Bloodletting for the Chemistry Gods 

18:09 LOL !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Blood definitely has strange properties that cannot yet be explained by science. I was once working freelance IT (read: I did odd jobs for my school’s IT department when I was in High School) and had to make a blood sacrifice. The student photocopier (already a bad sign, printers are the spawn of Satan) had jammed up because someone tried to print a 100 slide PowerPoint, full sized, 10 times. So I opened up the front door, pulled out the jammed paper, and closed it back up. Unfortunately, the job was not over, as the printer still said it was jammed. I opened it back up, saw nothing, and closed it back up. Still jammed, even after a restart. So I opened it back up, poked around, and accidentally cut my finger on some exposed metal inside. I shouted “is that what you want‽ a blood sacrifice‽” and slammed the door shut. Immediately it started printing the next job in the printer queue.

It was always easy to identify the asbestos samples in mineralogy exams because those were the ones with the "DO NOT LICK" signs attached to them. XD

I feel like we’re just reversing back to alchemy and herbalism. Like carrots? Banana water? BLOOD?!

As a Software Engineer, licking rocks seems about the same as telling my rubber duck 🐤 about what I'm doing

classic copypasta Disclaimer: my hatred of geologists is purely theatrical, but if I did have to kill one for some reason, it would be very easy. I’d brandish my obsidian knife at them and they’d be compelled to approach. “That’s very cool,” they’d say, confident in their superior strength and endurance from all the rocks they carry around at all times. They’d shower me with very interesting facts about obsidian and hover just out of range of the cutting edge, waiting for me to exhaust myself. “But as it is volcanic glass, it’s very fragile, you see, and isn’t well-suited for use as a weap-” and then I’d hit them with the wooden baseball bat in my other hand, which they would not have noticed because geologists can only see rocks and minerals.

Now I kind of want to know what reactions can be catalyzed by blood. Everyone's got some. The carrot chemistry was inspiring.

I’ve got a good story about blood in the Chem lab. I was doing a small molecule methodology project at work, trying to find new carboxylation conditions. The team got to talking one day about potential catalyst classes we could try, and we had thrown iron porphyrins around as an idea we wanted to explore. A few days later, I got a bloody nose (winter in a dry climate), while at my hood. I asked a teammate to watch my reactions so I could take my gloves and lab coat off to go clean up in the restroom, and instead of paper towels, he hands me a scintillation vial and tells me to “acquire” some iron porphyrins. I laugh it off thinking he was joking, he was not… My blood, (sterilized and lysed), can’t do the desired carboxylation reactions, but we found that with the right photocatalyst, with benzene as a cosolvent, we can produce alcohols instead. From that day on, I determined that Instead of calling myself a chemist, I am actually a blood alchemist. Useless synthetically, but funny none the less.

The most notable part to me is how the majority of accidents are either random events, or some super minor slip of concentration. It reminded me of a few days ago when I was making a salad. I had some sus vinager and as I opened it it let out some gas. At that moment I forgot it was vinager, and that I wad a chemist. To check if it was bad, I, a chemist, proceeded to pull the bottle of vinager to my nose and take a big and deep whiff so as to catch even the faintest aroma of spoilage. It gave my sinuses a thorough cleaning. A moment of distraction that left a sour smell in my nose.

The 1.0 could be german grading system (best possible mark).

The class safety hazard, let's call him "Violett" 😜, did something stupid. We were synthesizing an industrial blue dye that was superstable and insulable in almost everything. During the lab, his and the people's labcoat slowly turned blue. At the end of the lab, he spilled the blue powder on the fumehood floor. Instead of taking a wet tissue and just cleaning it, he decided the best action would be to use concentrated Sulforic acid. He poured concentrated sulfuric acid and the fumehood floor to dissolve the power, which it. Then he got paper tissues and put them on the acid. They turned black imminently and disappeared. He figured that he had to dilute the acid with water. Now he was able to mop the mess up. Just one fatal flaw. The dye was no longer soluble and crystalized in all the tiny cracks of the glass surface. The fumehood will be blue forever.

"Remind yourself that overconfidence is a slow and insidious killer."

oh also, for any home chemist out there: stay safe, stay nerdy and please stay away from organic peroxides and explosives in general if you dont know what you are doing, you can regret your choices very quickly

I once caused lead iodide to precipitate by sneezing. After adding sodium iodide, i had no precipitate which was very concerning to me. I felt a sneeze coming on, closed the fume hood door, and then sneezed. I looked back at the flask just in time to watch it begin to precipitate. My instructor called me sneeze magician for about a week.

My professor has told me some crazy stories about her Ph.D. days. In one incident she stated her colleague accidentally made HCN gas, and upon watching him begin to faint she leaped from halfway across the lab to catch him (and succeeded), to then carry him out of the lab and resuscitate him. She also told of hydrazine leaks filling up the whole lab, invisible methanol fires during hydrogenations (while she was holding the flask wondering why it was so hot and boiling) (always use ethanol in reactions prone to fire), and other interesting stories. Ironically, despite the upbringing of lab chaos, she is a very safety strict educator and ensures she teaches you the best way to run a reaction safely. suffice to say, she is my favorite.

I can hear my old high school drumline from 3/4 of a mile away. I have no doubt that an acetylene explosion could be clearly heard for a mile or more.

15:41 HF-icane, the crazy uncle of acid rain, starring in the spin-off series of the cult classic Sharknado.

The 13:39 story raises an important point: not only is it incredibly important to use Personal Protective Equipment whenever you are in a lab environment (even when you're not the one doing things), it is _also_ important to have enough spare PPE that you can cover anyone who you'd like to show your things to, as well as yourself. _Never allow more people into a laboratory than can be adequately protected!_

At a rock and mineral show upon seeing a display of various halite samples: "I didn't know you guys sold snacks" "Yup!" (They had some fluorescent ones, very cool)

Yeah, some of these mishaps remind me of a slightly disturbing occurence in my gen chem lab a few years back. We were doing introductory stuff like deionizing water or making electrolytic batteries, and after one lab session my lab partner asked the lab super-lecturer if he could mix some salt solutions that are used in similar lab works. These were the most general water-soluble salts you could find - alkali metal nitrates, chlorides, dilute phosphoric acid, sodium bicarb, etc. The lecturer said "Go ahead" and he picked two random vials and poured a small amount of their contents into a small beaker. The lab super asked what will happen, and my colleague correctly anwered something about ion exchange or neutralization reactions. However, a white precipitate formed, which was not expected. Cue some curiosity-driven tests carried out by the lab super, she storms to the other lab, angry as f**k. Turns out, someone from the organometallic lab had misplaced about 150ml of thallium acetate solution that reacted with dilute HCl to form TlCl in our little experiment

The computational/theoretical chemists watching these videos be like: *signature look of superiority*

A note regarding alcohol on skin: hairs act much like a candle wick. If you're smooth-shaven, or better yet waxed, the fluid's surface, where it contacts oxygen, will be a small but essential distance from your skin. Add those hairs, however, and they act like little pipelines for oxygen to reach right up to the skin itself.

