solution was, they went suddenly very pale, told the students to leave carefully, and pulled the fire alarm.
Yes, they made nitroglycerin! And the bomb squad came, and then proceeded to dispose of it.
The instructor ended by reinforcing her earlier point about letting someone know if something doesn’t feel right, as sometimes mistakes happen. And it isn’t just the students who make them!
My dad, an engineer, told me a great story about his roommate making nitroglycerin. They sparked small drops of it with a soldering iron, did a few other things, decided dropping the bottle out their 3rd story window onto the concrete plaza in definitely a bad idea, so they poured it very carefully down the sink in the bathroom down the hallway with copious amounts of water to keep any from staying trapped in the p trap and damaging the pipes.
Engineering students unsupervised do stupid crap has been my takeaway from all his stories... 😂
Biology Student here, my worst chemical accident story occurred about 2 years back while I was working with Drosophila Melanogastor (Fruit flies), for an experiment testing overexposure to light and it’s impacts on insect lifespan. For those who don’t know, fruit flies are grown in cultures that we had to replace every 10 days or so. One day I stayed pretty late in the lab to move the fruit flies all into new cultures, and yes, unfortunately, I was alone. I was probably thinking something like “Oh, it’s just fruit flies, what could go wrong?”.
Now I had done the procedure for transferring the fruit flies dozens of times before this with no issues. It involved anesthetizing the flies with triethylamine, separating them into males and females and putting the correct amount in each new culture vial. Well, someone had left something in the fume hood, and me, not wanting to mess someone’s project up, or deal with moving it out of the way, decided I wouldn’t use the fume hood.
So I started like normal, I got the new culture vials set up, I got the vial of triethylamine, I got the fruit flies, etc.
I then opened the vial of triethylamine and swabbed some of it up, and inserted the swab into the old vial to anesthetize the flies. After it was done, I discarded the swab and began sorting the flies. About 10 minutes into sorting, my eyes began to sting and water, like someone was cutting onions. At the time I didn’t think much of it, as that has happened sometimes, because occasionally the triethylamine can stick to some of the flies and then when you’re sorting them the vapors can get into your eyes and I wasn’t using the fume hood anyways, so a little getting in my eyes wasn’t out of the ordinary.
I pushed onward, however the stinging got worse, eventually my throat began to sting, like I had swallowed something hot that was burning my throat. This was unusual, so finally I looked up from my fruit fly culture and noticed that my vision had an odd halo to it, on top of the burning and watering. Realizing something was wrong, I looked around, and realized, that I had somehow spilled a small puddle of the stuff about 8 inches from where I was sorting the flies.
At this point, I had been breathing the stuff in for close to an hour. My lungs and throat burned and my eyes were on fire.
I managed to clean up the spill before running out of the lab and gasping for air. I then notified the lab manager and told him what had happened. He recommended I head to the doctor to get checked out, however, being a broke college student and not having the money to pay for medical bills, I decided I would be fine and just went home.
Well, the next day my eyes were STILL watering and I had the worse sore throat of my life. The watering eyes stopped after about a day, although my vision was still hazy for about 2 days, and the sore throat lingered for almost a week.
Either way, I learned a valuable lesson, that no matter how trivial or mundane a task in the lab may seem, or how many times you have done it, it’s best to always have someone else in the lab with you, to avoid potentially dangerous accidents. As well as not being an idiot and always using a fume hood when needed.
So basically, while trying to transfer fruit flies, I accidentally gassed myself with triethylamine vapors.
Aren't you insured via the University for cases like that, so you don't have to pay anything?
God when I worked in my uni’s fly lab, we didn’t have flynap so I learned to sort the mfs after just cooling them. I vaguely remembered my prof pushing cold sleep instead of the stuff.
Knowing how much of a dumbass I was in uni… I would have probs gassed myself too
The huntsman spider story reminded me of an incident that has happened twice to me now. I own a car but don't really use it a whole lot, so it's pretty common for it to just be sitting undisturbed for possibly as long as a week. Anyway, one time I had been driving for about 20 minutes on a summer day after not using it for several days, so the engine was quite hot, hot enough that baby huntsman spiders, that were apparently in my car, had enough and started to crawl all over the windshield to cool off. A huntsman spider must have laid a clutch in the hood. I'm not that squeamish, so the drive went fine, except for the fact that i couldn't use my left side mirror because it was covered in spiders, but it sure gave me a big initial shock. Needless to say I gave the internals a very good pressure washing afterwards. Clearly it wasn't enough, though, because the same thing happened a few months later.
On that note, here's a fact about huntsman spiders: They are very flat, they can squeeze into really tight spaces and clearances. I learnt this firsthand when I tried to catch one that ended up in my room when I was young, and it went under the floorboards through the small gap with the wall. I slept in that room, though I didn't really sleep much on that day.
When I was in middle school, there was this kid, not the sharpest crayon in the box. He almost licked a chunk of lead but the teacher (we will get to him later) slapped the lead rod out of his hand. Why did he try to lick it? Because someone dared him to.
