I get all my chemistry knowledge from this channel, and so far I've learned that I should stay the fuck away from the chemistry department. As a theoretical physicist they only let me have a pen, but I'm sure one of these days I'll manage to poke my eye out with it.
Please also check out the other chemistry channels I link on my channel page! There are lots of other great channels on YT with awesome videos for you to explore!
Honestly, staying away from the chem department is generally a good idea unless you’re a chemist. I was a chemical engineer who did some collars with chemistry, and the synthesis labs were crazy. We worked with analytics chemists (mass spec and the like) and they were a bit cleaner.
Shoes glued to the floor by a flammable solvent is a pain . Shoes glued to the floor and the vapor finding an ignition source is terrifying . I recall another student getting " glue trapped " , didn't realize it , tried to turn and walk , and promptly fell breaking both his ankles and his wrist . Another student had walked behind him while carrying an overfull acetone bath , sloshing acetone everywhere . He had not noticed as he was busy watching his own fume hood . Her excuse was she set up the bath before she realized her fume hood had no power so just decided to move to another one , all while rocking out / dancing while listening to her Walkman . Thankfully , no ignition of the acetone vapors , but the guy was out for 6 weeks and she transferred to a different school a week later , a move that was celebrated , as she had been responsible for a litany of other , though less spectacular , incidents . The guy still walks with a limp 40 years later . It only takes one careless person or one single thoughtless action to cause a lifetime of pain and misery . The chemicals are all known compounds and do just what they do . People , on the other hand , are the single deadliest , volatile , and , wildly unpredictable substance you will ever be exposed to . This includes each and every one of us at one point or another . I do not enjoy these videos just from the " car crash " perspective , I also value the safety lessons , hard learned though they may be .
Solvent spills can make rubber shoe soles either slippery or sticky depending on amount or how long you stand in them. Either way, it can easily cause a fall.
@@That_Chemist FWIW they fall into the same niche as the USCSB disaster recreation animations, where it's interesting intellectually to see how things failed but also occasionally completely fucking horrifying.
I worked for a group that solved tricky problems. One time we got a call that an old torpedo from WW2 had been found in a harbor by some divers. From the description we deduced the type and model of the torpedo - it was one that had a large (500kg?) picric acid warhead. We said - no problem it can be dealt with in place thinking it was still underwater. They replied - OK we hauled it up in the beach to dry out. Ugh.
@@brettcoles6462 also, what I already knew, and the numerous times that the media has shared unexploded ordnance over the years. The time they found that Tall Boy bomb from WW2 in a river...if some diver had started messing with it O.O
Re: the shoe story. I know it's not common to wear work boots in the lab in academia, but I highly recommend it. In my current industry job, I'm on my 4th pair of boots in 3 years. One pair was replaced because the back gave out and they lost structural integrity, but 2 were replaced because the soles got worn down to the point that the metal between the shoe and the sole was showing. Chemicals can absolutely destroy boots, look after your feet and wear steel toe-capped work boots if you can. If you're trained in moving and using cylinders at your university, you absolutely should be given a pair and please put in a request for some if you are not.
I also regularly work with chloroform, and as uncomfortable as they are, I definitely appreciate my workplace issuing us with safety shoes. Saves the frustration of having to hunt for shoes with stitched soles. As a related story, my lab goggles once melted because I placed them right next to a 100 mL volumetric flask of chloroform which promptly began to develop a crack for no apparent reason and spilling it all over the desk I was working on. Good thing it was only a small quantity but it made quite a mess.
To my knowledge, for example, the kilo of dental glue that the dentist uses to fill holes can cost up to a million. Not because the chemicals are so expensive, but because of all the insurance, the small but costly production, and so on.
Two picric acid stories. One of the biology profs at my undergrad college found an old, and crispy dry, one pound bottle of picric acid stored in a retired prof's office. She thought it would look good on a shelf in her office. Another faculty member noticed the bottle and immediately called the local bomb squad, who shut down the building for an afternoon, while they very carefully transferred it to a blast resistant container and then removed it from campus. Also while in college, I gave a "chemical magic" demo. Along with some boring stuff (ammonia fountain, sterno prep, ammonium dichromate volcano), I also did a few more energetic demos, including thermite and potassium chlorate/white phosphorus tablets. The big bang though was from lead picrate, which was made (from a spatula tip each of yellow lead oxide and picric acid) mixed in a steel crucible and heated with a Bunsen burner. Made a pretty good bang and left a large bulge in the steel crucible.