Alchemist: We are so proud

2:58 I dont think they are using the GPA scale but the scale common in the EU with the bachelor/master/doctorate system from 1.0 to 5.0 with 1.0 beeing the best possible grade. As far as i understand it, it would be uncommon in the US to talk about B.Sc. and M.Sc. and more common to use undergrad and grad as terms.

During the high school chemistry class a large sample of phenol in a bottle (one huge solid lump, so it could not spill) was passed around for everybody to smell it, to learn how phenol smells (we were forbidden to touch it). Some of my classmates chizeled small amounts of solid phenol from it, and melted it on their hands. Fortunately they stopped when it started to absorb into their skin, so there were no other symptoms except the chemical burn. The teacher has helped them to wash it off and learned that high school student are highly untrustworthy around dangerous chemicals.

God, when I was like 14 we had a session in our science class where we combined baking soda and citric acid to make and eat sherbet and demonstrate the reactions of acids and carbonates. My friends were in a different science class than me, which was also before mine, so I had found out that's what the session would be about from them during lunch break. Once I entered my class, where actual chemistry is also done by the older students, mind you, I saw some small crystals on my desk and immediately thought 'oh, that must be the sherbet!' and scooped some up with my finger and put it in my mouth for some inexplicable reason, even I was perplexed by what a stupid decision that was a few seconds later. Thankfully, I was right, and as you can probably guess by the fact I'm able to comment that I've gotten rid of that habit before I started working with actually dangerous compounds.

I love these stories and I wanted to contribute. Obbligatory not a chemist, but a pathologist, we don't work with too dangerous chemicals but we live with 10% buffered neutral formalin basically everywere in the grossing lab. This story happened during my residency, while I was grossing my cart of surgical specimen which entiles cutting the specimens in to smaller pieces so we can process them into slides we can study, we use very sharp scalpels and under the fumehood every thing is basically covered in a thick layer of formalin. While all of this was going on I didn't notice a small nick in my gloves (we usually double glove while grossing) and I went my merry way cutting and conversing with my collegues untill I finished all my specimens in about 2 hours. All this time I really dind't notice anything untill I removed my gloves and noticed a cold breeze over my little and ring fingers of my left hand, horrified I look down and my hand looked like it stayed one full day underwater and then the strong scent of formalin hit me. I went wash my hands for a couple of minutes but the damage was done, for two weeks it hurt like hell moving my fingers but no long lasting damage. Been checking obsessivley my gloves ever since.

I loved undergraduate organic chemistry, except long labs in the ether room (I once decided to quit the experiment when I couldn’t remember why I was in the lab). Unknowns were always fun. I think my demonstrator always gave me tough unknowns to work with. One time, not knowing what the unknown was (of course), one of my characterisations was to nitrate a sample. This came to an abrupt end when my demonstrator asked what I was doing and realised my end product would be 2,4-dinitrotoluene 😬 with potential for some 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene. It kind of gave away what the unknown was, I didn’t blow up the lab and received a high grade for that unknown.

During our second year OC-lab we had to add chemicals to a reaction under inert atmosphere. We had to do this by syringe through a septum. We used very long and thin needles for this. Apparently it was quite common for students to stab themselves with these needles to the point that you had to ask the TAs for the needles and they would check you while you were working with the needles. The rules regarding 2nd year chemistry students and needles were this strict because apparently some time ago a student stuck 3 fingers together with a single needle…

The remarks about geologists licking rocks remind me of the geotechnical tests for soils. Test procedures include: -Putting soil into a tower of increasingly fine sieves and (loudly) shaking it to find grain size distribution; -Repeatedly hand rolling fine soil into a 1/8” diameter thread until it breaks; -The Standard Penetration Test, which counts the number of hammer blows to advance a sampler 6” into the ground. It’s a field test which stops at refusal. (More than 50 blows); -Using a condom…while performing triaxial tests on weak cohesive soils, I mean ;)

I love these videos man. The stories go from awful to hilarious so quickly

So glad that we're not forcing glass tubes through stoppers anymore. That was always a great way to jam broken glass into your hand.

7:05 I would like to think the chemistry gods accepted the blood as a sacrifice or something

Syringe incidents: Just the tip, I promise, LOL, KH decomp reminds me of experimental work I did to determine how to safely get rid of an unknown accumulation from a Li-dispersion making vessel. About 100 pounds of this unknown had accumulated. We took the vessel out of service and parked it in a remote place. I determined that the stuff was laminations of Li-carbide and some calmer substances. It didn't like water. I found that t-BuOH slowly decomposed the material. Before I could rig up and add the t-BuOH the vessel detonated one night - no witnesses, just tiny pieces scattered over many acres.

6:03 yay the dirt catalyst. had that happen before, when i spilled a whole rbf of my reagents in the fumehod. Got everything with a paper towel and extracted it. I then ran the reaction and the yield was 15-20% higher than normal. do not ever fill a balloon with acetylene. it can ignite from static in the stretched rubber.

I love theese daily uploads

In my final year of High School our Chem teacher was...not the best. One day we had to conduct an experiment involving 8 mol Hydrochloric acid (the highest concentration they had ever let us mess with) and burettes. Our teacher explained absolutely nothing about how to use them and just handed them out to the class. One kid broke three within a 20 minute timespan, but sadly the biggest fuckup was done by myself: I had carefully measured out my 20 ml of HCl and proceeded to pour it into my burette which I was holding off the side of the counter. This was when the fact that I had neglected to close the tap on the burette was brought to my attention by the feeling of 20 mls of acid pouring straight onto my foot. Our long, inelastic school socks took about a minute to put on/take off: I probably ripped mine off in 3 seconds. Thankfully the only damage was a small scar and a big, discoloured hole in the sock where the HCl had eaten through. Part two of this experiment involved reacting Iron in said HCl: most students used the supplied iron filings, but being adventurous my lab partner and I elected to use a solid, fat, nugget of iron that looked like it came straight out of minecraft. After running two days overtime with everyone else finished our Chem teacher made the suggestion of heating our acid+nugget solution over a burner, and dumping in all the HCl we had left to speed up the reaction. This beaker of acid hit a rolling boil for over twenty minutes, no fume hood, just there for everyone else in the class to breathe in. It was only after I wikipedia'd the boiling point of our HCl and googled "dangers of hydrochloric vapor inhalation" did our teacher agree to let us give up and use another group's results. Fun times.

