Somebody Chlorinated a Rat
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2022
- In this video, I talk about some of your craziest research mishaps!
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Technically not research, but by far my favorite lab story is from O-Chem 1 as an undergraduate TA at a small teaching university. We are so small we usually only graduate ~15 chem and biochem majors a year and 10-15 of those are premeds, so it's safe to say that there weren't any chem nerds™ in the class.
This was their first time using actual glassware with ground glass joints and they were doing a classic fractional distillation with 19/22 kits and steelwool packing. I was just doing my thing “No, the still head goes at the other end of the condenser” “I believe you are looking for a round bottom flask…. That’s called a Claisen adapter” *Actual quotes* I noticed a student having a particularly rough go of it and decided to give them a hand.
As I picked up one of the pieces of glassware, I immediately noticed that it was sticky. Clearly the last person to use this kit failed to properly clean off the grease or one of the “let me just finger paint with grease” people got their greasy little hands on it. So, I go wash my hands, grab some gloves, a wash bottle of hexanes, and a big old wad of paper towels before getting to work cleaning up this greasy mess. Once I get that cleaned up, I pick up the column and that is greasy too, so I start cleaning that. Clearly the last person to use this kit was an absolute slob.
It's at that moment the student goes “Hey um I think we need some more of this grease stuff” “Ummm WHAT? 😱” I had put out a standard tube Dow Corning High Vacuum grease (you all know the one. I don’t think I’ve seen a chem lab that doesn’t have one kicking around somewhere, usually with a cracked lid). Admittedly, it was only about a quarter full but like I said we are a SMALL university, those tubes usually last us 1-2 YEARS.
At this point I look over at the student and watch as they pick up the column that I just finished cleaning for them and start to massage this poor thing. At first, I thought it was some sort of weird sex joke or something but nobody was laughing. I ask them what they are doing, and they simply respond, “Well you said that we were supposed to grease them.”
Finally, it all clicks, and I pick up the condenser to confirm. They PAINTED this poor thing with grease. “The JOINTS, not the whole d*mn thing!” to which they respond with my absolute favorite quote of all time “Oh sh*t, I forgot about those” and start to quickly rub grease onto the joints! They covered every single inch of every piece of glassware they had in grease except the f*cking joints! 🤣
Outside of the jacket? Covered.
Outside of the outer taper? Covered.
The hose barbs on the vacuum take off, column, and condenser? So caked with grease that I don’t think a hose could have stayed on any of them.
The mating surfaces of the joints? Na! Why would anyone ever do that???
The other part that gets me is when one of the professors asked me if I would be willing to be the example in a set of videos demonstrating proper lab skills. I unfortunately had an obligation come up when I found out who my co-start was going to be…
That is the dumbest thing I ever heard, and I have heard a lot of dumb things
This is amazing - super funny
This will totally make it into a future video
@@That_Chemist Oh wow thanks! That is super awesome I will definitely be watching for it. If there is anything I can clear up just let me know.
@@christianwentzell2777 I don't think I've ever seen a tube of grease with an intact lid lol.
"They chlorinated a rat" is the new "They did surgery on a grape"
I am gravely disappointed that I only saw this now
Hahahahahaha fuck
We're in a generation of the internet where rats became the new funny animal.
@@me0101001000 grapely disappointed
@@Retrenorium exactly, but I guess I can't vine too much, can I
The embarrassment of chucking a flaming rat at your department head reminded me of a story I heard from the glassblowers at Washington State University. Supposedly, an organic group was scaling up a new synthesis and had just taken delivery on a new 72 liter flask. The grad student who was unboxing this beach-ball sized flask fumbled it, the flask bounced on the floor and he caught it on the rebound. He was so astonished that he ran in to his advisor's office and said "watch this" as he tried, and failed, to bounce the flask a second time.
That's gotta be the funniest thing I've read in weeks. Holy shit, kid. "Watch this"? Really? Hahaha
Honestly maybe for the best if the structure was already compromised, better than shattering during a reaction....
Hahaha that’s so good
I’ve had a similar thing happen with a 2L flask - one time I got lucky, the other time I also got unlucky
To be fair, that flask should not have been used after dropping it the first time.
At 6:50 it's definitely the labs fault
If you have a shower and can't use it "unless you are going to die" someone is going to die and the teacher will be to blame
Yeah that’s seriously so stupid that they have that policy
@@That_Chemist That policy is so sus I would wonder whether the shower actually works.
If you dont regularly test your showers and eye washes (monthly and weekly at my work) they can act up. About once a year one of them will have a clog or discoloration or something that needs looked at. When we were reactivating an old building the eye washes water was rust orange :( had to replace a bunch of plumbing. Works great now.
Right? It comes off like they don't trust the students. Which is insane because you are trusting them to be mature enough to work with potentially hazardous chemicals, after all.
@@00muinamir Perhaps, and that would even be the more likely interpretation. But I would also guess like a 10% chance or more that that shower doesn't work, the teacher knows it and is hoping no one will notice.
At our college, we don't charge students for broken glassware (like they did when I was an undergrad). We do this mostly because we don't want students to hide their mistakes. I always ask them how it happened and constructive criticism on how to avoid breakage (with safety as the key priority).
my undergrad university was not as wise lol
Oh how much I've spent for broken glasswares 🥲
Tbf, if the glassware broke in the mysterious ways, it could be a research idea.
Honestly I feel as though less glassware would be broken from hyper-vigilance if this was more common.
Im an industrial mechanic. I am firm on my stance that I will never report equipment operators for accidents or damage they do, and because of this they always immediately come to me and I fix it instead of them trying to hide it. Same thing when I see them do horribly dangerous stuff, I'll either try to set them right, or tell management that they need to train the department on the issue, but I will not give them names. It's my job to build trust, correct issues as I see them, and keep the place running safely, Im not getting paid to punish people and threaten their livelihoods.
imagine walking in the hallway going back to class, and suddenly a FLAMING rat flies out of the door?
One of my hydrogeology professors was working at a nuclear refining site in the SE US and there was a guy whose entire job was to scrape roadkill frogs of the road because the pond they lived in made them count as radioactive waste.
Now what would Alex Jones have to say about this? 🤔 😂
dream job
@@jannikheidemann3805 THEY TURN THE FUGGING FROGS TO NUKES
Radioactive Roadkill Frogs would be an excellent band name.
I really want to know how to get a job like that. That sounds like a dream job to me, no joke, especially if it pays more because it's handling dead stuff and people normally don't want to do that kind of work.
I had an incident as a mortician that occurred one time whereby this decedent was extremely tall (about 7 feet) and would not fit in the normal sized caskets (which are 6.5 feet)
The family was offered an oversized casket at an additional cost but declined.
This was pretty common, all we have to do is bend the person's legs at the knees when we embalmed them; that way they would solidify like that and be stuck in a position that allows them to fit. This is normally fine because the bottom half of the person is hidden by the lower casket door. So everyone is happy.
However, after doing this irreversible procedure, the daughter ended up catching a glimpse of his bent knees as one of my funeral directors was retrieving paperwork he accidentally left inside the bottom of the casket. She EXPLODED with rage over this, with talk about how she is now forever traumatized knowing that her father will spend eternity in a slightly uncomfortable position and would have paid the extra money for the casket if she was offered (which she was) and threatened to sue under grounds of emotional trauma. She demanded that we magically undo the damage.
So we took the guy back into the prep room and we're like "okay how can we un bend his legs"
What transpired thereafter were some of the most hilarious moments of my career. But the highlight of it all was when myself and my co worker were literally hanging upside down underneath a table we moved the man to, off of a sheet, like Spiderman, that was tied to his knees. Thinking that the body weight would straighten them out.
That didn't work, so in addition to the Spiderman hanging; my heaviest co worker literally belly flopped onto this man's knees, and at that exact moment, our visiting CEO walked into the prep room to find us hanging upside down and jumping on this guy.
He paused for a second and only said.
"Is it working?"
"Uh.... No.."
"Well keep trying damn it!" *leaves*
Edit: for anyone wondering, what ended up working was buying a truck cargo winch from home depot. (One of those straps with the crank on it for securing things down in the bed of a truck) and cranking his legs down into a straight position very slowly over a period of 6 hours) plus a free oversized casket for the angry lady.
Holy shit...
Holy shit you should’ve been paid a lot more for this extra effort
Dammit, lady, what did you THINK was gonna happen? "He's 7 feet tall, a standard casket is only 6.5 feet, so you're gonna need an oversize casket." "No, that'll cost more, just use a regular casket." At that point I'd probably have said "You're the boss; would you prefer the cut be made at the neck or a little above the ankles?"
Jeeesus
Ahhh I can't believe you gave in to her bullshit at the end!
My career is in a hospital lab, we're called medical laboratory scientists in the US, but I kinda got a kick how intimidated you were by the hiv+ sample. You have to assume every sample is hiv+, hepC+, ebola+ whatever. Every sample we handle is both incredibly important as there is a life behind it, but also a threat. They have to be respected, like an unlabeled container of a mystery chemical.
Yeah - I have a similar protocol with chemicals; every new chemical is completely unknown in terms of risks
@@That_Chemist Yeah. It could be perfectly fine to handle, like dihydrogen monoxide, or EXTREMELY lethal, like chlorine triflouride.
@@Cl-2048 dihydrogen monoxide is NOT safe 100% of people that have come in contact with it die same goes for o2
@@Cl-2048 dihydrogen monoxide is NOT safe 100% of people that have come in contact with it die same goes for o2
Also HIV is much more difficult to contract than people seem to believe it is. Working with or cleaning up HIV+ blood isn't as huge a deal as many think. Yes, it's a risk, and yes, you have to be careful. But you're not going to catch HIV through minor contact. Even if you cut or stick yourself with something contaminated by HIV+ blood, the chance of contracting it is well under 1%, even less with prophylactic treatment.
Worked as a PhD student in a fiber optics lab, which is not a place you would expect to encounter dangerous chemicals. Towards the end, a postdoc and I discovered that a cardboard box in a cabinet used to store fiber spools and isopropanol for cleaning fibers contained a flask of Hydroflouric acid (HF)! It was probably used by a graduate student, who finished way before I started for etching the glass fibers. No Calcium Gluconate cream was kept next to the bottle so acute exposure could be treated. Our lab was not even rated for chemistry and being mostly physicists and electrical engineers, many would probably be unaware of HF's extreme toxicity.
