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I was discussing the most efficient solvent for ethylene vinyl acetate foam (toluene being the most efficient) and realized that I had regular occupational exposure to almost all of those VOCs that aren't banned for commercial use, and how many still raise your risk of cancer and organ failure. That plus the lead and asbestos lurking in the old buildings I work in.
@@oatmealman1586 man, you name a substance, real or fictional, I've probably smoked, drank or snorted it. Especially things you'd REALLY not want to. Powdered diamonds tore the FUCK out of my frontal lobe.
@@katiebarber407 oh it gets worse, I found out from a video by the iilluminaughtii (she focuses on researching scams and shady business practices), that the No Child Left Behind act contained a clause allowing military recruiters to demand private information for students that didn't perform on their tests so they could target them for recruitment. Someone in congress got their panties in a twist because they interpreted schools wanting to protect their students as schools having a vendetta against the military. So they got that one added just to make sure schools couldn't say no. If I ever find out that happened to my personal info at my school, I'm going to try and sue the Military for invasion of privacy. Especially if that clause is still on the books. Its absolutely disgusting that poor kids were made to take a rigged test that favored rich kids, then targeted by the army because they were too poor to do well, and tricked into going to iraq and afghanistan to possibly die. Let alone closing or cutting funding for schools that couldn't improve, this last bit about the military pretty much threw me into a rage. Maybe there's honor in military service, but there's none whatsoever in tricking poor kids into joining up. And if someone else who's reading this thinks what I just described is okay, you're a dick.
Blacksmith here: I once attempted to make mokome-gane with nickel and copper from quarters. (Basically Damascus nickel and copper) It turned out beautifully and I made several projects out of it but using quarters was expensive, so I tried to use nickels and pennies. Quarters are made from alloys of nickel with a copper core, whereas nickels and pennies are nickel, copper, around a zinc core. I ended up inhaling tons of zinc oxide fumes and was bedridden with metal fume fever for 2 weeks. 🤠
Wait, should I be worried about melting pennies? I did that all the time as a kid, and I was planning on doing it with my little sister for fun. Is it dangerous to melt pennies?
yeah , the least of my worries would be the the chemical toxicity. the alpha particle , if gotten inside the body would reap havoc on the internals. it's said to have close to the same radiotoxicity as polonium 210 .
I have a source that I've been too careful to remove out of this plastic/metal casing that it comes in inside a smoke detector. So it's still got about a 1/3ish of an inch gap of air when a GM tube/probe is pressed up against it, and it'll set off my ludlum 3 w/ a 44-9 probe at 110-120k CPM with that air gap.
Seconding your observation about other hazards - 'chemically inert" does not automatically mean 'harmless' . For example, any type of gas has the potential to asphyxiate. Asbestos, too, is basically inert, but has the ability to cause damage at the cellular level because of its mechanical properties. I saw in the news recently that titanium dioxide is proported to be harmful as a food addative, but I'm still skeptical about that one.
@@That_Chemist admittedly, I'm not a chemist. I did a little more Googling after your comment, and it SEEMS unlikely that the conditions in the stomach are capable of dissolving the TiO2, but I'm curious of your thoughts. EDIT: also, yeah, TiO2 is indeed less stable than I first suspected.
@@exstirpo8120 which, this actually highlights the first point really well - there may or may not be a chemical interaction with TiO2 within the body, but that doesn't rule out a hazard from extremely small particles, or particle shapes that have an unexpected biological effect.
If there's gonna be a dad joke at the end, I should submit my favorite chemistry dad...poem? "Billy was a chemist But Billy is no more. What Billy thought was H2O Was H2SO4"
Methyl mercaptan is *incredibly potent*. It can be smelled down to parts per trillion. I'm sure there's a large margin of safety until you get to toxic levels. When food rots, it produces things like ethyl and methyl mercaptan and it is very important that humans be able to detect it in very tiny quantities to warn if food is too far gone to eat.
My grandmother was a student back in the Soviet Union, and during a chemistry practical, a friend splashed her with sulfuric acid and burned holes in her new coat. So to get back at him she tricked him into tasting sodium chlorate at the qualitative analysis test by making him believe it was the chloride.
They use ethyl mercaptan as 'stench gas' which can be smelled at a level of 0.36 ppb according to wikipedia. The permissible dose is 10 ppm and the immediately hazardous level is 500 ppm. Seems that is a sufficiently wide range where you can have it be smelt unambiguously without actually poisoning people.
They otherwise omit the potential toxicity of the gas in any "training" session regarding it. Most people have no idea of the "second stage" where it smells sweet rather than rancid and could kill you rather quickly
you would be ok from the ricin as that would denature/be destroyed from the heat - you would be less ok from inhaling the fumes from the decomposing oil however 😂 Having said all that - id much rather inhale those castor fumes than 400+ year radioactive half-life Americium 😂
I mean... it's not an automatic game over but that dude who vaped Americium may want to get screened for... lots of things. In a few years I expect him to be in a Chubbyemu video.
In WW2, Soviets used CCl4 as a booze trap for Nazies. They were mixing it with enough ethanol to taste like booze and filling bottles labeled "Cognac" with the stuff (I guess it can be mistaken for that). Took the nazies a little to figure out what they were drinking!
I still remember the very first time my sister did a lab project. She was in the third grade and right before spring break the teacher gave everyone in her class cocoons that were about to turn into butterflies. She watched her cocoon religiously (I don't think she even slept) until the day came that the butterfly began to emerge. Eventually the butterfly got the strength to start flying, mind you this was around the time we had gotten a new puppy. So this butterfly's time as a butterfly was cut short as it flew directly into the mouth of our puppy.
Regarding the Copper Cyanide story, I wouldn't even use my fingers to clean a spatula from cooking. I'll normally wipe it off with paper towel or scrape it off on the side of the pan, then wash it. Maybe leaning proper kitchen etiquette could help people not do things like this in the lab? Idk, just a thought.
Kitchen safety test as a prerequisite to lab safety class sound like a great idea. If you can’t understand the point of best practices and PPE when handling boiling water or spicy peppers you shouldn’t even be given a chance to handle hazardous chemicals
I know I would clean it with my fingers or worst, my tongue, I chew my pills for fuck sake, thats why I am a programmer and star from labs. Didnt stop me to try to cook with ammonium chloride tho
@@sideways5153 I think making hot sauce or something would make an amazing ppe competency test. If you fail, you KNOW you failed. And you'll eventually be ok :)
These stories might be a bit less exciting, but a lot of stuff happened at my high school: - Benzene was not allowed in the school at all. However, there were no rules about experiments outside of the school. Guess who had a vault of some banned chemicals in the forest next to the school? A teacher, who then proceeded to show us (safe) reactions with the stuff. - The school had to remove the nitric acid from the back of our classrooms. Why? Well, it got stolen at least once and more importantly some students in the back row thought it would be really funny to just mix up chemicals in a beaker until something happens. The beaker got warm, then a lot warmer, and they quickly dumped the brown liquid down a drain. The school never found out who did it, so no punishments there, but the nitric acid became a lot harder to access. - A teacher instructed us to put something on glass in a microwave (forgot what the chemical was). The glassware exploded. This happened twice before she realized that it might be a good idea to stop the experiment. Stuff that I heard from other schools: - Someone told the teacher and an unnamed student had placed several drops of bromine in the air vents. So, they escalated the situation and promptly evacuated a school of ~1300 people. Several experts came into the school and did a bunch of measurements. They found a ton of alarming stuff (mold in some bathrooms and the likes) but no trace of bromine anywhere.