About a year later, the same kid licked a piece of dry ice and chaos ensued. On a dare. Not the sharpest crayon in the box. Also in middle school, my science and fencing teacher took us outside for a demonstration. The demonstration was the reactivity of sodium in water. Instead of doing a bit in a beaker like a normal person, he just threw probably 50 grams of sodium into a feeding trough filled with water. Fwoomp. There are many more stories but those are the most notable. There is also the Jesus potassium incident but I don’t remember enough to tell it.
Edit there is also the twenty second hairspray potato cannon. Fwoomp
Potassium Jesus ?
Do not leave us in suspense !!
We MUST know .
Potassium jesus?
Well now I am curious, why did it get the name "potassium jesus?"
Thirding the potassium jesus question. Tell us what you know.
Jesus was bringing awareness to the world on potassium deficiency. 🙌
20 years of some guy fucking with lasers and the safety guy getting his eyes practically cauterized is insanely scary to me. Like how did nobody realize he was this dangerous over the course of 20 years
And why the fuck didn't the safety person wear some laser goggles
That's easy, Tim: they thought the technician knew what he was doing...which, certainly, he didn't.
@@virtualtools_3021 I can think of ways that could still go wrong, in some cases lasers can change their wavelength (the most common one is green lasers in cold environments transitioning to infrared and people thinking they're broken and staring into them, frying their retinas), it could go so far out of its normal wavelength range somehow that it ends up being outside of the range of the laser goggles.
As someone who has had an insect (worse, a german cockroach) in their ear, the bull ant story is painfully relatable. We got it out of my ear with baby oil, though.
😔
I have an anecdote related to the LPG tank in the car. Another situation where it sounds sketchy, but apparently is fine.
My grandpa drove a meat truck and lived in Minnesota. This was before you could plug in an engine heater over night, so on cold winter mornings, grandpa would start up some charcoal in the grill, then move it onto a pan right beneath the diesel tank to warm it up.
Always sounded scary to me, but apparently it's fine.
Diesel isn't anything like gasoline. It's quite stable and difficult to light in comparison. It's not much more flammable than most cooking oils.
@@lobsterbark Right, but I didn't know that when I heard the story.
@@lobsterbark I’ve heard that it is possible to put out a small flame with diesel. I will never try that, but sounds cool.
Yeah, we've used burning firewood to warm up ATVs on cold mornings. I've heard stories about charcoal, but never actually seen it done. I am also Minnesotan, so I may have to try the charcoal trick when it's -30 out
Diesel is tremendously less flammable than gasoline.
The LPG Story reminded me of someone I know. Story happens in Belgium.
It was his Birthday, and he had been gifted a bottle of williamine (an alcohol made from pears). He also had an ice-cream cornucopia, which he kept cold using dry ice. Wanting to cool the bottle down for same-day enjoyment at the party, he had the brilliant idea of opening the bottle, putting a piece of dry ice inside, and then closing the bottle again to shake it (for better cooling). Well, let's just say he never got to shake it, as the bottle exploded in his hand as soon as he had closed the bottle, spreading the content of said bottle everywhere. Luckily the bottle being new, the explosion was quite small, although glass shards cut his hand. Luckily it wasn't bad (didn't even need stitches), and that was it.
The part that makes it funny, is that he only had 1-2 glasses of wine before, didn't really drink after, and so was still able to drive home. He however got pulled over to check if he was drunk, as part of a random check. A bottle of alcohol having exploded in his hand, his clothes were soaked and reeked of alcohol. He didn't have any other clothes with him, and so had to keep them on. So when he got pulled over and opened the window, of course, the whole car smelled of alcohol, which obviously made the police dubious, when he answered "no" to the question if he had drunk. It was only after blowing close to 0 on the breathalizer that he was let go. In the end a fun story without any serious consequences, and which is still used to poke a bit of fun at him.
Oh, my. Some of those were pretty scary!
The radiological incident reminds me of something that happened decades ago, when I was a PhD student.
Here's the context : This was a biochemistry department, and the folks in my lab were working under one supervisor on two different fields. I was working on sterol biosynthesis. The other research interest was visual transduction (the process that converts a photon of light into a nerve impulse). This occurrence mainly affected one guy, who was the postdoc working on visual transduction. Most of the proteins involved in visual transduction are light-sensitive (obvs), so the work all has to be conducted in a darkroom.
Because the visual transduction process involves cascades of protein phosphorylation, the research group often used 32P-labelled ATP, with the radionuclide often being transferred as a phosphate group to one or more proteins in the system. 32P is a high-energy Beta emitter, so the most appropriate shielding is a light material such as perspex, at least 1 cm thick. (Heavy metals interacting with Beta radiation can lead to a secondary effect known as Bremsstrahlung radiation. ) The good thing about 32P is you can easily track its presence with a Geiger counter, even if only a tiny quantity is present. Standard practice is to check all surfaces once you've finished a piece of work, and deal with any contamination appropriately. The typical reach of the 32P radiation in air is about a metre.
Anyhow, our supervisor had arranged a collaboration with a group from the University of Moscow, and several of the Russians came to visit for a month or so, and do some work in our labs. The day after they left, the postdoc came into the lab wanting to show me something. He took a Geiger counter and took me to the door of the darkroom. Having checked the door handle, he invited me to simply open the door. Without entering the room, the Geiger counter started crackling at about a thousand counts/second. Just a short way into the room, the counter's off-scale alarm sounded. We immediately retreated. The postdoc couldn't believe how screaming hot the darkroom was! What the hell had our friends from Moscow been doing in there?!