Having binged chemistry videos on RUclips, I realized how dangerous this situation was and immediately contacted the university safety department to get a qualified person to dispose of it.
Moral of the story: Clean up after yourself when you graduate!
If you want a really spooky one - normal people can buy HF as rim cleaner (it’s still 20-40%)
@@That_Chemist WHAT !? Normal, untrained, peoples can buy one of the nastiest acid ?
@@Kualinar hey, i even buy one as cleaner. Just 20%
But enough to send my bucket flying after i mix it with alumunium foil
@@Kualinar You'd be surprised what we can get hold of if we put our mind to it.
My supervisor and I were once the only people in a small, shared lab building. A regular post man came by with a package labelled to contain HF for somebody who had their office in that building. He gave us the package without second thought, without even asking for our names.
1) Why did this HF get send by what I assume is regular DHL
2) Anyone wearing a lab coat near that building would have received that package
Kind of creepy
Incinerated rat story is deeply similar to the time the research fellow in my lab barbecued several rat carcasses when he used ethanol to clean a surface near an open flame. why is this a common occurance?
He also used to work at a facility where rat carcasses were discarded into what amounted to a meat grinder for rats. They got an upgraded rat grinder, which was apparently so effective it rendered the rats into a fine dust. It fed into a pipe. One day the grinder stopped running, and they came to the realisation that the pipe the grinder fed into had become clogged, so they had to bust open the pipe and unleash a foul rat paste slurry
RA once took a rat home with her. Not on purpose. It crawled up her sleeve and she realised on the drive home. She was so startled she threw it out the window 🙃
RA as a phd student drank cancer cells while holding a plate up to the light to see the cells. She panicked, thinking shed get cancer until her supervisor came to console her 🥴
Wow those are great stories
Cancer cells' gonna just turn into protein in the stomach lmao
@@crowdemon_archives Until it becomes the first case of transmittible cancer in humans like it Tasmanian devils
@@crowdemon_archives contagious cancers are actually a real thing (mostly in highly inbred mammal populations)
If the PhD student were a Tasmanian Devil, she would be correct. They (and a few other species) have transmissible (in-species) cancers.
One story that gets told to every first semester bachelors student at my university, when they start their introductory lab exercise is, why they are never allowed to add the diluted potassium cyanide solution for proofing the presence of Copper kations by themselves. Apparently a few years back, one of the lab tutors was asked by a student to hand out the KCN-solution (its stored in a locker) so she could perform the mentioned test. Of course in the script the students were given, it stated VERY CLEARLY that the solution had to be alkaline before the addition of the Cyanide, to prevent the formation of deadly poisonous and gaseous HCN. The tutor asked the student if they had tested the pH of their solution, which they confirmed. The tutor proceeded to give the student a small bottle of the KCN-solution and a pipette, telling them to add a few drops inside the fume hood. Now I have to add, that the fume hoods in our undergrad labs a notoriously unreliable and often have the warning light for low flow rate turned on. Most people besides first semester students know that… The student then added a whole bunch of the cyanide to their test tube, which contained the aquious solution of copper(II), but they apparently had not tested the pH since the cyanide was instantly turned into HCN gas as soon as it mixed with the acidic solution, which started to fill the malfunctioning fume hood. The student collapsed shortly after and had to be rushed to the luckily nearby hospital, where they barely survived the cyanide poisoning.
Since then the tutors add the cyanide themselves, after checking the pH again with an indicator strip.
I was doing a qualitative analysis in an undergraduate lab in the 1970's and almost had that happen. There was a test tube with thioacetamide and you had to use use wet pH paper to test that the hydrogen sulfide release was complete. I was lazy and got in the bad habit of just sniffing it when no one was looking to test for hydrogen sulfide. There was another test tube with the KCN for the copper test mentioned by LunchBr4ke. These were of course in a fume hood. I made a mental note to NOT sniff the wrong test tube. But I got distracted and sniffed the wrong test tube and then got really dizzy and left the lab and sat in the break room for a few minutes. What actually happened was nothing since I had in fact checked the pH of the KCN solution and I just panicked when I realized I mistakenly sniffed the KCN tube.
Lesson learned was mental notes are not good enough and just don't sniff things in the lab.
Ngl malfunctioning hoods and potential toxic gas produced in lab sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen…
@@davidg4288you remind me of a SciShow video. The one where they show how plenty if grad students discovering things because of tasting the chemicals or other stuff along those lines.
My old chemistry teacher liked to share stories from his time growing up in the UK.
One of my favourites was when a colleague of his decided to make the largest sodium explosion he could. They hand wove a copper wire cage with a large hook on top, broke into the chemical supplies room, stole the whole jar of sodium and squirreled it away to the boys bathroom.
From there, he emptied the entire contents into the copper cage, hung it on the sides of one porcelain thrones and flushed.
It destroyed the porcelain throne and all the cubicles, and when everyone came to investigate the explosion, the offending student came out with his glasses crooked, tie over should, staggering out in shock and confusion. (Imagine a 60yr old chemistry teacher imitating this)
As a microbiology undergrad student. I only fear incurable diseases now.
To be fair, everybody in their right mind fears prions.
As a former human biology undergrad i'm mostly amazed that we don't just die spontaneously (more than we do)
No horror quite like seeing a soup of tangled strings in an electron microscope pic of one of your samples 😅
@@alextopfer1068 humans are funny because they can die to their own organs rejecting themselves and still have the ability to survive getting pulverized by truck amounts of force without any help
Those Halloween games where you stick your hand in a container of gross stuff would be terrible with a sharps container.
Here's another story!
When I was in uni, I worked in the shipping and receiving department (driving around in a golf cart delivering stuff across campus was *awesome*).
We had a box that came in destined for the bio lab and it had arrived wet, as in the whole bottom of the box was wet. The box didn't have any markings on it or anything, and we weren't too suspect of it so we grabbed it and threw it on the cart to deliver it to the bio lab.
When we got there, we met the professor and was like "Hey, we've got a package for you -- no idea what it is or why it's wet, but it arrived like that."
He responded in the most dead-pan voice, "Oh yeah, it's a box of dead cats for our dissection lab."
...
To this day, I still have no idea if he was joking or not.
I know bio ppl - that sounds like it *definitely* could have happened :(((
Probably the ice or same condensation on the package so anything that could compose so cat a possible but they sure had reason why they needed it for teaching /research
Oh, that brings back memories of my uni days. I give it 50/50 odds on whether he was joking.
@@That_Chemist someone stole a foot from the cadaver lab at my university and it was found in front of a residence on the street. Life sciences people are weird. That was the university of western Ontario in Canada in the very early 2000s.
LITERALLY SCHRÖDINGER'S BOX
Tinky winkenic acid is now burnt into my mind..
If for what ever reason I ever run into it again professionally, I'll be forced to use this nomenclature.
Perfect
I'm far too dumb to be a chemist, but I've come face to face with the mysteries of alchemy quite a few times. My most invigorating experience was when, while breaking down 1950s era French surplus ammunition to recycle the bullets and the good casings, I found out that the propellant, in its seventy years of life, would decompose from a nice stable powder that would merely deflegrate into a veritable hell-dust that very well could explode on impact.
I found this out when a bullet fell into one of the little waste bowls of powder from about a foot. It took me a while to figure out what caused the new white streak in my safety goggles - it was, of course, the abrasion of porcelain across the plastic after the bowl was launched, as shrapnel, across the room. Fun!
Eh, i think it's just French WWI Artillery shell that got more explodey as they aged, since they used Picric Acid that have the described characteristic.
God bless the alchemical mysteries.
I still recall a basic acid neutralization example from highschool.
The chem prof put a mixture including formic acid and a color indicator in the glassware (which was mostly, but not completely clean [something that remained on it must have caused the issue])
He then tried to reduce it, after having told us the color it would turn when it was neutralized. And it stayed the same. So he tried a bit more, it went a little less acidic.
Then he got annoyed, and retrieved a strong base, and carefully mixed it in.
The mixture got *more* acidic.
What then insued was 3 minuts of him mildly freaking out mixing more in and diluting it until it ultimately was neutralized, while the entire class started joking about the 'wonderacid' and how it would destroy the whole planet once it became acidic enough to melt the glass and enter the earth's crust.
Probably a cordite based powder which shed some nitroglycerin dust as it aged and promptly went boom on you when provoked.
That crap caused more than a few issues over the years.
@@revimfadli4666 ....do NOT play around....EVER...with any of the more toxic peppers....a LITTLE ghost pepper fluid will ruin your whole week if it gets on the wrong body part.....DO NOT ASK ME HOW I KNOW THIS TO BE TRUE!!!! O_o
@@ssnerd583 So. How's your long johnson doing after that?
Probably the scariest moment in my chemistry education thus far: In my undergrad OrgChem lab course, every student had to perform a synthesis with bromine. (Mine was a SEAr of acetanilide) Normally the inital pipetting of the bromine is uncomfortable enough, but I had some bad luck on top:
I had just started the reaction and was about to fine-adjust my dropping funnel's stopcock. It was somewhat tough to turn and so I overdid it. Suddenly, a lot of bromine dropped into my reaction solution, causing it to basically solidify and become unstirrable. I quickly closed my stopcock, but found that it was now stuck! (My best guess is that the bromine probably reacted with the silicon grease)
I then had to borrow another students dropping funnel and transfer my remaining bromine into it, a truly nerve-racking experinece! Luckily it all went well, my reaction solution became stirrable again after warming it up a bit and the experiment was successful. The compromised dropping funnel was subsequently quenched with copious amounts of sodium disulfite solution and the stopcock unstuck with careful application of a rubber mallet.
The lab assisstants did not help me with this at all out of fear of the bromine (somewhat understandable), but luckily the supervising professor did, with the encouraging words: "I have already achieved my family planning."
yeah bromine is really scary - that being said, I have made and distilled 300 grams of it, but it's no joke!
