The side yard of the house I grew up in, as a teen (1970s) is basically a chempit. Made all kinds of homemade explosives there. Nothing grew in that area, for decades !
It's the RUclipsr life cycle. You start out doing skits or something, you end up doing meme review or something. Easy content but no-one wants to see you meme-review if they don't already know you. Examples include TwoSet Violin and Brandon Herrera.
In high-school we were doing a water vapor distillation and were instructed to bring various produce like citrus fruits and such so as to extract their essential oils. My classmates, normies, brought various oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, lavander, and such "vanilla" produce. I brought garlic. The assistant was reluctant but 8am morbid curiosity got the best of him and I was allowed to chop it up and load it in the distiller. The pleasant citrussy aromas were soon buried under the thickest most violent most insulting miasma of concentrated garlic extract dripping into a flask. My eyes were burning a bit and the whole class of 20 people was sniffing and laughing simultaneously. I covered up the output flask because the smell was getting overbearing and people were complaining, but it was more performative than useful. The whole building reeked of garlic the whole day, and other students as well as professors were disgruntedly inquiring who was responsible fot that attack on their sensed amd why were they sniffing. I, an innocent highschooler, was watching the school burn; numb to the stench. The technician who came in with a cold was now cured and his sinuses were as good as ever. Now I'm a computational chemist grad student and this is still my fondest hs memory.
Girl in my undergrad lab didn’t label her bottles correctly so instead of putting some more hexanes over her Sodium she had a bottle of water in her hands and poured half of it into the porcelain dish. It honestly took longer than I would have expected for the sodium to ignite but soon after catching fire it exploded into at least 20 smaller burning lumps of sodium (Our sodium comes in sticks about 15 cm long and 3 cm in diameter and she had a whole Stik in her dish). But wait there is more. She put out the fires with sand, which worked well, but then decided to clean up with wet shop towel igniting the leftover sodium once more.
@@fatman9644 (Changed my earlier comment a bit) You might be able to get sodium to react with sand at very high temperatures, but it does not react under normal conditions. A similar reaction, magnesium and sand, has a big activation energy - you have to get it red hot in an inert or reducing atmosphere to start the process. If you tried the same with sodium it would definitely melt and could possibly boil.
Odd, I thought you put sodium fires out with high test peroxide and gasoline... ;) Seriously, this is high school level chemistry, not undergrad level! Hopefully, said individual was enrolled in a remedial course. A wet shop towel... Not labeling... Arrrrgh!
The guy who contaminated his privates with radioactive isotopes is lucky they had a safety team on hand. Otherwise he would have won a Darwin award on a technicality (you don't need to die, rendering yourself sterile also counts).
One of my fellow students told me this: In one of the early undergrad labcourses, they had to do a reaction with chlorine. Their assistant was helping and everything was fine until a rat came through the venting system into the fume hood. That poor animal died of chlorine poisoning after it took a few steps next to the cylinder. The poor student had to burn the dead rat to ashes, because they legally could not get rid of it otherwise. That dying rat was one of the creepiest things he ever saw.
When I toured CERN and exited the personnel elevator with my sixth form group I looked up and immediately saw an asphyxiation warning sign and as we were walking there were cabinets of escape rebreathers every 50-100 meters and it dawned on me I'd just entered one enormous array of confined spaces containing an enormous number of active superconducting magnets holding multiple tons of TNT's worth of potential energy that they'd rapidly and violently dump if quenched and tens of tons of liquid helium and other incomprehensibly large amounts of cryogenic gases. It made me sweat a little, but the tour guide distracted me with all the nice neutron probes they had hanging on the walls and there were even more GM counters hanging on the walls, and I must've walked past at least three sample storage cupboards each with a smattering of 1-20 petabecquerel sources (IIRC), and so many posters with math or physics jokes on them.
Mines generally use stench based alerts because of noise (and previously due to unreliable signals due to being in an active mine. Apparently (based on some of the MineARC product systems) they even have all clear signals as odorants (wintergreen). You can't hear alarms, but smell isn't drowned out by machinery, plus when you have forced air ventilation the message flows to the whole mine/factory without much effort.
Worked at a local Pb/Zn/Cu mine, and we had compressed gas cylinders of ethyl mercaptan on the intake fans for the fresh air raises, as well as on the headers coming from the compressor house to take compressed air underground. Upon smelling it, and rest assured you WILL smell it, all the workers go to the nearest refuge station and seal the doors. At the time I was working there (early to late 90's), all clear was either to be given over the phone system from the surface or, in the event of an event that cut the lines, by the mine rescue teams (draegermen) visiting each individual refuge station.
I once made the mistake of going to the bathroom after preparing a large quantity of chili peppers without gloves (I did wash my hands very well several times), I think everyone should be forced to do this as part of safety training, to respect cross contamination, and the limits of soap.
Done that too, can confirm that, apparently, no amount of soap and prior application of an organic solvent is enough (although without them it could be much worse). And it's even better with the eyes, because you cannot clean them the same way; the "upside" is that eyes only burn when you open them.
Using odors as signals is an extremely common practice in mines. Fires and cave ins are a huge risk. Radio signals don't work underground and in an emergency one can not rely on wires running along the tunnel carrying phone signals to be functional. Dumping a scent into the mine can usually spread a signal throughout the whole mine in just a few minutes. Most mines do a test of this every month or so in my experience.
I was recently etching some copper with dilute hydrochloric acid that I slowly added 3% hydrogen peroxide into whenever it stopped etching. I'm a hobbyist, so I did this outside in my family's garden since the solution has to form small quantities of (dissolved) chlorine to etch properly, which I just don't want to have inside. Everything went great and there was only the slightest hint of a chlorine-y smell, which was much less intense than even just household bleach, so I figured all was well. At least until a random bug decided that it was a great idea to drown itself in my etching bath. That little pile of nitrogen with wings of course immediately got chlorinated to hell and made the bath absolutely reek like an unhygienic swimming pool. It was terrible, but at least not particularly dangerous. Don't chlorinate insects.
Some 'fun' stories from a kilo lab. In a kilo lab environment, liquid transfers are done almost exclusively by pressure. Either pushed with a pump (diaphragm, peristaltic, ect) or pulled by vacuum. I learned the fun way that when transferring by pump, you need to put hose clamps on all the joints. Once while transferring 45L of some pharmaceutical solubilized in ethanol/H2O, I had a line disconnect and spray me. Thankfully I was wearing a full face respirator and went quickly to the shower. There have also been several times when the bottom outlet valve(BOV) of a 100L clogs following a crystallization. If the material inside is potent (ug levels of occupational exposure or less) that means suiting up in Tyvek or Tychem bunnysuits and climbing underneath there with a screwdriver to take off the BOV and a bucket to catch the product. A fun story that didn't happen to me revolves around being cognizant of exotherms. When my Coworker started, he was running a batch that had a really bad exotherm. It started off at 30C, then started ramping up past the spec of 60C over a span of 10 minutes. For reference it takes the jacket of a factor to heat or cool a batch 30C over an hour. Called up the bench chemist who designed the reaction and asked him what he did when it exothermed for him. "Oh yeah that happens, the product is stable at high temp. I would just toss the round bottom flask into an ice bath". Meanwhile my coworker is standing there like, "there is 40L in that reactor, I can't do that." If I can request one thing of bench chemists, document your temperature changes. Endotherms too are an issue and I've heard stories of stir shafts breaking when the batch suddenly begins to freeze.
Oh dear. Scaling up exothermal reactions is no joke, I recall watching the USCSB analysis of the T2 Laboratory incident with some horror. 2500gal vessel being used to manufacture MCMT, failed cooling system, fatal results. It was scaled up from a 1L reactor, and the difference just wasn’t understood/appreciated.
Undergrad lab: Working with fuming HCl. Accidentally knocked over the cup with about 100 ml or so. Before starting the clean grabbed some pH paper to check when the hood would be clean enough. About 3 meters removed from the hood the paper already turned bright red. Old fume hood :)
Way back when I was a kid (mid 70's), I decided to make some Chlorine gas in my little garage lab. The experiment went well, and I got a nice flask full of gas and did a few simple tests with it. During clean up, after rinsing my flask with just a little water from a wash bottle, I had the dumb idea to hold it up and look inside through the neck. Of course the flask was still practically full of gas which conveniently poured out into my face while I happened to breath in. Fortunately I had done my research (back then you had to do something like go to a library to learn how to do chemical reactions) and I had some dilute ammonia on hand which I tried to inhale in between coughing my lungs out and crawling around on the floor and ground outside for the next half hour. I was working alone at home after school, and that was scary. My other favorite cautionary tale involves nitric acid and ethanol. Our neighborhood backed up against an industrial park with a little bit of woods in between. Some other kids in the neighborhood had raided an outbuilding that was used for chemical storage - they stole (I was not involved!) gallon jars of all sorts of reagents. Being complete idiots, they then played around randomly mixing stuff. So they filled a test tube about 3cm with pure HNO3, and then started to add ethanol...the test tube blew up, liquids were blown up onto the ceiling and then dripped down onto the participants. Afterwards a little research was done and we discovered that we had inadvertently made hypergolic rocket fuel. Good times.
Scratching my head at the ammonia. From a medical perspective treatment is more supportive. Keep you breathing and ticking. Ammonia is not part of that process.
Properly fitted FFP2 masks cause very little fog (and FFP3 absolutely none) in addition to be very effective against covid. They also reduce the amount of crap we breathe in when handling fine powders.
There is a similar story often told at our biochemistry department. A few years ago, a PhD student was synthesising some sodium phenolate and decided that the best course of action for that was to take a flask of phenol, melt it and then dump in a large amount of sodium at once (some say 100 g, some say up to 500 g) . The bang was heard at least throughout the corridor and a postdoc was able to put out the fire quite quickly. Noone was seriously injured but he was only referred to as "Boom Boom Gordon" from then on.
One more story: my lab partner helped some other student to clean up at the end of the day. He told her to get some acid to neutralize a beaker with some (to my lab partner unknown solution). He did so with half concentrated HCl. As the first splash of acid hit the beaker a loud ‚fomp‘ sound could be heard and my partner stood there drenched in liquid. It turned out the beaker was full of conc. NaOH and H2O2 (still warm from when it was used) the loud fomp sound was the stuff evaporating instantly. My lab partner did the right thing and washed his eyes and then himself immediately after the shock. His safety glasses were milky everywhere the liquid went and he had red spots all over his face for a few weeks. This should be a reminder of two things: 1. safety measures are not to be taken lightly, everything has its use and you can never know when you need protection unexpectedly 2. label your stuff. All of it. Especially if you have someone else using it or working with the same stuff. Loosing your product is the least of your concerns if someone looses his eyesight because of you.