Fortunately, 32P has a half-life of about a fortnight. The darkroom was off-limits for about four weeks, after which the postdoc was able to at least enter the room in reasonable safety and start cleaning it up.
If you find a huntsman walking around covered in its own babies, it's probably a wolf spider.
Long time watcher first time commenter,
So I went to pick up a huge collection of used glassware somewhere in London. When I arrived and explained what I would be using the glassware for (various low-skill reactions for fun), he remembered a "funny" story about one of the chemical companies he worked for.
The company he worked for made chemicals to order at large quantities, so they had VATS of reagents you would not expect to exist in vat form.
So one day this guy at his job was doing routine checks for contaminants and levels of the various chemicals, but they had the bare minimum overhead railing, so in order to open and close the half-lids to these tanks, he would stretch his entire body over the open top.
So he fell into a vat of phenol.
He got out and everybody was laughing, he cleared himself up and went to lunch covered in a crystal skin of phenol.
He died at the lunch table.
Scary story that he kept light-hearted as if there was going to be a funny moment with a valuable safety story, but he did get his point across: Saftey is rarely a joke.
P.s. TC please limit spider pics, I beg.
The spider story sounds like something straight out of one of those video games where you shoot a big enemy and it spawns a bunch of little enemies. Bet he slept even worse after doing that!
You don't kill Huntsman spiders, they are harmless to you, they theoretically have a very painful bite but it's extremely rare that they'd bite you & they keep bugs & other spiders away.
I feel like a lot of these stories that end in "they didn't get any permanent damage" should instead be "no permanent damage has shown itself yet"😐
No permanent damage years later is like 90% indicative that there won't be any. Sure, that leaves 10%, but being alarmist like this only causes panic.
@@8bits59 we're talking about chemicals that are carcinogenic and can cause long term heart issues, for example.
@@tommihommi1 yes, but very rarely do chronic symptoms just appear out of nowhere like a ghost. You'll have issues that lead up to it.
@@8bits59 the examples of cancer and heart disease do precisely that: Happen suddenly ages later.
@@tommihommi1 right, I didn't say that doesn't happen, but that it's rare
As a bird man from Australia I can say the Huntsman are harmless. They're non-toxic and so timid that it's rare to be bitten... as mean as our wildlife looks, we have very similar crows as the rest of the world, and being swooped by an Australian magpie pales in comparison to crows swooping (which people likely repress due to trauma -- hence why we speak evil of magpies but not crows). To set the scene, I'm homeless, so I ride around on a pushbike with my everything... Imagine charged up battery packs, kerosene (with a bit of citronella, for a lantern), etc, all moving at 20mph with me, riding hands-free (as you do) at dusk, when a crow divebombs right in front of my face... My wild bird friends are such funny pranksters!
That guy with the propane converted engine in his car is lucky to be alive
CO in high pressures is useful in many industrial applications, e.g. purifying nickel and other metals. Doesn't surprise me that there are labs playing with that stuff, but it is scary af.
0:45 Surely this could have been prevented had they worn adequate laser protection goggles. Why didn’t at least the safety observer wear them? That seems like it should be the first thing to do when working with high power lasers.
CO in an autoclave without other gases would typically be catalytic carbonylation, but I'm sure there's other stuff you can do with it too. The first reaction I ever ran at elevated pressure was a carbonylation and I have never been so damn paranoid about a reaction setup.
Kid named 2,4,6 trinitrofinger:
I had spider problem in my bedroom a few years ago. While not as big as Huntsmen, their legs would comfortably span from my bird fingertip to wrist and their bodies are about thumb-size. I have no idea why, but what creeps me out most about them is they are bald with a flesh tone I would characterize as dead human medium brown. That little bit of human look really freaks me out. They also seem to actively hunt at night and while fast are a little clumsy. So they would often fall off the ceiling and on to me while using the computer. One landed on my forehead with a life altering flesh-on-flesh plop. Another time I woke up to the sight of the largest one I have seen on the wall less than 30cm from my face.
I tried catch and release but there were so many that never made a dent in the population. I have a cat who is as afraid of them as I am so he wasn't much help aside form morale support. He also has some dangerous form of epilepsy so I didn't want to spray pesticides. I achieved better living through chemistry by sealing the room and running UVC lights to fumigate with ozone. (The cat and I were outside until the ozone smell dissipated.) I do something similar to get rid of fleas, but one treatment was enough to terminate all of the spiders so I could RIP.