@@joshhoover1202 Does it really? I don't feel bad about using it in the lab once in a while, I'm more worried about it's presence in drinking water and chronic exposure - that seems to be the problem, not its acute toxicity or occasional exposure. I read the IARC literature on chloroform again a while ago, and that was what I was taking away from it at least, it's carcinogenicity was discovered in the general population that was exposed to it and not specifically to people being exposed to it in the workplace, while the acute toxicity seems to be an issue if you use it as an anaesthetic. On the other hand, I'm working occasionally with it and Bis(chloromethyl)ether or an Aziridine product, so the chloroform is the most benign component of those reaction mixes. :D
@@stefangadshijew1682 It isn't the carcinogenicity of chloroform that I am most worried about, rather the hepatoxicity. I have the impression that it will mess up your liver almost as well as carbon tetrachloride. From what I read, a single anesthetic usage could lead to delayed liver failure. Up there with leaching and blue mass in terms of bad medical practices in my book.
@@joshhoover1202 once upon a time I was a great deal younger and dumber and worked in a lab before I resolved my issues with substance abuse. I somehow decided that abusing chloroform would be a good time, and not only was it not a good time, a 2 day binge absolutely wrecked my liver and I spent the next week in the hospital waiting to see if it'd fail or get better. So yeah. Chloroform's hepatotoxicity isn't a joke.
another blacksmith here, i have two stories for you. First, when I was just starting out, I had a soup can forge (basically a soup can with the inside coated in ceramic). I was outside, in shorts and flip flops because i was dumb and 12. So im sitting there, waiting for the forge to heat up, and i move a piece of wood on the table i was using, only to find out a swarm of ants had it made their home and were now rapidly vacating the premises. I panicked, dropped the metal, kicked my legs, flip flops flew off, tried to run, then I *stepped* on the metal. If it werent still warming up, i'd probably be crippled. Second! I had a much better safety mind at this point, and was hot cutting a piece of metal with my brother. note that this was one of my first times using a hot cut chisel, and this specific chisel dulls very quickly. What had happened over the course of the cuts, is the edge had been so dulled that it was now round. Couple that with the now too-cold work piece, on the final hit, the work piece snapped free, shot across the shop and hit my brother in the leg. LUCKILY, he was wearing full length pants and it only bounced off. so yeah mandatory safety gear in my shop is now long sleeves, long pants, close toed shoes and non-flammable materials
In german Highschool (12th and final year), we were supposed to shoot a video for new students who would potentially join the school (4th class). One experiment was pouring ethanol in a large metal tray, igniting it and then blowing magnesium powder from a glass rod into the fire. This whole demonstration was done in a fume hood. Our teacher told the guy who blew the magnesium into the flame to not put too much into the rod. He absolutely loaded that thing and the result was a temporarily blinding, around one cubic meter large fireball, luckily no one got hurt. In the same class, I once somehow got HCl into my eyes (I don’t know how) although I wore safety glasses. No problem because we had an eyewash which the teacher immediately used. Turns out, there was a whole somewhere in the hose, which, unbeknownst to me, flooded the room next door which was used for the storage of chemicals, fun times.
By the way: The word (chemical) "complex" comes from a conjugated form of the latin verb "complecere", wich means something like "to hug", "to embrace" or "to encircle".
In high school, the first lab of the year was "distillation of wood'. The apparatus consisted of a test tube loosely held in a spring clamp, with one hole stopper with latex tube leading to a filled inverted jar in a bowl of water. There was a liquid trap proceeding this. The process was to heat popsicle sticks in the tube with a bunsen burner to the point of char, separating and collecting the 3 phases of matter. Some students would allow the jar to rest on the tubing, pinching it (at first this was unintentional LOL), and the nearly red-hot test tube would pop the stopper, launching into flight with a tail of burning wood gas / liquid. We learned rather quickly that POP! from another lab station meant DUCK.
"Not that radioactive" Americium IS THAT RADIOACTIVE! It isn't like Uranium with a half-life of millions or billions of years. It has a half-life of about 420 years IIRC. Which may SOUND like it should go in your vape but it is circa a 10 million times worse radioactivity than vaping DU.
Also, I'm fairly sure the main risk of Americium from a smoke detector if ingested/inhaled would be the radioactivity. This is because the amount of Am-241 is extremely tiny (290 nanograms) - not enough for chemical heavy-metal poisoning, but it's also extremely radioactive - a strong alpha particle emitter - 5 times more than Radium.
And it's gonna hang around once inhaled, too. If this is a true story, I'd be surprised if they make it a decade without lung cancer. As a former stoner, I can also totally see a stoner doing something like this. I never did anything nearly that unwise, but the whole, "taking stuff apart for no reason" I get. I just can't fathom why they thought it was a good idea to try to pry the disc out of its little holder. Had they not done that, no dust would've been generated and it would have been a _relatively_ safe activity. But creating dust? *-_-*
Typical Am241 in a smoke detector (a modern one) is about one microCurie. If vaporized and inhaled, it would cause 166 times the maximum annual dose to bone surfaces, or if in a chemical form that didn’t absorb into bone surfaces, only 100 times the annual limit. Fortunately for the vaper, the boiling point for americium is over 2000 C.
At 1 microcurie, your body will become 123% more radioactive (the human body is about 0.8 microcuries, mainly from K-40 and C-14). If all of it is absorbed, this will lead to a slightly higher incidence of cancer, but nothing immediate or dramatic will happen. There is still absolutely no reason whatsoever to vape americium though.
His lifetime dose would be 4.4Sv if he somehow managed to vape the whole Am241 source... that's not very pleasant 🤣 his chances of cancer probably would go up 10 fold maybe 100 fold. That lifetime dose is equivalent to 44,000 chest x-rays for a lifetime or 367 full body CT scans for a lifetime.
When I was in weld school, we where learning TIG welding. Part of that is to ball the tungsten before welding aluminum because we were using the old transformer based machines. Anyway, we had weld booths that we used as our work area, and the instructors said that pennies worked great for balling up our tungsten. Needless to say a student in front of me was getting carried away, as he was using newer pennies that are mostly ZINC. Now to ball the tungsten, you simply start the arc and pump the pedal to dump a large surge of current into the tungsten to ball the end. That is not what the guy I am mentioning did, HE VAPORIZED THE WHOLE PENNY and inhaled it because he had moved his vent away from where he was welding because it was pulling away his shielding gas. Needless to say he started throwing up and missed two weeks of class because of it. Also burning Zinc coats everything with white Zinc Oxide, the tell tale sign that what you are welding has a galv coating, also the zinc burned with an epic blue green flame because of the copper coating and zincs emissions.
Dad's chemistry lab (small highschool, student body of ~70) had a bunch of nasty chemicals left over from previous teachers. When the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) did a sweep, they discovered a rusty gallon can of carbon tetrachloride likely over 50 years old. It was only being held shut via a rusty bottle cap; stored in a cabinet at the back of the room. Coincidentally, it was where we also had all of our math and chemistry lectures; I'm not sure what we would have done if it happened to blow on a hot summer day.
I was in High School chemistry class and we had a lab about burning magnesium. this involved burning a few small pieces of magnesium, lithium and zinc ribbon/foil (~2-4mm) in a Bunsen burner flame to view atomic emission. We were all given glasses so we wouldnt go blind and told to keep them on the whole time. One girl decided to set a huge piece (like 4 inches folded on itself) on fire without her glasses on... She now has a permanent spot in her vision, and went blind temporarily.