So I'm an undergrad doing Mössbauer-spectroscopy, and when I was given the initial tour of the lab as an introduction the head of the nuclear chemistry department pointed out to me that the best working spectrometer has an arm floaty under it because the tram 300m away from the campus causes enough vibration where it messes with the spectrum because it's shaking the oscillating Co-57 source so it's messing with the Doppler effect needed to reliably excite all the Fe-57 nuclei in the sample. Other than that the sample holder is weighed down by a big lead brick precariously balanced on top also because of the vibrations. Also the PC for said spectroscope has been on for 30 years and the analyzer card is semi bricked so half of the software doesn't even work, and nobody dare change it out to the new one that was bought 5 years ago. On an other note the uni has an observatory built on top which is also barely usable because of said tram.
dear god, my professors in uni said that bunch of machinery was not installed in our building precisely because it is next to a busy road and the buses vibrate everything to hell. Laser table literally would not work there. Also occasional heavy trucks vibrate differently, to mess up floated tables even more. It was mechanics/mechatronics part of the uni and we had literally no sensitive equiment there. I guess real, not dropped out students(not me), went to a different part of the city to different faculties to use sensitive measurment stuff (at least several hundred meters from busy roads) :)
My university's new experiental science building put the new laser lab on the third floor with big windows. The entire building is (30%) filled with stupid shit like that.
@@Dmayrion2 holy shit. Rip laser safery and laser experiments :D Guess it is "more money than sense" problem. At our place there was very little and people made sure to install equipment properly (when possible) . Have seen not enough to see all blunders, pretty sure there was many anyway. Medical field was worse than uni. I remember sine hospital board getting used mri and then realising they had no money left to install it. They tried to spin it as needing new mri building then, with construction being easiest way to funnel money away, so that was a sus "mistake".
In my dad's lab they cut out a 8' cubic hole in the foundation and filled it with sand and put their test stand in the middle to dampen the vibrations from the freeway and train tracks 2 miles away (in Houston mud vibrations really propagate). Everyone called it Bruce's sandbox, and he was delighted that as a 40+ year old man, he had his own sandbox to play in at work.
During my master's thesis, we found a dead earwig that crawled into one of the NMR tubes. When I showed it to my mentor he looked me dead in the eye and said: "Deuterate that fucker"
Not a real accident and second-hand, once-upon-a-time, but still funny for someone not involved: Back when I tried to study chemistry, in first or second semester there was a series of experiments on one day, where one involved aqua regia, the other platiunum electrodes. The assistants made it expressively clear not to put the electrodes, each worth several thousand €, into the aqua regia. When asked if someone had ever done this, the short answer was: yes.
Stories from my PI: During his grad student years, another grad student tried (and failed) to out-suck a roughing pump. It collapsed his lungs and he was taken next door to the medical center. Another grad student was found unconscious next to an empty bottle of xenon. Putting one and one together, the guy who found him lifted up his legs to let the xenon out. My PI pranked his advisor by inhaling Helium-4 and saying, "Wow! Helium-3 really does make your voice higher pitched than Helium-4!" The joke being that 3He is extremely expensive. More recently, a professor was making ammonia at his home using the Haber-Bosch process. This is flowing H2 and N2 at 100 bar over iron powder at around 500°C. His house exploded, killing himself and a neighbor walking their dog.
Ahh the internet. Where someone tells a story about how someone totally preventably killed himself and an innocent passerby with an extremely dangerous chemical reaction, and the third reply is a 'your mom' joke. Never change, internet, never change.
going back to the topic of how important safety glasses are: We were working in a lab once, I forgot what exactly we were trying to synthesize but it wasn't anything dangerous. We all knew the importance of safety glasses but due to masks constantly fogging them up we decided not to put them on until we actually start working with the chemicals(at this point we were just preparing the glassware and filling things up with deionized water). So one of my labmates handed me a small and fragile graduated cylinder which he let go a millisecond before I had time to grab it. It fell on the table and shattered throwing glass shards everywhere. One hit my eye. Luckily it just touched it with the non-sharp side and I have my eye but it was quite scary.
Colleague of mine was cleaning glassware with piranha solution (Peroxosulfuric acid). While cleaning a frit he put it on top of what he thought was a beaker of aqueous waste. Turned out it was a beaker of org. waste. Never thought an essentially open container could explode that violently. Everything inside the fume hood was in pieces. Shards of glass stuck inside the safety glass. The colleague was insanely lucky, leaving with just a few cuts
I agree that tritium story is absolutely terrifying. OTOH if they bought deuterium and got shipped tritium by mistake they got a really good deal! I mean, they almost certainly didn’t make a profit if decontamination cost 100k but you have to find the silver linings in these things.
based tritium has never killed a single human (at least until the day H bombs are used in war).. it literally just makes our watches visible at night and flies immediately to the stratosphere by itself when it is spilled.
18:08 I thought avael was saying they're already infertile with or without teratogens, and would feel bad about it, but it's kinda cool to not need as many safety precautions as your colleagues and that partially makes up for it.
Way back in school for myhighschool graduation i had chosen practical chemistry... "the dangers of homemade explosives". And my chemistry teacher was a bit too complacent and trusting after the first things i made were some simple blackpowder and gun cotton. When she came back after an hour she asked me what i had in that beaker. Slightly yellow, clear, oily liquid.... yes, yes it was nitroglycerin.
Coming from medicine, sodium hypochlorite is my all time favourite chemical. It's a powerful antiseptic, that does not just kill microbes but actually dissolves their molecules. It also has the sometimes useful property of not penetrating living tissue, so you can use it on wounds and even during surgery on top of live tissue. It also makes the best cleaning agent possible when mixed with regular dishwashing soap, perfect for clean operating rooms. The only downside is that it reacts with many other things, such as chlorhexidine, and makes an to this day unidentified orange-brown muck that is assumed to be carcinogenic.
Damn the chem pit idea killed me. My supervisor once suggested to dump 2 L of aqua regia we found in a random flask (the lable had almost worn off from the years of neglect) at a nearby construction site lake. We ended up neutralizing the acid drop by drop with NaOH solution all afternoon long, burning through all the ice we had available to control the exothermic nature of the process. 10/10 experience
Actually a great guy. I did the bingo from some episodes ago and only had to mark 2 things. Let's just say he is from a different time (i am his last phd student before retirement)
Considering its only acids that are harmless if diluted enough, my totally not a chemist me thinks just diluting it might be a pretty reasonable way to get rid of it. Like slowly dripping it into a running sink.
My solution to deal with the fogging caused by masks is just using non-vented goggles that seal against the face. My university lab had a policy of using those anyway, since glasses do nothing if you're clumsy enough to splash something on your face that is just going to drip down into your eyes from your forehead. (FWIW you can also get glasses that come with an anti-fog coating from the factory and they don't look all murky like trying to DIY a coating) I also have a story I got from my first-semester biology professor about a lab incident: As a grad student, he was conducting a vivisection of a rat that he had anesthetized with diethyl ether. He was undertaking this in a fume hood, but the other side of the hood was also being used by another person who was heating a solution over a burner. You might see where this is going at this point. You wouldn't think the flow from the hood would allow the burner on the other side to ignite the ether fumes (I imagine that was his rationale), but that's exactly what happened. Suddenly, the rat is on fire and is right next to an open bottle of ether. His first instinct is to get the flames away from the bottle, so in a panic he grabs the flaming rat and throws it across the room, where it slides across the floor and into the hallway right as his department head is walking by. From what I could tell, no harm was done except for a significant amount of embarrassment.
Also there was a live, burning, cut-open rat that got thrown across the room. Tends to cause quite a bit of harm to the little critters, but I suppose that harming it was part of the plan from the beginning.
Not a chemist, but work in pharma research with radioactive isotopes. Since we do clinical testing in people, the amounts we work with are considered fairly safe as the doses we give people, but those in the lab work with larger amounts as they make up the formulations. One time, during our regular monitoring checks, we found a trail that lead all the way our the lab, down the corridor, into the changing rooms, and all over the shower. Clearly someone had had an accident (a fairly large one, given the spread), but nobody reported it. Took a fair bit of scrubbing to try and decon everything, and we figured out later which vial was missing some 14C material, but we never figured out who in the lab was wandering around hot.
they probably did not use phones or other wireless devices(or even electrical devices) in the mine as an emergency system, because stone isnt really great in "letting signal through", also you have no idea if you system is working in the first place. So an extremely smelly thing seems more "safe"
The flask falling off the rotovap hits a bit too close to home. I was working on a total synthesis and one of my compounds that took about three weeks to reach fell into the water bath. It was the only time I’ve ever had to use our labs 4L sep funnel and had to extract the bath to get my compound back. It was only about a half gram of material, which made the whole set up feel ridiculous.
I really enjoy your content, I am a Chemical-Technical-Assistant, or well that is the trade I learned. I now study beverage technology and brewing in Bavaria. My trade still helps me a ton. Anyways your vids help me keep my love for chemistry alive ! Thank you so much, if you ever have questions about brewing or distilling spirits just dab me up.
When i was 17 studying chemistry, i had to write up a sort of mini-thesis. Long story short, i was heating SnCl2 to dry it during class (this was permitted by my teacher at the time). All of a sudden, a couple students started coughing, as if their throats were irritated. When i had an inkling as to what was going on, and removed the SnCl2 from heat, I noticed both throat and eye irritation. Pretty sure i gassed my classmates. In hindsight, the teacher should not have okayed my suggestion. Edit: this was done out of a fumehood as I was inexperienced and did not read up on potential hazards. I'm doubly surprised that my then-teacher did not anticipate any of this, frankly.
I work in radiation detection (scintillator-based detectors) and thought I might be able to relate to or learn from the nuclear stuff, but all our radiation sources are sealed. So our safety training is basically don't eat the sources, don't put them in your pocket or your desk, and don't stick any body parts in the x-ray machine. Now if a source does somehow break... That's intentionally very difficult, and hasn't happened, but my understanding is that you stop everything, call everyone, and you will not be winning employee of the month.
My grandfather had a company that made organo-tin compounds, they had a chempit across the street- my dad said the soles of his shoes were starting to dissolve after walking through mud in the area one time. The eventual fish kill, government legal action, and superfund site are vivid reminders of the importance of proper disposal.
You know what happens when your final product falls into the rotavap bath? Congratulations, you get to run an extraction on the dirty rotavap bath water. Good times.
So, back in high school I worked for a pool maintenance service, and many of the pools had automatic chlorinators, basically a piece of pipe you fill with tablets, with a metered flow of water through them. Well one time I open one up to refill it, and it looks like the plastic inside has been stained a deep yellow. I was wrong, the plastic was still white, that was chlorine gas. Felt like I was coughing my lungs up.
my grandpa used to work somewhere where they handled large amounts of chlorine gas(i don't remember what they did or why they had to use chlorine gas) so once there was a leak and so all employees had to put on gas masks and run away from the chlorine gas
My high school chem lab had a few radioactive samples just to demo the Geiger counter, though we did have a particularly hot sample of Cs-137. I had no idea how old it was, but it was by far the most active one. I demoed it once to a friend and the look of fear on his face was priceless
I had an art teacher in high school who always told this story about how you better wash your hands after you are done painting because one time he met this woman who didn't wash her hands after painting and then she suddenly dropped dead because she didn't wash her hands after painting. I don't know the chemistry of this (arts during the 1970s?) but it always seemed unbelievable.