Not a chemist but I did my mechanic apprenticeship at a university. Our workshop was part of the institute for nuclear physics and we did all the maintenance and parts machining for its two particle accelerators. Whenever the accelerators were down for repairs or just not being used, it was the apprentices job to clean the inside of their terminals. Basically you can imagine these like huge metal tanks the shape of a small submarine which house the apparatus that generates the electrical current needed for operation. We had to use ethanol and acetone for cleaning and since the tanks were quite big, we would often spend almost an entire day in there. Ventilation was basically nonexistent with the only opening in the tank being a small hole about half a meter in diameter so needles to say by the end of the day we would be pretty high on fumes. Always a great time. Another funny incident there was when I had to clean up some cabinets and I found a small piece of sheet metal that someone had labelled "Cadmium" with a sharpie. The universities hazmat official was pretty pissed when she found out.

Oh lord, I just remembered a chemistry horror story that occurred to me before I even started university. I went to a K-12 school for middle school, and we had a chemistry unit in grade 8 science class. We did the classic KI + PB(NO3)2 reaction to learn about precipitates and solubility. Afterwards, our teacher, who is primarily a biology teacher, told us to dispose of our solutions down the sinks. I was skeptical of the safety, but she assured me that it was fine because we weren't dumping very much, and being 13 years old, I didn't push it. The worst part about it is that the science lab is on the 2nd floor directly above the grade 1 classroom, and later that year, there were reports of leaky pipes dripping into said grade 1 classroom. So that is how my middle school potentially gave lead poisoning to a bunch of 6 year olds.

This is probably a lot more basic than what you are looking for, but it does involve chemistry. I got my science teacher fired (or caused her to retire early, or be let go, not sure I just know she was gone after the incident) in 5th grade because she didn't take me seriously. To explain: It was a science fair, it was my first time participating on it and so the nerdy boy I was got really excited and decided to build a rocket. Not a simple water rocket, but a legit one. I even considered a liquid fuel rocket, but gave up on it because even 11yo me had more sense than try and make a miniature V2 at home. Instead I settled for a solid rocket based on designs I saw from hobbyists, and would launch it on the fair. This is where the chemistry part comes in: The fuel for said rocket was not black power, but a mixture of KNO3 (or more precisely a fertilizer that was about 45% KNO3) and sugar. The recipe for it called for a mixture of 60% KNO3 and 40% Sugar to be heated carefully in a pan until the sugar melts, and the mixture becomes a sort of caramel paste. This paste is then placed on the rocket's motor and allowed to cool and harden. I actually did this at home, and managed to do it safetly! No accidents, no fires, just following the instructions from the internet and using a low fire to make sure it didn't fuck up. So I took a chunk of the fuel to the school, and told my science fair colleges about it and they were all hype about it. I had this little tupperware of about 200g of the fuel, and the mockup "motor" which was made from a old car exhaust which I had asked a mechanic to weld a small steel plate to one end to close it off and some old car part that was a metal disk with a small hole I would place on top just to check how it would go. (This wouldn't be the actual rocket, it was just meant to be something to show off since the actual rocket would be smaller and I didn't think it would land back in the school even with a parachute) We go to the science lab and each group gets a table out of the 4 large granite tables to run their experiments on and work out the details, so me and my group get to mine and I start going on about rockets and the motor and the fuel and such. I then decide to run a engine test, so I took the chunk of "fuel", broke about 1/5th of it off and placed it inside the motor. Before I start it, I go to the teacher and let her know I am gonna run a test fire of the rocket fuel. And she simply nods her head muttering a "yep" and goes back to explaining something to the group she was coaching along. To this day I am not sure if she misunderstood what I was saying or simply didn't hear or something. So there I go, excited 11yo, I put the 40 grams of fuel in the motor, put the lid just to show how the thing works, and then tell people to back away a bit (which they did by stopping leaning over the table and just standing as close as they could of course) and I throw a lit match in the motor. Now, here is the thing, this rocket fuel is also used to make homemade smoke bombs because it works by generating a amazing amount of smoke (the only difference between it and classic homemade smoke bombs is in those 2 or 3 percent of the volume is replaced by baking soda to slow it down), so the fuel start working and doing wonderful. The little disk I was using as a lid quickly is thrown away by the pressure of it and it is all looking amazing and making a very "rockety" noise. And then disaster strikes: I forgot the rest of the fuel on the table, without a lit. Sparks of the fuel are being propelled out of the motor by their own combustion, one lands on the Tupperware and... Well the plastic on the sides didn't as much melt as it *boiled* into black smoke, and the huge surface area caused the chunk of solid rocket fuel to burn away super fast. I shout for people to move, and manage to get a glass of water and throw it at the remains of the tupperware (in the time it took for the glass to fill on the lab sink, the fuel was gone in smoke). By now everyone is aware of what happened, and the ceiling looks like it has come been reduced from the very tall 4 or so meters it had to a mere 2 because of all the smoke that the fuel generated. And then some genius turns the fans on. All the smoke comes down, and it is now impossible to see more than 20 centimeters ahead of our faces. No one pulled a fire alarm thankfully, would have been really annoying to the fire department to show up for such a nothingburger, but there was a lot of screaming and it did kinda look like the lab had been burned. I was given a day of suspension, but not more than that (probably suspended out of reflex as the school staff figured what was going on). In the end I never built the rocket for the fair, and settled for a simple model of it to be shown off in the fair as the school made it clear I was not to do anything of the sort ever again. Did get a 10 tho so it was a win.

Oh I thought in this video you seriously are going to take your own blood and do chemistry on it.

at my former highschool it`s said that they once had to call the bomb-squad because they discovered several really old bottles of picric acid in the chemistry lab. as far as i know that was the only time in my schools history that the facility was evacuated also one of my teachers explained how his former chemistry teacher once prepared a small batch of nitroglycerin and, as his method of disposal, set up a drop-funnel dripping a single drop every few seconds/minutes onto a granite plate (you can probably imagine how that sounded like).