A few years ago I was replacing the filter drier on an old R22 residential air conditioning unit. I had recovered all the liquid R22 into a recovery cylinder using the compressor, but I couldn't get the compressor to pull the remaining gas pressure below about 20 PSIG, and I didn't have a recovery machine available. I wanted to avoid releasing the small amount of remaining HCFC into the atmosphere due to its high ozone depletion potential, so I figured incinerating it would be a better option. I was well aware that the products of decomposition of an HCFC would include HF, HCl, and some amount of phosgene; however, I figured these would be less detrimental to the atmosphere than the raw R22. I proceeded to connect the service port to one of the air inlets on my brazing torch, and purged the remaining gas into the torch flame, which burned a brilliant green color in the process. Despite the occasional whiff of halogenated combustion products, the whole process when very smoothly and I achieved my goal of avoiding significant HCFC release. The filter drier replacement went without issue as well. Needless to say, don't try this one at home, though!
saw the huntsman story and i have my own secondhand accounts: a close relative regularly works at a local home depot and it has an issue with brown recluse spiders hiding in the shelves or other dark places like gloves, boots, etc. She has been bitten by brown recluse spiders at-least 10-20 times and is still working at the same home depot at the ripe old age of 81.
2,4,6-trinitrofinger haha! that's brilliant!
I used to work as a Radiochemist in Nuclear Med. We regularly performed PET imaging using 18-Fluorodeoxyglucose (18-FDG), and used to "consume" quite a few megaBequerels worth daily. The Hot Lab was located over the entrance archway to the Hospital, and although our 18-FDG Dispensing system was heavily shielded on the top, and sides, the shielding on the bottom was "not so thick", presumably to allow the device to be at least somewhat luggable by ordinary folks. The problem was that the attenuation of the 511keV annihilation photons was "very incomplete", and anyone walking through the archway was getting a reasonable dose of gamma radiation (100 microSieverts/hour). We had to barricade the archway off when we were doing PET imaging (and that was fairly frequently!)
I JUST did my workplace’s cryogenic gas safety training this morning and they recommend to move containers like that CO autoclave by putting it in the elevator alone, posting a warning sign in front of the elevator, sending it up, taking the stairs, then taking it out of the elevator (thereby protecting it from both knocks in the stairs and you from asphyxiation in case of a leak in the elevator)
I had been considering moving to Australia after I graduate, but this video is making me rethink some things…. lol. I live on the east coast US, where we don’t really encounter many venomous creatures.
That said, I was recently cleaning out a “doom bin” in my room, just a laundry basket full of clutter I haven’t found a place for yet. It was late, and this was basically the last thing I had planned to do that day. About halfway through the task, I pulled something out of the bin, and chillin right there at the bottom was a huge (by mid-atlantic US standards) brown spider. Now, my spider ID skills aren’t great, but that didn’t matter because the anxious part of my brain was extremely confident that it was a brown recluse (it probably wasn’t). I used an index card and a small jar to scoop the homie up, and then I loosely capped the jar. That was a big mistake; the little dude was FAST and he was crawling all over the walls and lid of the jar. I managed to keep it from escaping the jar without injuring it for long enough to get it outside, but when I opened the jar, it was dark outside and I just kinda shook it hard until I knew it was empty and ran away. I never saw where the spider went, and it took a while for me to get to sleep because I wanted to be super sure that he hadn’t crawled into my pant leg or clung onto my hair or something.
The Chlorine dioxide story looks like it came directly from styropiro's 1933 chemstry book, right beside the cold inhalant made of cloroform, formaldehyde, ether and isopropyl alcohol
💯
I think the industry name for that inhalant is "Fuckitall".
I took two drops of chlorine dioxide yesterday.
To my surprise, it significantly lessened my sniffles lol
I asked my father, who is a mechanic, about the propane thing and he just looked at me and shook his head
That LPG tank would have been liquid petroleum gas, not liquid propane gas. Still very flammable of course.
Yeah I realized after - fml
Liquefied petroleum gas is a mixture of mostly propane/butane.
My first year of chemistry, I had a really cool and laid back professor, but he was super super serious about safety too (i mean, as any professor should be). As his own “Suzy never wore her goggles, now she doesn’t need them” speech, he told us a story from when he worked at Tide detergents in North Carolina. He said that the enzymes they work with there are 650,000 times more concentrated than what goes into the bottles you buy at the store. These enzymes are also water activated. And North Carolina is very humid during the summer. One these humid summer days, one of the workers went to the restroom and failed to properly decontaminate himself before using the urinal. Within thirty minutes, the skin from the family jewels and his inner thighs had begun to slough off. We made sure we washed and cleaned all our lab equipment properly.
10 drops sodium chlorite and 10 drops HCl (using standard 2-part kit) in 1 litre of water is a reasonable use of aqueous ClO2 to kill infections; it should be mixed outdoors.
We use Benzyl bromide as a training agent to simulate attacks witch toxic chemicals ( like nerve agents, or blister agents )
Oh, chemistry stories. I had a professor who would take massive nose hits of dichloromethane. Fast forward a few decades, he was arrested and hauled off campus in cuffs. Bipolar as frig too.
8:48
I think it's a terrible idea. While the engine itself shouldn't get hot enough to ignite LPG, IF the exhaust header ever has an issue, (which is very common, especially if old/rusty) such as the flange coming loose, and flames from the engine's exhaust come out, gas would ignite. Same thing if you picked up foreign debris, like a tree branch or grass, that ignites against the VERY hot exhaust header. Also, whatever the paperwork, I wouldn't trust a pressurized gas container to be safe in an environment where it's exposed to 140-220°F
Considering this car was aftermarket tuned, it probably got MUCH hotter in places than it's factory equivalent.