Always wanted to be a chemist ever since getting my first Gilbert Chemistry set. When I was around 13 a shot train ride to John H Winn Chemical in NYC, allowed me buy any chemical ( concentrated acids, solvents, etc) or lab equipment I wanted, amazed I survived. Winn was the ACE hardware for amateur chemists. Never hand any serious accidents but looking back there was sure a lot of potential. The most toxic stuff a kid could get today would be water, and baking soda. Continued with chemistry through a couple years of college then switched to electronic engineering but still have a love for chemistry.
Once i had an apparatus implode on me as i was walking in to the lab. The whole room got covered in tiny glass shards, THF and whatever else was in there. Of course i didn´t wear my glasses but luckily i didn´t get anything into my eyes. That day i understood why you should put on your safety glasses BEFORE entering the lab. And you should really take a good look at your glassware before pulling high vacuum. In that same lab they had the sodium bottle sitting in a shelf right on top of the sink and the shower room was used as beer-storage. Good times.
My fiancé’s mom used to clean houses for a living. She told me a story of a house she cleaned. The woman who lived there thought it’d be a smart idea to mix bleach with all sorts of different household cleaners including ammonia. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it just goes to show how some people just have no clue what they’re doing.
While I don't work in a lab yet, for my glasses I use a liquid anti-fog product. It doesn't last to long, you need to apply once a day. It goes on clear too
Hi. Just discovered your channel. Retired nuclear engineer and Certified Professional Health-physicist. The C-14 and tritium stories made me want to cry, they were so over-wrought with radiophobia. Tritium is so harmless that I just don't worry about it. Had that event happened in my lab, my reaction would have been "meh. Wipe up what you can, the rest will dissipate". Tritium emits a beta particle that is so weak that the only practical method to detect is is to mix a liquid scintillator with the unknown and count the light flashes. In the 90s someone suggested that we start looking for tritium in nuclear power plants. When we did we found it everywhere. Tritiated water is made in the core and permeates almost any polymer. After some people spun around like one foot was nailed to the floor for awhile, we acknowledged its harmlessness and forgot about it. C-14 is pretty much in that same class. Now the Cf-252 incident is more interesting. My company owned 10 micrograms which was plenty hot to calibrate our neutron detection instruments. That 10 micrograms cost me a little over $10,000 in the 80s.
7:52 the defogging tricks never work. But there's a work around for them. It's called a face shield. It looks like a welding hood made of acrylic. Even if you have to wear a mask underneath, the face shield is far enough away that it generally speaking doesn't fog up. Added benefit, it doesn't just protect your eyes, it protects your entire face.
Reminds me of chemistry classes in highschool. -Our class was a collective dumbass and the teacher wasn't much into safety either, so one student stuck a hose attached to a bottle full of mystery solution, that was apparently fuming ammonia. -Once said teacher made batches of explosive powder that he left to dry in the lab glassware cabinets, next morning coming to several wrecked cabinets and a lab full of glass shrapnel. -One time the teacher made a solution that started fuming like an erupting volcano, spreading a cloud of steam in the ceiling, as the cloud started settling down, it smelled strongly of bitter almonds, so us students vacated the cöassroom in seconds while holding our breaths. -Then there's the time the teacher set fire to some alcohol in non-fireproof glassware, which proceeded to shatter, spreading burning alcohol across the desk, across the floor, over a couple students' backpacks, their notebooks and chemistry books... I don't think anyone in our class learned any chemistry and no one got better than a D-, but those classes gave me a lifelong respect for worksafety regulations.
A technician in my former lab was routinely producing dozens of grams of starting material for various projects. One step was a Staudinger reduction of an alkyl azide with triphenylphosphine. All you have to do is mix both compounds in DCM, basically. So he went on adding the substrate, followed by PPh3, and before he could add the solvent the whole flash went off with a loud "bang". No injury fortunately. The next week a conference person who described the closely related Staudinger ligation did clearly mention that azides and phosphines shoud NEVER be mixed in the dry phase. Too bad this conference was not given a week before.
We made Nylon in one college lab and for God only knows what reason this was the one where rhe lab book didn't require us to use the fume hood even though a boiling mist of HCl was involved.
6:00 Double comment but my grandfather told me multiple times as a lad that his dad (and likely his dad's horse too given he was on horseback a fair amount of the time) suffered at least two gas exposures while laying telegraph cables during the great war, one was definitely an alkylating lachrymator like benzyl chloride deployed as a tear agent one time, piecing what I was told together I think it wound up contributing to a gnarly slow-growing lung cancer that wound up killing him and it was generally attributed to those gas exposures. I don't envy him, my grandmother's dad however was too young for enlistment during the first world war, then too old for the second, lucky devil.
Radiochemistry is a lot less hazardous than people think. What other hazardous chemical can you detect and localise immediately with incredible sensitivity inside a sealed opaque container? People working with regular genotoxic stuff like ethidium bromide end up tracking it all over their labs, cars and homes without knowing it. With radiochemicals, you know about it immediately using handheld electronics. Also FFS don't spill any though, it is a massive pain in the ass.
I have not done anything chemlab related since college, I do enjoy your videos as I have encountered some interesting folks and accidents. I used my chem background for hazmat as a firefighter, talk about useful! Thanks for the content.
So I worked in a factory. We did steel parts. It was mostly hydraulic presses, but we also had a heat treat oven. This oven contains a carbon monoxide atmosphere in order to prevent oxidation of the parts as they are heated. Because the system is belt fed, the way the atmosphere is maintained is by continuously creating more carbon monoxide, while the escaping CO burns off as a "flame curtain" at the front. After heating, parts then are dumped into a bath of molten nitrogen/potassium chloride at anywhere from 400 to 650 degrees. Occasionally the quench tank must be drained for maintenance work. However, the tank cannot be completely drained by the pumps, so the final cleaning is done by hand with water dissolving the now hardened salts. A coworker got sprayed with extremely concentrated water. He also got a face full of the stuff. He didn't suffer any permanent issues, but the clothes he was wearing were kept on display at work for a while because they were so full of salt that they stood on their own. As a bonus, the fire department requires them to keep working sprinklers near this tank of molten salts... If anything were to try the sprinklers near that thing while there's liquid salts in that tank, you've got a very large hydrogen generator right next to a giant oven kept at 1600, and a CO generator putting out something like 700cfh of CO...
17:41 This reminds me of the time one of the managers at a restaurant I worked in decided to super-clean the kitchen floor by first dumping bleach on it, and then following it with ammonia for good measure. Neither were diluted from the gallon jugs she brought in. At least it was after closing before the off day.
@@That_Chemist Yes. Being a restaurant lifer, I have seen similar mixtures made multiple times by naive but good intentioned coworkers. The chemicals are sold on the same shelf in every grocery store. How is every liberal arts degree holding wage worker supposed to know not to dump bleach and vinegar into a bucket to clean the sidestation? The burning mucosal membranes just means it's more effective than the pink sanitizer that the company provides.
Great video for sure, liked and subscribed. As a grown up amateur mad child scientist, I have some fun stories. When I was a kid , around 12 or 13 years old, I red in a book or something that sodium reacts violently with water and naturally wanted to make some. I had already done lots of experiments with electrolysis of water and naturally assumed since table salt is sodium chloride I should be able to separate it somehow. My first attempt was to liquefy the salt using a map gas torch and try to use coat hangers in a car battery charger to separate it but the coat hangers kept dripping off and melting into the pool of salt. (Luckily I was unaware how violently molten salt reacts with water or I may have just tried that.) My next attempt was to use the high voltage electricity from a pre-energy star computer monitor, one of the ones that would stay on even though there was no video input. I ran the 25KV arc through a pile of salt and immediately smelled chlorine gas and freaked out realizing... Oh yeah, The other part of the molecule is chlorine.. maybe this is a bad idea 😂😂😂
@@That_Chemist For some ungodly reason, marine microorganisms actually produce minute amounts of volatile dimethylpolonium... because of course they do, microorganisms do be gnarly like that. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22924583/
We had a lab assistant with subtle scars in his face which I took for acne scars. Turns out when he was younger some apparatus exploded, showering him in broken glas and burning droplets. Thankfully in full safety gear. He showed us the scorched and punctured lab coat and ended with "that's why you will always wear safety goggles"
8:40 I’m a college student studying mining engineering right now. This is actually a method used by a lot of mines to let people know something is wrong. The nasty smell gets everywhere, unlike signals to people’s phones.
I've had success using baby shampoo as an anti fog on sealed goggles. The trick is getting a really thin film that's evenly coated without streaks, otherwise it will make some areas a bit blurry.
8:00 Solvents aren't that bad. Acids, bases and other corrosive stuff is. Nonetheless you should always wear eye protection and a coat in the lab. The small exception you don't wear it, that's the moment something will happen, trust me... My worst lab accident luckily wasn't that bad and didn't hurt me. But bad enough to make goggles almost useless... A colleague did a column chromatography and i stood beside her. She pressurized it to much and didn't secure it correctly... The reservoir popped up and spilled somme 100 mL of a 1:1 mix of ethyl acetate and heptane right into my face (and her chest...). Whith such a volume, goggles still help but i still got a good amount into my eyes. On the way to the sink it felt cold from the evaporation, very strange feeling in the eyes, and then I put my head under running water and rinsed my eyes for a few minutes. Got to a doctor afterwards, luckily no damage. My ex girlfriend touched a wall with a bottle of sulfuric acid. It broke... She instantly got under the emergency shower and stripped away her clothes. No damage thanks to her instant reaction. So yeah. Accidents do happen, always unpredicted, and it does have to be you. You could just walk by and get hit. So always wear PPE in a lab. No exceptions. And no "starting to get it on while walking in". Before you enter the lab, you fully and correctly wear PPE. Funny story aside, ended up in a mess but no one got hurt or contaminated: I thought, to speed things up, it would be a good idea to directly neutralize anhydrous acetic acid with water... You have to neutralize it before disposal, or something really bad will happen. But no like I did... So I had three beakers with 50 mL of anhydrous acetic acid in each. I added about 5 to 10 mL of RT water to each of them and let them react in a closed fume hood (next pro safety tip: Close EVERY fume hood that isn't used right now. This sadly gets ignored by most people...). Luckily. At first, nothing happened. But the reaction speed pretty much goes exponential with temperature. And it's exothermic... A few minutes later, one after the other, instantly boiled very vigorously and sprayed it's content into the fume hood. At least I cleaned the fume hood again... Thanks to my habit to always close unused fume hoods, it's now a funny story. With an open fume hood, it would be a different story. So please guys, wear PPE.
A product called "Clarity Defog It" works pretty well for keeping fog down on dry plastic optics. It's intended for things like motorcycle helmets, on mine it lasted about a week of commutes before needing a reapplication.
Not a chemist but an electrical engineer, we had a 60 year old PHD with 30 years of experience walk in to our lab, destroy the frontend of a $95,000 piece of equipment by overloading it clearly past the posted maximum amplitude and he said sorry and left we have bachelors right out of school with more sense than that
Just a quick thanks for explaining even easy stuff for someone like me, who is fascinated by Chemistry but totally lacks the competence to really get it. I'm sure some experts find the explaining tedious but it lets me in on the fun!