Mining Engineer here; The temptation forced upon Mining and Civil engineers upon taking the required geology courses is tough, but the faculty makes it pretty easy to NOT have any interest in geology besides the superficial enjoyment of looking at some pretty rocks. I will admit, I have not only licked, but accidentally consumed, lots of rock particles trying to differentiate grain size of limestone.

the acetylene explosion could have been a spark from static, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a decomposition explosion, since acetylene does that at moderately elevated pressure, and people with little enough regard for safety to do what they were doing probably ignored the red indications on the regulator that are there to remind you of that fact

I heard a story about a first year student trying to crystallize his compound. He was told the same thing, to scratch with a spatula if the compound would not crystallize on its own. The lab TA later found the student scratching the side of his fume hood with his spatula while staring at the solution.

I request half a liter of blood (I guess you could call that a sacrifice?) from new customers at my business before taking their orders. It really makes me feel closer to my customers knowing that I've drank from their veins before we work together.

back in secondary school we often made crystals of various compounds, every single time we never used a stirring rod on the inside, we simply lightly tapped the outside

12:15 yeah exactly, if you're trying to demo burning alcohol in your hand w/out getting burned, you'll want to use hand sanitizer on your palm w/out fingers sticking up into the flame. I used to do it on my leg as a party trick/for laughs & never got burned - just slap it out to extinguish the flame as soon as it starts to get warm, but it takes several seconds b/c the evaporating alcohol cools the area under the flame even while it burns

Probably the closest to chemistry story I know came from my father. He was working in the lab in uni and they had a set platinum plates used for something. By his description they looked very unassumingly - like small, slightly bent, old and beaten tea plates, metallic in color. One day they all disappeared. Because it's platinum - whole uni went tits up, authorities were involved and there were few very uncomfortable days for everyone who had access to the lab. At the end turned out somehow elderly janitor lady somehow got access to the lab and took plates to feed her cats from them. I'm not sure what happened to her, father never told, but I don't think punishment was very severe.

In school we had an AAS that ran with acetylene/compressed air in a fumehood. On a fateful morning a teacher demonstrated the machine to someone else while the assigned group prepared their dilutions. To start the machine there was a checklist which included opening the gas cylinder valve. The valve was already open which didn't make them suspicious. The last step was to press the ignite button which lead to the whole fumehood lighting up brilliantly and a light rain of carbon falling. Then we knew why this was the only machine in the lab inside a fumehood.

7:20 now I wish there was a “blood catalysed” reaction on at least one of the labs I took

8:48 not only that, but also sound has a tendency to travel through the air in a somewhat parabolic manner, it's sometimes possible for a very loud noise to be heard by people that are unusually far away; and under the right conditions there can even be locations where the sound was inaudible, while people _further_ away from the origin did hear it. But we're mostly talking about reactor steam explosions/fireworks factories blowing up/volcanoes/nukes kinds of territories.

I don’t know much about chemistry but the acetylene story reminds me of one from when I was young) my Dad was a big on chemistry and liked doing dangerous experiments (he made chlorine gas in our garage once after accidentally confusing sodium bicarbonate with granulate sodium hypochlorite and mixing it with HCl) anyways he wanted to show us how loud acetylene really is. So he got a plastic bag, used by laundry services to wrap suits in, to contain the gases. It was about the same size as a weather balloon. He used a really long extension cord with the leads exposed to detonate the bag. A quick plug/unplug from a wall socket detonated the bag. The resulting explosion, (which looked like the sonic boom when a jet breaks the sound barrier,) cracked all of the windows on that side of the house despite it being in a field at least 70feet away, almost blew out the glass on the patio sliding door, despite our ears ringing my dad and brother went into hiding mode in the house, within about ten minutes, the entire area was flooded with police cruisers, and, even a police helicopter circling the area. About an hour later, the damn ATF was canvasing the area. Slow rolling up and down the streets searching for signs of whatever it was that blew up. Needless to say, that was a 'one of' event. We damn near died laughing every time the story was brought up by friends and neighbors about that time something blew up in the neighborhood, and, how it rattled houses all over the 'hood. It was a topic of conversation for several years after the incident.

My uncle was a geologist but he was also a chemist. He only did the geology to get the calcite to make calcium carbonate and sell it on a commercial scale. They mined all the calcite from linwood mines in Iowa and when my uncle passed away I was gifted a large portion of his rock/gem/fossil collection. I NEVER saw my uncle taste a rock. I may have put a rock in my mouth as a small child but never as an adult.

Damn, those guys had sand for the sulfuric and nitric acids? For our school, it was basically on shelves with no protection for if someone's hand bumped into some glassware (People can be clumsy). One time, we were doing the iodoform test inside (obviously no fume hood or proper ventilation) and it was the worst experience of my life, our whole class had irritation in the eyes and the room was unusable for quite a bit after that

In a first year chem labs techniques lab we were doing analysis of goon (really cheap nasty wine in a bag in a cardboard box), doing things like doing flame specs do determine metal ion content etc. One of the tasks was to determine the organic acid content which required reducing the volume to concentrate the leftovers after driving off the alcohol, followed by most of the water on in a beaker on a hot plate. Anyway someone wasn't paying attention and drove off all the alcohol, and then all the water, and then proceeded to burn the residue... I have never left a lab feeling so nauseous. It was even worse than the times people have used 14M ammonia outside a fume hood, or dropped 40mL of ether on the bench on a 40C day by turning the knob on the sep funnel the wrong way next to me.

Geologists not only lick rocks, but also taste dirt my uncle is a propector for a mining company near the amazon, and i've listened to him a bunch of times telling his stories, and in almost all of them is there a :"then i took some dirt off the ground to taste it, and choose which areas would be sent for analisys" he explained to me that over time you can train your palate to indentify some minerals, and cos he need to scout sometimes kilometers per day, prospecting land for ming, you cant simply take a sample every 100m to send to the lab, so knowing how the type of dirt he is looking after tastes can speed up the process i mean, he is been doing this since 87, so there might be some truth to it, right?

epic stories, as always :) For you second example: Based on the phrasing, I assume he is refering to 1.0 as the highest grade. In german education a 1.0 is the highest grade you can get and it sounds fitting to my experience with greedy profs that want to have a nice stack of grad students and in return they will reward with really good grades, regardless of the persons behaviour in the lab, as long as the written stuff is formally fine.

I have a similar, albiet non-chemistry story to the first one. It's pretty common to hear about people losing fingers to a table saw. I always thought it was from being careless. That was until one day a few years ago, I was maneuvering a piece of wood and ran the cuff of my glove across the blade. If I was half an inch farther I might have gotten the nickname lefty. It goes to show how quickly our brains can lose focus.