@@janmelantu7490hat is the chemical equivalent of the popular safety phrase when working with high powered lasers: Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye...
over here in Bongland, methyl mercaptan and similar compounds are added to domestic gas supplies because their odours can be detected by the human nose at extremely low levels (as in, parts per billion), and if you can smell mercaptan-infused gas, that would otherwise be odourless, you can detect a gas leak long before it becomes dangerous with that in mind, your man's story about the mine at 2:19 makes perfect sense - a little stench gas goes a very long way funnily enough, the same is true of the mercaptan that acts as the principal flavouring/aroma agent in grapefruit; for some reason, the human nose is extraordinarily sensitive to it
The Am241 in ion sources is apparently sputtered or smashed onto a metal substrate and then laminated over with something inert like gold, so as long as you're not scratching at it or heating it up substantially it's supposedly pretty stable. The source material doesn't look very disturbed, if he's lucky all that happened is it got hot enough to oxidize the surface of whatever the outer cladding layer is (or toast it if there's some lacquer coating on top) and all the Am stayed embedded. Would be interesting to have a before and after of the activity of the button.
yeah , I don't think he messes with the actual foil of gold mixed with Am241 dioxide. the 2 are pressed and heated together so unless you dissolve the gold you're not likely to get any Am241 out of it. also it has a top layer of foil ( on top of the other foil disk with Am241) which usually is palladium.
Agreed, the heat in burning chamber not enough to release Am241 from encapsulated state. Still, an eBay detector could pick up the small gamma component if source was deposited in lungs. A small price to pay for peace of mind. If present, the alpha decay would be deadly over time but could be located (by gamma signature) in a major hospital with Medical Physics Dept. and followed by lung surgery to remove. The Russians used alpha from Po210 to assainate a guy by injecting a pellet from the end of an umbrella. Bad way to go.
Dad tried blacksmithing for a while, had a forge and everything. He had to stop making things because as it turns out, when you live in a rural suburbia, your neighbors tend to not like the sound of you hitting metal, repeatedly, for hours on end. His quenching barrel was an old 5-gallon bucket filled with transmission fluid, which also stunk to high hell every time he used it.
The only time I taught practicals for biology freshmen, one pair of students was... special. When it was time to do a simple acid-base titration, the students were supposed to use 50 mL burettes. The lab had tiny light chairs with a diameter of maybe 25 cm. From the other side of the lab, I saw the taller of the pair climbing on top of one of these chairs. Not good! Coming closer, I saw that he was holding the biggest pipette in the student set, and was proceeding to stick it into the burette. As tall as he was and standing on that puny chair, he was still pushing the burette, and was about to topple it over even if he managed to not fall over with his chair. I grabbed the burette before it got knocked over, told him to remove the huge pipette from the burette and get off the chair, and then asked for an explanation. "Well, you know how this is a quantitative experiment, and you explained how carefully we must read the initial and final positions on the burette?", why yes, I replied, "Well we were going to use the 25.00 mL burette twice to place exactly 50.00 mL into the burette". Obviously, detailed explanations had been provided about the initial level in the burette only having to be below the first gradation, not necessarily zero (that corresponded, of course, to 50 mL plus lord knows how much volume was below the last gradation). And obviously, long-winded explanations were promptly given again. BUT!!!!!! That same thing (well, almost the same) happened a second time!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not ten minutes had passed, and Mr. Tall Guy was on the tiny chair, with the biggest pipette in his hand, again! So I rushed over, asked him to step off, and asked for another explanation. The pair nonchalantly pointed to the burette, which they had topped up, as instructed, from a beaker with the help of a funnel, and said "You see, we've gone over the first gradation, so we must remove some solution".... O. M. G. The experience, for me, had transcended the realm of comedy and is just etched in my mind as one big WTF moment.
😳 Americium vape juice?! I would run far away from the vape in question. Alpha particles will do the numbers on the inside (it's the soft innards that's much more vulnerable than the skins on your body).
Blacksmithing story: I was in the 6th grade, and had taken up and interest in blacksmithing. I went to a local hardware store to pick up a bucket, a pipe for an air duct, and plaster of paris. I successfully built a small forge, and within two weeks, this happened. I had finished hammering down on a piece of round stock, and reached for my pliers to put it back in the forge, when, instead, my left hand landed on the (still piping hot) piece of round stock. The burn wasn't that big, but it hurt like nothing I'd ever experienced before. At least I had a good story for my classmates the following day. I also have a cannon/black powder story if you want to hear that.
I work at a natural products lab. We run column chromatography every day and use a lot of solvents, including chloroform. So, I was distilling some impure chloroform and added 1 L of old chloroform (maybe over 10 years old) to the distillation flask. The fume hood was on, so I didn’t notice anything strange. After the distillation, I stored the chloroform on a 5 L gallon. The next day, I was alone in the lab and opened the gallon outside the fume hood, since my chromatographic column was too big for it. I was hit by a strong sweet and acidic smell; it was like a punch to the face. I started coughing immediately and felt like my throat was on fire. I run out of the lab to breathe some fresh air (in the emergency exit) still coughing and unable to breathe. When I recovered, I turned on a fan in the lab to get rid of the smell and sealed the gallon. On that day I learned that chloroform can turn to phosgene, a WWI chemical weapon and that I probably breathed some of it. It didn’t cause further consequences and I learned to never use old chloroform again.
I think for the gas used in the mine, they have an incredibly low odour threshold, much lower than the exposure limits. And once you smell it, you should be leaving the mine, so the time of exposure is much less. That should overall make it much safer than a toxic gas, potentially at high concentrations, which you can't smell and therefore remain exposed to, or potentially explode.
In my first year of undergrad research, I had my own Schlenk Line so I could perform my air-sensitive polymerizations outside of the glovebox. It was really late one day, and being new and inexperienced I turned off the vacuum pump without lowering the liquid nitrogen dewar cooling the trap. The next morning I arrive in lab and figure out that I condensed about 500mL of liquid oxygen in the cold trap (I guess I had a leaky line), which essentially means that I made a bomb that could’ve blown up the whole lab and maybe even more. Thankfully my mentor was able to take care of the liquid oxygen, but only after he took a picture of it in the trap lol.
The "stench gas" thing, it can basically be smelled at PPB but is only toxic at PPM. Compounds like that are usually common byproducts of putrefaction, and not necessarily abundant ones, just very specific. Thus our noses have evolved to detect the faintest whiff to prevent us from inadvertently poisoning ourselves by eating spoiled foods.
Okay, so when I was in inorganic chem, one of my assignments was to make a green light-sensitive iron complex. It's used to... I guess measure how much light hits a surface? I don't really remember. It was pretty standard fare for a while, I precipitated the complex out of solution and poured the suspension through the filter paper to do a vacuum filtration. There was a nice, relatively dry green powder sitting at the bottom of the funnel, ready and raring to degrade under harsh light. Now, I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea, but instead of just pouring out the green powder like a sane person, i tried to... reach in with my finger and scoop the filter paper out of the funnel. With bare hands. I ended up spilling the complex all over the table and killing my yield, which had been pretty good up to that point. I'm a competent human person I promise.
@@tolyan9756 Personally, I like uranium. Different radioactive elements give different buzzes, but uranium’s is simply [chef’s kiss] delectable. Francium’s the worst though, weak compared to it’s volume.
