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For those who are uninitiated and asking how tf the blood sacrifice story counts as chempolation: watch the previous one that contains "blood" in the title
@@minusstage3 I always thought joking about pipetting by mouth was just that, a joke, because it was so ridiculously and obviously dangerous it seemed unthinkable that it would be standard procedure anywhere. Until I watched this channel. It should come as no surprise though. I was just writing another comment about how I read that a lot of famous "fathers of chemistry" from the 19th century and before usually had some sort of eye damage or vision impairment because eye protection wasn't a thing and accidents were pretty common. I wish I could give specific names, but I read this years ago. I recall there were quite a few of them associated with attempts at isolating elemental fluorine. As one can well imagine, many accidents happened with that before they figured out how to handle it safely. Again, with no eye protection.
@@ano_nymI mean, at least it mist be efficient. A bit deadly, but that allows your colleagues to observe the effects of the chemical for the meagre sacrifice of your life. What a hero 🤧 /j
To people who wear glasses, it is worth biting the bullet and buying a set of certified prescription goggles or glasses. Removes a lot of the hesitation to wear them all the time when you know you won’t get fog (with over glasses) or to have blurry vision by not wearing your prescription glasses.
I had the opportunity to get a pair at an internship I did once. Unfortunately they required your prescription to be within a year or so and mine was just a couple months out of date.
I feel a need to add: When opting for the $200-ish ballistic-rated lenses, *maybe* don't get the cheapest frames on the logic that the only frames at the same matching protection-rating are $400+ and 'oversized' aviators already cover the whole orbit/socket. While the lenses did keep a flying battery(?) from gouging out my eye, I have slight scarring from where the shattered bits of eye-glass-frames hit my face around the lenses (and a small recurring discount at a now defunct shop.) They called paramedics before I realised my vision was being obscured by blood in the way ... Funny thing is that I distinctly remember having trouble seeing out of my left eye when it I tried to get back up, after looking around for the rest of my glasses on my own; But I keep the surviving part of the frames next to my monitor, and it's the right side that's missing. (Which I guess explains why I could see 'better' once the concerned manager found it for me; LOL. Both the lenses were fine, btw.)
While performing research in the chemistry building on the weekend, a coworker and myself noticed smoke and smelled the typical burnt capacitor smell of an electrical fire. We grabbed the CO2 extinguisher and followed the smoke to the top floor, where a rotovaporator unit was smoking. We unplugged the unit and the smoke dissipated, so no need for the extinguisher. It was not operating in a fume hood, so there was no reason to suspect anything dangerous in the flask. We both went back to work (about 10 AM). By 11 we saw a crowd gathering across the parking lot with police and fire trucks. We decided to take an early lunch and check out the “event”. As we left the building, a security guard said to us “You can’t go in there. There is a fire in that building!” After discussion with the members of the fire department, we learned that they were unaware that people did research in the chemistry building of a major research university on weekends and at night. They had simply posted guards at the doors to keep people out, while around a hundred graduate students labored inside. It made for an interesting discussion with the safety committee.
On a note about the H2O2 rat, I'm pretty sure cells also have peroxidases, so, in addition to the metal catalyst, you also have quite a bunch of enzymes speeding its decomposition up as well
Most of the peroxidase is probably the myeloperoxidase from leukocytes which shouldn’t make up too much of the total blood volume and also feel like they shouldn’t be stable for long in 90% H2O2 but I guess nature has done much stranger things
there's also the fact that 90% H2O2 is basically hypergolic with almost anything organic, setting it on fire and feeding said fire with shit ton of O2...in a *big* tank of peroxide, the rat must've literally vaporized
If you have H2O2 that is that concentration, you don't even "need no steenkin' catalyst". Foul language, passing gas nearby, shutting the door too hard, moonlight from a window shining on it, or even a butterfly in Costa Rica can cause concentrated H2O2 decomposition.....🙃😜
Absolutely. As a kid, I was into acetylene/oxygen explosions. I got acetylene from calcium carbide + water. I generated oxygen from drug-store 3% hydrogen peroxide with a bit of freshly chopped beef liver (which is loaded with peroxidase) in a tied up piece of cloth (like a tea bag, to keep the liver bits from plugging up the gas lines). Usually filled up two liter PET bottles, but did a five gallon polyethylene "beer ball" (basically a disposable mini-keg) once.
The peroxidases will most likely not last long before being destroyed by oxidization. But as joeylawn stated, just starting anything in there could cause violent decomposition of the H2O2.
To the dead cat delivery story. In high school, we lived in a dorm, where a whole floor shared a refrigerator. Since our biology teacher had a very hands-on method, he would let us dissect anything, we could get our hands on. We had a guy in our class, who was hunting at the time, and would bring us anything we wanted. We had only one slight problem, that our biology classes were not on mondays, and he also lived in the student hostel, with us. Everyone soon learned, that if there is a big black plastic bag in there, they should not open it.