I’m graduating from BS Computer Science. Being in computer science, we are exposed to IC chips and breadboard in a laboratory environment. We didn’t need to solder anything, because we didn’t need to manipulate PCBs. Every time I see an IC chip, I’m tempted to lick the pins. I dunno why, but the metal pins on any computer chip look very… lickable to me. Though I do know the taste of a battery, it’s metallically sour. I know this because when I was little, I had the chance to lick the terminals of a 9V one.

I remember when I was 14 and it was winter, really really cold temperatures like -10°C and my hands were always freezing. I had just learned that when you mix HCl with Zinc it made an exothermic reaction and I had the brilliant idea to Bring a plastic bottle containing HCl and bits of Zinc to school so that I could warm up my hand… the next day I show up with these things and tell one of my friend to check out what I brought and then proceeded to put the bits of zinc in the acid, at first we were like oh wow it’s bubbling and it’s actually hot but then at one point it became so hot I legit burned my hand and the plastic started melting with some droplets of acid going on my hands and sweater, I rushed to the bathroom to wash my hands and they were fine but my sweat wasn’t at all, I still have it to this day with bunch of little holes on it

My experience with Acetylene in welding is that it can easily make explosive mixtures. In the welding bays we had in college one time I had to do some AO cutting of metal and couldn't get the torch going properly because either the striker was bad or the torch was dirty. Still enough acetylene built up enough under my workspace that when I got the torch going it just went WOOOMF and there was a snow of black soot around me. If your a welder working with torches, make sure to clean out the torch nozzles often with those cleaning picks to get proper combustion.

The disaster at Tianjin port was an acetylene detonation, followed by an AN decomposition.

3:05 I'm assuming that cloud was nitrogen dioxide, not nitrous oxide? If it was nitrous oxide that would've been a very different experience lol

Back in my high school days, we did some basic stuff to learn the ropes. And being high school, kids will at times be kids, especially if you give them toys. One of the things we used then were plastic eyed droppers, and sometime during a lab activity a couple of the students got it in their head that it’d be fun to use them as water guns and spray each other with them. It didn’t take long for one of them, with an empty eye dropper, to reach for one filled not with water, but with HCL for the lab, and spray it at their target, who dodged. Who didn’t dodge? The guy at the next table actually doing lab work, and he got the acid sprayed down the back of his shirt. The students involved in the ‘acid fight’ incident were suspended. The unwitting victim was treated and back in class the next day. (being in the next classroom over, I only ever caught one glimpse of his back, after it had been treated) The lessons you can draw from this? Oh so so many.

Fire extinguisher should be there when you deal with KH and t-butyl lithium. They catches fire easily. A severe accident happened when my labmate put scissor with sodium residue into a plastic container because there were drops of water and the room was filled with solvent vapour. Container should be half-filled ethanol before you put anything with sodium residue in it. Misconnecting gas dryer with conc H2SO4 is also a scary accident ! Hope all chem students stay safe!

A relatively minor story, when I started out in O. Chem I labs, the procedures often had us dry out solvents with nitrogen gas. This involved putting a rubber tube onto a faucet like fixture in the fume hood, turning the associated nozzle, then testing if any gas was coming through before finally adding a pipette to better direct the gas. Since the gas flow generated audible noise I typically used that to determine if the nozzle was pushing gas. This one time though, there was no noise and I couldn’t see the pipette moving any solvent from a short distance away. So with one hand on the pipette, and my other hand on the nozzle controlling the gas flow, I proceeded to boost the flow a little too much and caused the pipette in my hand to fire out of the rubber tube. The pipette then hit my forehead before dropping onto the floor and shattering. Fortunately, I had safety glasses on and my forehead was stronger than the pipette, so no damage was sustained. Just a little shocked. The lesson learned? Sometimes you only need a gentle touch and to place a little water on your forearm to test if there is any gas flow a little bit at a time.

I'm a civil engineer but I love both chemistry and manufacturing. Thanks for both the entertainment and education for us non-chemists!

5:32 I use similar tactic to break H2CO3 when I am forced to drink it's solution. It works by adding energy to an oversaturated solution. They were effectivelly tapping the glass, since you can't scratch glass with a fingernail. 8:20 I don't doubt it was audible up to a mile. Sound dissipates quadratically, about 6dB for every doubling of distance. If at 200ft it was at at least 120dB (immediate damage to ears), then at 5280ft, it would be at at least 88dB.

My mum has a story: In the mid-70s she was in a High School science lesson. This school was in a deprived area, and some of the pupils were what we would now call “troubled”. The way she remembers it, the Practical that day involved adding ice and salt to water while monitoring the temperature. I guess the topic was basic Enthalpy or something. Anyway, 2 of her friends heard the teacher warn them about not dropping the *alcohol* thermometers and decided it would be a good idea to steal several. The idea was to drink the contents and get buzzed during school hours. So during the Lunch Break these 2 chuckleheads broke open the thermometers and poured the contents into a bottle of orange juice, which they shared. They started to feel unwell about 30 minutes later and went to the School Nurse. Once they’d owned up the science teacher was called to check what they had drank. The teacher came RUNNING and shouting “Call an Ambulance!” It turned out the school was using a mixed batch of thermometers and the 2 chuckleheads had stolen a combination of alcohol and *MERCURY* thermometers, which they had then mixed and drank. My Town didn’t have its own major hospital until the late-80s so that was a 40 minute ambulance ride to the nearest Casualty Department. Needless to say, the two boys were expelled for this incident.

The Yikes Awardee at 11:25 reminded me of a few things of my past, that were pretty similar, also playing with mercury and also getting someone to burn himself. Also in elementary school or maybe even earlier, a cousin and I played with mercury from a broken thermometer (those were still common in the early 80s) for a while, pushing the drops around on the floor until a grown-up took it away. Later, in the late 90s, when Germany still had mandatory military service, which I was serving then, Hg-thermometers were not common anymore, I think, but they were still used by the Bundeswehr, of course. I waited for a Doctor's appointment for half an hour in a waiting room where someone had dropped a thermometer on the floor and nobody bothered to clean it up, and when someone finally did, they just picked it up with a paper towel and threw it into the nearest bin. I was too sick to say anything (hence at the Doctor's), but was glad when I was finally called into the office and could leave. And about burning someone: In ninth grade I dared a friend to touch a match when it was igniting. I guess he thought he could just extinguish it between his fingers as you could if it's just burning. I still feel bad when I remember that.