Art isn’t typically seen as a high risk profession but I regularly work with cadmium and cobalt pigments and one of my professors is a sleep deprived state (not for teaching thankfully) decided to put some soft body (refers to the thickness of medium) cadmium into his airbrush. Cadmium pigments in a medium are pretty safe but in power form such as the actual pigment dust and soft pastels or if you aerosolize the pigment ups your likely of exposure a lot. So basically he probably is getting cancer just a bit quicker. Also basically every oil painter has almost passed out from solvent fumes once in their career.
One of the first times I melted zinc was in a big spoon in a wood burning stove, it boiled, and I saw it making strings of oxides on contact with the air sucked in and thought "YIKES I don't want that in my lungs"
Yeah, I don't know why one would use methyl mercaptan in an alert system, sounds like a nice way to accidentally overshoot and cause CNS toxicity or death. Ethyl mercaptan seems to be way less toxic (NFPA 704), and in underground mining, they actually use it as a "stench gas" as an alert system in case of emergency. In fact, it is law in Ontario they use either ethyl mercaptan or an equivalent in an alert system.
I rusted a shelf with nitric acid once 😂. Also found a leak one time when I realized none of my battery devices stored in the immediate vicinity we're working. The batteries had some white dry marshmallow looking stuff leaking out of every single battery. The lid on my nitric acid was cracked.
You just gave me a funny idea. A vape that "functions" as a smoke detector and for 5 seconds after a drag on a vape, it will start beeping like a smoke detector.
for how they control the amount of "Scent alarm" in mines, I'd assume they meter out the release into the air getting pumped down into the mine that it's not going to cause issues. Most mine airflow goes from the entrance to the working face in terms of airflow, that way any airborne hazards (like hitting a gas pocket) don't go the same way as the people trying to escape the hazard. Either that or they have wire triggered stink bombs around the mines, but i'd bet they just meter it into the air intake as the vents handle the distribution (have to have full air circulation in a mine so you don't wind up with a pocket of bad air) and it'll do it pretty damn quick too as most mines use diesel equipment and thus have to have at least 0.6 m3/s of air for ever kilowat of diesel power they have underground. That isn't taking into account breathing air and other things like air powered tools which are used in some places to avoid needing to burn as much diesel. Edit: Storytime! Ok so in college i took forging as part of a required metallurgy course and during this we each got to sand cast, forge, and machine a chisel, wrench, and machinist's square. pretty basic stuff, make a ceramic mold to make the stock, fire it in the kiln, pour molten steel into the mold, let it cool, and then forge and grind to shape. Well, thanks to another classmate's forgetfulness, things got a bit... jumpy on me. We'll call him Dan. He did step 1 fine, but improperly fired his mold. Now, firing here does 2 things. It burns out the wax used to make the mold's internal shape, and most importantly it removes the water from the ceramic paste/slurry we used to make the mold. He only stuck his mold in the kiln when it was cooling off to melt out the wax. Those who have cast metal in the past can already see where this shitshow is going. Well, time comes to pour and we head out into the hot work area of the campus. Teacher is already out there and has us set our molds up in metal buckets of sand so they're nice and stable, and things cool at a good rate. I notice as I'm pouring sand around my mold that his looks a touch cracked, and is... crumbly? odd but i don't think much more of it because at this point everyone's molds were fired... right? My pour goes off without a hitch. If you ever get the chance to cast metal, do it. It's hard work but very fun, and if you're lucky you get a tool or something that'll last. everyone else's has been fine as well. Then it's Dan's turn. The instructor has to take a call, so he gets me and another student to supervise as we're the ones he didn't need to help with the pours. the other guy had experience casting before, and I'd seen enough videos to know how not to kill anyone. We'd also been helping the other students by that point. Well, we get set up and force Dan to put on his PPE (he was a massive vegan and hated wearing anything made of leather). Dan pulls out the crucible almost dropping it 3 times he was so nervous, so i take over as he's way too antsy to be handling molten metal. I line up the pour, and i watch through my face shield as the glowing yellow stream of liquid steel falls down towards the mold. Now, we're going to pause the story a moment so i can explain something. For those of you that don't know, molten steel is at a minimum of 2500°F or 1371°C. If there is any water left in the mold you're pouring it into, this water will flash boil at those temperatures and explode. With lead, as was the case in the story in the video, this will cause the lead to splatter around the room and that's only at around 320 - 600 celsius. In Dan's case, there was a LOT of water left trapped in the thick layer of unfired ceramic. The outer layer was dry, which probably saved my ass, but once the heat reached the damp layer that started turning to steam, creating pressure and a hissing noise. As soon as i heard this i stopped pouring and stepped back. Damn glad i did too because not a second later the contents of the bucket (including the molten steel) erupted loudly into the air sending everyone running. my PPE took the worst of it, but i still have a shiny spot on my arm where a bit of the steel made it through and burned me. I'm glad i was using one of the metal face shields, as the first plastic layer and the glass in the lens had been destroyed by something hitting them. Rung my bell pretty good too. 'course the instructor comes running out asking what happened and all i could reply was "I have no fucking idea. Also, some steel made it through the arm of the coat, where's the burn cream?" we figured it out after the ceramics instructor came in asking who left the wax in the bottom of the kiln as that should have burned off. Dan later profusely apologized, he had missed the class where we went over the procedure and thought that everyone was just putting their molds in the kiln to melt out the wax. He got one chance to redo it (under close supervision) and nailed it that time.
We had the CCl4 funsies, how about some phenol now? One funny observation with phenol can be made in molecular bio lab. We use a mixture of Chloroform, Phenol and Isoamyl Alcohol in DNA / RNA extraction protocol, it forms an OBVIOUS two phase system with phenol layer being the lower one, which is the part you're supposed to use in the protocol. Over the years we are yet to see a student who would not instinctively shake it to mix without even asking, which is exactly what they are not supposed to do :D We have to keep a hidden 2nd bottle of it in the fridge just to have a well separated one in case someone does it again. (It's not like the protocol won't work when using a shaken mixture but it's suboptimal yield / purity, and we keep the phenol under chloroform layer after mixing and saturation cause it preserves much better). Another semi-yikes story I can share is with preparing the phenol solution for this protocol. Pretty casual stuff, you just melt some phenol, wash it with EDTA buffer a few times, and right into the freezer it goes to prepare the chloroform mixture later. We usually do a bunch at once cause it's a pain, and small batches take just as long as large ones (still not a lot, in the order of 500-1000 mL at most which lasts for a few years). Anyway, for the separatory funnel mixing the PI told me to make sure the stopper fits the funnel, cause there are some bad ones, and to stop and wash my hands and get a better stopper if i feel it's getting wet. But thinking naah i have gloves, ain't nobody got time for that i just used a towel to hold the stopper end in case it'd get wet - of course i picked a crappy one and it had a tiny leak so it did get wet but i couldn't feel it in the gloves. What i didn't realize is that the nitrile gloves will get absolutely destroyed by the still warm phenol, and when i finally got to cleanup i had to wash off the disintegrated pieces of gloves off of my hands. ALWAYS ALWAYS check the glove compatibility if you're not sure :D if I did it bare handed i would at least know it's wet and stopped immediately, instead i had to deal with my hands reeking of phenol and skin being super dry cause of the ethanol i used to wash the phenol and glove pieces off. Also a fun idea if you have no clue what could be a wedding gift for mol bio researchers, the reason we make our own phenol solutions is my PI got 40 kilos of super high purity phenol as a wedding gift from his former boss in a reagent supply company. FR works much better than the premixes you can buy nowadays, especially for our own optimized protocols.