I've got a few radiation related stories thanks to my family. This one might not be that chemistry-related, but I think it's still worth sharing: My great-grandmother worked at Rocky Flats back in its heyday. She was one of the first women engineers to work there... unfortunately that had some bad safety implications for her. She was a small and petite woman, so the respirators that they had (all sized for men) didn't fit on her face properly, and let some (contaminated) air in around the sides. On top of that, her coworkers weren't the most respectful of women. Because she was a woman and small, they made her CRAWL UNDER THE GLOVE BOXES TO CLEAN UNDER THEM. (For anyone who doesn't know, the glove boxes are where workers would use tools to shape the radioactive plutonium pits. They were enclosed and had gloves built-in so that workers could reach inside safely. Unfortunately, they often weren't sealed all that well, and plutonium dust could escape and settle on the surroundings.) And, on top of THAT, after one of the fires, (I don't know if it was the 1957 fire or the 1969 one) her DESK became contaminated. She worked at that radioactive desk for a year (might have been two years actually) before anyone realized it was hot. I didn't hear this story directly from her, as she died (of plutonium-related illnesses) when I was little. My grandmother told me all about her mother's (and her father's, her sister's, and her own) experiences of working at Rocky Flats. As Grandma put it, "She loved her job, and it killed her." I think an important safety lesson to learn from this is that lax safety culture isn't the only dangerous workplace attitude. A culture of disrespect toward some groups (whether it's over gender, race, language, or anything else) can cause just as much harm.
@Fictional Indian Space Program - SFS I feel like immediately blaming one group of people is counterproductive. When trying to facilitate a culture of good intentions, it is generally a good idea to assume that every individual is capable of bad decisions, rather than relegating that trait to a specific, generalized group of people. I've seen people do things like this regardless of their political affiliation, and I've found there are many reasons why people are the way they are, and do the things they do. Very few of them have anything at all to do with their political leanings.
I used bar soap for my goggles. I am perpetually very sweaty and have huge issues with foggy goggles, but just scraping some bar soap on it and then rubbing that around worked brilliantly. The fog was replaced by a thin film of liquid that was easy to see through. Only major issue is it only worked if you let the soap dry, so as soon as they got foggy and you had to clean them, the effect was ruined.
When I was about 14 in a practical Chem lesson in school we where doing a simple distillation and I forgot to watch the boiling tube which we where heating, the tube, once all of the distillate had evaporated, started to heat up itself, and the glass expanded to a point at which a perfectly circular piece of glass cracked out of the tube and flew off, hitting my lab partner in the shoulder
Reminds me of a funny story, in middle school we also did a demonstration on distillation. We had two desks paired up, and we built the apparatuses on those in pairs, and then we're given colored water to distill. Apparently the round bottom flask a friend of mine was given was old, because after a couple minutes of gentle heading its bottom fell cleanly off. Laughs were had. In high school I learned that the coolant hose you run from the condenser back to the sink should be held or weighed down with something, otherwise it'll start flailing about under any slight water pressure, drenching half the class. This happened multiple times over a five or six week course.
1993 or 1994 I was an upperclassman TA in 2nd year organic chemistry lab. Someone poured diethyl ether down the sink and one end of the lab. Another student, at the complete other end of the lab, threw a just-blown-out match down the drain. Whomp, there it was: blue flame shooting up out of every sink drain in the entire lab!
18:22 I'm guessing it's their way of consoling themselves? "Welp, at least I get to use these cool chemicals!" Idk. I personally don't want kids ever and I've lived long enough to know that that's a 100% for sure (lots of personal factors playing into that choice).
7:41 For me I simply fold a piece of Prowipe and clip it on the top edge of my mask. Soaks up the vapor in exhaled breath to a nice degree and curbs goggle fogging quite well. That being said, goggles are an absolute necessity, not just in the lab, but also in other places wherever, whenever you're doing lab work. We all know the story of Prof. Sharpless sacrificing one eye to the NMR gods, so that's something worth always keeping in the back of your head.
I discovered many years ago that a really effective way to prevent goggles or glasses fogging up: Windscreen (aka windshield) de-icing spray, the type which comes in big aerosol cans. Spray some onto the inside surface of your goggles, ensuring to wet the entire surface with the liquid. Do not wipe it off, just let the liquid evaporate, so it leaves a thin coating of whatever the residue is in the spray. I don't know what this residue is or why it has the anti-fogging effect, but I promise it works.
18:45 O hai thar Umbrella Pharmaceuticals from Resident Evil. (Although to be fair, Popular Mechanics at one time had instructions on how to dispose of engine oil waste in a gravel pit in the ground... Yeah the 1960s were a different time.)
My Radiological Disaster story came from the 1970's. The US Navy finally realized that "glow-in-the-dark" radium dials just MIGHT be unsafe! (Maybe...) Anyway, the orders came down to survey any dial faces/control panels/clocks, etc., and properly dispose of any radioluminescent dials. One such clock face found was the personal property of a senior officer, and he did not want to lose his favorite clock. So, he gave the clock to a Recruit, and told him to scrape the radium paint off the clock. Said recruit did, right on a table in the ships galley! Said ship went into the yards for 8 months for decontamination. The High Ranking Officer was assigned a desk, not in his ship, and left there until he retired (about 5 years early...) Mind you, the Senior Officer was a Naval Academy graduate and had served on nuclear subs, and STILL pulled this boneheaded move. A major Charlis Foxtrot to say the least.
That first story... that method of opening an ampule is old, like early Victorian age old. Modern sommeliers still employ that method with a purpose built set of tongs to cleverly open wine bottles in a showy way for the rich and affluent.
On the soap on glasses note, I snowmobile and if you don’t have a heated visor it fogs pretty horrendously. Use cheap foaming hand soap on a clean dry paper towel, rub in until it goes clear, it keeps fog off for a few hours
The soap on glasses thing worked for me, but it was just pure dish soap, not watered down. I used some paper towel we normally use to clean spills that aren't dangerous, put some dish soap on it and used that to create a very small film on the glasses.
I worked on a NDT ( Non destructive testing) company. They do some radio photography that use Ir 192 or Co 60 to shoot x-ray photos of pipe and structure welding. They use a shielded bag about 20+ kg to carry the isotope around and the box has a tube that can move the isotope out of the box to shoot the picture. Here's the fun part, most of the operators cannon even read or write the local language and for get about English or other language and we engineers have to "write" all of their papers including the exam and even their work contract information. Once they diagnosed to be received too much radioactive, they will be resigned and return home that usually after about 1-2 years. They shoot these photos all around the country too, loaded the isotope in a truck and drive around the city. I quit that job after a month.
As a diver, you rub the soapy solution with your thumb around the interior eyepieces then wash it off with water before wearing the googles so only a thin film remains. And use a mix of shampoo and water, shouldn't matter which type for safety googles but use no-more-tears type stuff for swimming otherwise your eyes will sting.
18:47 Here's a real-life example of why you should, I don't know, NOT do this: The town surrounding the old Grumman plant in my area is still dealing with contamination issues and increased cancer rates even though that plant closed almost 30 years ago. In fact, they just unearthed leaking drums of chlorinated solvents and waste petroleum a few days ago, in what is now a community park.
i'm in cosmetology school right now and that guy is not lying when he said perm solution absolutely reeks, everytime someone comes in for a perm you can smell it throughout the entire school
![I.N "HALLUCINATION" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/n5B5q1Hwt_U/mqdefault.jpg)
mom said it was my turn to play in the chempit!!!
I prefer the hot landfill
@@koukouzee2923 *the warm ground
@@koukouzee2923 “Don’t change color, Kitty” starts playing in the background
Do we get an extra hour in the chempit instead of a refund for our concert tickets?
The side yard of the house I grew up in, as a teen (1970s) is basically a chempit. Made all kinds of homemade explosives there. Nothing grew in that area, for decades !
A chemistry channel becoming a reaction channel just feels right
I won’t entirely become that, but it will become a staple of the channel for the near future
Also that’s a funny joke
Ayyyyy, I see what you did there!
Bound to get a lot of reactions
It's the RUclipsr life cycle. You start out doing skits or something, you end up doing meme review or something. Easy content but no-one wants to see you meme-review if they don't already know you. Examples include TwoSet Violin and Brandon Herrera.
In high-school we were doing a water vapor distillation and were instructed to bring various produce like citrus fruits and such so as to extract their essential oils.
My classmates, normies, brought various oranges, grapefruits, tangerines, lavander, and such "vanilla" produce. I brought garlic. The assistant was reluctant but 8am morbid curiosity got the best of him and I was allowed to chop it up and load it in the distiller.
The pleasant citrussy aromas were soon buried under the thickest most violent most insulting miasma of concentrated garlic extract dripping into a flask. My eyes were burning a bit and the whole class of 20 people was sniffing and laughing simultaneously. I covered up the output flask because the smell was getting overbearing and people were complaining, but it was more performative than useful.
The whole building reeked of garlic the whole day, and other students as well as professors were disgruntedly inquiring who was responsible fot that attack on their sensed amd why were they sniffing.
I, an innocent highschooler, was watching the school burn; numb to the stench. The technician who came in with a cold was now cured and his sinuses were as good as ever. Now I'm a computational chemist grad student and this is still my fondest hs memory.
hahaha
Now, that is something I have to try. Never thought of doing a garlic extract. Btw, I live in Dracula's country!
I want to distill an onion now
@@SuperAngelofglory yea, a neat way to purge it clean of vampires hahaha
@@anoobis117 10/10 highly recommended
You just know that first guy is gonna somehow be the one person who future scientists radiocarbon date and confuse the heck out of them.
They would probably think he was a time traveler lol
Girl in my undergrad lab didn’t label her bottles correctly so instead of putting some more hexanes over her Sodium she had a bottle of water in her hands and poured half of it into the porcelain dish. It honestly took longer than I would have expected for the sodium to ignite but soon after catching fire it exploded into at least 20 smaller burning lumps of sodium (Our sodium comes in sticks about 15 cm long and 3 cm in diameter and she had a whole Stik in her dish).
But wait there is more. She put out the fires with sand, which worked well, but then decided to clean up with wet shop towel igniting the leftover sodium once more.
I am not really a chemist but I thought sodium is reactive enough to rip off the oxygens from the silicon
@@fatman9644 (Changed my earlier comment a bit) You might be able to get sodium to react with sand at very high temperatures, but it does not react under normal conditions. A similar reaction, magnesium and sand, has a big activation energy - you have to get it red hot in an inert or reducing atmosphere to start the process. If you tried the same with sodium it would definitely melt and could possibly boil.
@@jasonpatterson8091 okay, thanks for the explanation
Odd, I thought you put sodium fires out with high test peroxide and gasoline... ;)
Seriously, this is high school level chemistry, not undergrad level! Hopefully, said individual was enrolled in a remedial course.
A wet shop towel... Not labeling... Arrrrgh!