Well, since you're looking for interesting stories, I've got a good one and two near misses from college. I worked part-time as a lab assistant in the Civil Engineering test lab at my college. Normally this wouldn't lead to much in the way of chemical exposure, but this was more a reminder to respect the mundane solvents. In the center of the lab, we had the 'high bay', a 3-story tall open area to fit the tension-compression testers (the biggest was built into the structure and 30 ft tall). As if that's not enough, there was also a section of removable floor, so the ceiling-mounted cranes could reach down into the basement to move equipment to the centrifuge lab and hydrology lab. We had some slow days, so the lab manager decided we needed to repaint the warning lines around the removable floor panels, the fluorescent yellow paint had gotten crusty dull brown over the years. So, we removed the floor plates, and step 1 was to remove the old paint. It was caked in years of floor varnish, so he handed out our standard heavy-duty lab cleansers to cut through the sealant and paint: large wash bottles of straight acetone, and some filled with azeotropic ethanol. Now, since the plates were removed, this was essentially a four-by-ten foot hole in the floor, and the next level down was 15 feet below to a cement floor. We didn't have much in the way of fall protection, and the paint we were removing went right up to the edge of this hole, so to keep balance, we were laying on our chests to scrub away the old paint. About an hour in, I was feeling nasty. Throbbing headache, brain fog, feeling dizzy with a gross taste in my mouth. I mentioned it to my buddy who was cleaning with me, he had the ethanol to strip up the paint, I was going ahead of him with the acetone to remove the varnish. He stopped in his tracks, saw my eyes were kinda glazed and not focusing well, and told me to carefully crawl away from the hole and not stand up til he got the lab manager. It was at that point I realized I'd had my face maybe 8 inches from large volumes of evaporating acetone all morning. I got checked out, and while I wasn't punished for my foolishness (manager said it was his responsibility to get us solvent filter masks, his fault), I certainly felt like an idiot. Fortunately I didn't suffer any lasting issues, but I did discover something disturbing the following day in a P.E. class: if you inhale acetone and don't metabolize it all, some comes out by exhaling it again. So during that morning's calisthenics, I started tasting acetone in the back of my throat. Not pleasant at all. As far as the near misses, same buddy once got some really nasty stuff on him. Product called 'aircraft remover', sounds like a euphemism for a missile. We were testing if it could easily strip boiled linseed oil off wires so we could do corrosion testing on coated field samples. He got some on his forearm above the glove, didn't notice for a minute or so til I pointed it out. He washed it off thoroughly and kept flushing it for a good 15 minutes under the tap, he said it had felt warm and tingly. Developed a nice angry red mark where the glob had been, but fortunately it just left a tender spot instead of a hole. Lastly, I once got assigned to inventory our acid cabinet, only to discover that someone had stored concentrated organic and inorganic acids in the same cabinet. That's bad enough, but then I pulled out another bottle that made my hair stand on end. Yep, that's 35% H2O2, sitting right next to the concentrated H2SO4. And what's this in the back? Oh, just a bottle of pure NaOH granules. In the *acids* cabinet. Thank goodness nothing in there had leaked, or there would have been some serious problems. My report to the lab manager resulted in every wet-lab student in that facility having to take a weekend seminar on safe storage principles.

8:59 this reminds me of a welding incident at my high school. The shop teacher was cutting the bottom off of a 55 gallon drum that had not been thoroughly cleaned with an oxy-acetylene torch. The residue of whatever had been in the drum combusted and shot a tall jet of flame out of the narrow slit he’d cut and burned off his eyebrows but left him otherwise unharmed. I guess he wasn’t wearing goggles.

I do some incidental home chemistry as part of other hobbies, most of it is related to various polymers for making components (printed and cast parts of various plastics and rubbers). As a result there is occasionally a need to run chlorination reactions. I do this in the well-ventilated outdoors with some fans to keep the air flowing in the area along with appropriate PPE, and work with small quantities of diluted HCl and NaOCl at a time, so the quantity of gas in the active system at its peak is no worse than that given off by, say a public fountain that has been freshly chlorinated. I do however have more concentrated solutions in storage, and I keep my reagents separated from each other, stored in larger containers alongside containers of their neutralizing compounds (in this case it was, bicarbonate for HCl, sodium thiosulfate for NaOCl). Once, while I lived in a rented property, the landlord decided to repaint everything outside. Because no entry was required to the livable interior of the property, they were not required to inform me a day in advance, so I found out with little time to spare when the painters arrived and asked me to collapse some outdoor furniture. While I was doing that, one of the painters decided to 'consolidate' my storage area to make it more compact and out of their way. I later came to find that they put the bottles of HCl and NaOCl together in an empty container, despite the warning labels on the bottles themselves, one of the HCl bottles was roughly handled and slowly leaking, and the larger containers with the neutralizing compounds now were storing various other items from my backyard in addition to the neutralizing compounds. At least cleanup was relatively quick and without incident, but that could have ended up a lot worse with how little respect they gave the compounds. Bonus story: High school chem was full of people who were careless with fire. Frequently there would be labs where students had to have burning splints, but they would often not properly extinguish them and place the still smouldering splint on their notebooks. Several notebooks and binders, a textbook and a backpack were all casualties to this. It also happened in an EE class in college once, except due to a soldering iron. Bonus story 2: speaking of college, undergrad chem labs had large glass waste jugs for disposing of chemicals from the labs which were neutralized and cleaned every morning before labs began. They were supposed to be left unstoppered in the fume hoods over night, but occasionally these rules were disregarded by low tier staff. Twice labs were cancelled because of the waste jugs detonating during the night. There was also a time where the whole building got evacuated because a graduate student's lab accident resulted in part of the building getting flooded with at least one toxic gas.