I had an excellent teacher for high-school chemistry. He'd been an industrial chemist before becoming a teacher, so he had lots of good stories and took us on a field trip to the local cellulose acetate plant (which was quite an olfactory experience). Also he had an excellent tremendous beard. Depending on one's tastes, the worst dangers in class (or one of the best!) was that he also played in a bluegrass band. And so he on occasion brought in a guitar and serenaded us and the rest of the school with things like a love song between a chlorine atom and a sodium atom, featuring a chorus about "I'll change your name from Chlorine to Chloride." Apparently someone else's rendition of that one is now on RU-vid, titled "Sodium Chloride: A Love Song of Science," for the rest of you. He also was fond of doing the acetylene-in-a-balloon demonstration. He'd start by filling a balloon with hydrogen and demonstrating the squeaky "pop" that it made when ignited. He may have also done methane; I'm not sure. And then he would have all of us except for him and one brave student line up on the far side of the classroom from the fume hood, and we also brought in the students from the other three classrooms in that building, and he would drop a bit of calcium choride and water into a balloon and seal it. He had a long wick in the end of a yardstick so you could reach around a corner with it, and he and the student would take cover around the side of the fume hood and someone would turn out the lights and he'd light the wick and the student would carefully reach around the side of the fume hood with the yardstick and set off the balloon. It was a very very satisfying kaboom. And then a couple of years later I started college freshman-year chemistry, did the first lab class which involved experimentally determining the density of lead (I think) by taking a bunch of small lead shot and weighing it in a beaker and then adding water up to a fixed level and re-weighing it. I looked at the experimental results, observed that they were nowhere near accurate, wrote up a rather snarky lab report in which I used the measurements to calculate something *actually* unknown -- namely, the amount of water clinging to the obviously-still-very-wet-from-the-last-lab lead shot -- and figured out how to test out of the class.
Fun fact about the superbug-colonized soap - we were told at Medical Hygiene class that bacteria, when exposed to the same antibacterial compounds over a lot of generations, they start to develop resistances the same way they become antibiotic-resistant. The janitor skimps out on the disinfecting solution and makes it more dilute - a good recipe for a hospital outbreak. The hospital uses the same solution for more than a year - same here.
Living tissues (including rat blood) also have catalase, which is an enzyme that destroys hydrogen peroxide. Part of our defense against reactive oxygen species. My guess is that most of the hydrogen peroxide decomposition was from catalase, not the iron. You can test this yourself - saliva contains plenty catalase. Or take a potato and grate it. Or carrots. Carrots would work fine.
Not necessary for 90% peroxide. NINETY! That stuff is quite willing to blow up on its lonesome, let alone when provoked by a ratful of fuel in its lake of oxidizer.
The first one was simply a loose electrical connection. When banging on something that's electronic, and it's "magically" fixed, it's just an open circuit being closed.
For what it's worth most "paper jam" detectors use photo emitter and detector pairs which either use the paper itself or a small piece of plastic on a hinge as an interruptor. The paper dust that accumulates in a printer is good at both making it hard for the hindged plastic to rotate freely, and good at blocking the light on the optical pairs. Canned air Is usually a quick fix. Don't be the guy who feeds the printer crumpled sticker labels, nor the guy who feeds the scanner stapled papers.
So Monday two weeks ago, we had Chem lesson in the morning and then Italian (which was cancelled) so i decided to stay in the chemistry room to finish sorting the funny plastic molecule building set ( we had like 500 Atoms). When we would have had Italian afterwards, the ninth graders ( i am 10th) had chemistry there. Them being absolutely bored by the lesson, i thought it would be a fun experiment doing the KMnO4+H2SO4. The teacher sad yes, and i proceeded to put the reaction together in the fume hood ( wearing glasses ofc). Then i went and grabbed some petrol to burn and i apparently made a bit too much of the Mn2O7 so it made a phoomp and a bit of a mess in the hood. Now the ninth graders are interested in chemistry. But please don't repeat after me!
Yeah I would be reluctant to teach kids how to do reckless experiments - it’s actually astonishing how many hazardous chemicals people just have all the time
My uncle was a mason, so he mixed and laid a lot of cement and concrete. He also worked with all different sorts of knuckleheads, including one that apparently didn't realize that Portland Cement is fairly caustic. Lost all the skin on his feet.
I never get tired of these Chempolation videos, they also keep reminding me of my own lab stories, though all of mine are from commercial laboratories and here are a couple more: 1: The past couple of videos have mentioned a 'chem pit' which are all well and good if you're the ones making it and at least have an idea what's in it, less so when you inherent one along with the building that will house your laboratory. The first instance of this was very mild, mainly solvent based paint all of which was in labeled containers left over by the building contractors. The second was far more troublesome. In this case the previous occupants ran a Biosafety Level-3 facility and had all the necessary infrastructure, unfortunately that is an extremely expensive investment and the company went into liquidation after only a few years of operations. The lab was shutdown with the liquidators effectively telling the staff to put down their pens and pipettes, grab their personal belongings and vacate the premises. I cannot comment on what happened after that, though the building was raided by rather unscrupulous scrap collectors who looted most of the external metal infrastructure as well as over 50% of the copper piping, given the state of the building when we moved in. This brings me to the chem pit, which was housed in what was affectionately called the 'Breaking Bad' room. As part of the chemistry department, I was assigned by the site manager to catalogue it's contents so we could arrange for collection and disposal. While containing a large amount of non or low hazardous waste, it also composed of, amongst other things, 175 litres of concentrated sulphuric acid, over 200 litres of 35% Sodium Hydroxide solution, 50 liters of 25% ammonia solution, a bottle of 32% formaldehyde and a bottle of metal pickling paste which contains both nitric and hydrofluoric acid. Thankfully most of this stuff was bunded and has since been properly disposed of. So going back the looted pipes, well turns out the Bromine Barium room was part of the on-site water treatment facility, it was a level-3 after all, and tracing the remaining pipes, some of the looted sections came from the acid/base lines... 2: In your previous Chempolation video you mentioned a responsible person or persons 'who wares the pants in the lab' I happen to be one of those, given I made bromoacetone in an uncontrolled manner once, so you can say I am a poacher turned gamekeeper. One of the analytical methods we currently perform is the Volhard test to determine the concentration of water soluble halide salts in a sample. The samples are prepared by boiling them in a mixture of silver nitrate solution and nitric acid with the extraction always performed in a fumehood. Being experienced in this method, I am aware of what happens when their is an excess of nitric acid and heat used in the extraction process, though I could not say the same about my co workers as fantastic as they are. When one noticed brown fumes coming off one of the reaction mixtures, they asked what was going on before making the mistake of removing the flask from the fumehood. Upon seeing this I told them to immediately put it back, before quenching the reaction with water and explaining about the release of nitrogen dioxide. I suppose it was a good way to remind the team what to do if that were to happen again.