Chloroform melted the bottom of my shoe as well once, I was pouring it into a sep-funnel and forgot the stopcock open... I didn't know Chloroform was pouring out after 5 seconds. When I saw it, I immediately closed the stopcock and when I looked at the bottom of my shoe felt gummy and soft. The lesson is, always triple-check your stopcock to ensure it's closed! It's such an amateur mistake that I think nearly everyone experienced
Ah, the good old stopcock oopsie. Happened to me too, but instead of a sep funnel I was filling up an addition funnel in my undergrad org labs (Grignard). Many years later, I still double-check like it happened yesterday haha
@@pipariini This happened to me in an addition funnel with HCl, poured all over my hotplate (I cleaned & polished it tho) It's such an easy thing to forget for beginners! I still check as well after the trauma from cleaning my hotplate
I was once making some copper chloride for a customer. I had just finished building my lab (no longer have this facility) and didn't have everything put away yet. The copper chloride and HCl solution was in a beaker on a hotplate while the water was being driven off at about 80°c-ish. This was a 250ml heavy walked beaker. I forget what I was doing, probably putting something away, but I ended up tripping over the hotplate cord without realizing what I had tripped over. The cord was very long for some reason and dangled off the side of the bench and onto the floor. Both the hotplate and the hot solution of copper chloride and HCl came tumbling down. Now, I had eye protection on. But.... It splashed my face a tiny amount, not enough to cause any real damage to my skin. Except, it .ade it's way into my right eye. Somehow, a drop of the hot solution splashed up and under my safety glasses and into my eye. It instantly started burning and stinging and even with having an eye wash station nearby and immediately going for that and washing my eye for well over 10 minutes, it was still burning badly after that. For 3 days I couldn't open my right eye and I still to this day have a blurry spot in the center of my vision from the right side. From that point on I used only goggles. Never again will I trust just safety glasses to protect my eyes. That, and all cords are now taken care of before any experiments/syntheses even start to take place. PS:. I also have an extremely scary story to tell about an accident with about 5-7g of white phosphorus. I'll tell it one day soon, but for now I'll leave you in suspense. Lol
Do you have any suggestions for fog protection? Having to where goggles is synonymous with not being able to see what I'm doing, how Is that more safe?
@@petevenuti7355 I definitely know what you mean. Finding anti fog goggles is a must, but sometimes even that's not enough. I've found that, if it will adhere to the surface properly, RainX(or however it's spelled), the stuff that you spray on a windshield to make watwr bead off of it, actually works somewhat well on mine. Maybe give that a shot? Worst that could happen is it could maybe discolor the lense, so test it on a small patch of it first. Like the corner or something.
@@BackYardScience2000 I've had bad luck with Rain-X, God forbid you get something else on them and you have to clean that, ya end up with an emultion like Mayo... I was thinking to actually ,on purpose, frost/etch the lenses, & make them extra hydrophilic, it seems counterintuitive but that way they get clear when they get wet... That's the theory I have not yet tested anyway... I've been talking to a few manufacturers bucking for some free samples first 😜
8:51 most expensive stuff in our work is probably Lipofectamine RNAiMAX, which we use as positive control for RNA knockdown experiments. Just last week I placed an order for 0.75mL, which cost 734€. If you disregard bulk discounts that's basically 1 million for 1L.
Speaking of hexavalent chromium and carinogenicity: When I was in school ('60's to '70's) a really popular demo or project for science classes was the ammonium dichromate volcano. You would make a cone, maybe about a foot in diameter and similar height, from chicken wire and plaster of paris, with an old tin can (well, tin plated steel if we want to be chemically accurate) in the middle, and usually paint it black so the whole thing was a reasonable model of a volcano. Then you would put ammonium dichromate in the can and light it on fire. It would make quite an impressive shower of sparks and lots of smoke, leaving a fine layer of ash in the vicinity and in the can, likely full of nice carincogenic chromium compounds. The ammonium dichromate was a bright orange color. The ash after it had all burned up was green (some oxide of chromium probably). It was a far different era from now. I don't think bicycle helmets even existed then, and even if they did, I'm sure any kid that wore one would have been teased mercilessly. I am still alive, but considering some of the stuff that I did in childhood, both school sanctioned and otherwise, I'm not quite sure how.