It was about a year ago, our chemistry teacher hasn't done any demonstrations or experiments at all, so the class was really boring and I was the only one interested. I spoke with the teacher if I could do something cool for an extra grade and she agreed. Long story short, I made magnesium silicide at home and intended to make silane at school. In class, after talking and explaining for a bit, I poured some of the HCl I got from the back into the beaker and sprinkled my magnesium silicide onto it, expecting the beautiful explosions to form but it didn't happen. Turns out that the HCl was very, veeery old (10+ years at least) and it just started releasing copious amounts of gaseus chlorine, and I really mean it. The class had to be evacuated and there was still a slight smell of death for the next day

I have a story that happened to me while in HS chemistry. We were doing an experiment on the decomposition of peroxides. It was supposed to be a VERY simple demo showing how catalysts can speed up reactions like peroxide decomposition. The lab was to mix 3% H2O2 with KI as the catalyst. My lab partner and I were last to get our materials and they had run out of corner store H2O2 they bought for the lab. The instructor told us they had more in the back, and a couple minutes later they brought us our test tube filled with peroxide from the store room. When I go to put in the KI, Whoosh! The whole mixture shoots out of the rest tube. The instructor hadn’t realized that the peroxide stored in the the back wasn’t 3%, but 30% instead. Make sure to read your labels carefully. Luckily we were wearing PPE including aprons, so our clothes were spared. The only casualty was my lab notebook now soaked in brown iodine residue. My teacher got a weekly reminder from every stained report I turned in though LOL.

So I have a story as well, seeing as one of my friends recently posted his own about the dead fume hood and two dead heating mantles. My dad has a DIY electrolyser at home he made to "purify water" (bunch of pseudoscience, but whatever), which connects directly to the 220V mains and converts AC to DC via a bunch of diodes. Now, he had used it on tap water in the past, and nothing bad happened, so in my infinite wisdom I on a whim decided to make some chlorine. Knowing that a) chlorine is an irritant and b) is very toxic, I donned my full PPE gear - lab coat, goggles, thick gloves and turned on the "fume hood" above the stove. I then took a big glass jar, filled it with water and added salt until it stopped dissolving, then filtered off the excess on some paper towels. Then I put in the "electrolyser" and plugged it in. My first red flag that something went REALLY WRONG was the fact that I immediately felt the rather thin wire go absolutely HOT, the insulation was halfway to melting and it lost all of its stiffness, turning into a deadly 220V noodle. The second flag? A MASSIVE CLOUD of chlorine gas just immediately went out of solution, making my eyes water and throat sore. To this day I think that the only reason I did not die to a house fire or chlorine poisoning was that I had the presence of mind to immediately yank the power cord from the wall socket. The "fume hood" did absolutely nothing, as it was apparently clogged with grease enough to make it useless as a real fume hood, and I booked it to the balcony to have some fresh air. Half an hour later, I returned back to the kitchen, and the chlorine still lingered enough to be felt, but over the course of the day, it dissipated. The "electrolyser" was now coated in a layer of rust, the whole solution looked like it was pulled right out of a rusty bucket after sitting there for years, and it never really worked well ever since. I suspect I destroyed some of the circuitry with the massive amount of current I managed to pull from the wall (though the 25A breakers never tripped). Moral of the story - do not synthesize dangerous compounds outside of a properly equipped lab environment, and certainly do not use untested DIY contraptions to do so. Cheers!

There is a single building on my campus that houses the math department and the geologists... The sadists and the Rock lickers

That balloon story reminds me of a story my dad always told me as a kid from when he was a kid. See my grandfather was a race car driver in the ARCA stock car circuits of the late 60's and 70's, and as it was essentially amateur racing was his own mechanic. My dad often told me a story from the time, apparently at his elementary school they heard an incredible bang, and assumed it was a plane breaking the sound barrier overhead for whatever reason. Well when my father got home he found out that, in fact, my grandfather had detonated the garage somehow while working on his car. One can only assume it was related to welding gasses but with stories like this of course we may never know. Luckily everyone was alright (or so I assume, at the very least nobody was dead) and my grandfather went on to continue racing for a few more years.

As a pro welder i can tell ya a little thing we used to do with fresh apprentices. A older welder thats been doing the welding trade many years would snuff out the cutting torch and grab a rubber glove and put just enough gas in it to inflate it to shape no more then tie it off the wait till the new guy was grinding on some steel and toss it in to his sparks and boom! The new guy would fill his pants and jump out of his skin everyone would laugh then once he calmed down the old timer would repeat the process in front of the newbie and show him just how little gas it took to make the massive boom. The lesson being respect the cutting torch and double check the bottles are off when you go to break and at the end of the day. It worked 16 years and over a hundred apprentices and never had a torch accident at the plant

Back in january this year, I slightly stabbed myself with a syringe of anhydrous DCM (hence the needle). No need to say that the images of necrosed hands quickly flashed through my mind. Fortunately, nothing went wrong with my hand and about cancers, well I guess I'll get to know that in a couple years

I betcha that acetylene shop incident was just filling a trash bag with acetylene and either static or a lighter set it off. The really loud boom is when you're helping build a steel pipeline and the welder at the end of the 600' string blows acetylene up the pipe then sparks it to scare the guys uphill.

I’m more an applied engineering type but you do a hell of a job making chemistry fun and make days on the road a little more interesting I had a friend who was a chemistry major around 20 years ago, I wish I could remember some of the stories he told me in better detail to submit

Blood for the chem gods! Skulls for... the geologians to lick?

My dad nearly shot down an airplane with an improvised rocket. He was part of something called "The Interplanetary Society" and they had their own reaction mix that they called super-thermatal-sulphide. He never told me what it was because - as he said - he liked me having ten fingers. So they made a rocket - basically a pipe bomb that was open on one side and set out to test it. Unfortunately, they chose to test it in the in-flight zone to a military airfield. So an old military jet came in for a landing and the rocket missed it by a small margin. And the military came out to have a look at who the hell was firing rockets on their airplanes. Made the papers and my grandmother was convinced that my dad would never get a job but would become homeless and live out his days on the streets of Gothenburg. He didn't. My dad's gang had a couple of seriously demented people in it and they played a lot with explosives. But somehow they all survived without major injuries. Fool's luck, I suppose.

7:07 - well, blood is a very dense liquid at room temperature (20 C), it is also aqueous to different amounts depending on oxygen and iron levels; not even counting blood type.

Your videos are developing very delightful Lofty Pursuits overtones :)

Acetylene: the balloon probably exploded from excess pressure. The tanks contain the acetylene dissolved in acetone. For welding I think they use something like 5 psi for acetylene. As i recall, when not dissolved in acetone, acetylene explosively decomposes at around 30 PSI.