Women ☕️
I don't know what was more terrifying, the future superfund site aka the chempit or somebody hiding a strong neutron emitter somewhere.
both are pretty good contenders
the second one is at least Darwin award worthy, the first one is straight up screwing over other people
that reminds me that I have to assemble my geiger counter and check around home, lol. Having enemies is fun :)
@@mechadrake labmates have gone rogue
But what about someone hid a stronger neutron emitter somewhere?
The guy who contaminated his privates with radioactive isotopes is lucky they had a safety team on hand. Otherwise he would have won a Darwin award on a technicality (you don't need to die, rendering yourself sterile also counts).
Glad I’m not the only one who’s aware of the technicality 😉
maybe we should have let him sterilize himself. (all jokes i do not believe in eugenics)
One of my fellow students told me this:
In one of the early undergrad labcourses, they had to do a reaction with chlorine. Their assistant was helping and everything was fine until a rat came through the venting system into the fume hood. That poor animal died of chlorine poisoning after it took a few steps next to the cylinder. The poor student had to burn the dead rat to ashes, because they legally could not get rid of it otherwise. That dying rat was one of the creepiest things he ever saw.
rest in peace mousie
rip 😢
I’m not a psychopath, but I wouldn’t have minded cremating a rat. I have a bone to pick with those damn things!
When I toured CERN and exited the personnel elevator with my sixth form group I looked up and immediately saw an asphyxiation warning sign and as we were walking there were cabinets of escape rebreathers every 50-100 meters and it dawned on me I'd just entered one enormous array of confined spaces containing an enormous number of active superconducting magnets holding multiple tons of TNT's worth of potential energy that they'd rapidly and violently dump if quenched and tens of tons of liquid helium and other incomprehensibly large amounts of cryogenic gases. It made me sweat a little, but the tour guide distracted me with all the nice neutron probes they had hanging on the walls and there were even more GM counters hanging on the walls, and I must've walked past at least three sample storage cupboards each with a smattering of 1-20 petabecquerel sources (IIRC), and so many posters with math or physics jokes on them.
Hahaha
as a sixth former i’m so jealous, that sounds so cool!
Mines generally use stench based alerts because of noise (and previously due to unreliable signals due to being in an active mine. Apparently (based on some of the MineARC product systems) they even have all clear signals as odorants (wintergreen). You can't hear alarms, but smell isn't drowned out by machinery, plus when you have forced air ventilation the message flows to the whole mine/factory without much effort.
It’s really clever
im not surised and they only got partical gas masks from learning of this vid so im happy they use chemical sents for alerts.
that's actually really cool.
Worked at a local Pb/Zn/Cu mine, and we had compressed gas cylinders of ethyl mercaptan on the intake fans for the fresh air raises, as well as on the headers coming from the compressor house to take compressed air underground. Upon smelling it, and rest assured you WILL smell it, all the workers go to the nearest refuge station and seal the doors. At the time I was working there (early to late 90's), all clear was either to be given over the phone system from the surface or, in the event of an event that cut the lines, by the mine rescue teams (draegermen) visiting each individual refuge station.
At least here in Finland, oxygen used for welding also comes with a strong odorant mixed in so as to draw attention to any potential leaks.
I once made the mistake of going to the bathroom after preparing a large quantity of chili peppers without gloves (I did wash my hands very well several times), I think everyone should be forced to do this as part of safety training, to respect cross contamination, and the limits of soap.
"bathroom after... chili peppers without gloves"
say no more but yeah real good lesson
(this comes up a lot when eating stunt-hot wings)
Had a friend help us collecting some firewood, on one told him about poison oak.
i always wear nitrile gloves now when working with peppers in the kitchen.
that’s how i discovered that we have taste buds down there
Done that too, can confirm that, apparently, no amount of soap and prior application of an organic solvent is enough (although without them it could be much worse). And it's even better with the eyes, because you cannot clean them the same way; the "upside" is that eyes only burn when you open them.
Using odors as signals is an extremely common practice in mines. Fires and cave ins are a huge risk. Radio signals don't work underground and in an emergency one can not rely on wires running along the tunnel carrying phone signals to be functional. Dumping a scent into the mine can usually spread a signal throughout the whole mine in just a few minutes.
Most mines do a test of this every month or so in my experience.
I was recently etching some copper with dilute hydrochloric acid that I slowly added 3% hydrogen peroxide into whenever it stopped etching. I'm a hobbyist, so I did this outside in my family's garden since the solution has to form small quantities of (dissolved) chlorine to etch properly, which I just don't want to have inside. Everything went great and there was only the slightest hint of a chlorine-y smell, which was much less intense than even just household bleach, so I figured all was well. At least until a random bug decided that it was a great idea to drown itself in my etching bath. That little pile of nitrogen with wings of course immediately got chlorinated to hell and made the bath absolutely reek like an unhygienic swimming pool. It was terrible, but at least not particularly dangerous.
Don't chlorinate insects.
hahaha
I've never thought about bugs as winged nitrogen capsules until I read this. It's terrifyingly accurate and I don't like it.
toss in a little copper sulfate. Itll help the reaction along too.
Gold 😂
So you experienced the proverbial "fly in the ointment" moment?
Some 'fun' stories from a kilo lab.
In a kilo lab environment, liquid transfers are done almost exclusively by pressure. Either pushed with a pump (diaphragm, peristaltic, ect) or pulled by vacuum. I learned the fun way that when transferring by pump, you need to put hose clamps on all the joints. Once while transferring 45L of some pharmaceutical solubilized in ethanol/H2O, I had a line disconnect and spray me. Thankfully I was wearing a full face respirator and went quickly to the shower.
There have also been several times when the bottom outlet valve(BOV) of a 100L clogs following a crystallization. If the material inside is potent (ug levels of occupational exposure or less) that means suiting up in Tyvek or Tychem bunnysuits and climbing underneath there with a screwdriver to take off the BOV and a bucket to catch the product.
A fun story that didn't happen to me revolves around being cognizant of exotherms. When my Coworker started, he was running a batch that had a really bad exotherm. It started off at 30C, then started ramping up past the spec of 60C over a span of 10 minutes. For reference it takes the jacket of a factor to heat or cool a batch 30C over an hour. Called up the bench chemist who designed the reaction and asked him what he did when it exothermed for him. "Oh yeah that happens, the product is stable at high temp. I would just toss the round bottom flask into an ice bath". Meanwhile my coworker is standing there like, "there is 40L in that reactor, I can't do that."
If I can request one thing of bench chemists, document your temperature changes. Endotherms too are an issue and I've heard stories of stir shafts breaking when the batch suddenly begins to freeze.
this will definitely make the cut for the next chempolation - great stories!
Lose the batch? Sad face
Lose the reactor and have to validate a new one? Very angry face
@@SocialDownclimber Lol, thankfully not in GMP so didn't have to deal with qualifying and validating and all that stuff.
Oh dear. Scaling up exothermal reactions is no joke, I recall watching the USCSB analysis of the T2 Laboratory incident with some horror. 2500gal vessel being used to manufacture MCMT, failed cooling system, fatal results. It was scaled up from a 1L reactor, and the difference just wasn’t understood/appreciated.
Undergrad lab: Working with fuming HCl. Accidentally knocked over the cup with about 100 ml or so. Before starting the clean grabbed some pH paper to check when the hood would be clean enough. About 3 meters removed from the hood the paper already turned bright red. Old fume hood :)
What were u wearing for that?
Way back when I was a kid (mid 70's), I decided to make some Chlorine gas in my little garage lab. The experiment went well, and I got a nice flask full of gas and did a few simple tests with it. During clean up, after rinsing my flask with just a little water from a wash bottle, I had the dumb idea to hold it up and look inside through the neck. Of course the flask was still practically full of gas which conveniently poured out into my face while I happened to breath in. Fortunately I had done my research (back then you had to do something like go to a library to learn how to do chemical reactions) and I had some dilute ammonia on hand which I tried to inhale in between coughing my lungs out and crawling around on the floor and ground outside for the next half hour. I was working alone at home after school, and that was scary.
My other favorite cautionary tale involves nitric acid and ethanol. Our neighborhood backed up against an industrial park with a little bit of woods in between. Some other kids in the neighborhood had raided an outbuilding that was used for chemical storage - they stole (I was not involved!) gallon jars of all sorts of reagents. Being complete idiots, they then played around randomly mixing stuff. So they filled a test tube about 3cm with pure HNO3, and then started to add ethanol...the test tube blew up, liquids were blown up onto the ceiling and then dripped down onto the participants. Afterwards a little research was done and we discovered that we had inadvertently made hypergolic rocket fuel. Good times.
And this is why education about chemicals are important.
wait did you attempt to neutralize the chlorine in your lungs by breathing in ammonia 😂
Scratching my head at the ammonia. From a medical perspective treatment is more supportive. Keep you breathing and ticking. Ammonia is not part of that process.
It quickly reacts with any residual chlorine to make ammonium chloride which is fairly benign, stopping tissue damage. @@ravenoferin500
For anti-fog, we use some stuff called "Sea Drops". It's meant for dive masks, but it works OK but not perfectly on safety glasses and goggles.
Revision makes some anti fogging wipes for military goggles that work extremely well. But the ones for sale on amazon right now appear to be expired.
Properly fitted FFP2 masks cause very little fog (and FFP3 absolutely none) in addition to be very effective against covid. They also reduce the amount of crap we breathe in when handling fine powders.
There is a similar story often told at our biochemistry department. A few years ago, a PhD student was synthesising some sodium phenolate and decided that the best course of action for that was to take a flask of phenol, melt it and then dump in a large amount of sodium at once (some say 100 g, some say up to 500 g) . The bang was heard at least throughout the corridor and a postdoc was able to put out the fire quite quickly. Noone was seriously injured but he was only referred to as "Boom Boom Gordon" from then on.
lmao
that is the best way of making phenolates imo
@@SuperAngelofglory boom boom Gordon synthesis
@@mechadrake I would have used potassium though
@@SuperAngelofglory *modified Boom Boom Gordon syntgesis
One more story: my lab partner helped some other student to clean up at the end of the day. He told her to get some acid to neutralize a beaker with some (to my lab partner unknown solution). He did so with half concentrated HCl. As the first splash of acid hit the beaker a loud ‚fomp‘ sound could be heard and my partner stood there drenched in liquid. It turned out the beaker was full of conc. NaOH and H2O2 (still warm from when it was used) the loud fomp sound was the stuff evaporating instantly.
My lab partner did the right thing and washed his eyes and then himself immediately after the shock. His safety glasses were milky everywhere the liquid went and he had red spots all over his face for a few weeks.
This should be a reminder of two things:
1. safety measures are not to be taken lightly, everything has its use and you can never know when you need protection unexpectedly
2. label your stuff. All of it. Especially if you have someone else using it or working with the same stuff. Loosing your product is the least of your concerns if someone looses his eyesight because of you.