In my B.Sc. honours project, one of the synthetic steps didn't work, but I wasn't familiar with the reaction to realize it, and my supervisor wasn't paying much attention. As I recall, I was trying to purify a product by recrystallization, and ended up with several litres of slightly-contaminated ethanol. I decided that rather than discarding it as organic waste, I could purify it by distillation and re-use it. So I followed all of the proper procedures: stirring plate, heating mantle, condenser, and a few boiling chips chucked in to allow smooth boiling. The first day went fine, and I collected about a litre and a half of ethanol before I shut everything down for the night. A moderate amount of crud had precipitated through the day, and more settled out overnight as the setup cooled. The next day, I restarted the setup, but even after the flask got quite hot, almost nothing was coming out. It occurred to me that the old boiling chips might have become coated with the crud, and therefore no longer effective. So I popped the top off the flask and tossed in a couple more of the chips. It turned out that my guess was correct... sort of. The flask was superheated, and the moment the new boiling chips hit the liquid, it fountained out of the flask. The ceiling was sprayed and the air filled with mostly-ethanol vapour. I held my breath while I made the decision: turn off the mantle and risk a spark that would ignite everything, or run and wait for the heat to start a fire? I opted to turn off the mantle before running. I guess I got lucky, since the only consequence was a really big cleanup job. And the long-standing stink from the thiols that had been spilled many years earlier mostly masked the smell from this new spill.
4:56 That is the most terrifying story I've heard in this series. Including the fatal ones. It's just such a visceral scene, and the way it's delivered is so vivid that I van almost sense all the shit everywhere.
Just this year a pretty bad accident happened at our uni, and it made me really glad that i chose not to pursue a carrier in chemistry. I wasn't even in the vicinity when it happened, and i only heardd it from some of my more chemically alligned friends at uni, so some of what i say might be wrong. Apparently the people in this lab were working on decontaminating cannisters who's original contents were unknown, and possibly quite dangerous. Well one of the cannisters still held quite a lot of pressure and it ruptured, not so violently as to blow up, but the person working with it still got a facefull of the gas that was inside. I don't know what the gas might have been, but it was deffinietly very corrosive, as the poor guy ended up with burns all over his face and airways. He had to be rushed to the nearest hospital unconcious and the other people working alongside him were allso affected, however not to the same extent. The whole building was closed down for the rest of the day and even the disaster controll had to get involved in the clean up. As far as i have been informed the guy did survive, but i'm not sure how well he recovered.
@@SuperAngelofglory a face full of anhydrous HF can be lethal, though most, if not all corrosive gases I know of are toxic. Still just reading this and I immediately think criminal negligence in terms of H&S.
@@SuperAngelofglory I actually looked this accident up and what I found seems to match Bence's narrative, however the institution involved did not, and to my knowledge, has not publicly stated what the chemicals were, though the responding NDDM later stated that multiple chemical substances were involved, initial media reports stated it was chlorine gas. The news snippet did not state the two exposed staff members suffered severe chemical burns, only that they inhaled the substance after opening a container and were taken to hospital. If it was chlorine or something similar, burns are indeed a possibility.
That glove rupture story reminds me of some of my near-misses in the lab. I work with diazonium salts, these react with aromatics to produce very strongly colored substances called azo dyes that can have some useful properties. I didn't notice a hole in my glove when I was pipetting some freshly synthesized diazonium salts into a reaction mixture. The vapor pressure build up inside the pipette caused a few drops to leak out onto my glove, and unbeknownst to me at the time, through a tear and onto my finger below. After I had finished pipetting, I saw my gloves were contaminated so I took them off to change them and saw the results. Despite my best attempts to wash my hands, there are aromatic side-chains in proteins, so the dye was now part of my skin. I didn't have any permanent damage, but I got the honor of walking around with a neon orange ring finger for a week or so. Similarly, be sure to choose the correct gloves, as nitrile doesn't do much to protect you from solvents like acetone. I learned this when I assigned an undergraduate to clean some SEM stubs. These are little aluminum stubs (they kinda look like large blunt thumb tacks) that have samples attached with carbon black loaded tape/paste to conduct electricity and allow you to do SEM. The paste was very sticky but pretty much instantly dissolved in acetone, so cleaning was actually quite easy. She cleaned a ton of stubs for me, maybe a hundred or so. Everything was good and merry, until she took off her gloves and her hands had these blue streaks running down them. I stood there stunned, trying to think what could have possibly caused this. I was about to call 911 when she laughed and said it was her nail polish. We checked the gloves and there were no holes that we could see, but the nail polish on every finger of both hands had been stripped and run down the backs of her hands. She had been soaking the stubs in a beaker of acetone, then reaching in to grab them and finish washing. The acetone apparently had sufficient time to penetrate the glove material and dissolve her nail polish after doing this a few dozen times. Thankfully the SEM samples were harmless so there was no lasting damage (aside from some lost fashion), but I made sure my undergrads knew to use forceps when cleaning stubs after this.