The green stuff is Cr2O3. My high school chemistry teacher used to do that exact experiment in a lecture hall but I'm pretty sure this has been discontinued. Inhaling Cr(VI) dusts is obviously not good for you.
I imagine that the most expensive chemical class per unit of mass would be purified biologic chemicals, particularly peptides and protiens. The splicing reagents for genetic manipulation are probably the most costly of all of them, micrograms worth over a grand kinda prices 😲
Years ago, I worked for a clinical chemistry company, making a range of blood test reagents. The most expensive was the reagent mixture for testing amylase. The active enzyme ingredient, PNPG7, is astronomically expensive, and extremely sensitive to amylase, obviously. Full protection was required, and a clean, dry room, less than 5% rh. I liked doing it in the middle of the night, with no one around, I felt like Jesse mucking around in the meth lab in Breaking Bad, lol.
You mentioned Recycling Centers....I visit a local salvage yard for fun on my lunch break sometimes, about a year and a half ago I dropped in with my dad and started digging through the newly dropped pallets. He ended up finding two brown bottles packed carefully with cardboard and MSDS paperwork. One was dibutyl ether, the other was some horrible chromium/lithium compound. I cant recall the name, but I remember a distinct shudder of "this is cancer in a jar". We told the yard guy about the bottle, he said he'd send it back to whomever they bought the scrap from. I bought the bottle of ether 10$. I did some O-chem, chemistry stuff is fun. Having a 2L bottle of solvent sounded like it could be neat. After I read up on how dangerous peroxide formation in ethers is, and with a bottle of 3~ year old ether sitting in the garage, I did the only reasonable responsible thing I could come up with. I drove it to the nearest refuse center and dropped it off at the 'Household Chemicals' building. Someone else probably bought that bottle from the center within a week of me dropping it off. At least I labeled 5 faces of the box with "Explosion Hazard: No Touchy" before 'disposing' of it.
When I was in my senior year of undergrad, there was a -20C freezer in the lab that was quite icy. There was a day that it got so icy that the door wouldn't close properly, so I used a spatula to chisel away some ice. A professor I knew happened to pass by and asked what I was doing. Then she proceeded to tell me a weird story from when she was a PhD student. Apparently, she saw another PhD student doing a very similar thing as me, chiseling away at a freezer. When asked, that student responded by saying that his protocol needed some dry ice so he was getting some from deep inside the freezer where the ice was dry... That student somehow managed to graduate. The freezer that I chiseled was defrosted the day after.
Also a short story from the same, final year of my undergrad. I had a fun lab course where we were given unknown chemicals and we had to identify what they were. I was quite confident that my #1 unknown was t-butylamine from the smell and some of its other physical properties. I thought distilling it and finding its boiling point would give me another piece of concrete evidence of its identity - our prof reminded us that there could be some impurities in our samples (which was the case for one of my other unknowns). The distillation was uneventful, with me finding out that the unknown has a boiling point of 45C, showing that it was t-butylamine. However, I just had to think that the first few drops coming out of the distillation may be unpure so it would be a good idea to give it a deep sniff. It was apparently quite pure and I could feel the burn reaching all the way down my respiratory tract... I was apparently fine otherwise and I hoped I didn't end up with lasting damage.