I think bromine is the most dangerous inorganic liquid, perhaps with exception of oleum, anhydrous hydrazine and liquid chlorine oxides
@@SuperAngelofglory F2O2 is a liquid...and so is ozone if cold enough and you have a deathwish :P
@@AKAtheA I ment for room temp and pressure liquids. Well, yea, FOOF, is a liquid, but you don't see that very often in a lab, so I forogt about it. Bromine, however, is ubiquitous. As I think I said before, sometimes ubiquitous chemicals like bromine and strong acids tend to give some of us a false feeling of safety: they are so often used, we get used to them and kinda begin to ignore what harm can they do!
@@AKAtheA Ozone is oddly the scarier one of those two. FOOF is onomatopoeia for what it will sound like when you mix it with almost anything that's not meticulously fluorinated already, but liquid ozone just detonates. They've tried to use it in rockets for decades. Once you get it concentrated to 75% in liquid O2 it just detonates; it seemingly needs no reason to go, it seemingly can't be stabilized, it just detonates randomly and without warning.
Pretty tame story compared to everything else, but I once had a geology lab where we had to identify a bunch of rocks. One of the test was to lick the rock to figure out if it was NaCl. One other test was to drip "dilute" HCl on the rock to see if it contained carbonates. Suffice to say I now know what "dilute" HCl tastes like.
Haha - I knew geologists were a bunch of rock lickers
@@That_Chemist lol! The "rock lick test" is mentioned in the videogame "Mass Effect: Andromeda"!
What does it taste like?
@@veggiedragon1000 at low enough concentrations? Pain.
At high enough? Nothing. It eats your nerves.
@@lordfelidae4505 Yikes, glad you didn't get your tastebuds burned away then.
Watching this reminds me of my time in high school, where I was the driving factor in what was (at least up until that point) the worst -if not the most ridiculous- set of lab accidents my teacher and school had witnessed. In the span of a few hours, the entire school reeked of vomit, I got a new scar, and the school got a new incident of water damage. This is a bit long, so buckle up.
This was about six years ago, back when I was taking AP chemistry. We were doing an ester synthesis by refluxing an alcohol and carboxylic acid, performing a separation, and finally distilling the product. We had to one for credit and had the option of doing a second one for extra. I ended up doing three because my first one had a bit of an accident, but it was the third one that is by far the most infamous. I cannot remember the exact chemical, but it smelled like pineapple, and I remember picking it because I wanted to make pineapple. Of course, I did not want to end up wearing the chemical, but that's exactly happened. During the separation step, we had to neutralize the acid, and we used sodium bicarbonate. I suppose I was a little too ambitious shaking the separatory funnel because the cap blew off when it was upside down (we were told to do repeated inversions and release pressure using the nozzle), spraying pineapple all over the place, not to mention the alcohol and whatever was left of the acid. It smelled far too good for how crushed I was.
I had to redo the lab, and I believe I used methanol and methanoic acid, which ended up smelling like ether, but after distillation, I ended up with a product in excess of 99% purity.
But the real fun was when I wanted to do an extra credit lab. One of the rules of the lab was that if anyone wanted to use butyric acid, they had to do the entire lab in the fume hood (we only had one) because the acid smelled so bad. We had to use the raw acid, so the smell was incredibly strong. No one did a butyric acid lab for course credit, but there were a few (including myself) that wanted to do one for extra credit. I do not exactly know why; perhaps it was the fact that we were immature teenagers, or perhaps it was just the call to go on a thrill-seeking adventure. Either way, it ended up not going very well.
Everything had descended into chaos within five minutes. I was the person in charge of getting the acid from the bottle into the round bottom. Unfortunately, I -in my infinite wisdom- poured the acid into a grad cylinder before I took the cork off of the round-bottom, so I had to remove the cork before I could put the acid in. I also had the grad cylinder on top of a plastic bag (because the teacher stored the butyric acid in several plastic bags buried under sand in a metal can sealed shut with electrical tape). I ended up moving the plastic bag, which spilled the grad cylinder, which had either 5 or 15 milliliters of stock, pure butyric acid. I slammed the fume hood's door shut in less than a second, and what was supposed to be a fun lab turned into a cleanup operation.
Normally, a spill in a fume hood is not a problem, but the ones at my school were not installed properly. In essence, all of the fume hoods were connected to each other, but they were not all always on, so each fume hood vented into all of the others, which then let everything get into the vents. This meant that the literal vomit smell of butyric acid was vented throughout every hallway in the entire academic side of the school. But this is not everything.
One of my group members was tasked with getting the spilled acid just out of the building in whatever way possible. I had to clean the fume hood, which was partly because the entire ordeal was my fault to begin with, but also because I volunteered. I had a stuffed nose that day, so I couldn't smell the acid nearly as much. I had to wash the entire fume hood, and another student had to dispose of all the rags I used. We could not dispose of them inside because of the smell, so she ended up having to wipe it all up with paper towels and carry them outside, which also ended up taking several trips. I can't imagine what someone running into her in the hallways would have thought.
I was tasked with getting everything out of the fume hood a, which I did successfully, but what I did not succeed in doing was getting everything put away. Apparently, my teacher was watching me like a hawk this entire time, and the next accident I had was in the single second he was looking away. I was more or less relaxed at that point and was looking at all of the glassware we had. There was this glass desiccator that had really thick glass that I wanted to look at, so I picked it up to have a closer look, but I picked it up by the lid. Now, the lid was stuck on, and I thought it would stay that way, but it didn't. The lid detached, and the desiccator fell back down onto the table and shattered. I tried to catch it, but all I got for my trouble was a nice, deep gash on my right pinky. My teacher then had me put a large stack of paper towels on it and promptly evicted me from the lab. He had me call my parents and sent me home. This was a pretty nice wound: the scar is about 15mm long, and the cut was a few millimeters deep, considering how I was able to get my thumb nail stuck in it, and it was bleeding a lot. We had to close the wound somehow, either with stiches or with glue, and I was not about to have my dad stich my finger shut (he was a veterinarian, so he did this stuff all the time) because I just could not handle that. We ended up supergluing the wound shut once I got home, which was about fifteen or twenty minutes after the incident.
But wait, there's more! When I was washing down the fume hood, I did so using a vinyl tube attached to the sink inside of the hood, but I did not take the tube off of the sink nor put it back in the sink. I thought I turned the sink off, but apparently it was still slowly dripping. The fume hood was tilted slightly forward when it was installed, so instead of the water going down the drain of the hood, it ended up leaking onto the floor. The real kicker is that the lab was on the top floor of the building, so the water ended up leaking into the classroom below and directly onto the teacher's computer. I didn't learn this until class the next day, where I was basically shamed for causing a disaster.
The rest of the students tried their best to keep me out of the lab, but they couldn't. What's really funny is that I ended up being a TA for that same teacher the next semester.
the endless train of "but wait, there's more" had me rolling on the floor, best comment ever
My chemistry tutor once got a big flask of butyric acid out, opened it and put it directly underneath my nose. Everybody else was gagging but I wasn't that badly affected honestly though it wasn't terribly pleasant.
I'm amazed that teacher even wanted to see you again after the semester was over. 😆
Wow
This is why we can't have nice things
Statistically, HIV actually has one of the lowest transmission risks. Even after a contaminated needle injury the risk is only about 0.3% (vs about 30% for HepB and 3% for HepC) and there is post-expositions-prophylaxis available but still it’s a very human thing to fear an essentially untreatable disease (even though modern therapy has almost normalised life expectancy)
I'd still never want to deal with a HIV Blood sample ever
Also, for much more contagious/easily transmissible diseases (like a couple of the ones the “lucky” folks in our Containment Level 3 lab work with), they get centrifuged inside secondary containers, so at least if the sample pot explodes, it gets contained inside the secondary container rather than spreading over the whole centrifuge. The secondary container can get taken out and dealt with in a safer, contained manner.
It's also not viable in air exposure. A germicidal lamp, heat gun or just waiting will kill it with zero human contact. The danger is from the shards of glass.
@@introprospector The tubes used for centrifuges, whether eppendorf or falcon, are usually plastic. I've never seen a glass tube used for centrifugation.
There's also the stigma around it and how people will think you're gay if you have it.
A friend of mine was trying to get her bunsen burner working in the fume hood she was using. However, she had accidentally connected the burner to the water supply instead of the gas. That was even an example our profs liked bringing up for ruining equipment in lab by drenching your burner in water, slight change here though: she still opened the gas supply and tried to light her bunsen burner. Will never forget walking past her fume hood and seeing that make-shift flamethrower right next to me. Luckily she reacted fast and it didn't burn for more than like 2 seconds but still, what a scare.
that is so weird
I remember something like that happening in year 11 chem. Somehow a classmate had taken the gas hose for the bunsen burner off, and a flame was now coming directly from the gas tap. Tbh was kinda funny.
@@yr0 Also very dangerous, that could flash back and cause a gas explosion at the source.
@@nikkiofthevalley no it won't, gas requires oxygen to burn.
@@tsm688 It can in a lab, because labs are full of people who fiddle with taps. If the big room valve is closed and someone opens one of the lab taps, then you get oxygen in the pipes.
In school classes we were taught a simple precaution against this: Let the gas run for ten seconds before you light it, to flush the pipe.
Another incident: Graduate students in Geology at the University of Washington were doing perchloric acid digestions of rocks. One of the students told me that the fume hood used for the digestions was dropping a liquid. I told the student to lock the door to the lab and stay out. The hood was not designed for perchloric acid work.
F
They still use perchloric acid for that? I thought it was phased out.
So to check my understanding, acid digestion means you've got some soup of rock, perchloric acid and HF, maybe heated? Dripping out of the fume hood? I also would not care to troubleshoot that...
@@SuperAngelofglory This occurred in the 1970s
@@sealpiercing8476 That's more or less how mineral samples were digested in a radiochem lab I worked in in the early 1980s. In a tiny teflon beaker, put a finely-powdered sample, some KF, and some perchloric acid, then simmer on a hot plate for a couple of days with occasional addition of more perchloric acid. After all of the silicates had been boiled away, the residue was carefully treated to precipitate out other constituents such as Fe⁺³. Then we could get to work on analyzing the uranium, thorium, and radium. I don't recall seeing anything dripping out of the fume hoods, but I couldn't swear that they were rated for that purpose. There turned out to be a number of problems with the venting systems as well as the rest of the ventilation in that building.