Might share two short stories from my middle school - nothing major, but still, perhaps some folk can have a giggle at them In one of the classes, we were learning about sodium, and how it reacted with water. So, since I was one of the best students at chemistry at the time, I would often go to the teacher's desk to make small experiment. I simply cut a tiny chunk of sodium with a kitchen knife, and put it into a large glass bowl of water, to see its start reacting, nothing special. But the thing is, I didn't really know what a "tiny" chunk of sodium should be, so I made it bigger than I should've, and it ended up exploding after a while. The teacher then told us not to move and to carefully look for the chunk of sodium to take care of it. We couldn't find it on any desk or anywhere on the floor - and after I looked up, I found where it went. It launched vertically up, and ended up making a small crater in the ceiling. Nobody was hurt, but it's one of my most memorable moments of middle school chemistry classes. In fact, it's half of the reason why my username is what it is, I still have a thing for this metal. And - allegedly - the crater was never taken care of, since it wasn't *that* big, so it's in the ceiling to this day, a decade or so later. (In case you're curious, the other half is a short sci-fi story by Stanisław Lem that included sodium, but, I digress.) The other story is from my chemistry teacher herself. It happened back in the late 80s or early 90s, when some student told her that they have a bit of mercury in their house that was not in use by anyone, and they could bring it to the class, perhaps it could be used in some experiment. The teacher said, sure, she assumed it would be a tiny vial of mercury from a broken thermometer or something like that, nothing major, just a tiny amount that she could take, so it would at least not hang around in a random house. The next chemistry class, the student brings the mercury to her. And it was not a vial, they brought a bloody mason jar full of mercury, and a large one at that. She asked them where the heck did they get this stuff from - they didn't know, it was just, there, in their house, and they asked their parents, who said they could have it and bring it to chemistry classes. My teacher was still shocked a couple decades later, and when this happened, she was especially terrified that the jar's bottom might break off at any moment, since, y'know, mercury's pretty heavy. She handled it carefully, and handed it away to some laboratory her friends worked at to take care of it, since she was NOT keeping all that garbage around. Middle school chemistry classes are some of my fondest memories I've had from all my years of education, and these two stories are part of it.
when you mentioned the correct dose of memethyl mercap, wasnt there a story in a previous episode that a mine just poured a 10lb bottle into the ventilation to raise the alarm
I have a story from when I was a dumb young student who didn’t take lab seriously. Allergies were getting to my eyes, and I had been lifting my goggles all day to rub them. We were working with concentrated H2SO4 (16m I think) and I didn’t think much of it. I was about to rub my eyes again after I tested pH. With one hand I grabbed litmus paper and the other I lifted my goggles. At the last second I noticed the paper was bright red from the insane amount of acid my gloves. I think I should be blind, thank god I randomly looked before doing something that stupid
I'd say they could just approximate amount of the methyl mercaptan in the mine. That stuff is VERY stinky at low concentrations and the difference between stinky and toxic levels are huge
Aluminum bronze is a fun metal to practice sand casting it melts at a rather low temp and it has a beautiful gold color to it when it's cleaned up. Ware the proper PPE. Casting metals you rarely get a second chance
I have a boneheaded story. Last video, I shared a story involving chlorine. The theme hasn't changed... I was in middle school (7th grade I believe) and I read about mixing acid and bleach. Of course, with me being the dumb teen I was, I decided to mix them together. I got a hundred mLs each of vinegar and bleach (damn that rhymed) and mixed them together. A few seconds afterward, it gave off a small amount of green gas, then it picked up steadily. Soon it looked like I had an XXXL size smoke bomb burning. My dad came home, and he saw the cloud of chlorine. He flipped his lid, and I still hear about it to this day.
I know this is quite boring but this sparked a hatred for acids that still remains years later. Once in year 7 chemistry, we were making copper sulfate. There were 3 groups at my table and I was by myself, the group next to me didn't add enough copper oxide to the sulfuric acid. Our teacher made it extremely clear to add enough so that there was extra copper oxide. After about 1 minute of their evaporating dish being on the Bunsen burner (that they left and I was tending to), I started getting a sore throat. After this, I had quite a bad cough for about 2 months and even had to go to the doctor (I hated the doctors office).
Amateur blacksmith and metallurgist here. Years ago I was melting brass bullet casings with an electric foundry and forgot to properly preheat my little cast iron ingot mold. I poured the molten brass in and immediately there was a steam explosion, which resulted in it flinging a gobbet of molten brass into my mouth. Thankfully the Leidenfrost effect is a thing, so it ended up vaporizing all the saliva in my mouth first which gave me time to spit it back out before it actually seriously burned me. All that ended up happening was that I needed some water, and my tongue felt like I burned it on a hot drink. You'd better believe I'm a heck of a lot more careful these days.
The mine I worked at back in the 90's had pressurized bottles of ethyl mercaptan (remote electrical release/local manual release as a backup) on both the intake fan for the fresh air raise as well as on the header that ran from the compressor house to the underground workings. It was explained to me that they were sized such that they would fill the entire mine with a very easily detectable amount of gas, while still being below the danger threshold. Considering the alternatives (collapse, fire, explosion, SO2 & NOx, flooding), and the fact that the volume of the mine naturally increased over time, I'm sure they pushed up against the upper limit as much as could be considered practicable when they installed the system. Previous to it, there were glass bottles of mercaptan that the surface crew would throw into the intake fan, and those continued to be stored in both the shift bosses office in the headframe as well as in the security gatehouse, just in case.
6 yeas ago I was preparing nitration acid for the whole hall. Everyone gave me their beaker and I mixed the chilled Sulfuric and Nitric acid (with the thick black rubber gloves on inside the fumehood with my upper body behind the lowered glass shield). The first beaker fine the second, third and fourth also fine but one the fifth one I just hear a small bang, and the whole fumehood is filled with brown nitrogen oxide. To this day I have no idea why that happened but I was happy I was wearing my PPE
nitrous oxide is N2O aka laughing gas. What you mean is nitric oxide or nitrigen dioxide. A lot of people seem to be getting this wrong. Just letting u know
@@mdobbelja1505 ich hab noch nie gehört dass es jemand Nitrose Gas genannt hat aber danke für die Info, hab mich immer gefragt ob es einen besseren Namen als den systematisch Chemischen gibt.
Equivalent of high school, we had a chemistry club as an extra curricula thing where we would do some of the more fun experiments one could do. One was filling a 2 litre carbonated beverage bottle with hydrogen and oxygen mix and igniting our new rocket :D, now only the staff or the students in the final year of school that were technically adults actually got to handle this contraption, so yeah, I was handling it. So we I the bottle, take it out to the school tennis courts where all but the one igniting is behind a chain link fence. When doing this we used a Bunsen Burner Tripod as a launch stand. I set it up, lit it, and well, I'm pretty sure the mix was perfect 2:1 ratio as there were 3 bits of tripod rocketing horizontally across the tennis courts as it blew out the welds. No-one hurt, one bounced off the fence and due to lighting between the legs none came my way, but from then on new policy was to use the tripods where the top was a single piece of metal rather than formed from 3 pieces or bent metal welded together.