I feel like these stories put things into perspective lol, as a physics student I was scared of working with completely sealed-off minor radiation sources, and lasers that will damage your vision but only if you fire them straight into your eye, and blocks of solid lead just because lead is toxic, meanwhile chemists are working with liquids and gases that will straight up kill you if you screw up badly enough Also I only just realized “chempolation” is a play on “compilation”
My only lab story is when I was in high-school biology. We were doing a lab on a McDonald's meal, and we would switch stations or something I don't really remember. However what I do remember is that my group was at the station where we clean the tubes, and the sinks there were very powerful. One of my lab mates went to clean a test tube and turned the faucet to *FULL* *BLAST* and imagine his surprise when the test tube is completely eradicated from this dimension. We then always asked "Are you going to break another test tube" every time we met him, also he was a friend so we weren't just bullying a random kid lol.
Mercury aside, according to the alcohol thermometer article on alcohol thermometers: "The liquid used can be pure ethanol, toluene, kerosene or isoamyl acetate". Yummy!
The kids who drank the mercury probably are better off now given that they, at the time, were also likely suffering from tetraethyllead toxicity. Chelation could solve both.
The story about the PB&J is why in the medical field we always wash our hands IMMEDIATELY before donning gloves and IMMEDIATELY after doffing them. I’ve been working on a gastroenterology ward recently and I can’t imagine eating a peanut butter and c. diff sandwich.
The thermometer one is very common on old ships. I worked on a tanker with old alcohol filled compass and every so often we'd catch a cadet trying to smuggle one of them to their cabin.... It's the size of an office printer lol
The thermometer story reminds me of an event from my A-level chemistry days some 30 years ago. We were given Styrofoam cups to conduct a reaction in, and we had to measure the temperature. One of my classmates hadn't been given a thermometer, so he went and got a standard mercury thermometer rather than the high temperature thermometer the rest of us were using. The reaction mix melted the mercury thermometer, and the mercury then caused a breach in the styrofoam cup which dumped the extremely hot contents, and liquid mercury, all over the bench and floor, necessitating a large scale evacuation. Having had a couple of mishaps of my own over the two year course, I was just glad that it wasn't me that goofed that time!
On the subject of "opening pressurized vessels away from yourself": I'm not a chemist, but I was at high altitude (3400m) yesterday and I heated up a can of cooked salmon. Then I opened it without thinking about it and the combination of heat and low ambient pressure made it so as soon as I cracked the seal it proceeded to spray a ridiculous amount of boiling salmon juice on me.
Note: This didn‘t happen in my lab group but in my semester and was confirmed by the assistants. Back when we were doing qualitative analysis in the first semester, the first thing you had to do every godforsaken time, was doing the lead-cup test (Bleitiegelprobe in german, don‘t know if this translation is correct), to check the analysis for Fluoride. Basically, you add conc. sulphuric acid to protonate the fluorine (if it is present), it reacts with present silica. SiF4 rises up and and reacts with the water in a present black filter to reverse the reaction and leave behind a white stain of the SiO2. The thing was, we basically never had any Fluoride in our analyses, because HF=Bad, however, one girl had Fluoride in hers and while performing said test, she managed to somehow splash herself with the mixture of silica, conc. sulphuric acid and HF. In panic she ran to the assistant’s room to, I don’t know, check if she was going to die? Jokes aside, the assistants, not expecting anything like this to ever happen, tell her to get rid of as much of the liquid as soon as possible and called the prof. whose job it was to survey our lab course. When he was there, he was (for good reason) quite annoyed, checked if the girl was ok and told her she was probably fine because it wasn’t much and she got rid of it quickly. But then, when everything seemed to calm down, a second girl came screaming into the room because she splashed herself with the containments of her lead cup. Turned out, she didn’t have fluoride in it, so it was „just“ conc. H2SO4, however said professor was furious and was screaming at our assistants that they have to their job properly and how the fuck they managed to be so useless that the students obviously don’t know how to perform such a simple test. In their defence, I think it wasn’t their fault but just a queue of unfortunate events, as these were the only two out of 130 who failed this (relatively simple) test in the whole semester and their timing was just… unfortunate to say the least.
Found this one in a blog a decade or so ago. The wonderful tales of adventure and idiocy you purvey managed to shake it loose and provoke a hearty round of googling. In a response to the satanic abomination that is triply Flourinated Chlorine and how to deal with spills of it. (Running shoes.) Ah, the old sand bucket. Was out in the hall outside the undergraduate labs. Might have been there since benzene was linear. Top was decorated with cigarette butts, dried gum, bits of paper. Then one day down the hall the THF still is being cleaned out - long over due. Thick clumps of whatever ketyl becomes. Inside, a bright shiny prize of sodium metal that disagrees with the optimistic and impatient grad student's use of straight ethanol as cleaning aid. Fire erupts. Extinguished by CO2. Humid day, icy glass, beads of water form and follow gravity down. Into and onto sodium metal. Fire erupts. Extinguished by CO2. Repeat several times until it dawns that CO2 will eventually run out. Send terrified lab mate down the hall to fetch savior: Sand Bucket! Weight of bucket: about 200 lbs. Skinny grad student risks hernia rushing it back to lab, arrives exhausted, collapses in victory like Pheidippides. Firefighting grad student drops damned CO2 tank, plunges bare hand into sand bucket. Screams in pain - sand has been accreted by age into protoconcrete, impermeable to human flesh, spatulae, metal rulers, etc. Fire meanwhile burns itself out. Sand bucket replaced for next sucker.