My only chemical background is watching videos like this and dropping out of chem unis a couple of times (mostly due to a lack of motivation to do anything other than binge watching youtube), so I can't say that I have many stories, but here they are:
There was one time back when I was in high school (2014-2016) when a guy teaching extracurricular chem/bio stuff (not in school, it was a completely separate thing) decided to have an extra lesson with real chemicals for everyone who was willing to chip in for reagents.
During the lesson, I either broke the "dilute water with acid, not the other way around" rule, or added something else into the sulfuric acid test tube, which made it shoot out of the tube and onto the table. Thankfully no one was hit, especially since I don't remember if we had any safety gear, but trying to mop it up with paper towels, while they were slowly darkening and disintegrating was fun, and I left with no damage to my most likely unprotected skin.
Also, since we only really used, like, 20% of what was bought, he let us take home a bunch of stuff. Don't really remember whether everything was up for grabs or not, but people were definitely scooping up lead nitrate, and I walked home with a plastic(?) tube of sulfuric acid, lol. At least it had a lid.
Later on I used it to make a small amount of piranha on my windowsill by putting a small glass cup on the lamp part of a lava-lamp to heat it up, mixing said acid with 2% peroxide, and waiting for enough water to evaporate. It actually worked and when I dropped a piece of paper in there, it made a nice sizzle before disappearing :D
I also used the same contraption to slowly dissolve zinc pieces of batteries in vinegar, and making the entire public staircase part of my commieblock smell like vinegar in the process. All while I was sitting right next to it and breathing all of it in, but my asthma took a day off that time I guess.
I guess that's about it, washing chlorate out of hundreds of matches and lighting it on fire mixed with a bunch of sugar also happened, but seems tamer.
Oh, and those couple times in unis, when during the whole "extract iodine from solution using DCM(?)" one time a girl said that a drop of it just got sucked up into her finger, and in another uni it was ok to mix up the contents by plugging up the test tube with your thumb and shaking it during this experiment. Guess that might not be too bad, since it's only a drop of solvent at the bottom of the tube under all that water, but still feels a bit off.
Ive also nitrated my fingers once. I had to make a nitrating mix for a home chemistry project but was out of nitric acid so I had to make some more. I was too lazy to do a distillation, so I had the genius idea of using calcium nitrate with an exces sulfuric acid and filtering off the insoluble calcium sulfate. I thought the calcium sulfate would just settle to the bottom and I would be able to decant it through a filter paper, but there was no separation, it was more like a paste. So I decided to just try to filter the paste and try to get some of the liquid out of it. It was really slow, about a drop every second. At some point, the rubberband that I used to held the filter broke, probably because it has been exposed to acids for a while, so I instinctively grabbed the filter with my bare hands. I didnt know what to do with it, I did not want to drop it and have to restart the filtration since it was so slow. The nitrating mix continued dripping on my hands until it started burning, thats when I decided to just drop it in and ran to the sink. I still have pictures of my yellow hands if anyone is interested to see them.
Correction about thorium: it has EXTREMELY high intensity radiation, but it isn’t that penetrating (goes through very thin lead but radiation greatly reduced)
Edit: my story is that I didn’t know what thorium was a few years ago, so I casually had a sample of it tucked away in a safe in my room somewhere. I found it yesterday, and just realized that I was lucky it was tucked away in a thick safe. Another story was that I forgot I wasn’t wearing gloves, and touched antimony with my bear hands. Was not pleasant after.
I'm no chemist but I have a chemical related story from working in a plastics moulding factory.
While training with the machine setters we were doing a plastic change, purge the old plastic out, put special purging plastic in and purge it out to clean the barrel then add the new plastic; easy, I'd done it dozens of times before, on other machines...
I climbed up the machine (about 6' high), perched precariously on a hydraulic cylinder and leaned over to unclip the hopper lid; why there isn't an actual access platform up there I don't know.
What nobody told me was that this machine used different plastic, it used acetal, which when left in a hot barrel degrades and releases formaldehyde gas.
I pop the seal on the hopper lid and lift the fairly heavy assembly away only to be hit with a facefull and lungfull of the gas. Somehow, completely blinded, eyes watering, coughing with my throat burning I managed to climb down off the machine without breaking anything or going flying over some part and stumble into the toilets that were mercifully right beside the machine. Head in the sink and run the tap into my eyes (because of course none of the eye wash stations had been restocked in a decade). 20 minutes or so later I was okay and years on I've learned that in future if I end up training an apprentice I should probably warn them about the toxic gas clouds before *they* stick their head in one.
LPG installations are quite common in my home parts, and generally if you have engine in the front, you put the bottle in the rear, as far away as possible. There are of course various regulations for safety, to make it reasonably nearly as safe as a car with petrol tank, but I'm also aware that SO MANY people have "fake" certifications, or rather "bought" ones.
However, mounting the bottle WITH THE ENGINE is just driving around in a car bomb with an impact fuse at the end...
How can someone make chlorine dioxide and not notice immediately it's toxic?
I made some chlorine with Ca(ClO)2 yesterday, just a small amount made me so uncomfortable and my nose feel so not nice I had to take my gas mask, and I can barely even smell anything because for some reason my nose is fucked up for awhile now, and that was just a bit, I havent even made a ton, and I was outside (although it wanst windy
How did he make it inside and didnt immediately regret?