100%
So I'm an undergrad doing Mössbauer-spectroscopy, and when I was given the initial tour of the lab as an introduction the head of the nuclear chemistry department pointed out to me that the best working spectrometer has an arm floaty under it because the tram 300m away from the campus causes enough vibration where it messes with the spectrum because it's shaking the oscillating Co-57 source so it's messing with the Doppler effect needed to reliably excite all the Fe-57 nuclei in the sample. Other than that the sample holder is weighed down by a big lead brick precariously balanced on top also because of the vibrations. Also the PC for said spectroscope has been on for 30 years and the analyzer card is semi bricked so half of the software doesn't even work, and nobody dare change it out to the new one that was bought 5 years ago. On an other note the uni has an observatory built on top which is also barely usable because of said tram.
F
dear god, my professors in uni said that bunch of machinery was not installed in our building precisely because it is next to a busy road and the buses vibrate everything to hell. Laser table literally would not work there. Also occasional heavy trucks vibrate differently, to mess up floated tables even more.
It was mechanics/mechatronics part of the uni and we had literally no sensitive equiment there. I guess real, not dropped out students(not me), went to a different part of the city to different faculties to use sensitive measurment stuff (at least several hundred meters from busy roads) :)
My university's new experiental science building put the new laser lab on the third floor with big windows. The entire building is (30%) filled with stupid shit like that.
@@Dmayrion2 holy shit. Rip laser safery and laser experiments :D
Guess it is "more money than sense" problem. At our place there was very little and people made sure to install equipment properly (when possible) . Have seen not enough to see all blunders, pretty sure there was many anyway.
Medical field was worse than uni. I remember sine hospital board getting used mri and then realising they had no money left to install it. They tried to spin it as needing new mri building then, with construction being easiest way to funnel money away, so that was a sus "mistake".
In my dad's lab they cut out a 8' cubic hole in the foundation and filled it with sand and put their test stand in the middle to dampen the vibrations from the freeway and train tracks 2 miles away (in Houston mud vibrations really propagate). Everyone called it Bruce's sandbox, and he was delighted that as a 40+ year old man, he had his own sandbox to play in at work.
During my master's thesis, we found a dead earwig that crawled into one of the NMR tubes. When I showed it to my mentor he looked me dead in the eye and said: "Deuterate that fucker"
hahaha
Not a real accident and second-hand, once-upon-a-time, but still funny for someone not involved: Back when I tried to study chemistry, in first or second semester there was a series of experiments on one day, where one involved aqua regia, the other platiunum electrodes. The assistants made it expressively clear not to put the electrodes, each worth several thousand €, into the aqua regia. When asked if someone had ever done this, the short answer was: yes.
haha
@@JustinKoenigSilica But it would take some effort to get it back, and even more to remake the mesh structure.
Stories from my PI:
During his grad student years, another grad student tried (and failed) to out-suck a roughing pump. It collapsed his lungs and he was taken next door to the medical center.
Another grad student was found unconscious next to an empty bottle of xenon. Putting one and one together, the guy who found him lifted up his legs to let the xenon out.
My PI pranked his advisor by inhaling Helium-4 and saying, "Wow! Helium-3 really does make your voice higher pitched than Helium-4!" The joke being that 3He is extremely expensive.
More recently, a professor was making ammonia at his home using the Haber-Bosch process. This is flowing H2 and N2 at 100 bar over iron powder at around 500°C. His house exploded, killing himself and a neighbor walking their dog.
FFFFFF
Some proffesors really are a whole different breed...
That first one should have paid better attention to when his mother showed him how to do it.
Ahh the internet. Where someone tells a story about how someone totally preventably killed himself and an innocent passerby with an extremely dangerous chemical reaction, and the third reply is a 'your mom' joke.
Never change, internet, never change.
Who would think the mf Haber Bosch process would be suitable for a home lab?????
going back to the topic of how important safety glasses are: We were working in a lab once, I forgot what exactly we were trying to synthesize but it wasn't anything dangerous. We all knew the importance of safety glasses but due to masks constantly fogging them up we decided not to put them on until we actually start working with the chemicals(at this point we were just preparing the glassware and filling things up with deionized water). So one of my labmates handed me a small and fragile graduated cylinder which he let go a millisecond before I had time to grab it. It fell on the table and shattered throwing glass shards everywhere. One hit my eye. Luckily it just touched it with the non-sharp side and I have my eye but it was quite scary.
Yikes!
Colleague of mine was cleaning glassware with piranha solution (Peroxosulfuric acid). While cleaning a frit he put it on top of what he thought was a beaker of aqueous waste. Turned out it was a beaker of org. waste. Never thought an essentially open container could explode that violently. Everything inside the fume hood was in pieces. Shards of glass stuck inside the safety glass. The colleague was insanely lucky, leaving with just a few cuts
yikes!
Holy shit
Shouldn't some neutralization take place before pouring into aqueous waste?
I agree that tritium story is absolutely terrifying. OTOH if they bought deuterium and got shipped tritium by mistake they got a really good deal! I mean, they almost certainly didn’t make a profit if decontamination cost 100k but you have to find the silver linings in these things.
@@00bean00 You could be right - I think the wording is still a bit unclear. The tritium they filled the vessel with was still a great value though!
at least everyone lost money, so it kind of balances out!
based tritium has never killed a single human (at least until the day H bombs are used in war).. it literally just makes our watches visible at night and flies immediately to the stratosphere by itself when it is spilled.
18:08 I thought avael was saying they're already infertile with or without teratogens, and would feel bad about it, but it's kinda cool to not need as many safety precautions as your colleagues and that partially makes up for it.
"And it might be uncomfortable, but it's more uncomfortable then dying" understood.
Way back in school for myhighschool graduation i had chosen practical chemistry... "the dangers of homemade explosives". And my chemistry teacher was a bit too complacent and trusting after the first things i made were some simple blackpowder and gun cotton. When she came back after an hour she asked me what i had in that beaker. Slightly yellow, clear, oily liquid.... yes, yes it was nitroglycerin.
Coming from medicine, sodium hypochlorite is my all time favourite chemical. It's a powerful antiseptic, that does not just kill microbes but actually dissolves their molecules. It also has the sometimes useful property of not penetrating living tissue, so you can use it on wounds and even during surgery on top of live tissue. It also makes the best cleaning agent possible when mixed with regular dishwashing soap, perfect for clean operating rooms.
The only downside is that it reacts with many other things, such as chlorhexidine, and makes an to this day unidentified orange-brown muck that is assumed to be carcinogenic.
muck is yuck
I thought I was gonna look at the structure and predict what happens - I cannot - chlorhexidine is a weird molecule
Damn the chem pit idea killed me. My supervisor once suggested to dump 2 L of aqua regia we found in a random flask (the lable had almost worn off from the years of neglect) at a nearby construction site lake. We ended up neutralizing the acid drop by drop with NaOH solution all afternoon long, burning through all the ice we had available to control the exothermic nature of the process. 10/10 experience
F-tier supervisor
Actually a great guy. I did the bingo from some episodes ago and only had to mark 2 things. Let's just say he is from a different time (i am his last phd student before retirement)
I am sure we had a bit of carbon tet going down the drain occasionally when it was used in undergrad labs...
Considering its only acids that are harmless if diluted enough, my totally not a chemist me thinks just diluting it might be a pretty reasonable way to get rid of it. Like slowly dripping it into a running sink.
My solution to deal with the fogging caused by masks is just using non-vented goggles that seal against the face. My university lab had a policy of using those anyway, since glasses do nothing if you're clumsy enough to splash something on your face that is just going to drip down into your eyes from your forehead. (FWIW you can also get glasses that come with an anti-fog coating from the factory and they don't look all murky like trying to DIY a coating)
I also have a story I got from my first-semester biology professor about a lab incident:
As a grad student, he was conducting a vivisection of a rat that he had anesthetized with diethyl ether. He was undertaking this in a fume hood, but the other side of the hood was also being used by another person who was heating a solution over a burner. You might see where this is going at this point. You wouldn't think the flow from the hood would allow the burner on the other side to ignite the ether fumes (I imagine that was his rationale), but that's exactly what happened. Suddenly, the rat is on fire and is right next to an open bottle of ether. His first instinct is to get the flames away from the bottle, so in a panic he grabs the flaming rat and throws it across the room, where it slides across the floor and into the hallway right as his department head is walking by.
From what I could tell, no harm was done except for a significant amount of embarrassment.
Yikes!
Also there was a live, burning, cut-open rat that got thrown across the room. Tends to cause quite a bit of harm to the little critters, but I suppose that harming it was part of the plan from the beginning.
Imagine some random archeologist digs up the body of the C14 guy 2000 years from now and tries carbon dating it
"I only date carbon"
"Thus guy's age is -37 years."
Not a chemist, but work in pharma research with radioactive isotopes. Since we do clinical testing in people, the amounts we work with are considered fairly safe as the doses we give people, but those in the lab work with larger amounts as they make up the formulations. One time, during our regular monitoring checks, we found a trail that lead all the way our the lab, down the corridor, into the changing rooms, and all over the shower. Clearly someone had had an accident (a fairly large one, given the spread), but nobody reported it. Took a fair bit of scrubbing to try and decon everything, and we figured out later which vial was missing some 14C material, but we never figured out who in the lab was wandering around hot.
Yikes!
they probably did not use phones or other wireless devices(or even electrical devices) in the mine as an emergency system, because stone isnt really great in "letting signal through", also you have no idea if you system is working in the first place. So an extremely smelly thing seems more "safe"
The flask falling off the rotovap hits a bit too close to home. I was working on a total synthesis and one of my compounds that took about three weeks to reach fell into the water bath. It was the only time I’ve ever had to use our labs 4L sep funnel and had to extract the bath to get my compound back. It was only about a half gram of material, which made the whole set up feel ridiculous.
Rip - I hope you managed to recover the compound!
I really enjoy your content, I am a Chemical-Technical-Assistant, or well that is the trade I learned. I now study beverage technology and brewing in Bavaria. My trade still helps me a ton. Anyways your vids help me keep my love for chemistry alive ! Thank you so much, if you ever have questions about brewing or distilling spirits just dab me up.
awesome - glad to hear it :)
When i was 17 studying chemistry, i had to write up a sort of mini-thesis. Long story short, i was heating SnCl2 to dry it during class (this was permitted by my teacher at the time).
All of a sudden, a couple students started coughing, as if their throats were irritated. When i had an inkling as to what was going on, and removed the SnCl2 from heat, I noticed both throat and eye irritation.
Pretty sure i gassed my classmates. In hindsight, the teacher should not have okayed my suggestion.
Edit: this was done out of a fumehood as I was inexperienced and did not read up on potential hazards. I'm doubly surprised that my then-teacher did not anticipate any of this, frankly.
I work in radiation detection (scintillator-based detectors) and thought I might be able to relate to or learn from the nuclear stuff, but all our radiation sources are sealed. So our safety training is basically don't eat the sources, don't put them in your pocket or your desk, and don't stick any body parts in the x-ray machine. Now if a source does somehow break... That's intentionally very difficult, and hasn't happened, but my understanding is that you stop everything, call everyone, and you will not be winning employee of the month.
My grandfather had a company that made organo-tin compounds, they had a chempit across the street- my dad said the soles of his shoes were starting to dissolve after walking through mud in the area one time. The eventual fish kill, government legal action, and superfund site are vivid reminders of the importance of proper disposal.