So... about that "chemicals you don't know about"... My dad once asked me to polish some welded metal with some chemical. It was gel in a can labeled in German and Had no ingredients listed... I later checked the name and found out I had my hands splattered with Hydrofluoric acid for half an hour... and the smell... it didn't have smell, it registers as pain in smell receptors... fortunately I did it outside on windy day, so didn't breather it, just had accidental whiff once. would be nice to know what that was beforehand.
In middle school, two years older than my class (I thinkthey were in 8th grade/13-14yo at the time, the teacher had some mercury from a thermometer in a bowl as a demonstration. He got called away to deal with some minor emergency, and told the kids to wait for him, just don't drink the mercury or anything. Well he comes back and the mercury is gone, apparently one of the boys thought it would be hilarious to actually go ahead and drink it. Fortunately, the density of mercury meant that it left his system before his body had too long to absorb much - before the teacher got an answer from a Poison Control Center a wet patch appeared on the student's jeans. Fortunately, between how quickly the mercury left his system and the lower uptake of metallic mercury, there were no serious symptoms. But I can't imagine anything like this happening so casually in a middle school science class today.
@@MrKotBonifacy The alcohol may not have been ethanol, or may have been denatured. Mercury is still used today to extract gold from ore - the two form an amalgam, you separate the metallic gold from the mercury, and you get your mercury back with your gold (though it requires regular removal of other elements). Mercury became a very common medical treatment with the explosion of syphilis. Metallic mercury isn't taken up by the body very easily, even in gaseous/microlysed forms. It's still not *safe* - especially with repeated exposure over time - but it's nowhere near as bad as is often anticipated. The reason why I'm hesitant, however, is that organic mercury compounds (especially methylmercury and dimethylmercury) are taken up very quickly, and have strong harmful effects. It's possible for these compounds to form in situ, and is theoretically possible in the context of a stomach filled with acid/bile and food/drink being broken down. I'm guessing that's what happened with the lit cigarette dipped in mercury - heat, lots of potential candidates for a reaction with the mercury... There's still plenty that can go wrong when you start with elemental mercury. It might not be as bad as many mercury compounds, but it can be a step or two away from those compounds under some circumstances.
At one point I worked at a papermill that used a wet electrostatic precipitator for the exhaust for the power and recovery boilers. The resulting suspension was settled than distilled to concentrate it. The concentrated distillate was full of various mercaptans and other nastiness and possessed an odor most foul. During my stint there a colleague described how he had broken into a different colleagues vehicle and had liberally doused the interior with aforementioned distillate. He said it was in retribution for sleeping with his wife. The vehicle had to get disposed of in a junkyard as the smell became a permanent fixture.
When I was in my 1st year of my undergraduate degree we had a practical chemistry exam. We would go into the lab and repeat and experiment we had done previously, but with no help and we couldn't have a procedure in front of us. The experiment I had to do was a simple acid base titration using HCl and NaOH. However we were short on time, and I had forgotten to label which beaker had the acid and which had the base. I didn't have time to go get more, and we didn't have pH / Litmus paper. So I decided to taste the solutions while nobody was watching, I remembered we had been taught that acids tasted sour and Bases tasted bitter, and that's the story of how I tasted Hydrochloric acid. It worked as I got full marks but its probably not something I'd try again.
I can use a bit of smarts and a raspi to detect if there is anything in the fume hood. Automatically keep it on if something in it. Turn it off when something’s removed. Make it obvious with a lamp that indicates weather its own
Obligatory "I am not a chemist, but" post. I work as a Lab Technician for a coal mine, and was running a coal/HCL slurry through a gravity filter. Now this filter has the top opening at about face height, so I was filling up the filter when a spider crawls onto my hand, not a small one either, so I instinctively flick away and shake the bucket of mixture, splashing it directly at my mouth. Yes I know what HCL slurry tastes like now, no it's not very pleasant.
Fun story i just remembered I wasnt in the class that this happened in but one day while in my science class i hear screaming from the bathroom down the hall and people rushing down the halls, come to find out what had happened, a chemistry class was fucking around with sodium slats i think? And one student needed to goto the bathroom and while he was in the bathroom there was sodium dust/ salt on his shirt (i think cause he didnt wear a labcoat or smth idk) and when he went to washing his his hands he accidentally got water onto his shirt sleeve and you can probably guess what happened next.
Microbiologist here, did my Ph.D. in a Clostridium perfringens lab (causes lost of bad things, from mild food poisoning to fatal if untreated gas gangrene). We collected our biohazard waste from doing spectrophotometer readings into a glass Erlenmeyer vacuum flask. I was changing out the flask (not wearing safety glasses or lab coat), and when I pulled the rubber vac hose off, the flask wound up smacking the bench and shattering. The contents of the flask (perfringens culture, lab strain E. coli, various protein measuring reagents, etc.) go EVERYWHERE, including all over me. Thankfully, I didn't get cut by the glass, but my clothes were soaked. Stripped down to my underwear (which was dry, thank god), threw my clothes in a pile, and poured bleach all over it. Grabbed a lab coat to cover up, cleaned up the rest of the mess, and had my wife bring me a new change of clothes. Honestly, I think even the shitty absorbent style of coat we had would have let the culture through, but I still should have been wearing it. Thankfully nothing got on my face, but definitely should have been wearing glasses.