One of the Chem videos I was watching mentioned Diethyl Ether, and now I can't get the "die potato" asdf animation out of my head with the "die thyl ether" in the potatoes' place. I blame you for making me think of chemistry on a daily basis.
As a kid I sprayed canned air upside down in a soda can I cut in half, then tried to ignite it in my dad's garage. I was expecting it to just I dunno, boil off, I thought they used inert gasses in canned air. Then my eyes and lungs started to burn. I tried stomping the fire out and instead spilled the halogenated hydrocarbons that I did not know were halogenated hydrocarbons all over the concrete, prompting them to spread out, evaporate, and burn even faster! I ran out of the side door of the garage and stumbled on my way out, landing on the grass, heaving and gasping heavily for a few minutes. I didn't tell anyone, I was lucky nothing else caught on fire. I punched in the code to the outdoor garage opener later to make sure nobody else got exposed.
Anitmony pills were used during the 15th and 16th century as a laxative. Since antimony pills were expensive, you then dug through the resulting pile (or, rather, you had one of your servants do it) to retrieve it.
Tame lab story: As part of an inorganic chemistry lab course we were tasked with the synthesis of metallocenes (the students were put into pairs and each pair had to synthesize a different metallocene). The synthesis is hell for anybody who doesn’t like working with Schlenk lines (me), but at least the product forms as these really pretty, dark green crystals (nickelocene). Nothing went wrong for me and my partner but I later heard that a different pair, who probably had to handle a more sensitive metallocene, had their product spontaneously catch fire. Nobody was hurt and I didn’t get to see it but that must have been scary.
when I was doing blacksmithing as a hobby, I had a VERY scuffed forge. made it myself from an old charcoal grill, a hairdryer and a bunch of pipe sections. got steel white-hot so it worked well. one day I was working on something and on my upswing the head of my hammer broke off and time slowed. I had hot metal in my left hand and the handle in my right, so I did the thing any genius would. tried catching the head with my arm. 3lb head proceeded to hit the fuck out of my right forearm and cause a hairline fracture that I didn't go to the doctor for. all in all, made a few fugly-yet-functional knives
Methyl mercaptane can already be smelled at ppb concentration (yes, parts per billion). So just give a drop of it into the air vent and everybody will smell it pretty quickly while toxicity is not even remotely an issue.
Probably way too late, but will try to contribute my part. So, obligatory, not a chemist, but a former electronics repair tech in a third world country, and had a fair share of accidents. 1) In one of the places i worked, a colleague tried to recover data from a damaged laptop, the battery has been holding it's structure just good enough to combust right after removal and smoke up the place in an unventilated room with no sand bucket, we both had to leave it burning there on the metal table and run out. All my cloth items stunk of burning lithium for the next month, luckily nobody was injured; 2) Had a fairly big blob of molten solder shoot out right into my eye, somehow reacted in time. Now i have a scar on my eyelid and a story to tell; 3) This is commonly overlooked, but this is why you don't wear flip-flops in commercial environments: a capacitor i was trying to remove from a board, exploded in a violent fashion, showering everything under it in boiling electrolyte, thankfully i had socks on; 4) Occasionally we had to melt plastic to make a patch or reinforce structure on some plastic parts, didn't really have any good methods of doing so, so a fair bit of it burned and the room had to be vented out; 5) Me, being stupid back then, tried to stop superglue from bonding by pouring acetone onto it. I think this is where i've got my persistent cough from, because i had a violent reaction for half an hour after smelling that; 6) Had a 10L canister of isopropyl alcohol knocked over in the shop right when the whole deal with the facemasks started, so basically had the floor accidentally perfectly disinfected; 7) Had several accidental acetone spills on the desk, that i've noticed only after an hour or so, when my arm was basically soaked in it; 8) Had several electrecution attempts from computer power supplies, still have small marks of electrical burns from some; Left the field last year because of professional growth aspirations, with some permanent damage and a lot of experience. Moral: try to think what you're doing, and have safety practices and equipment in place, because any of the incidents i've had could've been a lot worse if i was less lucky and/or careful. Considering the power supply experiences, it's a miracle i'm even alive. Gladly, moved to an industry where the worst i can do is accidentally bring down a website for about an hour.
Professional Stank Juice is detectable at such low levels that by the time it caused a risk of asphyxiation/toxicity, you'd already be functionally disabled by the extreme nausea of such high concentrations.
I have a yikes story. In the 1950s, my grandfather saw some P4 being used as a weapon on television. He then saw some in his high school and he picked the lock and then stole it. He was going to put the P4 sample, about a cubic inch, in the sink. But before he can, it exploded in a 1-2 foot tall fire. He still has that scar on his hand.
I also hav egot quite some stories: - One time in the building next to us (which was a different school) They did something involving bromine where the teacher thought it would be a good idea to let a student hold a Beaker with Bromine and do the reaction... the slipped and dropped the beaker which resulted in the school being shut down for 2 weeks. - another time i was helping our chem teacher sorting the chem cabinet and we found some very interesting chemicals there like half a fucking Kilogramm of Potassium permanganate and like a completely oxidized block of sodium and some carbon tet - Once there was an "explosion" in the acid cabin because someone didnt ventilate the pure nitric acid and the No2 blew the cap off and blew the bottle into smithereens
I work in the fire alarm industry, and i've done HUGE replacment jobs replacing old, radioactive Ion detectors with new, safer, photo detectors. I've left jobs with PILES of those detectors in boxes, and i've always wondered: Would it be possible to gather enough Americum to go critical? and if so, how many Ion detectors would need to be one place at one time? I'm sure (hopefull) its either impossible or some unresonably large number.
The one with the Powdered Magnesium generating hydrogen, that was funny, but damn. Very lucky no one got hurt with that. Vaping Americium-241... Yikes. Why would you even take apart a smoke detector to get at that piece of Americium? Madness The hair pun at the end... I chuckled at that. Help me, my sense of humour is broken.
I work as a safety tech and IH in an oil refinery that shall not be named. I was told by one of the OLD Operators that they would make their own crud buster hand wipes by soaking rags in benzene. They would use them to wipe raw crude oil off of themselves. It's amazing how little people understood toxic chemicals even in the 70s. Especially shocking because they work with them regularly. Though that happens today as well. Had to explain to a guy less than a month ago why it is a bad idea to hang out under a SO2/SO3 leak without acid gear while it is raining.
Not a blacksmith but a former welder. I think most chemists would be shocked at the normalization of toxic fume exposure, especially to things like chromium (from stainless) and aluminum vapors. I was always very careful and wore a respirator, but we basically never used fume extraction. we theoretically had a couple of portable extractors around the shop, but they were huge and always stored in inconvenient locations because the layout of the shop had not been designed with their use in mind, so no one used them. because we were using processes with inert gas shielding, no one liked to keep the bay doors open either except on really hot days because the drafty air would mess up our gas. As a result, the air in that shop would become thick with welding fumes. The aluminum always smelled the worst. Once or twice I remember welding aluminum when I had forgotten my respirator and ending up with blueish-black aluminum oxide in my boogers when I went to blow my nose later. Other guys weren't nearly as careful as me though. There was a saying that they didn't need a respirator because everything was filtered through a cigarette, or that tar built up in the lungs would protect against fumes. Many of my coworkers were old and many had health problems - one guy had COPD, but it didn't stop him from smoking like a fish and wearing no respirator.