Lesson: Always dedicate an entire fume hood to a flammable project. And even yet keep a fire extinguisher next to it.
I personally couldn't "vivisect" a rat. I could euthanize one then dissect it. But never "vivisect" it. Maybe this was a warning from the guardian angels of rats.
Same, but I even struggle with dissections
@@That_Chemist I think rats get a bad reputation too from the way they capitalize on the squalor in cities. To them that is rat paradise, for they don't believe in wasting like we humans do. This is humans' fault. The rats are doing what rats will do, and they didn't need cities to live for what, millions of years?
If humans could use food waste of cities to create, say, hog slop for the country, then the efficiency would be better, and there would be less rat related difficulties too.
SQUEAK
@@darylcheshire1618 lol
Isoflurane is so much better
Fun story from my high school chemistry class. Teacher was a “cool guy” rules breaker chemist. I thought it was unsafe at the time but I didn’t quite realize it until the day of the event. We’re exploring exothermic reactions and he says a perfect example is pure sodium and water. This man proceeds to take out what I can only assume is a brick of it and break off a fingernail size chunk (with his hands mind you). I’m already thinking it might be a little too much to put into a beaker safely but whatever I’m just a dumb hs student he’s a teacher. He then proceeds to gather the whole class around a fume hood. Thumbs up because this is the only safety precaution taken. He tosses this sodium into the beaker with water. No reaction for 30 seconds, “well, I guess we have to add more.” . I am no genius but I thought oils may inhibit such a reaction because he didn’t have gloves on. I proceed to tell him this. Promptly ignored before he lifts the hood and grabs a thumbnail sized chunk and tosses it right on top of the other chunk still floating. Cue explosion and glass sticking out of this guys clothes. This explosion was heard to most of the school. Thankfully no one was hurt but it was a situation where more safety is necessary, waiting for a reaction can be useful, and less is more. He still teaches there btw. (For more on his safety skills he thought himself an engineer for duct taping his windshield back on when the seal broke and bungie corded his door shut to the center console when the door latch broke).Man, I love public Ed. I’m currently going for my bachelors in chem. Your channel has been great education and fun.
A lot of these stories remind me of the old rhyme:
Johnny was the chemist's son, now Johnny is no more.
What Johnny thought was H2O was H2SO4
This really has two lessons in it:
1, labeling of secondary containers is critically important.
2, don't drink random flasks of stuff you find laying around!
My best story happens when I was in my year 11 chemistry class. We were making esters in groups of 3 and then smelling them as show of changing properties and how they can be quite pungent. The proper procedure was to have your head away from the beaker and use your hand to waft the smell over to you, then after you smelt it you would pour the liquid into a bucket the teachers would deal with after class. Now being 16-17 year old boys after pouring a bunch of strong smelling esters into a bucket we wondered what that would smell like, so completely ignoring the instructions we stuck our face real close and sniffed hard. I can’t quite describe the smell but boy was it strong, this we kept doing messing around until class finished. Then the next class rolled around and it was math, so me and one of my partners were sitting at the back of class absolutely out of it, could not focus and was nearly falling asleep the entire lesson. Luckily we weren’t noticed, however since then it has changed how I view the method on an experiment
Maybe don’t breathe in the ester bucket jungle juice
@@That_Chemist That is a great name for it.
simultaneously speaking like a Prof and an undergrad, man of two worlds
Bit off-topic, but smelling esters reminded me that I recently learned that "GC-Sniff" is a real analytical technique that actually exists. It is apparently used in the perfume industry to add sensory data to newly synthesized esters, or in quality control to figure out which compound is making the latest batch of perfume smell a bit strange, for example. Imagine a dude in a lab coat sticking his nose into a tube coming from the rear end of a GC column. Because that's exactly what it's like.
If you haven't ended up huffing chemicals that you shouldn't inhale, have you really been in a British chemistry class? I accidentally inhaled concentrated HCl vapours in year 13 because someone decided to just take the pipette I was using for some organic (can't remember what it was specifically) and replaced it with the one from the fume hood (where the conc. acid was, to stop us inhaling the fumes) while my back was turned. Ended up just going home to sleep that one off lol
It was my first-year organic chemistry in Australia. We were producing cyclohexanol from cyclohexanone. Upon distillation of the product, I had a substance very different in appearance from my fume hood partners. I went and asked the lab demonstrator, and she comes over. She proceeds to say "never do this!" and gives the presumed cyclohexanol the biggest whiff possible, re-clamps it and says "yep, that is DEFINITELY cyclohexanol".
Have you ever worked with australium
*sniff sniff*
yes, that's some good shit. 🥴🥴🥴
I don't have much experience with chemistry, what is cyclohexanol and why would it be a bad idea to sniff it? (Not saying it's ever a good idea to sniff chemicals made in a lab, was just wondering what exactly the dangers from this would be)
@@nikkiofthevalley sniffing anything in chemistry is generally a bad idea, because some things can kill you in concentrations where you barely able to sniff anything. That's why she said "never do this".
@@quint3ssent1a That's basically what I said in the note, I was asking what the dangers specifically from this would be.
In high school we were each tasked to come up or recreate an experiment, the teacher was concerned over my lab (combustion enthalpies of dif. Primary alcohols) but let another kid burn straight gasoline to measure fuel efficiency. But this is not where it goes wrong.
1. First red flag, kid shows up with 3 mason jars (83,87,93 gas)… mason jars… and the teacher lets him sit them on the lab bench
2. Next, this should have been a clear stopping indicator, he poured the gas in the alcohol burner and began his experiment. After one trial the alcohol burner cracked… but it gets better..
3. Since I finished my experiment I let him use my spirit burner the next day… even after the first burner cracked the teacher said “it will be fine.” However this was not fine… he lit the flame and 5 minutes in the glass shattered, also igniting gasoline all in the fume hood… the teacher (who was at his desk) heard this explosion and rushed over with the fire extinguisher. Luckily no one was harmed but I still am puzzled how that flew by the teacher…
Wow, just wow
I have another one for you: In first semester of uni i was in a inorganics lab. to my defense i had no clue about chemistry at this point. In the lab there was a weekly rotating lab job which included cleaning up the lab after it finished. at some point i had to do the lab cleaning. i was running around the lab with paper towels and acetone, wiping all the working spaces from the other students. one working space was hilariously stained orange. i didn't spent a second thought about it and just wiped everything off, like i did before. After i was done cleaning i asked the PhD student, who supervised of what the orange stuff might be. He answered that its propably potassium dichromate. I didn't knew anything about Chromates since i was slightly behind with my experiments so i asked him if the stuff was concerning. He looked me dead serious in my eyes and said that its highly toxic and cancerogenous. Guess who didn't wore gloves wiping that stuff up. I washed my hands for at least 10 minutes to get rid of the orange stain on my skin.
Licking goggles is funny. When snorkeling or diving you can spit in your mask & spread it around to prevent fogging.
Oof, that's bad. My first thought was that the contamination could have been bromine, but you would definitely have noticed that immediately after touching it with acetone.
Wait, they didn't tell you to wear gloves while cleaning?!
@@00muinamir Nope. But the supervisors were shitty af
1:02
I feel like the rat would not agree with the last statement.
True
So before chemistry I did an undergrad in microbiology and I was working on a fairly pathogenic enterobacteria. In our lab we had a duran bottle for all the bio-chemical waste that we produced and once a while someone would empty it. One evening I was cleaning up after my experiment, and I was emptying falcon tubes full of VERY overgrown cultures of aforementioned bacteria directly into the waste bottle. Turns out I did it so energetically, the contents of the bottle splashed right into my eye. I washed my eye in panic for sth like 20 minutes in the bathroom, and ran off home without telling my supervisor. The same day I thought it was stupid not to tell her, and admitted to my adventure via text, and asked if I was going to die. She said I was probably going to be fine, and that the same thing happened to her once, but that I should be reporting accidents immidiately (which is true). For the next month or two I felt like I had some solid shit under my eyelid tho. Got blood tests done anyway.
Yikes!!!
I work in a medical microbiology lab, and routinely culture tuberculosis. The sound of glass hitting the floor has a whole new level of terror in my lab. We also occasionally have suspect anthrax chilling in a sealed box in our lab, waiting for the health department to confirm the ID. Good times
0:07:45 Your professor is also subject to employment law and employee safety law when you are doing lab work ordered by the class. No exceptions. If you are ordered to complete a lab without safety equipment 'or you will be failed' that is literally extortion. Don't bother reporting it to the school or deans, report it to the state government and link the USCSB in the e-mail.
I'm not a chemist, but a metallurgist. I have two stories for you, one featuring myself at the induction furnace, and another with a colleague at the rolling mills.
I (as a foundry technologist) was melting up a batch of cast iron and the last composition analysis we took showed some carbon missing. So I calculated the amount to be added, then handed it off to an assistant to weigh out and add to the melt. As I was preparing the spectrometer for the next measurement I notice how I had twisted two numbers on the piece of paper and now we would overalloy by around 5 times the amount needed. I rushed out of the measuring room to find the carbon already swimming on top of the 150 kg of 1400 °C liquid iron. As shoveling it off from the top proved ineffective, I quickly took our shop-vac and carefully removed the excess carbon with it. As the layer got thinner, hot pieces of carbon were aspired and maybe a bit of glowing iron clinging to it as well. The (replacable) vacuum hose went up in smoke, but the main vacuum body was left unharmed due to the dust already sitting in it was isolating the plastic body from the hot pieces. In the end, I sacrificed a 30 € of plastic hose to save a 2000 € experiment. I heard that this stunt I did was quite the show to watch. :D
Another time, a fellow from the process metallurgy department had to investigate the deformability of a new grade of steel they were researching. The strips of initially around 100 x 20 cm had to be heated to somewhere around 250 °C to make deformation easier and then passed through a rolling mill. The tray for preheating can hold quite a few liters for samples this size. Now you could use a salt bath to hold the steel strips at temperature but that might corrode things and they are not exactly healthy. You could also buy some fancy high-temperature stabile oil, but that could cost quite something. But you know what's cheap? Vegetable oil! Sadly it turned out that the temperatures are a bit too high for those oils, causing to turn rancid within minutes. He had to look at quite a few different compositions, meaning we had this oversized deep-fryer (150 x 30 cm opening) spewing out fumes from overheated frying oil into the workshop for days. For a few weeks half the institute smelled like the most unkempt food truck imaginable. He got quite a few nicknames for this experiment and is still known (and sometimes answers the phone) as the head of our "deep-frying departement".