Australian here, can confirm bullants are terrible.
Where I grew up we had lots of them, I was stung many times, the last time it happened my thumb became swollen and my hand numb.
They can get quite aggressive, I remember accidentally disturbing nests and having to run away as hundreds of bullants poured out of the ground.
Responding to Robert LaPointe's comment (the one about the eye irritation): I dunno why y'all chemists don't keep a few cleansuits (think HAZMAT suits) and full-face Supplied Air Breathing Apparatuses (SABAs) [with the requisite air supply equipment being installed in the lab] or Self-Contained Breathing Apparatuses (SCBAs) around at all times (plus ensure ALL OF YOU are trained/ready to use them if required)... that way, if something goes south by emitting irritating/asphyxiating/toxic vapours or gases, everyone can clear the area, then a couple people can don a cleansuits + SABA/SCBAs and go deal with it while themselves being safe from the airborne hazard.
If y'all were to have someone fall unconscious or otherwise be incapacitated due to toxic gases/vapours, that'd be especially critical - because rescuing them as quickly as possible is essential (mere minutes of delay could make the difference between life and death with many airborne hazards), but you can't safely do that if no one can enter the area without being affected.
To me, having that kind of backup plan in place is a HUGE part of safety - in fact, I'd say the largest part. I'd argue those kinds of things are MUCH more important than the paperwork side of safety. You should ALWAYS have a backup plan - and preferably a backup plan for your backup plan.
On the topic of chlorine, back in 11th grade we were making some chlorine gas in chemistry class to demonstrate its bleaching properties, but the problem is because this was in Croatia school had no funding for any sort of PPE or other safety equipment so we just put the starting compound (i don't remember what it was, but it was probably some chlorate) in a petri dish with the colored fibers and put the lid on, but because i was an idiot i occasionally removed the lid and let it spread throughout the room with the windows closed because reasons. During the next class i discover I've given myself and most of the class mild chlorine poisoning due to the nausea, headache and feeling like the upper respiratory system is burning off.
All in all, a 7/10 experience, would recommend. Also had some silver nitrate spill on my fingers one time and had silver in my skin for about 3 weeks.
Individual one creating a problems with radiation- sounds like an ex president I know of.
0:25: don't look at laser with remaining eye
I routinely use CO in an autoclave (25/ 200 mL) as part of a CO/H2 syngas mixture for the Rh catalyzed hydroformylation of olefins, but at least we leak check it with N2 every time and never take it in the elevator.
Trinitrofinger had me rolling. 😅😅😅
Someone telling a guy to repeat the thing that got someone else eye injured without wearing eye protection sounds like something that will inevitably end up like that.
The chlorine dioxide stuff is sold as "Miracle Mineral Solution." Professional chemist and youtuber powerm1985, (Myles Power), has done some really good work covering the stuff and the associated pseudoreligious quackery that is associated with it. It's bad in every way. I'd highly recommend his channel if you're into that sort of thing (debunking alt medicine and bad science in general).
as someone with mechanical experience, that car with the LPG tank under the hood is INSANE, if it were my project id likely try for the trunk and surround it with heavy metal as a fire wall, at the VERY least put some type of barrier between the engine and tank for obvious reasons
Also an Aussie here, once I woke up and went out to my living room and found a huntsman spider larger than my hand just chilling on the wall
Speaking about cyclotrons, look up a related but not identical device to a cyclotron, called the Therac. Unlike a cyclotron it is a linear particle accelerator and it caused a disgusting series of radiation incidents.
In the 1970s, I made some ClO2 by adding cold H2SO4 to some KClO3, in a test-tube, as per the method described in "Mellor's Modern Inorganic Chemistry." The dense, yellow gas rose slowly up in the test-tube, then, "POW!" Gee, "Mellor's..." didn't mention THAT! Fortunately, the tube didn't break. I later discovered that various methods for making certain other chemicals weren't exactly safe, despite being published in reputable texts and reference works.
The Huntsman spider one... Bloody hell. Oh good grief, all those baby spiders. Aaagh! I don't like spiders. I know Huntsmen aren't deadly, but bloody hell they are scary.
The ant in the kid's ear as well, that sounded terrifying but damn he's lucky it didn't sting him.
The LPG tank above the car engine? Who's damn fool stupid idea was that? The engine heats it up, so the pressure builds, plus its next to a hot ignition source. Just... Just no!
I've had a huntsman experience as well - Tonnes of baby spiders in my spare room!
Chlorine dioxide _is_ good at clearing your lungs, if and only if you're referring to the removal of your lungs that will take place when you inevitably need a transplant /hj
Story time... in one of our undergraduate labs we were working with a product dissolved in petrol 40-60. Most of us headed over to the Buchi to vac it down but, naturally, there weren't enough for the class so one bright spark headed over to stores and signed out a Bunsen burner. On the open bench they clamped the 250ml RB flask (full to the brim) onto a stand and moved it over the Bunsen flame. As expected the petrol boiled almost immediately and then caught fire. They had the presence of mind to turn the Bunsen off but everything after that was a disaster.