Fun side note, we used to handle our cultures using syringe and needle quite often. Our supervisor told us that if we ever cut or stabbed ourselves with them, that we were to immediately go to the hospital and tell them we were inoculated ourselves with perfringens, and to ask for a week long high dose course of a particular antibiotic (forget which one off the top of my head, probably just penicillin).
on fecal tests...I study wastewater. Some of the more...digested...samples can evolve gas for a week or so. Every now and then, someone forgets this, and overfills a sample bottle, seals it, then leaves it for a while. then, BAM, new wall decoration
Not a lab story, and not really even a very exciting story, but I still feel like telling it. During the beginning of the pandemic I got more into photography. I used and still use mostly film. So, sometimes an acidic stop bath is used to stop development faster than rinsing can. The acid completely stops the development reactions. Typically acetic acid is used, so I had ordered some 99% acetic acid to dilute to use for my stop bath. I read all the warning labels and knew I was supposed to use a vapor respirator, only use it in a well ventilated area, use goggles, gloves, apron, etc. I had none of that, so I decided to come up with my own safety procedure. I would do it in my bathroom, with the fan on, and transfer the acid from the bottle it came in to the bottle I was using to store the properly diluted acid using a syringe. I would do it fast and leave the room as soon as I was done to let the fumes clear. I had assumed the fumes were going to be like most general household solvent fumes, where it takes a while to become a problem and so if you work quickly with small quantities ventilation isn't too important. But when I opened the bottle, even without breaking the seal, instantly my eyes started to water and my lungs started to burn. I had at least worn safety goggles, but no gloves because of the shortages at the time. I stabbed the syringe through the seal on the bottle, hoping that that would reduce how much fumes were generated. I'm not sure it helped much. I ended up splashing a few drops on my hand, which I immediately rinsed off. My eyes burned and my lungs felt weird for an hour after that. Nothing really bad happened, but that was still extremely unpleasant. Now, I always use development procedures that let me skip the stop bath so I don't have to deal with mixing more.
Is the 25% food-grade "concentrated vinnegar" too dirty with whatever makes it taste different than pure acetic acid, for the -purposes of stop bad function? It's safe enough to get by without warning pictograms here.
When I was about ten years old, my dad had a can of air duster computer cleaner. I played around with it and quickly figured out that you could take out the cryogenic liquid gasses by turning the can upside down. I also decided that it would be a good idea to fill up a small bottle cap with the liquid gas and try to light it on fire in an enclosed garage. It turns out that burning the air duster like this produces HF. I got several breathfulls of HF while trying to evacuate the gas chamber that I had just created. I had severe irritation and couldn't stop coughing for 15 mins straight and was severely nauseous for the rest of the day. Even months later, I would still break into coughing fits.
The concept of chemistry story time is really unique! We’ve got lots of hobby chemists on RU-vid ranging from Codyslab to NileRed to ExplosionsandFire, but I haven’t seen a channel like this before! Keep it up
I didn't know there was alcohol in thermometer I thought it was just Mercury. Still not sure how anyone was able to get pieces of mercury though since we can't even really get to Mars yet.
In the summer of 2016, I was working in Virginia and one of my coworkers tells me to try something. I try it and then realize that I have no idea what I just ate. "What the hell was that?" I ask my coworker. "A mushroom." He responds. Oh my God, I think in horror, I'm really risking my life on the mushroom identification skills of my coworker I've barely known a month. Turns out it was a sulphur shelf, also known as a Chicken of the woods - a common culinary mushroom. So of course, once I know it's not going to kill me, I gorge myself on the fried mushroom, content in its flavor. Flash forward 10 hours and I'm on death's door (metaphorically anyway) as my digestive system is staging an armed insurrection at this foreign food it doesn't recognize. It might have been the worst I ever felt after eating food. I teach foraging classes now as a part of my job, and I always have two rules I outline before anything else: 1.) Always introduce a new food to your diet slowly, as you never know if you have allergies or sensitivities to any of its chemical compounds. and 2.) Never forage for mushrooms as a beginner.
That one about dumb ways to get alcohol and ending up with mercury reminded me of a story my dad had about the lengths some Russians would go to for alcohol, I think from when he was on tour in the Navy. Apparently some construction workers in Russia will stick a long drill into a fresh can of paint thinner to stir it and collect all the solid material on the bit, then pull it out. What was left was a pretty high concentration of alcohol, which could be drunk if you weren't concerned about if any of the rest of the compound was still present. This all being despite the fact that it wasn't all that difficult for them to get cheap vodka that would be roughly the same proof, and a lot safer to drink...
I work in a medical microbiology lab, and a friend of mine had this story from our plating bench. His coworker was plating stool cultures, which arrive from all over the country. He went to open the container, and the stool sample exploded out, coating the hood and himself in stool. Since he had the sash down, he had a strip of stool coating his labcoat. Another coworker of mine had a similar experience with a tissue that was more or less puree, and coated everything in her hood in a Pink slime. The joys of microbiology is that bacteria can create gas in their sealed samples, and pressurize the containers. I've had various body fluids spray all over my (gloved) hands. We work in Bio Safety Cabinets, which are essentially fume hoods for biologic use. They don't stop smells, however. Boy I wish they did.
If you have static electricity issues, you may at east try using a Faraday cage. You work in an hospital and find one bar of soap that is contaminated ? The best course of action is to send all the soap to the incinerator and get some new soap from the closest grocery. One bar per patient and one per member of the personnel. Drinking the alcohol of a thermometer ? Do you know exactly what alcohol is in there. It could be methanol, or a mixture containing methanol. Working with some large amount of ether ? Work OUTSIDE, on a windy day, with the wind coming from your back. Also, make sure that there is nobody downwind.
I think the trick is that you drink the alcoholic thermometers first, so you are so drunk when you get to the mercury ones, that you no longer care about the toxicity.