Wow!!!
I remember pre highschool one of my friends was obsessed with bromine, it was his favourite element and he wanted to make it. A couple of years later probably age 15 or 16 he decided to make it by himself and accidentally managed to inhale enough bromine fumes that he was still coughing the next day at school.
That is very scary and dumb
it's BROmine BRO
When I was in college, I managed to land a summer internship as a chemical engineer at a factory. Often, I had to run some basic chemistry experiments entirely unsupervised (as it was assumed I knew chemistry). This part I could manage just fine, and could successfully perform all of the tests. It was always basic stuff, and could just watch a RUclips video and get by. One time, I was asked to create my own procedure for testing very caustic solutions. I wasn't familiar with any existing procedures, but figured I could just do a basic titration that would yield the results I was after. The process I came up with worked great, I got the exact numbers I was looking for and the test could be done quickly, which was a huge plus. There was a big focus in the lab on repeatability so I followed the procedure I wrote 9 more times to make sure it wasn't a fluke. Not once did I consider the byproducts of the reaction. Turns out, I was making a pretty considerable amount of H2S. I smelled it the first time I did the experiment, but just assumed it was the smell of the factory as it always smelled awful. Eventually, as the smell got worse, I realized what I was doing. I was effectively committing chemical warfare on myself. Luckily, I didn't inhale more than ~300ppm of the stuff, but I still had to go to the nurse and was stuck with some minor side effects for a couple days.
Since then, I've become a full-blown chemical engineer. The lesson of this story: don't trust a 20 year old physics student with free reign over a chemistry lab.
1:28 the problem with only experts should pick mushrooms, is that you cant really become an expert without picking any mushrooms
You can pick them, *BUT NOT EAT THEM*
I counter, an example: while it is true one cannot become an expert chemist without mixing chemicals, that does not mean someone with no experience should leap in to it to gain experience (transition metal chemistry to start say?)
Perhaps read a book first? Take a course? Ask someone with local expertise? Don't be the guy who played with microwave transformers to learn about them
One of the best stories I have heard on my labs:
A guy is making as an analytical chem project something like Zn quantification on hair, so he samples one from his head hair for the high Zn sample bc he dyes it a lot and one from his…underparts, as reference.
Then everyone has to do a presentation on those types of projects, so he shared a damn photo of his hair and the parts where he got it with the whole class, 2 teachers and 1 guest. The incident got named the “swallow nest” bc when one of the teachers got asked about the incident she answered: “You couldn’t even see much it was like a swallow nest”
Eww eww eww eww eww eww eww eww
I am not a chemist, and I still have a fire extinguisher at my desk, because I have a soldering iron. I also have one in the kitchen, because food does a lot of burning stuff too. They're just handy to have in general, and not too expensive.
It’s wise - almost everything we build stuff out of is flammable, so it’s probably a good idea
While in my NMR-saving story I was the good guy, I also had the chance of being the perpetrator: in my MSc I had to use n-BuLi in hexane for a synthesis. This was done in a Schlenk system under Argon, and we used the syringe method (of course). One time while I was trying to inject the organolithium solution the syringe got stuck, so I pushed a bit harder. This caused the needle to fly away and sprayed a stream of hexane with n-BuLi, which immediately caught on fire. It literally looked like in those WWII flamethrowers footage. Luckily, it was aimed into the fume hood. Unluckily, a colleague of mine was with his head inside the fumehood (don't ever do this, kids) trying to unlock a part in another setup. Unluckily still, the guy didn't wear safety goggles because he was not doing any reaction (don't ever do that too, kids). The flame passed about 2 cm from his eyes, I nearly sh*t myself and he almost got a heart attack (obviously). Very luckily, no one got hurt, and since then I never saw him in the lab without wearing his safety goggles.
a good lesson
Yeah having your head inside the fumehood while not wearing safety goggles and someone is working with n-BuLi in said fumehood seems safe
Wow that guy is super lucky
Considering the positioning of the flame, I think he'd have been worse off if he had been wearing safety goggles.
If you see somebody in a chemistry lab without eye protection you need to yell "lab specs!" at them immediately and insist they go and get them right away. No excuses. Nobody should walk through the door without safety specs.
Not a chem lab accident but I was using some hand sanitizer (70% ethyl alcohol, slightly flammable gel) for an experiment that involved igniting it on the stove.
My roommate, who's much less aware of this stuff, comes up and asks what I'm doing and after I explain it, he immediately opens a half liter bottle of 91% isopropyl alcohol (runny and extremely flammable) and begins pouring it on the stove with absolutely no caution whatsoever.
Immediately everything is on fire, the entire surface of the stove and the counter, and he drops the bottle, which lands on the counter and fortunately is upright but on fire.
I grab a bathroom towel and try to smother the fire but it just burns through the towel.
I then grab a gallon jug of water and pour it on the fire, and snuff out the burning bottle with my hand and put the lid on. Fortunately everything is put out.
My little experiment is kinda destroyed but I managed to prevent my roommate from burning down our apartment building.
Moral of the story, don't assume that because you know what you're doing and everything is under control, that a curious bystander who has no knowledge of physics or chem won't just come up and do something insane.
Crazy
That's a certified bruh moment.
Why tf would he do that? Does he not know that alcohol+fire=molotov??? Great way to burn down a building 🤦♂️🤦♂️
These stories are crazy, yet somehow, I envy those involved. I have a passion for chemistry, but as a high school student there isn’t much I can do. Probably the biggest mistake I’ve ever made trying to practice chemistry at home was accidentally leaving a beaker of muriatic acid unattended while neutralizing an NaOH solution, and when the pH paper went immediately red as I held it closer to my beaker, I knew I messed up. I rushed out of the workspace, let the vapors dilute in air for a few hours, and that bottle has not been opened since. Amateur mistake, but I am an amateur, so say what you will
A story about not labeling stuff: we did a routine cleaning in the lab near the end of a semester, and asked an undergrad to clean the fume hood. He started wiping the shelves in the fume hood and accidentally dropped a small flask with some liquid (several mils). The flask broke and the thiol-like smell quickly spread throughout the whole room so it was impossible to stay there. We evacuated the room and then I and another PhD student have to quench the fume hood with bleach wearing gas masks, and clean the rest of the lab, which took several hours. The flask was very old and not labeled and we still don't know what it was.
Biology story here;
In my final year of high school I did a research project quantifying the effects of temperature on the pace of lactic acid fermentation in dairy. For this, I'd left samples of various dairy products in various conditions (room temperature, a fridge and a stove). After the study was done, I forgot to remove the samples, thusly leaving the samples in the stove for over a week longer than necessary. At some point, while I was writing my paper, a biology lab tech walked into the classroom asking me to remove my samples. I looked at her, absolutely horrified, realizing what I had just done.
Luckily, the principal chemistry lab tech (he'd assisted me through the entire process of doing my study, as he's an expert in food microbiology / biochem), offered some help. So we donned long cleaning gloves and labcoats and dunked the samples straight into a tub of water and strong cleaning agents.
I think it's safe to say I'm glad I didn't breathe any of that orange / purple / green / yellow / whichever colors the stuff that had grown on my samples at 40 degrees over two weeks in.
Ewwwwww
On the topic of the Yikes Awards and solutions of toxic stuff dissolved in chloroalkanes, in undergrad I had some sort of osmium compound dissolved in chloroform in a glass pipette. I think I was preparing a TLC plate or something like that. Anyways, I cringe to even recount this story, but a single drop somehow made it on to my left leg.
Within the week, a hole opened up in my flesh where the drop had been. This was... Not good, obviously, and I called poison control some time later after attempting to debride the wound as best I could (with a hydrogen peroxide solution lmfao I was so dumb). After a long silence, the woman came back on the line and with a deep sigh said "Okay... Sir... You're going to have to tell me how in the world you possibly came into contact with this stuff", and then I proceeded to explain I worked in an inorganic lab and had an accident, yadda yadda.
The wound healed, but there is a bump underneath it that will remain there the rest of my life probably. I've monitored it with a dermatologist and it hasn't grown in six years and doesn't seem to be cancerous but like... I am begging any young up and coming chemists reading this to please be more careful than I was because all this time later I still spend way too much time worrying about it than I should. This still isn't the worst thing that ever happened to anyone working in that lab- my PI at one point recounted a story from grad school when he had accidentally pumped nickel tetracarbonyl into the lab through a questionably placed vacuum pump.
Oh my gosh - that is terrifying
I was reducing Valine using solid LiAlH4 to use in an Evans-Aldol reaction. I added it bit by bit but did not notice that a clump of it had formed. The clump must have broken up at some point because I suddendly heard a sizzling noise and closed the fume hood as fast as possible. Maybe three seconds later, the septum blew out because the Balloon+Needle could not equilibrate the pressure fast enough. It sprayed the whole fumehood and I had to clean it up. Later that evening I got a nosebleed and I was really scared I poisoned myself. But nothing else happened and I am fine.