When i was 15,i was really into chemistry,so as with all irresponsible 15 year olds,i decided to mess around with butane along with some friends.What i used to do is take those butane canisters intended for camp stoves and such, poked a hole in them(not too big,not too small)and put the butane in a soda bottle,which should be sufficient to contain the pressure.So while messin around with a half-filled(closed) butane soda bottle i poke a small hole in the side and a stream of high pressure butane came out,my dumbass thought lighting it on fire would be cool,so i did that and it was a cool high pressure flame,if left at that,nothing bad would have happened other than a hard time to extinguish, but i also decided to give the flaming bottle to one of my friends friend and i specifically told him at least 4 times "whatever you do,DO NOT open the bottle cap".He opened the bottle cap...In the aftermath,his parents called my parents and i was in big trouble,i also had most of the burns,he didnt have many,lucky bastard,i was blamed to hell, although i didn't cause the disaster first hand,my lips and part of my face had 1st degree burns for a week or so.Quite a lesson to learn
5:28 having worked some years in automotive, yeah. That sounds right. Most places just put the amalgamation in a barrel and have the oil recycler guy haul them off once a month, but there are a few that... don't... You wouldn't believe some of the stuff gets washed down sewer pipes or to the nearest storm drains. Some larger cities can take chemicals, like glycol, down a drain, and the waste treatment plant will recover it. but if you don't know where the drain goes, don't.
Yeah, most storm drains go the nearest large body of water, bypassing sewage treatment. Your drinking water will most likely come from that same body of water. Think about that the next time you get the urge to dump something iffy on the ground or down that storm drain.
The dissolving shoe one brings back memories. I was in an undergrad organic chemistry lab and we were working with toluene as a solvent. I managed to spill some on the lab bench and didn't notice. Later, my my mechanical pencil rolled into the puddle. When I grabbed the pencil, it had partially dissolved and long strings of plastic connected it to the bench. I had to borrow a pen for the rest of the lab. Always check for spills and clean them up!
Bro the USCSB videos are absolute bangers dude. I got all my coworkers hooked on them, we watch them at lunch. We don't even work with chemicals, we're an IT company lmao.
my friend worked at a place that used supercritical co2 to extract THC from weed. anyway, they dropped a cylinder of CO2 and it made 2 holes in the roof. like it went through the roof, flew higher then came back down through the roof again.
one time me and a friend found an old factory. We were extremely happy and started to play with chemicals, little did we know that diethyl ether(from 1998-9) can form peroxide. So ,we combine a loot of salts and burn them,BUT BUT we forgot to close the bottle and for 1 and a half hour we intoxicate ourselves with a exposive peroxide (the flames were touching the bottle) also there they were poorly stored chemicals acids,potassium perm,salts, etc. SULFURIC ACID RIGHT NEXT TO POTASSIUM PERM.
Today’s valuable lesson: be patient with mercury syringes, especiall if it has a needle. I was trying to get the mercury in the needle back to the glass it was stored in, the needle hapoened to have come off, yeeting the mercury into the glass piece and ejecting and spraying a bunch of mercury right back into my face. At least my mouth was shut, but because this happened in a physics experiment, for some reason I did not wear face or eye protection. Always. Wear. Face protection.
The safest way to do home chemistry is just watching videos on RU-vid of experiments performed by professionals. Period. And when using household chemicals like those for cleaning, read the safety labels on the back of the bottle and only use those products the way they were intended to be used and as instructed by the product label. When curiosity overcomes common sense, bad things happen. Also, if you do find yourself in a chemical laboratory or anywhere around unknown substances or chemicals, just assume they'll kill you in the worst ways possible or ruin the rest of your life and/or destroy property and avoid them unless instructed by a professional and wearing proper PPE.
So many of the stories in this series remind me of my own chemical misadventures. The barbecue dust fire at 3:28 reminds me of a time when I saw something going very wrong and didn't have time to do anything about it. I was getting ready to grill with my friend. My friend was trying to get a bag of old, slightly damp charcoal started in one of those kettle-style grills. He was *very* generous with the lighter fluid. Because the charcoal was damp, the lighter fluid was only burning slowly. For some reason, he closed the lid (maybe to keep the heat in). No dice. But when he opened the lid again, a thick white plume of vaporized lighter fluid billowed up from beneath the lid and promptly ignited into a meter-wide fireball. Luckily, my friend had the lid as a shield, and only lost some hair on his arm and got some blisters. Needless to say, vapor-cloud fires are no joke either.