Back in high school, we had a physics teacher who was the most chill man on the planet. he would often make jokes like "I mean I could make crack, but everyone's seen breaking bad so..." or just do random things in the lab while he was bored. His favorite thing to do was spread a bunch of isopropyl alcohol on a lab table and light it on fire, yo make this big flame that would last for 10 seconds and go away. What he didn't realize was that the smoke detectors had grown dirty over the years, and there was an accumulation of dirt and dust in the detector. so, when he lit a lab table up underneath the detector, and a gust of warm air started rushing up, it freed all the particles chilling on the dusty detector, and it decided that these were smoke particles. we all had to evacuate the building and wait for the FD to show up, but I got to miss a class and a half so it was pretty cool
The only positive to be drawn from the Americium story is that it's melting point far exceeds any temperatures that a vaporizer will reach. The strange taste was probably the coating on the new vaporizer. But there is always the danger of inhaling microscopic pieces of the substance that have become airborne inside the smoking device. If any decent amount of Americium is inhaled I would expect the person to die within a matter of weeks due to acute radiation syndrome. If they survived or avoided that, I'm sure the chance of developing lung cancer or leukaemia to be around the one hundred percent mark.
Im pretty sure the “issues at hand” in a mine are going to cause more harm. You could tell me the only reliable warning system is a device strapped to my ankle that stabs me in the leg with a nail and I wouldnt complain
One history that happaned on the lab I do undergrad research is that the lab technician was exposed to more than a years maximum dose of radiation in a day. The older X-ray diffractometer worked with its door open... So, he basically took a paid leave for 10 months. He was not allowed by law to work. He still works in the lab. Newer diffractometers don't work with the door open, but we still have the old one kind of accumulating dust. Every technician still gets 30% a month of additional salary for dangerous work as they should.
Watching this brought back memories from high school. The chemistry class/lab was on the first floor of the building so that in of itself was a good and bad thing, there’s was only ever two occasions where something happened but I have no knowledge of this stuff but anyway the teacher planned a lab to create some type of liquid to gas back to liquid, trying to mix stuff together, the teacher said to follow the steps exactly or it could result in a dangerous gas. He did the lab all day with no problem until lunch time. A kid misread and put the last ingredient or whatever first and it resulted in a very abrupt cloud in the whole room. Had to evacuate the building until it cleared and settled
i would guess there are charts or something for the "stench gas", but the easier answer is, you better get moving before it becomes toxic, plus you have a second reason to gtfo as fast as you can, toxic gases might be a great motivater that get even the laziest guy moving quickly
i remember that one time back in 2016 in chem class, we were supposed to use hydrochloric acid and a few other solvents and such, and the idea was to prove what (x) looked like under certain circumstances. One of the processes involved a bunsen burner and the acid. I have no idea how they did it but a group of 3 girls managed to make what was essentially a chlorine bomb. It didn't explode perse but what it did do was; 1) turn black, into some sort of glue/resin texture, which soon hardened. 2) burn extremely quickly 3) put a burning mess of compounds together to create what could only be described as chlorine gas mixed with a couple other off-gasses.
Blacksmith here, I have one time burned my steel so violently I had to toss the whole fire and bar into a safe earthen firepit. The forge is cast iron, which when insulated with coal/ash/air won't burn in atmosphere. If the already burning steel touched the cast iron, it could have the risk of burning it too, and sending shrapnel all across my shop. I did manage to partially melt/burn my grate, but the coal forge survives. I'll replace the forge with a better coal forge when it breaks one way or another. Most of the time I get coal that's too wet, or throw too much on as I'm a "seasonal" blacksmith. I live in the south and the summers are too hot with no fans to be burning a coal forge, especially when I have a job during the week, and blacksmith on the side
I remember in the 6th grade during chemestry class, we had a lock down. Now the chemical closet was our safe hiding spot during lock downs. Everyone huddled back there, and got down, being me I didn't do that. I got up and being the nerd I was I looked at the chemical rack. I recognized a bunch of suspicious stuff, but the worst of it was Uranium and Yellow cake. I kept trying to tell the teacher about it, but she wouldn't listen to me saying "there's no way that's back there" A few months later a bunch of men in white suits are there cleaning stuff out. Apparently the seventh grade teacher from the year before was using it for demonstration purposes.
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Worried, yes, and I really hope they'll get to a doctor. But at least it is not fatal, according to the papers: --- No reports were located regarding death in humans resulting from acute-, intermediate-, or chronic-duration inhalation exposure to americium. Death was noted within 6 months in an unspecified number of dogs following acute exposure to 241Am aerosols (as americium nitrate) resulting in inhaled activity of 1.5 µCi/kg (55.5 kBq/kg) (Buldakov et al. 1972). Significant early mortality, attributed to radiation pneumonitis, was noted in rats following acute inhalation of 241AmO2 particles (activity median aerodynamic diameter [AMAD] 0.75-1.39 µm) resulting in an approximate initial lung burden of 1.3 µCi (48 kBq) and radiation dose to the lungs of 1,500 rad (1.5 Gy) (Sanders and Mahaffey 1983). --- (amount in modern smoke detectors is around 37kBq)
When I was in grade 9 we were in a basement level, high school lab. Lots of sinks, glass, shelves, lots of gas lines, and One back door that lead out of the building. The hippie children turned every gas handle 360 degrees. It went on for 3 days. Maintenance was dumbfounded. The quiet kid in the back, tried to smoke a puff of cannabis under his thick winter coat. A shelf, easily 100 feet away, blew a bunch of glass around. They later found burn marks on the ceiling above, and the shelf itself. They also cut all direct gas lines, but didn't replace the actual faucets until after I graduated. True story, but I am still unclear on how it happened..
Blacksmith here. One thing a lot of newer blacksmiths do is look for free or cheap steel to forge stuff out of. This is all fine and dandy, recycling and all that, but a lot of people aren't aware of galvanized steel (prevents rust from forming, really useful stuff) and that's where issues can arise. When galvanized steel is heated to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit it'll begin to create zinc fumes, which really aren't the greatest to inhale. Causing what we refer to as "heavy metal fever", flu like symptoms and feeling terrible etc. Welders are typically warned about this stuff too, at least I was when I was taking classes. So for any of you new smiths out there, be aware of galvanized steel.
Guys, when I commented "Top 50 vape flavors" under the toxic gas tier list I was trying to make a joke, not a suggestion.
@@Stormstyker damn all 73?
I was discussing the most efficient solvent for ethylene vinyl acetate foam (toluene being the most efficient) and realized that I had regular occupational exposure to almost all of those VOCs that aren't banned for commercial use, and how many still raise your risk of cancer and organ failure. That plus the lead and asbestos lurking in the old buildings I work in.
@@oatmealman1586 man, you name a substance, real or fictional, I've probably smoked, drank or snorted it. Especially things you'd REALLY not want to. Powdered diamonds tore the FUCK out of my frontal lobe.
Ye, Amaricium-241 is preety nice taste, but I personally prefer Uranium -239.
@@Bemajster I personally prefer my Curium-242, Oganesson-294 is pretty sweet tho. 🫠
these videos are like 30% funny, 30% scary, and 40% reminding me that public education is an unmitigated disaster
Doesn't have to be if american culture would just get its shit together.