That nosebleed part is weird - LAH solutions are much nicer to work with imo
@@That_Chemist Maybe it was just a coincidence but it really scared me. It made a bad day worse...
i had an accident once. i had to synthesize anthraquinone in a lab, and i poured a few drops of concentrated sulfuric acid on a heating mantle. it seems that this drops messed up the wires and the fuse just popped. then the mantle started to smoke like crazy, i told my teacher about it, he cussed me out and gave me another heating mantle. i’ve swapped the broken one with new, and guess what? fuse popped once again, mantle started to smoke and my teacher is came to me yelling about me destroying lab equipment. the moment he came close to the fume hood he got electrocuted from it, and we decided to stop the experiment and let the reaction go by itself (heating it was necessary to speed up the reaction). after that we decided to disassemble the broken mantle, and we found out that all of them were completely trashed, and the first one i ‘broke’ was broken by electricity, not by me. wire insulation just melted out from every wire it had, not only in those spots where i spilled the sulfuric acid. same thing goes to the second mantle, it had molten wires everywhere, even though it had no contact with acid at all. it seems there was some problem with connection of this fume hood to the grid, and it was lucky that i found out about it in harmless way, and the only deceased were two heating mantles
A fume hood wired for 240V (in a 120V region), or maybe even 400 (instead of 240)? As an EE: YIKES!
@@T3sl4 i dunno what kind of voltage was on our fume hood cuz i’m not an electrician, all i can tell you is that my country uses 220v grids in our homes and things like that
Crazy!
@@imlostimcommon Most likely the electrician had messed up earth with one of the phases. That means your heating mantle gets 400V instead of 220V and the metal case gets live. This is not very common but it happens sometimes, electricians are humans that makes mistakes. In any modern installations there will be a ground fault interrupter that protects against this.
I've got a scarier electrical/fume hood story than that:
A good friend of mine was working in his fume hood and somehow his hand slipped so a steel cannula made contact with the steel sash handle and the steel "chin" baffle along the bottom of the fume hood. Instantly it glowed red hot and the power tripped out. Understandably he swore in pain at his scorched fingers and called estates to get them to send an electrician...
It turned out that some wiring had been improperly secured above the fume hood and the steel cable to the sash counterweight had been rubbing up against the insulation and eventually wore through. So that sash frame and handle were connected to live mains voltage (230 V here in the UK) but because they weren't earthed the RCD breaker didn't trip... and my friend had been using that fume hood like that for who knows how long. If he'd touched it with an ungloved hand it might've easily been fatal... so let that haunt your nightmares next time you reach to close the sash down after you've taken your gloves off...
Not chemistry related but the flying rat made me remember one time in school when in physics class we did a competition about protecting an egg thrown out of a window with random materials. With my team we build some complicated web of paper and tape, with the egg in the center, and we win. For no reason a friend kicked the thing, and the egg went flying straight into the professor's head. We didn't do anything fun like that for the rest of the year lol
Egg Drop!
Around where I used to EMS every few years a family would cook mushrooms from the backyard and the entire family would be in the ICU (with no real hope). Where they moved from mushrooms like that were fine with no chance at messing up, here in NJ everything is poison. It was always so sad, usually one family member didn't like mushrooms and didn't eat them and that made it worst.
HIV+ blood is NBD. As long as you didn't breath in the droplets when it exploded, let everything settle, even then it wouldn't be easy to catch. Put on PPE (mask, gloves, whatever makes you comfortable) and spray it down with bleach. The O2 in the air neutralizes HIV pretty quickly, it's not cooties. Knowledge and safe practices. I dealt with HIV+ patients all the time, it must be hard enough on them, the least I could do was be educated enough to know you don't catch it easily. It's the accidental needle sticks that might give you it, but I even knew a guy who did that. 10 years of blood tests and he was fine.
Wow
@@That_Chemist Thank You for the content.
There is an eastern (unfortunately I don't remember the exact nation) legend about explosive mice. They are signs of bad luck or gods being unhappy, something like this. Perhaps seeing a burning rat in the hallway is a sign of bad luck too?
3:18 - DO NOT LICK THE SCIENCE
A couple years ago, I was running a reaction in a 250 gal reactor. This process involved the hydrolysis of a nitrile group to a carboxylate. At shift change, the reaction was just about at temp and the bubbler was bubbling vigorously. After the handoff. I continued to monitor the reaction, and as the bubbling both in the reactor and in the bubbler would subside, I'd bump the tcu a couple degrees each time. The long and short of it is this: the bubbling I saw in the bubbler was not NH3 byproduct, but house nitrogen providing an inert atmosphere. Well, as I was looking into the reactor, the whole reaction began to foam. I looked to the pressure gauge--1psi...2 psi...3 psi... 5... 8... and then pfoomp. The rupture disk went. I learned what a burb tank was that evening, and how difficult they are to access. My assistant manager told me I made around 15,000 gallons of ammonia gas in a few seconds. From then on I made sure to look over the little things, even the humble N2 needle valve.
Oh my gosh - amazing
For perspective on how much 15,000 gallons is: There's days my entire town uses less water than that.
@@tsm688 a little under 60 m^3
@@klondikesaloon7026 I didn't say it was a *big* town.
@@tsm688 no judgement here haha, I'm just converting units lol
This reminds me of a couple stories from high school, we had a very well equipped lab and a typical "crazy scientist grandfather" type teacher. He tried to make nitroglycerin in the school lab, only for it to be set off by the vibrations of a tram passing outside the window. Another time we found a famcy rock on the desk, turns out it was uranium. Third time is when we found a 1.5 liter bottle of some fancy brown liquid. After nearly opening it, he told us as a sidenote that we probably _shouldn't_ open that as it was bromine and it could kill like half the school. Also, as a final fun fact, our fume hoods vented straight to above the sidewalk, and into the school yard. The old man sometimes had fun by flooding the yard with purple smoke from some relatively "safe" reaction. I left the school several years ago, and the old man retired 2 years ago.
So this happened only a few months ago: I'm in 4th semester and we were doing our first ever real organic synthesis stuff. So in the third experiment we were doing a radical chlorination of cyclohexane with Sulfuryl chloride and AIBN. We had set up a gas trap for the SO2 and HCl gas that would be created in the reaction. In like the preparation with our supervisor urged us to use Cyclohexane and NOT cyclohexene or cyclohexanone because the latter one happened once (noone was hurt there I think). And so then one of my labmates went and got us the chemicals for the reaction. I was the last to put them in the roundbottom flask and so I put in my sulfuryl chloride and then wanted to put in the cyclohexane, but I had like 5ml too little. So I went into the storage room and there were some other students getting their stuff for the same experiment. And so as they already had the container open I asked them if it was cyclohexane to which they said yes. They gave me my 5mls of "cyclohexane" and went back to my apparatus. I put it in and it immediately started to bubble violently. So I rushed back to the other students to tell them to not put their stuff in and the guy just looked at me kinda scared and told me "it was cyclohexene". In the meantime my labmates went and got our supervisor, who put an Icebath underneath the reaction mix to cool it down. We left it stirring there for now to just react slowly away. It was only like 5 mins later when I realized that I had forgot to turn the gashan leading into my water trap and I had had a sealed off system during all this. And so I turned it and the trap immediately started bubbling away. I think it was only because of the Icebath that it didn't explode from too much pressure.
Also quenching sulfuryl chloride is a real pain because I had to put water and later base in it but it just didn't react at all and so I dumped it in an erlenmeyer and it just sat there for like a month until the organic layer was no longer acidic.
Oh my gosh
One of the worse things that happened to me in my gen chem class was when we were doing our titration lab. I was with a my lab partner and we were cleaning our hood. Meanwhile behind us another student had somehow managed to clog their burette. So in the students infinite wisdom, they decided to violently shake the filled burette spraying the whole front of my body and the back of my partner with not so dilute base. Luckily I was quick enough to put my notebook in front of my face as a shield. This was the final straw that got this student kicked out of the lab. They poured heavy metal salts down the drain, turned their distillation apparatus into a pipe bomb, etc.
Moral of the story: Eventually you WILL encounter an individual who has no regard for lab safety. Therefore it is your job along with everyone else in the lab to help said person to be the safest they possibly can. For your sake and theirs.
Exactly!!
There's quite some malicious proceduralism here. I would humbly suggest that fully chlorinating a rat is not the optimum method of disposal. On the other hand, ozonating hundreds of grams tinkywinkenic acid sounds more reasonable given the unreasonable situation, but still something of a spectacle.
Yeah that is also kinda weird
@@That_Chemist Don't get me wrong, ozone is great if you can feed it in a little at a time. Powerful and thorough but also slow and controlled, if done properly. But... was that like, days? weeks? of ozonating a pile of the acid? Not necessarily the wrong thing to do, but an interesting image.
I am pursuing an chemistry heavy major this summer, and i am so glad to be exposed to these new words and lab procedures that i was not privy to before. This channel was such a great find!
Best of luck!
Time to tell my story. During my B.Sc. I had to bring elemental iodine into a glove box. My Supervisor told me to just open the bottle and put it in the vaccum chamber (he didn't think evaporation would be a problem). After 20 min, when I opened the chamber inside the box i was greeted with a brown vapor. Luckily I closed the breach shortly after opening it, but still the wall of the box was covered in iodine dust.
When I had to clean the vaccum chamber I was told to use aceton, which worked really well. But after a few minutes I noticed that my eyes were kind of tearing up and thats when I figured out that I just created iodoaceton, a teargas. Luckily it wasn't that potent and I was alone in the lab.
After that realisation I opened the windows and cleand the rest with water.
legendary
This sounds suspiciously like we might have worked in the same lab...
My university changed the structure of the whole course. So in the first Semester of Chemistry/Biomedical Chemistry all the Students had to heat stuff in an oil bath with brand new PEG. So after using it the first time a student put the entire pan with hot oil in her heavy metal whate container. (Everybody got like 1L PET bottels where they put the waste before neutralising it and dumping it in the big waste container). The Prof was speachles and just left the lab.
One time the radiation research lab was on the first floor, under an organic lab. The organic lab left a reaction overnight and, if I am not mistaken, the sink clogged, flooding the floor it was in and the lab right under it. So there was water with radioactive isotopes flooding the first floor. Very nice story I heard when I had just entered the university.
Yikes!
4:15 Give me a break, MSDS sheets make water sound terrifying. Sketchy dihydrogen monoxide.
According to a couple sources, assuming rats/mice etc. have similar tolerance as humans, the LD50 for DMAP is on the order of 300 ppm. So around 20 to 30 grams to kill someone
So 19 grams is the limit, got it.