I remember in highschool I was fascinated with the reaction between aluminum foil and HCl. My dad had a gallon of 35% HCL leftover from a project and needed to get rid of it. So my friend and I went to the woods and had some fun with gatorade bottles, HCl, and aluminum foil. Being kids, it wasn't long before we decided to make it more exciting. So I assembled a pressure container from a section of 4" PVC pipe 2 endcaps, and returned to the woods. We filled the pipe halfway with acid (probably 1qt or so), chucked in a big roll of aluminum foil, and quickly superglued the PVC cap on. After 2 minutes, nothing had happened. 2 more minutes go by, still nothing. So my friend throws a rock at it, and it explodes with a huge bang sending PVC shrapnel everywhere, along with a fine mist of acid. We were extremely lucky to not get hit with any flying chunks, and there was a pond nearby we were able to rinse off in.
I've been looking at this thumbnail for about a month without watching this video, and I still completely dumbfounded by it WHY DOES SHE HAVE A BACKWORDS FOOT! WHY IS THE JAR FLOTING!
in my pchem lab there are 3 bottles; nitrogen, argon and CO2. they are secured to a table by a pair of straps attached to a c clamp, tightly clamped to a table. the 2 TA's were testing them on wednesday, to see if the apparatus was working, and kept releasing argon into the room. every time my lungs felt weird i went outside for a second and held the door open so nobody passed out. later, they were having difficulty unscrewing a coupling from a detached depressurized hose . i offered them some help but they said i couldn't because it was "dangerous". they called in the professor, and he tried it, then realized the two of them were trying to unscrew by turning it clockwise after i asked if it might be left-hand-threaded. the professor is a great guy, and he seems a lot more safety conscious than these 2, but i bet my bottom dollar i'm gonna have some stupid story about them before the end of the semester. one of them tried to tell me to read a vernier scale off of "the first one that lines up". despite the instructions on the desk next to her directly contradicting that.
1st story goes hard. "I thought the chromium trioxide and solvents would explode so I mixed those things" Also you're clearly upping your thumbnail game.
7:59 That explains a lot...... And I always wondered why my shoes would fall apart back when I was in undergrad Chemistry and having a lot of lab couses to attend.
I work at a small biochem startup that makes fluorescent dyes. I synthesized something from fluorescein the other day that sells for $300 per uMol. So, it’s safe to say that it would sell for a lot of money if I had more than 150 migs of it, but the company was still making like a hundred grand from that one reaction and purification.
a fun kind of chemistry thing I did when I was younger: I learned that the acid produced by plaque bacteria if you collect enough can eat through clothing.
@@That_Chemist yep tho I wasnt following the scientific method at the time and only tested it on pure cotton clothing and nothing with polyester or the like.
Not a chemist, but a chef. Had a dishwasher way back who was told to clean the women's restroom at a restaurant I used to work at which was absolutely filthy. Halfway through he decides that the ammonia based floor cleaner he was using to mop wasn't strong enough and decided it would be a good idea to pour half a bottle of bleach in his mop bucket... 5 minutes later he comes out of the bathroom like he'd been sunburned and hacking his lungs out wondering what went wrong...
@@That_Chemist He was fine half an hour later, but I had to explain to him that he just chlorine gassed himself and that he should never, under any circumstances, mix any chemicals in the kitchen. We've got some pretty nasty stuff like Carbon-off with nasty things like Dichloromethane and Butoxyethanol, Grease stripper plus which is basically just a 10% sodium hydroxide gel, the dish machine cleaner is just a puck of solid sodium hydroxide, lime away which has nitric acid in it, and peroxide cleaners that come concentrated to 8% before being mixed. I am so glad that I took advanced chem in high school, I've probably stopped a dozen of my coworkers from gassing themselves and the restaurants I've worked in at this point. At one point a supervisor poured some drain cleaner down a floor sink and when it started stinking came back with 3 bottles of bleach to pour down... barely stopped her before she did, and found the drain cleaner had sulfuric acid in it.
8:55 I was working in a covid PCR lab and the primer and mastermix solutions were like ... 50 ml for €10k ? Somewhere in that area. That kinda stuff is incredibly expensive.
Even iron dust can catch fire. I read an accident report about a foundry which had extremely poor cleaning habits so iron dust was on every surface. One day during hot work a nearby hydrogen line ruptured and deflagrated causing a lot of dust to be disturbed and fall into the hydrogen flame. The resulting inferno caused extensive damage to the building and iirc it gave a couple workers extremely bad burns.