You know what happens when your final product falls into the rotavap bath? Congratulations, you get to run an extraction on the dirty rotavap bath water.
Good times.
So, back in high school I worked for a pool maintenance service, and many of the pools had automatic chlorinators, basically a piece of pipe you fill with tablets, with a metered flow of water through them. Well one time I open one up to refill it, and it looks like the plastic inside has been stained a deep yellow. I was wrong, the plastic was still white, that was chlorine gas. Felt like I was coughing my lungs up.
Oh my gosh
my grandpa used to work somewhere where they handled large amounts of chlorine gas(i don't remember what they did or why they had to use chlorine gas) so once there was a leak and so all employees had to put on gas masks and run away from the chlorine gas
My high school chem lab had a few radioactive samples just to demo the Geiger counter, though we did have a particularly hot sample of Cs-137. I had no idea how old it was, but it was by far the most active one. I demoed it once to a friend and the look of fear on his face was priceless
I had an art teacher in high school who always told this story about how you better wash your hands after you are done painting because one time he met this woman who didn't wash her hands after painting and then she suddenly dropped dead because she didn't wash her hands after painting. I don't know the chemistry of this (arts during the 1970s?) but it always seemed unbelievable.
some of the pigments used in paints are heavy metals
@@That_Chemist scary
Always wanted to be a chemist ever since getting my first Gilbert Chemistry set. When I was around 13 a shot train ride to John H Winn Chemical in NYC, allowed me buy any chemical ( concentrated acids, solvents, etc) or lab equipment I wanted, amazed I survived. Winn was the ACE hardware for amateur chemists. Never hand any serious accidents but looking back there was sure a lot of potential. The most toxic stuff a kid could get today would be water, and baking soda. Continued with chemistry through a couple years of college then switched to electronic engineering but still have a love for chemistry.
Once i had an apparatus implode on me as i was walking in to the lab. The whole room got covered in tiny glass shards, THF and whatever else was in there. Of course i didn´t wear my glasses but luckily i didn´t get anything into my eyes. That day i understood why you should put on your safety glasses BEFORE entering the lab. And you should really take a good look at your glassware before pulling high vacuum.
In that same lab they had the sodium bottle sitting in a shelf right on top of the sink and the shower room was used as beer-storage. Good times.
Yikes!
My fiancé’s mom used to clean houses for a living. She told me a story of a house she cleaned. The woman who lived there thought it’d be a smart idea to mix bleach with all sorts of different household cleaners including ammonia. Thankfully nobody was hurt, but it just goes to show how some people just have no clue what they’re doing.
Bleach chemistry is so fun!!!
I love how he says “some people might get the wrong idea” about getting their privates scrubbed 😂
While I don't work in a lab yet, for my glasses I use a liquid anti-fog product. It doesn't last to long, you need to apply once a day. It goes on clear too
Hi. Just discovered your channel. Retired nuclear engineer and Certified Professional Health-physicist. The C-14 and tritium stories made me want to cry, they were so over-wrought with radiophobia.
Tritium is so harmless that I just don't worry about it. Had that event happened in my lab, my reaction would have been "meh. Wipe up what you can, the rest will dissipate". Tritium emits a beta particle that is so weak that the only practical method to detect is is to mix a liquid scintillator with the unknown and count the light flashes. In the 90s someone suggested that we start looking for tritium in nuclear power plants. When we did we found it everywhere. Tritiated water is made in the core and permeates almost any polymer. After some people spun around like one foot was nailed to the floor for awhile, we acknowledged its harmlessness and forgot about it. C-14 is pretty much in that same class.
Now the Cf-252 incident is more interesting. My company owned 10 micrograms which was plenty hot to calibrate our neutron detection instruments. That 10 micrograms cost me a little over $10,000 in the 80s.
7:52 the defogging tricks never work. But there's a work around for them. It's called a face shield. It looks like a welding hood made of acrylic. Even if you have to wear a mask underneath, the face shield is far enough away that it generally speaking doesn't fog up.
Added benefit, it doesn't just protect your eyes, it protects your entire face.
Reminds me of chemistry classes in highschool.
-Our class was a collective dumbass and the teacher wasn't much into safety either, so one student stuck a hose attached to a bottle full of mystery solution, that was apparently fuming ammonia. -Once said teacher made batches of explosive powder that he left to dry in the lab glassware cabinets, next morning coming to several wrecked cabinets and a lab full of glass shrapnel.
-One time the teacher made a solution that started fuming like an erupting volcano, spreading a cloud of steam in the ceiling, as the cloud started settling down, it smelled strongly of bitter almonds, so us students vacated the cöassroom in seconds while holding our breaths.
-Then there's the time the teacher set fire to some alcohol in non-fireproof glassware, which proceeded to shatter, spreading burning alcohol across the desk, across the floor, over a couple students' backpacks, their notebooks and chemistry books...
I don't think anyone in our class learned any chemistry and no one got better than a D-, but those classes gave me a lifelong respect for worksafety regulations.
> it smelled strongly of bitter almonds
One yay for cyanide
A technician in my former lab was routinely producing dozens of grams of starting material for various projects. One step was a Staudinger reduction of an alkyl azide with triphenylphosphine. All you have to do is mix both compounds in DCM, basically. So he went on adding the substrate, followed by PPh3, and before he could add the solvent the whole flash went off with a loud "bang". No injury fortunately.
The next week a conference person who described the closely related Staudinger ligation did clearly mention that azides and phosphines shoud NEVER be mixed in the dry phase. Too bad this conference was not given a week before.
yikes!
17:00 Uhh, that's attempted murder.
such simple yet brilliant content. i could listen to these stories for hours
We made Nylon in one college lab and for God only knows what reason this was the one where rhe lab book didn't require us to use the fume hood even though a boiling mist of HCl was involved.
6:00 Double comment but my grandfather told me multiple times as a lad that his dad (and likely his dad's horse too given he was on horseback a fair amount of the time) suffered at least two gas exposures while laying telegraph cables during the great war, one was definitely an alkylating lachrymator like benzyl chloride deployed as a tear agent one time, piecing what I was told together I think it wound up contributing to a gnarly slow-growing lung cancer that wound up killing him and it was generally attributed to those gas exposures. I don't envy him, my grandmother's dad however was too young for enlistment during the first world war, then too old for the second, lucky devil.
Radiochemistry is a lot less hazardous than people think. What other hazardous chemical can you detect and localise immediately with incredible sensitivity inside a sealed opaque container? People working with regular genotoxic stuff like ethidium bromide end up tracking it all over their labs, cars and homes without knowing it. With radiochemicals, you know about it immediately using handheld electronics. Also FFS don't spill any though, it is a massive pain in the ass.
yeah that really is unique
I thought I was a clown of a chemist but now I feel better
I have not done anything chemlab related since college, I do enjoy your videos as I have encountered some interesting folks and accidents. I used my chem background for hazmat as a firefighter, talk about useful! Thanks for the content.
Keep up the good work!
So I worked in a factory. We did steel parts. It was mostly hydraulic presses, but we also had a heat treat oven.
This oven contains a carbon monoxide atmosphere in order to prevent oxidation of the parts as they are heated. Because the system is belt fed, the way the atmosphere is maintained is by continuously creating more carbon monoxide, while the escaping CO burns off as a "flame curtain" at the front.
After heating, parts then are dumped into a bath of molten nitrogen/potassium chloride at anywhere from 400 to 650 degrees.
Occasionally the quench tank must be drained for maintenance work. However, the tank cannot be completely drained by the pumps, so the final cleaning is done by hand with water dissolving the now hardened salts. A coworker got sprayed with extremely concentrated water. He also got a face full of the stuff. He didn't suffer any permanent issues, but the clothes he was wearing were kept on display at work for a while because they were so full of salt that they stood on their own.
As a bonus, the fire department requires them to keep working sprinklers near this tank of molten salts... If anything were to try the sprinklers near that thing while there's liquid salts in that tank, you've got a very large hydrogen generator right next to a giant oven kept at 1600, and a CO generator putting out something like 700cfh of CO...
17:41 This reminds me of the time one of the managers at a restaurant I worked in decided to super-clean the kitchen floor by first dumping bleach on it, and then following it with ammonia for good measure. Neither were diluted from the gallon jugs she brought in. At least it was after closing before the off day.
this is all too common in restaurants
@@That_Chemist Yes. Being a restaurant lifer, I have seen similar mixtures made multiple times by naive but good intentioned coworkers. The chemicals are sold on the same shelf in every grocery store. How is every liberal arts degree holding wage worker supposed to know not to dump bleach and vinegar into a bucket to clean the sidestation? The burning mucosal membranes just means it's more effective than the pink sanitizer that the company provides.
Great video for sure, liked and subscribed.
As a grown up amateur mad child scientist, I have some fun stories.
When I was a kid , around 12 or 13 years old, I red in a book or something that sodium reacts violently with water and naturally wanted to make some. I had already done lots of experiments with electrolysis of water and naturally assumed since table salt is sodium chloride I should be able to separate it somehow. My first attempt was to liquefy the salt using a map gas torch and try to use coat hangers in a car battery charger to separate it but the coat hangers kept dripping off and melting into the pool of salt. (Luckily I was unaware how violently molten salt reacts with water or I may have just tried that.)
My next attempt was to use the high voltage electricity from a pre-energy star computer monitor, one of the ones that would stay on even though there was no video input. I ran the 25KV arc through a pile of salt and immediately smelled chlorine gas and freaked out realizing... Oh yeah, The other part of the molecule is chlorine.. maybe this is a bad idea 😂😂😂
For the yikes awardees: I read Avael's comment to mean that Avael is already infertile, and so the teratogen risk is not there. May be wrong tho.
I love dimethylpolonium. It’s just as toxic as dimethylcadmium but it’s radioactive too.
wtf thats terrifying
@@That_Chemist
For some ungodly reason, marine microorganisms actually produce minute amounts of volatile dimethylpolonium... because of course they do, microorganisms do be gnarly like that.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22924583/
We had a lab assistant with subtle scars in his face which I took for acne scars.
Turns out when he was younger some apparatus exploded, showering him in broken glas and burning droplets. Thankfully in full safety gear.
He showed us the scorched and punctured lab coat and ended with "that's why you will always wear safety goggles"
8:40 I’m a college student studying mining engineering right now. This is actually a method used by a lot of mines to let people know something is wrong. The nasty smell gets everywhere, unlike signals to people’s phones.
I've had success using baby shampoo as an anti fog on sealed goggles. The trick is getting a really thin film that's evenly coated without streaks, otherwise it will make some areas a bit blurry.
do you want to play minecraft with me
We’ve played terraria a few times recently on the discord :)
i dont have terraria crying rn
haha this is great
People who don't like wearing goggles around chemicals should go watch that old video of what acids do to chicken wings.