My dad contracted CLL later in life. He worked on cars as a hobby, and routinely washed grease off parts and his hands with gasoline, which is full of benzene and derivatives. I've always blamed the cancerl on all that exposure. Another hobby exposure I've noticed.. Brake cleaner is a popular cleaner. Some brands are hexane, and some brands are carbon tetrachloride(!!). I have and use both. My safety protocol for the carbon tet is MUCH more stringent! Honestly, though, I'm not sure there's a difference. I should probably stick to the hexane. Oh, and ALWAYS double glove if you care about exposure.
CCl4 was banned from consumer products c.1970. Before that, people like systemloc's father would have been exposed. We had a bottle of it that was for removing stains from upholstry/fabric.
In the US Carbon Tetrachloride is now banned from use in consumer products, although chlorinated brake cleaners can contain Dichloromethane and Perchloroethylene in them which isn't great either.
I'd really love to see a video like this about chemistry accidents from history. The sort that led to the safety rules we take for granted today. Especially eye protection, those are a dime a dozen. Apparently a lot of famous chemists from back in the day had eye damage and vision problems because eye protection wasn't a thing. There's also a litany of accidents relating to attempts to isolate elemental fluorine. Again many eye injuries. But outside of these, and a few other stories, it wasn't easy to find much else. Not saying what you should do with your channel, but I think it would make a good video. Even if it deviates from the user-submitted stories.
Once our undergrad lab was doing a Birch reduction of a benzene derivative (one of the xylenes if I remember correctly). Everyone had their setups ready, their sodium pieced weighed out, etc. The liquid ammonia would be added by the TA, who would take the pressurised cylinder from fumehood to fumehood, filling every setup. This cylinder was quite big and heavy, and was on a small trolley. The hose attached to the cylinder had a small spout at the end equipped with a rubber cork. To prevent small amounts of ammonia leaking out when transferring the cylinder from one fumehood to another, a small erlenmeyer flask was held over this spout, and the cork would keep it relatively airtight. Since the TA needed both hands to push the trolley around, holding this erlenmeyer over the spout was the job of a student, in this case, me. Now, this cylinder was equipped with two knobs, one opened the cylinder to the pressure reduction valve, the next allowed the liquid ammonia to travel through the hose. When transferring between fumehoods, both of these had to be closed. At some point, the TA forgot to close the second one of these. So the liquid ammonia still in the valve slowly started to evaporate as we walked between fumehoods. The pressure buildup from this was much more than what a few small drops of ammonia in the hose would have done. I felt the erlenmeyer in my hand become warm, and a second later, the cork popped off. Immediately, the intense smell of catpiss and horse stables hit me. Luckily, I was wearing a thick glove. Even more luckily, I had my thumb pressing down on the cork, so I instinctively put it back on the erlenmeyer. While the TA yelled to evacuate, I quickly placed the erlenmeyer down hard in the nearest fumehood, breaking it in the process. While evacuating, I noticed I still had the incredibly stinky glove on, which I threw behind me. Within a minute, the whole lab and the one next to us was evacuated, and we actually got complimented on the quick and orderly evacuation. While we were waiting outside the lab, I had several people smell my (still quite stinky) hand. After a quick wash with dilute acetic acid, the smell was gone, luckily.
I am a researcher in organic chemistry at a well known UK university. While i've never witnessed a major mishap in person, there have been a few in our department and I would like to share some of the stories with you. While destroying a quantity of excess sodium hydride using isopropanol, the solvent ignited. Although the student attempted to put the fire out using a CO2 extinguisher, their actions actually caused the fire to spread. The air flow in the fumehood caused the fire to develop rapidly and to rise into the ductwork; this caused the plastic piping to catch fire and melt. Significant water damage was caused when the fire was put out by the fire Services and the entire lab had to be replaced at a cost of several million pounds.
"Alcohol thermometers" are often not pure ethanol, so even if the students hadn't grabbed mercury thermometers they wouldn't necessarily be safe. Other chemicals commonly used in thermometers (usually dyed red too) are toluene, kerosene, isoamyl acetate NOT a fun time if you consume those either. Not to mention the potential for drinking broken glass!
A friend of mine, in college, who was a biology major, related this story to me. In his Freshman bio-lab class, his instructor, a squeamish young lady, was showing him how to "pith" a frog, by sticking a dissection needle up through the base of its skull, and "scrambling" its brain. Something went wrong, and the frog started screaming, "WAAAAAAH!...WAAAAAAH!...." The instructor handed the frog to my friend, then ran to the sink and threw up. He walked around the lab, searching for someone to do something with the frog, holding it up like a pop-sickle on a stick, with it continuing to scream, "WAAAAAAH!...WAAAAAH!...."
This is probably a bit 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 the overeager 11yo 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 or fertilizer of 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.
Not yikes but somewhat funny scenario: I was making an NMR sample from a crude reaction mixture that I concentrated into a solid. Typically we use the tip of a glass pipette to pick some of the sample up (basically a large capillary tube), put the pipette in an NMR tube, and use another pipette to add CDCl3 into the pipette w/ sample. I had a crude sample that got stuck in the glass pipette and wouldn't come out when I added CDCl3. So I thought "let me use a capillary tube to poke the sample through the pipette." I realized that the capillary wasn't long enough so I dropped it in the pipette, hoping the force of falling would loosen the sample enough, but it didn't. I forget what happened next but eventually I got the sample and CDCl3 into the NMR tube... with the capillary tube inside. I thought a bit and then decided to pour the contents of NMR tube 1 directly into NMR tube 2, which went fine. Then I shook the capillary tube out of the NMR and disposed of it. A grad student in my lab said I was psychotic for pouring from 1 small opening into another same-sized small opening
Stefano's formalin story reminds me of a time when I was bored a decided it would be a fun idea to fill hand sanitizer in gloves I was wearing. Similar outcome but more deserving.