Anti-acne medication here in the U.S. costs like $700 per small tube of the stuff, Maybe not $1M per liter, but still *very* expensive without good insurance
I would imagine the work boots with oil resistance would work pretty good in the lab environments. Also most of the manufacturers will repair your boots if they need be. That's a complete guess by me, but I would imagine oil on your boot wouldn't be good for the glue either. Considering the similar problem maybe the solution works for both, or they might have specifically something for the chemical industry.
Oil resistant doesn't necessarily mean solvent resistant. Nitrile and neoprene are both quite resistant to petroleum products, even gasoline but dissolve readily in chorinated sovents, acetone, etc.
@@russlehman2070 I did a little bit of research, the work boot/shoes manufacturers do make chemistry specific version. Apparently it depends on the manufacturer how they organized and labeled. Getting something specifically designed for your use case is probably going to work better than, I know this exists so it might be worth a try. They're bit on the pricey side but considering most come with a warranty and have repair services I might just be cheaper in the long run. More or less the work boot / shoe manufacturers are really just foot PPE manufacturers for different industries. If you have a particular requirement for foot protection they probably make a version for that. The reason why I thought of the oil version is one of my buddies from high school is a large engine diesel tech. I've seen him literally covered in oil multiple times and the solvents they use. My reasoning was if they can survive years of him they might have a decent chance of not falling apart in the lab. Now that I'm aware they make Labs specific versions those would probably work better.
@@That_Chemist apparently they do I just wasn't aware of it. In hindsight I knew they make ESD specific variants, Specific variants to resist oil field work and automotive work, I should have guessed they have chemical industry ones.
We used to use a protein called Rank Ligand, which activates Nf - kappaB signalling in macrophages, among other cells. At the time, iirc, the market value of the stuff was somewhere around $100/10 ng. We needed perhaps 100+ MILLIGRAMS of it in our research every year. So we would make our own using bacteria, and purify it on a column. It was always fun, making a minimum of $500,000 dollars of material in maybe 10-20 mls of liquid. Concentrated, it would just have been a small pellet at the bottom of the tube.
I burnt my arm with steam reaching over the kettle to get the coffee jar this morning 😂 I definitely never want to be handling anything dangerous as I’m sure my own stupidity would kill me haha
So, a good example of something where a liter would be worth an unreasonable amount of money would be the medication Veletri, Epoprostenol, for consistent infusion, for treatment of things like Pulmonary Hypertension. For the end user in Oregon, the total cost is about $10000 per milligram, and is held in .1 milligram vials for mixing into sterile water. A fairly high, but standard enough, is 1 milligram per .1 liters, which makes a liter of that solution worth roughly a million dollars, and would last ten days.
similar story here, i had made and distilled some chloroform to synthesize chlorobutanol, i so happened to have my laptop sitting on the table that i was working on and i accidentally knocked over the bottle of chloroform, i noticed very quickly and caught it, but a tiny amount spilled out of the bottle and landed on my laptop. i went and grabbed a towel to wipe it up with and when i came back, the chloroform had completely eaten through the parts of my laptop where i spilled it. i had to replace the keyboard because of this which was not cheap, but thankfully i didnt get any on me. it was this day that i learned that chloroform completely eats through plastics and a lot of other substances.
Whats up with people thinking that bleach and ammonia or amines make mustard? Like where do the ethyl chains come from and why is that magical ethyl chain chlorinated
I too had an interesting incident involving chromium trioxide. I was in the lab watching a new person working, but had not yet put my lab coat on. The new person was working with hot chromic acid. He had slipped while holding a beaker of the chromic acid and spilled some on my shirt which was cotton. My shirt of course started smoking, I got it off quick. Although I don't believe any chemistry got on my skins, I did get a little scar from what I believe was the heat created by the chromic acid-cotton reaction.
5:20 it's also the German word for eggs so may just be German as well, no clue how to dispose of chemical waste here tho outside of laboratory settings
A flour or other dust explosion is called a thermobaric conflaguration, and is the third most powerfull explosive in the world, only fusion and fission bombs are more destructive pound for pound.