Quick tip, to stop the syringe from sticking, dissembling it and wrap the rubber/nitrile with a little piece of Teflon tape, works pretty well. (also keeps the cheap nitrile ones from getting instantly destroyed by solvents)
As a former custodian... what the hell are they doing having janitorial staff in a lab that's continuously used? Surely keeping that clean top to bottom should be the responsibility of the staff. Thinking about doing janitorial/custodial work in a place with active experiments, with the industry standard "you aren't cleaning fast enough even if you give it your everything" makes me shiver.
Honestly I’ve seen custodians go through every lab that I’ve worked in, and it always scared me for their sake
If I recall correctly during the development of Haber-Bosch process the main challenge was avoiding explosions of the reaction containers. H2 at high temperatures led to the formation of brittle metal hydrides which tore the whole apparatus apart. The professor should have known that...
In graduate school we worked with a uniquely effective combination of solvents comprised of amines and thiols. They were very effective, but very pungent. A lot of the solutions were sensitive to oxygen and moisture, so they were prepared and occasionally used in a nitrogen glove box,
It had a catalyst to remove the O2/H2O and a solvent trap that periodically needed regenerated with a dilute H2 in N2 gas flow. This setup had a flow meter to ensure there were no clogs so you didn’t overpressure the traps. The solvent vapors had a nasty tendency to cloud and damage these flow meters, so after a couple cracked, I installed a bypass that could be switched over to after verifying flow, but it was rarely used.
When regenerating the catalyst there was always some slight thiol stench because it was so potent, and some of the stinkiest things my mostly ineffective nose has smelled. As such, they started an automated regeneration cycle on a Friday afternoon because it was unpleasant to be in the lab at the same time. They didn’t bypass the flow meter, and left for the evening. I was at some friends’ place when a lab mate there was called in by emergency services to the lab. The flow meter had broken, and was straight-piping the residual solvent vapors into the middle of the lab, and a poor janitor had walked in on the mother of all stink bombs when going to collect trash, and pulled the fire alarm. My lab mate had to help coordinate with fire fighters and the emergency response.
Fortunately, none of the solvents were particularly toxic, just super-duper stinky. The best of them smelled almost exactly like skunk-oil and was closely related, but more volatile. Afterwards I sat down with the janitor, told him he did the right thing pulling the alarm, and explained to him chemicals that he’d smelled, because he was rightfully worried. I’m super glad it was nothing worse. We shut the lab down for a week to clean up and reevaluate the safety protocols for that procedure.
Stories like this just remind me why I went into computer engineering.
Haha
I am really glad I work in a physics based lab now, because some of these stories are insane.
The worst that happened to me was that rotovac exploded in a fumehood next to me. We use a lot of methylene di chloride to dissolve the polymers and then do a viscosity test on the solution. You can get a good estimate of the length of the chains of your polymer by doing that.
Anyway we go through a lot of it and analytical level methylene di cloride aint cheap. So the new lab head had the idea that we can reuse the old one by destilling it instead of disposing of it which probably would have worked if he for some unfathomable reason hadnt plugged everything in the rotovac. He also decided to go big or go home and wanted to distill like 3L at once as the first test. He luckily then closed the fumehood and walked away. Well I was next to the fumehood doing some MVR tests.
I can attest that an exploding rotorvac for one is really loud and also not great for your shocksensitive tests. Thankfully nothing much happened except that the fumehood got a new coating of first methylendichloride and now a plastic coating. If the fumehood was open there is probably a good chance that I would have gotten a nice methylen shower.
Now I only work with voltages exceeding 10k V so I dont have to deal with chemicals anymore.
Edit: but at least the lab head learned a lot from this accident and increased the safety in general
Oh my gosh!!
I'm not a chemist, and I am not really interested in chemistry, but this video was pretty entertaining. Good job!
Thank you!
Not a chemist, but they were cleaning out the quality test lab at my work and discovered that there had been a glass bottle of fuming nitric acid with a very wonky stopper just chilling on the top of a ~8" tall cabinet in the corner for presumably several years. It's worth noting that the room had ended up being used for storage, and had a ton of cardboard boxes placed directly beneath the bottle. There were also several containers of various solvents stored in a flammables cabinet nearby.
Yikes!
I went to school to be a histology technician and spent a year working in an immunohistochemistry lab.
There wasn't much in the way of required chemistry education (my high school AP chem credits were sufficient to enter the program), but we did spend some time studying chemical compounds we might encounter, especially if they were potentially hazardous. Sodium azide didn't make the cut, however, and the lab that hired me used it routinely to inhibit bacterial growth in various solutions.
My supervisors and coworkers never described it as particularly toxic or dangerous during training, and I would end up handling grams at a time without PPE (always outside of a fume hood) on more than one occasion. Didn't come to learn how risky that was until years later.
Luckily, neither me nor anyone else in the lab suffered apparent consequences from those mistakes, but I learned an important lesson about doing my own due diligence, reading safety data sheets, and adhering to general lab safety protocol whether it's stressed by management or not.
Another syringe story. I was using a syringe filter to remove particulates from a 10M NaOH solution. I was really tired, my first child was 2 months old at the time, this is my only excuse. I pushed too hard and it squirted into my eyes. Fortunately there was an eye bath and emergency shower 10 feet from me. I had bright red eyes for 3 months as the outer layer of my cornea regrew. It did clear the conjunctivitis though and have no long term problems. Bizarrely, 15 years later I joined a new lab and there was a note not to syringe filter NaOH, exactly the same accident had happened there too. Leason - do not use syringe filters.
Oh man, that’s brutal!
I tried home chem *once*, just after graduating high school. I had a good relationship with my former HS chem teacher. I decided to synthesise Prussian blue for the purpose of cyanotyping. Potassium dichromate is frequently used to extend the shelf life (according to Google), so I got some concentrated from the school with permission from the chemistry teacher. A week later, I am preparing the dichromate and in my infinite wisdom decided not to wear lab safety glasses because I was just making a solution.
While stirring, I bumped the beaker and the dichromate splashed on to my face, including my eyes. So I begin washing my eyes and call my mum to take me to the hospital, where I spend the next 4 hours with my eyes being washed by a hose whose outlet attached directly to my eye. I then see an optometrist (ophthalmologist?) at the hospital, where they put some form of stain to assess damage. There was. Queue many, many sessions with said doctor over the next few months to assess healing. So, now I have permanent damage in my left eye from chemical burns because of my own negligence 8 years ago.
I had no idea dichromate was so incredibly harmful... got loads of it (old photo chemicals). I'll sure think twice about using it for anything now.
@@tsm688 Cr(VI) compounds in general aren't the best for health. In the case of potassium dichromate, it is a known carcinogen and is corrosive. In my case, the solution was quite concentrated which makes it worse. Appropriate PPE definitely helps with this, it was a very stupid mistake on my part.
So sorry to hear that :(
Nice, the text was readable on a phone.
I spent ages trying to make sure it was :)
Man I almost got kicked out of my biochem course because I made a joke about splicing scorpion DNA into a crab lol! My prof said it was “unethical” and told the science dept lead, the lead literally shrugged his shoulders & asked why is this even an issue to stop a class for & made him look stupid. As a STEM grad, I love it, but we have some ALOT of people across many of the disciplines who lack even the most rudimentary common sense.
I bet your prof hasn’t even seen the real world if he gets upset about dna splicing jokes
@@That_Chemist yeah, he was a terrible prof, he seemed very insecure & stuttered a lot when we go into more complicated taxing lectures, I think he got fired a few semesters after mine, I was told his whole class turned on him & reported him for whatever reason, probably because he sucked so bad & had trouble explaining even introductory topics. The guy sucked at his job & had a bad attitude so it was a double negative.
Love the rat stories 😂
My mum told me that even she was at tech and they'd come back from their holidays, there was a dessicated rat that had gotten stuck in a small cutout in the floor and passed on. The lab manager wasn't thrilled to have to dispose of it
In a previous analytical laboratory I worked in, I thought it was a good idea to synthesise a small amount of bromoacetone via an acid catalyst in a fumehood as I had all the necessary starting materials and had just finished all my required testing for that morning. First mistake was thinking it was a good idea to make it, let alone actually making it as we had no practical use for a lachrymatory agent. Second mistake was using concentrated sulphuric acid as the catalyst and not realising just how exothermic an acid catalysed bromination is. So I had my solution of acetone and acid, which wasn't too scary until I added one drop of bromine... Upon contact with the solution the whole mixture violently erupted, splattering the sash and inside of the fumehood with acid and acetone as a white cloud of bromoacetone seemed to go everywhere! Even with sash down and wearing safety goggles my eyes began to sting, but thankfully I wasn't coated in the corrosive mess I had just created. To get rid of the airborne bromoacetone, I opened the fire exit to ventilate the lab and hoped no one would walk in, while I began the task of cleaning the fumehood, amazingly there was no lasting damage and the whole incident seemed to have gone unnoticed. Never have or will push my luck like that again.
Why exactly were you trying to make Bromoacetone? That is probably the one chemical I worry most about *not* making.
@@zockertwins honest answer, I can't remember as it was over nine years ago. Though as I stated, my first mistake was thinking it was a good idea to attempt to make it.
Yikes?
"You might think you're terrified of us, biologists out there, but I guarantee you that the chemists are just as terrified of you as you are of us."
Me, a toxicologist: "I have no such weaknesses!"
👀
I used to work on CdSE CdS nano particles and I spilled so much of them that legend has it that the fume hood still glows under UV lol. I never got heavy metals blood work done which is a bad idea lol. Don’t be like me and go get a baseline and regular heavy metal check up if you work with them.
its so cool that those fluoresce
This was a biology class, but the worst thing I’ve ever seen in a lab was during the crawfish dissection unit in high school. Our teacher left the room for a bit, and one of the rowdier kids told his lab partners to dare him to eat the crawfish heart. The raw, formaldehyde-covered crawfish heart. The obliged, and he popped the thing in his mouth. INSTANT regret. I watched him start to gag and run pell mell into the hallway - right past our returning teacher - and hork into the hall trash.
Wtffff
I didn't understand 90 percent of what you said but still found myself picking my jaw up on some of these especially the sulfuric acid story.