13:10 It's diethyl ether. Also it contains a substantial amount of hexane. By the way, it's great for degreasing parts, but it won't work as a paint stripper. Something that's really neat is to have a flame in front of the nozzle (use one of those long-reach grill lighters, so you don't burn your fingers), which makes a great flame-thrower. It's fun to use it in an area with a lot of flies, buzzing around. The flame makes them "drop like flies," so to speak.
Re: the second to last story: Im not a chemist but I worked for as a custodian at a public school for a time & that happened to me with toilet water (much safer obviously but pretty damn gross.) One of my many tasks was to scrub that yellow ring stain around the bowl of the toilet with a pumice stone & I totally tore open the tips of my gloves and my hands got all saturated and pruny with the toilet water, and i didnt realize it until i was done. Nasty. We did have thicker, heavier duty dishwashing type gloves i could put over my nitrile gloves but I have tiny hands and they only had L/XL sizes which were so big i could barely even hold things much less do my job & they had to special order me small ones, and this happened before they arrived We also had to use these like, 'all natural' gentle cleaners and we weren't supposed to have bleach because a few years before I was hired, some idiot mixed bleach and ammonia and almost killed himself. He probably would've died if his coworker hadn't found him and got help. So my bosses would just hide the bottle of bleach in the back of our supplies cupboard 😅 and we rarely used it. Which I'm kinda glad for tbh. I only used it once, when I found blood and bloody scissors on the bathroom floor in one of the stalls, and despite it being a big open bathroom (I think like 10 stalls), the smell gave me a bad headache and made me SO light-headed that I had to turn the fan on (thank god that bathroom even HAD a fan!) and go do my other duties first, when usually the bathroom was the first thing I did.
Yeah… In response to the solvents exposure, I have cleaned glassware waay too many times without gloves in my undergrad orgo lab. I remember thinking at the time, “yeah acetone, it’s the same material as nail polish remover, it’s fine” then looking at a completely dried out hand after cleaning a few beakers/flasks. Definitely learned from then, but I feel so dumb thinking about it now…
Not chemistry, but the worst workplace safety story I know is from when my uncle was working in a foundry. They use these big tongs to move around crucibles filled with molten steel. Well, the bolt on one of those tongs failed for a coworker of his, spilling the contents of the crucible straight down the poor schmuck's boot. He was known by web foot after he got out of the burn ward.
Bad, but much, much worse was when a huge ladle of molten steel being moved in a Chinese factory hit something, Spilling! out the contents.....aaaand I'll let you fill in the rest
Finally time to share my home chemistry story. I'm exclusively an amateur chemist. To try and be safe, I do all my work outside, and in a rural area. I even have an "emergency wash station," the lake about 50 feet away. One day I got the bright idea to purify sulfuric acid drain cleaner via distillation, which I had done once before without issue. This time, the disadvantage of working outside reared its ugly head, the sun had gone down. Worse yet, a piece of glassware finally cracked under the strain of 700+°F sulfuric acid, so now I have at least half a liter of wicked hot acid slowly dripping onto the stone beneath me, and no clue how to handle it, all without any decent light source. I managed to contain the incident and bottle up most of the acid in the end, but I suspect my nose hairs were singed several times by the fumes. I also took off my safety goggles a couple of times because I'm the smartest person on the planet. I got lucky and nothing happened, but the memory is more than enough to scare me into wearing them religiously. One upside, that stone/concrete was cleaner than it's ever been by the next morning.
@@That_Chemist Yeah not my brightest moment. I need to rethink my setup for that to prevent another toe curling situation, or y'know maybe just never do it again
My brother and I were in the same AP chemistry lab in high school despite being 2 years apart. (I was a senior and he was a sophomore.) The teacher thought it would be funny to make us lab partners for every single lab, and after the first time my brother overfilled the titration buret (yes, *first time*) I was begging to switch partners. My brother was spilling HCl on me about once every other week because he just could not figure out when to stop pouring. Weird coincidence how none ever got on him. Luckily the acid was never very concentrated and after these incidents, I was a pro at molarity calculations.
@@That_Chemist Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the plot twist is that the high school sophomore who couldn't properly fill burets is now a chemical/petroleum engineer.
So the story goes, there used to be soda factory (local brand, not a big one) near where I live. Used to be, because it shut down. Reason: The factory's water supply got contaminated. By runoff from the local graveyard. It is not quite chemistry but still.
My personal preference is prescription safety glasses. Those little sideshield things never made me feel comfortable. Whether or not they work as well as advertised I don't know. Having something designed and rated for protecting me just sits better with me.
For me H2S was one of the chemicals that had a super easy to remember smell, because here in hungary we have lots of thermal water hot springs and basically everyone just goes there, enjoys the bath and only thinks about the smell for the first couple of minutes because of course it’s H2S and you get used to it very quickly. I don’t know the lethal concentrations, but next time you are worried about pool pee, just remember that it could be an oily (as in natural gas) smelling H2S solution if you are in the right place. (the smell of raw oil is because they were looking for oil but they only found hot springs)
Instead of a static gun you can just ground stuff. They have bracelets for IT that wrap around your wrist and have a ground wire/alligator clip to attach to ground components. Much easier, cheaper and more reliable than static guns and such.