12:28 I hope they sued the contractor for the money
8:00 Solvents aren't that bad. Acids, bases and other corrosive stuff is. Nonetheless you should always wear eye protection and a coat in the lab. The small exception you don't wear it, that's the moment something will happen, trust me... My worst lab accident luckily wasn't that bad and didn't hurt me. But bad enough to make goggles almost useless... A colleague did a column chromatography and i stood beside her. She pressurized it to much and didn't secure it correctly... The reservoir popped up and spilled somme 100 mL of a 1:1 mix of ethyl acetate and heptane right into my face (and her chest...). Whith such a volume, goggles still help but i still got a good amount into my eyes. On the way to the sink it felt cold from the evaporation, very strange feeling in the eyes, and then I put my head under running water and rinsed my eyes for a few minutes. Got to a doctor afterwards, luckily no damage. My ex girlfriend touched a wall with a bottle of sulfuric acid. It broke... She instantly got under the emergency shower and stripped away her clothes. No damage thanks to her instant reaction.
So yeah. Accidents do happen, always unpredicted, and it does have to be you. You could just walk by and get hit. So always wear PPE in a lab. No exceptions. And no "starting to get it on while walking in". Before you enter the lab, you fully and correctly wear PPE.
Funny story aside, ended up in a mess but no one got hurt or contaminated: I thought, to speed things up, it would be a good idea to directly neutralize anhydrous acetic acid with water... You have to neutralize it before disposal, or something really bad will happen. But no like I did... So I had three beakers with 50 mL of anhydrous acetic acid in each. I added about 5 to 10 mL of RT water to each of them and let them react in a closed fume hood (next pro safety tip: Close EVERY fume hood that isn't used right now. This sadly gets ignored by most people...). Luckily. At first, nothing happened. But the reaction speed pretty much goes exponential with temperature. And it's exothermic... A few minutes later, one after the other, instantly boiled very vigorously and sprayed it's content into the fume hood. At least I cleaned the fume hood again... Thanks to my habit to always close unused fume hoods, it's now a funny story. With an open fume hood, it would be a different story.
So please guys, wear PPE.
7:06 "and id might be uncomfortable but it's more uncomfortable than dying" just pointing that hilarious misspeak out.
F
i enjoy listening to this even though i have no idea what barely anything means
also congrats on 100k
Thank you!
A product called "Clarity Defog It" works pretty well for keeping fog down on dry plastic optics. It's intended for things like motorcycle helmets, on mine it lasted about a week of commutes before needing a reapplication.
My worst nightmare was spilling an organic mercury compound on my hands
Now its spilling a radioactive compound on my hands
Thanks comments
or even just working near a lab that does nuclear stuff
I think getting stuffs like dialkyl mercury on your skin is worse than spilling radioactive compounds on it.
@@That_Chemist nuc science guys have the warmest handshakes.
wait , what?!
:D
What about a radioactive organic mercury compond?
@@gingermcgingin4106 like an iodoacetate of radioactive mercury that also has radioactive iodine
Not a chemist but an electrical engineer, we had a 60 year old PHD with 30 years of experience walk in to our lab, destroy the frontend of a $95,000 piece of equipment by overloading it clearly past the posted maximum amplitude and he said sorry and left
we have bachelors right out of school with more sense than that
Just a quick thanks for explaining even easy stuff for someone like me, who is fascinated by Chemistry but totally lacks the competence to really get it. I'm sure some experts find the explaining tedious but it lets me in on the fun!
that fucking Cf-252 story just made me burst into terrified hysterics. basically the "oh no no" part from the "look at the top of his head" vine
I've got a few radiation related stories thanks to my family. This one might not be that chemistry-related, but I think it's still worth sharing:
My great-grandmother worked at Rocky Flats back in its heyday. She was one of the first women engineers to work there... unfortunately that had some bad safety implications for her. She was a small and petite woman, so the respirators that they had (all sized for men) didn't fit on her face properly, and let some (contaminated) air in around the sides.
On top of that, her coworkers weren't the most respectful of women. Because she was a woman and small, they made her CRAWL UNDER THE GLOVE BOXES TO CLEAN UNDER THEM. (For anyone who doesn't know, the glove boxes are where workers would use tools to shape the radioactive plutonium pits. They were enclosed and had gloves built-in so that workers could reach inside safely. Unfortunately, they often weren't sealed all that well, and plutonium dust could escape and settle on the surroundings.)
And, on top of THAT, after one of the fires, (I don't know if it was the 1957 fire or the 1969 one) her DESK became contaminated. She worked at that radioactive desk for a year (might have been two years actually) before anyone realized it was hot.
I didn't hear this story directly from her, as she died (of plutonium-related illnesses) when I was little. My grandmother told me all about her mother's (and her father's, her sister's, and her own) experiences of working at Rocky Flats. As Grandma put it, "She loved her job, and it killed her."
I think an important safety lesson to learn from this is that lax safety culture isn't the only dangerous workplace attitude. A culture of disrespect toward some groups (whether it's over gender, race, language, or anything else) can cause just as much harm.
So sorry to hear that :(
Unfortunately Republicans don't understand that. And sorry for your grandma
@Fictional Indian Space Program - SFS I feel like immediately blaming one group of people is counterproductive.
When trying to facilitate a culture of good intentions, it is generally a good idea to assume that every individual is capable of bad decisions, rather than relegating that trait to a specific, generalized group of people.
I've seen people do things like this regardless of their political affiliation, and I've found there are many reasons why people are the way they are, and do the things they do. Very few of them have anything at all to do with their political leanings.
I used bar soap for my goggles. I am perpetually very sweaty and have huge issues with foggy goggles, but just scraping some bar soap on it and then rubbing that around worked brilliantly. The fog was replaced by a thin film of liquid that was easy to see through. Only major issue is it only worked if you let the soap dry, so as soon as they got foggy and you had to clean them, the effect was ruined.
"Very offensive" is definitely an understatement on the smell of NO2, that shit makes you question your future on Earth.
When I was about 14 in a practical
Chem lesson in school we where doing a simple distillation and I forgot to watch the boiling tube which we where heating, the tube, once all of the distillate had evaporated, started to heat up itself, and the glass expanded to a point at which a perfectly circular piece of glass cracked out of the tube and flew off, hitting my lab partner in the shoulder
wow
Reminds me of a funny story, in middle school we also did a demonstration on distillation. We had two desks paired up, and we built the apparatuses on those in pairs, and then we're given colored water to distill. Apparently the round bottom flask a friend of mine was given was old, because after a couple minutes of gentle heading its bottom fell cleanly off. Laughs were had.
In high school I learned that the coolant hose you run from the condenser back to the sink should be held or weighed down with something, otherwise it'll start flailing about under any slight water pressure, drenching half the class. This happened multiple times over a five or six week course.
1993 or 1994 I was an upperclassman TA in 2nd year organic chemistry lab. Someone poured diethyl ether down the sink and one end of the lab. Another student, at the complete other end of the lab, threw a just-blown-out match down the drain. Whomp, there it was: blue flame shooting up out of every sink drain in the entire lab!
That is hilarious
18:22 I'm guessing it's their way of consoling themselves? "Welp, at least I get to use these cool chemicals!" Idk. I personally don't want kids ever and I've lived long enough to know that that's a 100% for sure (lots of personal factors playing into that choice).
7:41 For me I simply fold a piece of Prowipe and clip it on the top edge of my mask. Soaks up the vapor in exhaled breath to a nice degree and curbs goggle fogging quite well.
That being said, goggles are an absolute necessity, not just in the lab, but also in other places wherever, whenever you're doing lab work. We all know the story of Prof. Sharpless sacrificing one eye to the NMR gods, so that's something worth always keeping in the back of your head.
I discovered many years ago that a really effective way to prevent goggles or glasses fogging up: Windscreen (aka windshield) de-icing spray, the type which comes in big aerosol cans. Spray some onto the inside surface of your goggles, ensuring to wet the entire surface with the liquid. Do not wipe it off, just let the liquid evaporate, so it leaves a thin coating of whatever the residue is in the spray. I don't know what this residue is or why it has the anti-fogging effect, but I promise it works.
having worked in a nuclear research lab a bit, some of these stories are horrifying
Yeah I would think so!!
18:45 O hai thar Umbrella Pharmaceuticals from Resident Evil.
(Although to be fair, Popular Mechanics at one time had instructions on how to dispose of engine oil waste in a gravel pit in the ground... Yeah the 1960s were a different time.)
18:18 They mean they're already infertile, Chem...
My Radiological Disaster story came from the 1970's. The US Navy finally realized that "glow-in-the-dark" radium dials just MIGHT be unsafe! (Maybe...)
Anyway, the orders came down to survey any dial faces/control panels/clocks, etc., and properly dispose of any radioluminescent dials. One such clock face found was the personal property of a senior officer, and he did not want to lose his favorite clock. So, he gave the clock to a Recruit, and told him to scrape the radium paint off the clock. Said recruit did, right on a table in the ships galley!
Said ship went into the yards for 8 months for decontamination. The High Ranking Officer was assigned a desk, not in his ship, and left there until he retired (about 5 years early...)
Mind you, the Senior Officer was a Naval Academy graduate and had served on nuclear subs, and STILL pulled this boneheaded move. A major Charlis Foxtrot to say the least.
haha - thats brutal
That first story... that method of opening an ampule is old, like early Victorian age old.
Modern sommeliers still employ that method with a purpose built set of tongs to cleverly open wine bottles in a showy way for the rich and affluent.
On the soap on glasses note, I snowmobile and if you don’t have a heated visor it fogs pretty horrendously. Use cheap foaming hand soap on a clean dry paper towel, rub in until it goes clear, it keeps fog off for a few hours
The soap on glasses thing worked for me, but it was just pure dish soap, not watered down. I used some paper towel we normally use to clean spills that aren't dangerous, put some dish soap on it and used that to create a very small film on the glasses.
I worked on a NDT ( Non destructive testing) company. They do some radio photography that use Ir 192 or Co 60 to shoot x-ray photos of pipe and structure welding. They use a shielded bag about 20+ kg to carry the isotope around and the box has a tube that can move the isotope out of the box to shoot the picture. Here's the fun part, most of the operators cannon even read or write the local language and for get about English or other language and we engineers have to "write" all of their papers including the exam and even their work contract information. Once they diagnosed to be received too much radioactive, they will be resigned and return home that usually after about 1-2 years. They shoot these photos all around the country too, loaded the isotope in a truck and drive around the city. I quit that job after a month.
As a diver, you rub the soapy solution with your thumb around the interior eyepieces then wash it off with water before wearing the googles so only a thin film remains.
And use a mix of shampoo and water, shouldn't matter which type for safety googles but use no-more-tears type stuff for swimming otherwise your eyes will sting.
Old scuba diver's trick. Rub spit on your mask or safety glasses to avoid fogging
18:47 Here's a real-life example of why you should, I don't know, NOT do this:
The town surrounding the old Grumman plant in my area is still dealing with contamination issues and increased cancer rates even though that plant closed almost 30 years ago. In fact, they just unearthed leaking drums of chlorinated solvents and waste petroleum a few days ago, in what is now a community park.
i'm in cosmetology school right now and that guy is not lying when he said perm solution absolutely reeks, everytime someone comes in for a perm you can smell it throughout the entire school