Now you might be surprised to know that the fire was, at this point, surprisingly tame. There was a flame about 1.5m high coming out the top of the flask but that was it. The ceilings in this lab were very high so there was no real danger to the lab at that time. The danger was actually added by the lecturer that was running the lab. For some reason I will never understand he grabbed a carbon dioxide extinguisher, held it 10cm from the side of the flask and pulled the trigger. In a surprised to absolutely no one this cracked the flask and sent burning petrol all over the bench and the floor. Now this was nearly 30 years ago and in those days we kept glass bottles of solvent and other chemicals on shelves at the back of the bench, these were now all covered in burning petrol and the tops were starting to dance about. Two lab techs then rushed in with more extinguishers and were able to mostly control the fire. Control here means extinguishing some of the fire while chasing most of the burning petrol into a sink when it eventually went out.
The guy that signed out the Bunsen was permanently banned from the labs and Bunsens were removed from then stores.
The only thing that I can imagine needs autoclaved CO is making formates
0:50 and my jaw is already on the floor. This episode's gonna be a ride, ain't it?
ETA: 8:45 yes, I think that sounds like a terrible idea.
My first year of teaching I had a student in Gen Chem 1 who decided that, rather than go through the bother of using a striker to light his Bunsen burner, he would use a faster, more efficient method. He proceeded to grab a wad of paper towels from the dispenser, stick them into the lit burner of the student next to him, and light his burner with his improvised torch. To top it all off, he then threw the flaming paper towels on the ground and stamped them out with his feet. The students around him screamed and scattered. He did this so quickly that I didn't have time to say anything, and after it was all done I was literally shocked speechless. Apparently he had taken chemistry previously in a foreign country; he told me that that was how they did it there.
Australian here, huntsmans are our friends, I just don't like them in my bed. They eat the mosquitoes and they're non-venomous. I don't want a million babies in my house though..
They're big spiders, but at least they don't want to kill us. It's a breath of fresh air.
I've seen a LPG malfunction. The tank was in the back of the car. The tank ruptured. The car got completely shredded. The hood got bent and had a few tears in it. Even the front bumper sustained some damage.
Using ClO2 to cure your cold ? It may cure you from your breathing habit and from your heart beat.
worst huntsman experience was having one walk across my motorcycle helmet's visor. While I was in traffic.
wtf
@@That_Chemist indeed!
Ok, I’ve had enough stories about insects now lol
2, 4, 6-trinitrofinger sounds like a good band name.
Huntsman spiders are harmless, massive (the size of dinner plates) and terrifying
Kid named 2,4,6-trinitrofinger:
huntsman spiders are just friendly little guys
Ah, the story at 4:00 really hits home, because I too made some "skin nitrate" as I called it at the time but I think I was lucky it wasn't a mixture of sulfuric and nitric acids, just nitric, although it wasn't 68% it was white fuming, 98% + which you obviously don't want to handle with nitrile or latex gloves, and I didn't have butyl rubber gloves at the time so I just did it bare handed and got a little bit on my finger. It didn't hurt, just turned it hard yellow/orange which took over a month to go away, but no lasting anything whatsoever. Then fast forward a few years and I see Nile Red demonstrate himself pouring fuming nitric acid on his finger as if it was no big deal, so I guess it really isn't a big deal due to passivation effect (though it's cringeworthy to think of fuming HNO3 having a "pacifying effect" on your skin!) I was like 15, trying to make some forbidden nitrate esters, what can I say?
*edited to add: Did anyone ever figure out WHY anyone needs CO in an autoclave??
nice timing! a new vid right for my evening meal :з it feels good to not have chlorine dioxide in the soup
I sorta nitrated my left hand once. I was making silver fulminate in a 10ml graduated cylinder and was holding it still with one hand while adding the alcohol and nitric acid with the other. It got a little bit angry and spewed the contents of the aforementioned cylinder all over the hand holding it. I wasn't wearing gloves because fuming nitric acid, so I quickly walked to the bathroom and rinsed it off. No injury, but my skin and a couple of fingernails were yellow for a couple of weeks.
The weirdest chem story I have is in junior year chemistry we were doing an experiment to measure the amount of calories in different nuts by poking them onto a thumbtack and lighting them on fire. Said thumbtack was glued to a wooden block, then poked through aluminum foil for fireproofing. Experiment went on as usual but somehow my friend and I managed to light the flame retardant coating of the aluminum foil on fire.
We called our teacher over because hey this number is gonna be way higher, what do we do and he just stared at the flaming aluminum foil and asked how the hell we did that
And that's how I learned that there's over 126 calories in a single cashew! Science is incredible.
I don't have any really crazy stories but I do remember a strange one from early high school:
My class had a science test on some topic (I think it was atomic structure and bonding ), which was divided into two sections: Theory, and practical. And how it worked was that one half of the class would be at the front of the room doing the theory whilst the rest of them were doing the practical at the back. Anyway, so one of my friends (who is... not very smart) was on a question which said to: separate the mixture of salt that is dissolved in water (something simple like that) and as I was walking to my desk after I finished my practical to go do the theory, I saw him with a burning match in his hand and failing to open the gas tap because he was not pushing it down, so being the great friend I was, I got his attention and motioned pushing downwards and turning the gas tap. And as I turned around to check on his progress, I witness him finish processing what I suggested him to do (open the gas tap properly). Then the match burned uncomfortably close to his hand so he put it out by shaking vigorously, he then opens the gas tap successfully. After he accomplished this feat, he realizes that his match is no longer lit so he picks up the match box and strikes it again (And by then I had realized what was going to happen but it was already too late). And as he stuck the match on the match box, it lit, and thus igniting the butane that spent the last 10 seconds diffusing into the room from the bunsen burner. Luckily, the fireball didn't hurt anyone because it was relatively small and burned very quickly, but it gave him a hell of a scare and from that point on, he never touched a gas tap or a bunsen burner ever again. And quick PSA to some dumb students, light the match before opening the gas tap.