These days I'm just an amateur chemist who hates handling anything volatile or acutely toxic and refuses to work in a messy lab space, but in my teens back in the days before modern safety wisdom.. or regulations.. I worked as a Lab Technician / Assistant for a company that produced aviation deicing fluids and specialty inorganic and heavy metal reagents for government contracts, weird combo I know. It was my job to help the chemists out any way I could, and that usually meant washing and putting away their dirty glassware and being the lab errand girl and custodian. One summer I was cleaning the lab's aqueous chemistry bench of empty dirty glassware after my coworkers had left for the night, and I accidentally knocked over a small nearly empty grad cylinder onto a stack of discarded used filter papers next to it. I saw the paper begin to carbonize and realized it must be conc. H2SO4 so I immediately turned my back to it to go get some K2CO3 from the alkali cabinet to neutralize the spill. I see an unexpected flash of light reflect off a bit of glassware on the other side of the room as I'm on the way to the cabinet and I turn around to see the stack of filter papers up in flames. I panic for a moment while I figure out what's the best way to handle this situation given that there were a dozen or so open beakers and flasks partially filled with reagents as well as evaporation dishes full of product immediately straddling the ever-increasingly on fire stack of used filter papers, and using the lab's only extinguisher, a dry powder type, would ruin all of that as well as create a massive mess. I think what I thought was a brilliant idea at the time: "just grab the wash bottle from the sink and smother it with water, it's all aqueous chemistry on that bench so any stray water will simply evaporate or dilute things harmlessly!". I grabbed the nearest wash bottle and proceeded to enthusiastically spray it at the fiery stack of papers. The flames surged, and my first thought was "oh no is this an oil fire?!". It wasn't an oil fire. It turned out that the bottle wasn't filled with water, It was filled with anhydrous isopropanol that was being used as a last-rinse drying agent for cleaning glassware at the sink. Apparently someone had filled a spare water wash bottle (blue cap) with good old dimethyl carbinol (supposed to be yellow or red cap!) and thought that was fine to just leave unlabeled and not tell anyone else about. I figure this out as I watched the stream of highly flammable volatile solvent still flowing from the bottle in my hand catch fire and burn back up the stream towards me in mid-air. Thankfully I was able to stop the flow without the bottle catching fire. I put the bottle into the sink and grabbed a 2L beaker from the drying rack, filled it with water from the sink, and carefully tossed it onto the accelerant-assisted burning stack of papers. I got lucky, it put the flames out and there was no harm done to any of the nearby work. I went and sat for about a half an hour and thought about what just happened before I got back to work cleaning up the bench. If I had ruined the work on the bench or burned the lab down I would have gotten fired. At the time all I could think was "I wish we had CO2 extinguishers!". I went and got watch glasses and stoppers from the cabinet and covered every last bit of glassware before I left that night. In hindsight now I think "holy fuck that lab was a dangerous mess" and "why was a teenager barely educated in lab protocol allowed to work alone cleaning up professional chemists' messes?". That experience taught me never to assume anything is anything in a lab setting, and to always look out for the setups that enable accidents and dangers to unfold, don't just look for dangers themselves.

The geologist licking rocks is so accurate. The way we were taught by the professor to identify whether something was loam or silt was to just eat it and identify it based on how it felt in your mouth.

I'm far too clumsy to ever be near a lab, but I'm so happy that your channel exists so that I can learn.

Don't even do that much practical chem anymore, but these vids are really entertaining, keep it up!

To prevent accidental chemical injection, use a dispensing tip! They're blunt and can be really short (1/4in or so) which makes them a lot less unwieldy. I use them to dispense solder paste and keep the lead and flux out of my veins. If you're too cheap for that, you can cleanly break a needle by repeatedly bending it back and forth in one spot with needle nose pliers until it becomes brittle. Don't snip it or bend too far, or it will be sealed forever.

with that last story about the old / faulty / damaged equipment and lack of ppe because of a lack of funding and care, whether you're a teacher or student it's always worth it to voice your concerns to the next-in-command and to also suggest possibly going to another school nearby to either sit in during their experiments & watch, or to use their equipment for an hour or two for experiments or practical exams; it may feel humiliating or degrading at first, but there's a much higher chance of receiving the support and respect of whoever you ask than their judgement, because you share the love of learning in common and that has always extended itself to help whoever needs it, in my experience... :)

These are very fun videos, keep them up.

I know this might be a bit late to comment this, but the story of the teacher burning himself with iso alcohol reminded me of a story about my dad. When I was little we had a wood shop where we would build tables and whatnot. So we had some chemicals around he’d use for painting or finishing the wood. One day he tells me that alcohol burns at such a low temperature you could light some on fire and it not burn you. So he decided to pour denatured alcohol on his arm and hand, and light it on fire. It burned all the hair off his arm.

Thanks to you I now imagine working in a big lab means that every once in a while you see someone running to a sink or a shower half naked and/or somewhat bleeding

My Organic Chemisty Undergrad class was incredibly overcrowded. We had like 30 groups (15 pairs) in a class with only 4 fume hoods. Meaning that for all the students to do the reaction they'd have to crowd 4 people into a fume hood while doing their work. I forget specifically which reaction it was, but it required the mixing of 10M HCl and some organic carbonate in a separatory funnel. Of course this reaction gave off a lot of C02 which required venting to prevent disaster. All of which is difficult when 4 students are shoulder to shoulder in a single fume hood. Needless to say, as I was doing my work I heard a pop followed by fizzing and panicked shouts. A student had lessened their grip on the stopcock as they were adjusting their position, which was all that was required for the pressure to force it out spraying the entire area with Concentrated Hydrochloric acid. "Luckily" the student managed to catch most of the spray with his body (lab coat) and was able to quickly run over to the shower to get it off him while the other students suffered only slight irritation from the Chlorine vapours. -Don't overcrowd a fume hood -Keep good grip on your equipment.

When I was in my first organic chemistry classes, the teacher was fanatical about lab safety. I'm glad! We all had to submit abbreviated SDS sheets for every chemical in our lab, alongside re-written instructions in our own words, and if something was missing we had to correct it and resubmit for her approval. (Sometimes this happened DURING lab time, and that would piss her off.) AND she made sure it was a part of our grade to have all of these organized in a lab binder--if you were even missing a title page, it wasn't getting full marks. Though small stuff like that, at least she let us correct it. Notably, she never curved her grades. Most of us "passed" the class with D's. Some brilliant accelerated student in our class once did so well on an exam (over 100%), that the professor had been considering curving the exam for the first time but had no way to once she saw how ridiculously high his score would have become. Everyone was FURIOUS. She was stingy but, she pushed us to be our best! Rock on Dr. Ripper! (Yeah, that was REALLY her name.)

I had a nmr tube with nickel tetracarbonyl in d6 dmso shatter in my hand and it went all up my wrist. Luckily it was very dilute (also deadly in contact with skin) but i had a strong flavour in my mouth for a while after from the dmso