14:31 I get really annoyed when someone on the internet says "hey, if you spill an acid you should always neutralise it with a base!" or vice versa. I know they think they're being helpful, and if you're talking about vinegar and baking soda it's generally fine to do so but totally unnecessary. However strong acids are available (e.g. HCl for brick cleaning) and they do get spilled. I have visions of someone scratching their head trying to work out how much they spilled, weighing out the right amount of baking soda to neutralise it and so on when the reality is they should just be diluting the crap out of it.
Favourite story of mine was from when I was 17, I was doing an applied sciences elective (either that or geography). We were doing a module about alcohol (the drinking kind).
Among other things we had to measure the alcohol content of a few beers to check if they were right. Anyway the legal drinking age at the time was 18 (EU) and my lab partners all had to redo a year earlier so they were 18 already. My lab partners also were the partying kind and liked to get drunk, that is not me. I was the rule following kind of kid. So my lab partners hooked up the distillation apparatus while I was doing some measurements, we start the distillation and take a step back. We weren't paying close attention and suddenly I notice a faint smell of alcohol so I start paying closer attention, and notice a leak. My lab partners start to freak out and don't think straight, but I took action and sealed the glassware.
Since a lot of people where doing this distillation, and it's not supposed to be dangerous, no one used a fume hood, and since I was the one to fix the leak, I inhaled some alcohol vapours. Que my next lesson being biology, and I was there not paying attention because I was tipsy, being quite embarrassed because that wouldn't be okay. I can't quite recall but I think only one of my friends knew about me being tipsy. The chemistry teacher never found out about the leak, or me inhaling alcohol vapours.
In my first semester inorganic lab I managed to knock over a 50ml bottle of mercury nitrate solution or some other salt, which dumped about half of its content over my hand. I immediately ran to the sink and washed my hands for the next 10 minutes. Called my supervisor and he said I should be fine.
Inorganic mercury salts aren't crazy dangerous on skin contact alone, still this was without a doubt the most scared I've been in my entire carreer so far.
PS: I should mention that because this is the biggest and most expensive lab course and the uni apparently didn't want to pay for utensils the students were instructed to buy their own gloves at the supply shop. As you can imagine we were....lenient in their use. Not a single week passed without me returning home with yellow fingers from some contentrated HNO3 splashes. Ran out of shop towel? Your labcoat sleeve will do. Good times.
That’s so stupid - what the heck is wrong with them
I always wanted to do some cool home chemistry, and I decided in my dumbassery that I want to do a thermite reaction and get myself some silicon. I tried shredding aluminium foil with a blender, and I ended up not knowing how to use the blender. Guess who saw the inside of her hand? Me :))
That was less then two weeks ago and the wound is almost healed, and I can use my hand normally now.
:(
HOW? Anyway....
I saw the inside of my hand more than once..
A broken stem of an old CRT sucked my hand into it, never pick up a heavy vacuum tube by the stem ... I'll never forget watching the doctors fingers feeling around under my skin looking for glass fragments, like he was wearing my skin like a glove!!!
The other time involved a machete... I drove to my surgery for that , so most anesthesia was unavailable, cuz I was driving home, so I was awake to watch that whole surgery as they reconnected my tendons. Apparently I talk to much during surgeries.
@@petevenuti7355 my blender wouldn't open and I accidentally turned it on without realising, while it has the cup off. I forget to disconnect it from the electricity, which I have a history with, already got electrocuted once because of something like that.
Anyways, I'm happy to hear that your accidents got well now
Horrifying accidents aside, making silicon from aluminum is actually a cool idea
@@tsm688 it's a really cool reaction, but from what I understood it's kinda hard to maintain the reaction, I still couldn't try it
The out-sucking the pump story made me laugh uncontrollably for a good half a minute. Students don't need a "why" to hurt themselves doing the dumbest shit imaginable lol
I once saw a classmate of mine snort methylene blue off a lab table without knowing what it was.
We were doing a basic physical separation lab where you have a mix of three things and you need to separate them. This one had salt, sand, and ammonium chloride so it was really simple. Sand was the easy part and then I had my beaker full of salty ammonium chloride water which I evaporated off and got my little white powder (watching the crystals form in the solution was so satisfying!).
I ask my teacher what the next step would be and he said to sublimate it and not to collect it. Yeah that was not a good idea, school almost had to be evacuated and my lungs hurt like hell. Worst things worse my smell was still shot from having covid so I couldn't even smell if anything was wrong.
That guy who collapsed his lung trying to out suck a pump sounds like an all out frat house legend
defs
2:15 Some many people make that mistake. End up losing dollars trying to save cents. I wonder how many businesses have went under from do this.
Imagine if they were showing their investors around the university: "And this is our chemistry lab. We have bunsen burners, fume hoods - wait, is that rat on fire?"
In high school, we did a lab where we mixed hydrochloric acid and sodium hydroxide to make sodium chloride. The teacher accidentally gave us sulfuric acid instead. It made a bunch of white smoke and we had to evacuate.
#rekt
I'd say most of my interesting stories has happened to my lab books rather than myself, but in undergrad we were preforming an epoxidation on geraniol with m-CPBA, and were using separatory funnels to wash and neutralize the solution with saturated sodium carbonate, causing a lot of sodium benzoate to crash out of solution. My lab neighbor failed to notice that the precipitated benzoate was blocking the funnel, meaning that her venting was doing nothing and pressure was building up quickly as she shook it to get good mixing. This eventually resulted in the stopper launching out, and as it was facing my general direction, my area in the fume hood and myself getting blasted with benzoate. It was everywhere. I believe the technicians had to disassemble the hotplate after the lab to properly clean it. It was only on my arm and hand, so a good rinsing meant that there weren't any issues apart from the fact that my skin was red and itchy for a bit, but my lab book on the table, which is a form of assessment for that unit, was... unsalvageable.
My replacement lab book didn't completely manage to avoid any mishaps either, as my lab neighbor's condenser tubing would come loose and soak everything in a later lab, nothing a little airing can't fix, and a later mishap with essential oils meant that it reeked of eucalyptol to an almost overwhelming degree. That one needed about a week straight of airing to resolve.
this is why I always listen for the shh of the gas rushing out when I vent it, if it doesn't make that sound something is very wrong
Did you have to start the lab over because you lab book got ruined? I hope not
@@zockertwins Thankfully not, it looked like crap but it was still mostly legible, so I took some good photos of the pages and they accepted it as a substitute until I could copy everything into a new book.
Yikes!!
A bit different from lab stories, but I still think this counts as far as experiments gone disastrously bad:
When I was in middle school, as some kind of an additional home-school program, we did quite a few experiments out of a college course textbook titled 'Caveman Chemistry'. One of the experiments we did was a simple fermentation of honey in two 2-liter soda bottles. Well, we didn't do any brewing in our household, unlike the family who's house we started this project at, and so while they had these nice CO2 bubblers to keep the system anaerobic, we just put the bottles' lids back on, and intended to swap out with other means of venting CO2 later on.
Cut to a few weeks later, my mom is in the middle of bringing up that we should get bubblers for the bottles soon since they look like they're expanding, and as if on cue, both bottles burst practically simultaneously as the shock from one sets off the other. So we had a kitchen, sprayed from floor to ceiling with half-fermented, still incredibly sticky, sugary yeast water. It was a very surprising turn of event, which led to us needing to mop the ceiling, as well as the floor, and everything in that pantry smelled of yeast and honey for a few months afterwards. For the shock of having had our mead explode, I was rather underwhelmed by the taste when we gathered with the group afterwards when one of the batches was successful, only to find that the mead was incredibly dry, and not at all as anyone had hoped.
From that point on, it was decided that any experiments where they needed to be observed over a period of time would be left in the supervision of the host, and any experiments which involved possibly pressuring vessels were skipped from that point on.
Hahaha
3:45, easy slap a Cut waste material gem in a socketed pendant, then slap a sticker on it "Pendant of decay", genuine treasure
My takeaway from this is that I was right not to major in chemistry and to instead commit to observing from a distance for the rest of my life
Haha
2nd semester labs, adding boiling hot H2SO4 to an aluminium solution as a practice on canned drink metal recovery. Advised my lab partner to add it as slowly as possible and cool in the ice bath, does he do?
I turn for a few seconds to look for the next reagent and I hear a FFFFFFFPPOOO and turn back to see the entire inside of a fume cupboard painted black.
Oh my gosh
I also did that alum lab at one point
Your approach of offering sound safety advice between the hilarity, and explaining the technical terms out a little to widen your audience, are rare and laudible. Much better effort than most of the similar content on RUclips. Subscription earned.
A couple weeks ago in my organic chem lab, we were using a glass syringe to measure out different chemicals like acetone and ethyl acetate and ethanol to put in our mini GC (mostly just to get comfortable while using it).
Now this syringe is the pride and joy of a different professor, not our o-chem prof, but one we've all had at some point. His name is Mr. Meier. If the syringe breaks, Mr. Meier would probably murder everyone in our class, plus our prof for letting it happen. It is like his child. He probably cares more about its wellbeing and safety than that of his (grown) children.
So in this lab, which was a 7:15am lab by the way, one of my classmates was doing absolutely nothing by his own choice (he does this during every lab). So, we decided to force him to do something. And that something was using the syringe to put one of the chemicals in the GC. Now, this guy is not the sharpest tool in the shed. What I mean is he's very book smart, he just lacks a lot of common sense. And by that, I mean a LOT. So when trying to put the tip of the syringe into the beaker, he failed to remove the watch glass. The watch glass that we had put on top of the beaker. So the syringe tip, instead of going into the beaker, hit the watch glass.
We all stared at this poor man in horror. If the syringe broke, we were all dead. We soon realized that no harm was done to the syringe, and we were all safe, so we all let out relieved laughs, but we were still shaken up over the fact we were all very close of experiencing the wrath of Mr. Meier. No one died that day.
I guess this isn't like the other stories but it is by far the most potentially dangerous incident that happened in one of my labs. Hope this made you laugh or smile! (Mr. Meier wouldn't actually murder anyone, so don't worry. He'd just lock them in the creepy science department storage room for a couple weeks (:
god i love these anecdotes on lab accidents