Chlorine Dioxide is common around the alternative medicine guys as a cure for everything... 'muh, main stream medicine bad' 🤦🏻♂️
LPG isn't just propane, it sometimes has butane in it as well.
Keep that butane away from my propane and propane accessories
Student: (Finishes a reaction that violates conservation of mass)
Teacher: "Great work, you get an A."
When I was at Basic Training, I had a cold the day we got to experience tear gas. Wow did that clear out my sinuses, fast.
Sorry to hear that
I can tell you how to remove baby spiders. You need a pair of women's hose or tights, a rubber band, and a vacuum cleaner with a hose attachment. Stretch a part of the hose/tights tightly over the end of the vacuum tube and rubber band it in place. Don't use the toe because you don't want them potentially getting through the seam. You don't want the fabric to be loose and have it sucked into the vacuum. You can cut a small piece out of the fabric to use if you don't plan to wear them again.
After the fabric is secure, turn on the vacuum and vacuum up the spiders. This works on most adult spiders too as long as you don't live in, "Everything Wants You Dead Land." Once you have all of the arachnids trapped, turn off the vacuum and quickly remove the fabric. You'll want to have the wand end pointing up so you don't lose any spiders. If you grab the fabric edges and pull quickly you should be able to turn the fabric inside out making a little pouch you can take outside. If that idea freaks you out too much then get your still running vacuum to an outside door, open it, tilt the wand end upwards so no spiders fall, quickly disconnect the tool/tube and toss it outside. Go back in 30 minutes to retrieve it and all spiders should be long gone.
Lead can be a dangerous shielding material to use with high energy beta emitters, as the bremsstrahlung radiation due the the electrons rapidly decelerating when they interact with the lead causes x-ray emission, this is actually how x-ray machines work, they get ~10kV of potential difference across a vacuum tube with an angled tungsten plate in the centre, they heat the cathode and emitted electrons hit the plate and change direction, all the energy they lose from that acceleration is emitted as photons, since their initial energy was 10kV, the photon energy is 10kv minus their kinetic energy after collision, and the direction of the emitted x-ray is determined by the angle of the plate.
Lpg tank above hot egine. In theory it's fine. Still not something I would do. Running away seems a bit of an over reaction. The tank had been in there for a while.
Something for all of you to look up: American Airlines flight 132.
Basically an unlabeled, undeclared drum containing both hydrogen peroxide solution (in an illegal concentration!) and a sodium orthosilicate-based mixture was placed on its side inside a plane's cargo hold. The two mixtures ended up reacting, causing a fire that burned hot enough to melt part of the cabin floor.
He cured it forever ☠
One time, while concentrating hydrogen peroxide from the 500ml 3% solution, and had reduced the volume of water by painstakingly watching the temperature of the water bath, as I wanted it to decompose as little as possible. After doing a few successful runs, I decided to prepare to build an iodine still by putting a glass tube through a rubber stopper. I had no way to grease it and it had to be a tight fit, so I twisted it and pressed it in there. Next thing I know I have half the glass tube lodged in between my index finger and middle. After pulling the tube out and in my race to manage the wound, I grabbed the enriched peroxide. Enriched to about 15-25% by volume. I dumped it on the cut. It cauterized the wound and there was a whooshing sound and I felt a ton of heat, and my hand was totally bleached for days. I had reduced 500ml of 3% peroxide down to 50mL
One time i tried to clean pennies with bleach and vinegar, whoops that makes chlorine gas. Luckily i don’t think i was really effected by it because i didn’t really breathe all that much in.
and it makes acetyl hypochlorite - very yikes
@@That_Chemist i wasn’t expecting a response, but thank you.
Putting a gas tank in the engine bay of a car seems like a ye-gods-awful idea. What if a spark arises and there's a leak of any kind?
I just remembered back when I was 18 and worked at a metrology laboratory. We calibrated multiple types of viscosimeters with the Cannon™ Silicone Standards that wouldn't wash out with just soap and water. So we used gasoline. And acetone. Lots and lots of gasoline and acetone with no fumehood, inside a maybe 5x6 meter room with a single window. Ah, funny times.
When I heard huntsman spider I thought of the european huntsman, a cute little aracnid with long spindly legs that like to bob around and dance
I once emptied a small test tube the volume of about a pinky of chlorine gas synthesized by electrolysis during a lesson because of a stupid bet i made with a friend and it had me coughing and sneezing the whole day and torched my throat. Despite all that it still wasn't as bad as breathing in the fumes from a vinegar flavored Lays chips can
Lmao