Edit: *crosses out American and replaces it with modern*
Young people always did stupid things and feel invincible. It's just they used to be private, that's the difference
if only it was properly funded and certain private institutions would stop trying to sabotage it
@@katiebarber407 oh it gets worse, I found out from a video by the iilluminaughtii (she focuses on researching scams and shady business practices), that the No Child Left Behind act contained a clause allowing military recruiters to demand private information for students that didn't perform on their tests so they could target them for recruitment. Someone in congress got their panties in a twist because they interpreted schools wanting to protect their students as schools having a vendetta against the military. So they got that one added just to make sure schools couldn't say no.
If I ever find out that happened to my personal info at my school, I'm going to try and sue the Military for invasion of privacy. Especially if that clause is still on the books. Its absolutely disgusting that poor kids were made to take a rigged test that favored rich kids, then targeted by the army because they were too poor to do well, and tricked into going to iraq and afghanistan to possibly die. Let alone closing or cutting funding for schools that couldn't improve, this last bit about the military pretty much threw me into a rage. Maybe there's honor in military service, but there's none whatsoever in tricking poor kids into joining up. And if someone else who's reading this thinks what I just described is okay, you're a dick.
@@AnimeShinigami13 Nah it's America
Blacksmith here: I once attempted to make mokome-gane with nickel and copper from quarters. (Basically Damascus nickel and copper) It turned out beautifully and I made several projects out of it but using quarters was expensive, so I tried to use nickels and pennies. Quarters are made from alloys of nickel with a copper core, whereas nickels and pennies are nickel, copper, around a zinc core. I ended up inhaling tons of zinc oxide fumes and was bedridden with metal fume fever for 2 weeks. 🤠
Pre-1982 pennies are solid copper. :)
@@Greeev this is true, but I definitely didn't use those 😛
@@DogsaladSalad oh I figured, just figured that information might come in handy in case you ever wanted to reattempt it.
Terrifying!
Wait, should I be worried about melting pennies? I did that all the time as a kid, and I was planning on doing it with my little sister for fun. Is it dangerous to melt pennies?
With Americium, the most dangerous hazard is almost certainly the fact that it's insanely radioactive. Moreso than pure radium.
yeah , the least of my worries would be the the chemical toxicity. the alpha particle , if gotten inside the body would reap havoc on the internals.
it's said to have close to the same radiotoxicity as polonium 210 .
@@AlChemicalLife dudes be giving themselves lung cancer for fun
@@hcolider2817 People have been doing that a long time before we started vaping radioactivity LMAO
@@hcolider2817 it’s not for fun, it’s for self expression
I have a source that I've been too careful to remove out of this plastic/metal casing that it comes in inside a smoke detector. So it's still got about a 1/3ish of an inch gap of air when a GM tube/probe is pressed up against it, and it'll set off my ludlum 3 w/ a 44-9 probe at 110-120k CPM with that air gap.
Seconding your observation about other hazards - 'chemically inert" does not automatically mean 'harmless' .
For example, any type of gas has the potential to asphyxiate. Asbestos, too, is basically inert, but has the ability to cause damage at the cellular level because of its mechanical properties. I saw in the news recently that titanium dioxide is proported to be harmful as a food addative, but I'm still skeptical about that one.
it is a lewis acid - what would most metal oxides do in HCl?
@@That_Chemist admittedly, I'm not a chemist. I did a little more Googling after your comment, and it SEEMS unlikely that the conditions in the stomach are capable of dissolving the TiO2, but I'm curious of your thoughts.
EDIT: also, yeah, TiO2 is indeed less stable than I first suspected.
@@That_Chemist TiO2 will react in hot sulfuric acid and in HF, HCl is not reacting with it.
Fear mongering. Stop.
@@exstirpo8120 which, this actually highlights the first point really well - there may or may not be a chemical interaction with TiO2 within the body, but that doesn't rule out a hazard from extremely small particles, or particle shapes that have an unexpected biological effect.
If there's gonna be a dad joke at the end, I should submit my favorite chemistry dad...poem?
"Billy was a chemist
But Billy is no more.
What Billy thought was H2O
Was H2SO4"
Oh yes, a classic
literally lol!
Methyl mercaptan is *incredibly potent*. It can be smelled down to parts per trillion. I'm sure there's a large margin of safety until you get to toxic levels. When food rots, it produces things like ethyl and methyl mercaptan and it is very important that humans be able to detect it in very tiny quantities to warn if food is too far gone to eat.
My grandmother was a student back in the Soviet Union, and during a chemistry practical, a friend splashed her with sulfuric acid and burned holes in her new coat. So to get back at him she tricked him into tasting sodium chlorate at the qualitative analysis test by making him believe it was the chloride.
crazy ivans
@@jhoughjr1 isnt ivan a boys name
Average soviet lab shenanigans
@@theviolenceenjoyer "ay blyat, Dimitri drank the ethanol again"
@@cybersentient4758 the auto-translate for this is absolutely broken lmao
They use ethyl mercaptan as 'stench gas' which can be smelled at a level of 0.36 ppb according to wikipedia. The permissible dose is 10 ppm and the immediately hazardous level is 500 ppm.
Seems that is a sufficiently wide range where you can have it be smelt unambiguously without actually poisoning people.
Cool cool
They otherwise omit the potential toxicity of the gas in any "training" session regarding it. Most people have no idea of the "second stage" where it smells sweet rather than rancid and could kill you rather quickly
Sure, let's inhale a vaporized alpha emitter. What could go wrong? Next, let's try vaping castor beans?
vape morning glory seeds next
@@virtualtools_3021 That’s actually decent tho
you would be ok from the ricin as that would denature/be destroyed from the heat - you would be less ok from inhaling the fumes from the decomposing oil however 😂
Having said all that - id much rather inhale those castor fumes than 400+ year radioactive half-life Americium 😂
@@mduckernz 1 the flavor
2 wouldn't vaping it destroy the lsa\lsh
‘Feeling under the weather? like you’ve got the flu? That would be the ricin I gave you, I slipped it in to that vape shit your always smoking’
I mean... it's not an automatic game over but that dude who vaped Americium may want to get screened for... lots of things. In a few years I expect him to be in a Chubbyemu video.
I look forward to it!
A man vaped Americium. This is what happened to his lungs.
It tasted funny, but that's normal for new vape pens, he thought.
Nothing will happen to him cuz its fake
☝... presenting to the emergency room, where we are now.
In WW2, Soviets used CCl4 as a booze trap for Nazies. They were mixing it with enough ethanol to taste like booze and filling bottles labeled "Cognac" with the stuff (I guess it can be mistaken for that). Took the nazies a little to figure out what they were drinking!
I still remember the very first time my sister did a lab project. She was in the third grade and right before spring break the teacher gave everyone in her class cocoons that were about to turn into butterflies. She watched her cocoon religiously (I don't think she even slept) until the day came that the butterfly began to emerge. Eventually the butterfly got the strength to start flying, mind you this was around the time we had gotten a new puppy. So this butterfly's time as a butterfly was cut short as it flew directly into the mouth of our puppy.
That's just natural selection. If not for the pup, it probably would've flown into a foxes mouth or spider web or something.
Hahaha
And thus she got another lesson
Nature is cruel and often short
Regarding the Copper Cyanide story, I wouldn't even use my fingers to clean a spatula from cooking. I'll normally wipe it off with paper towel or scrape it off on the side of the pan, then wash it. Maybe leaning proper kitchen etiquette could help people not do things like this in the lab? Idk, just a thought.
Hate it when I mix up my lab etiquette and cake batter etiquette and lick the spatula with chemicals on it :/
Cooking is chemistry. It all started with beer and wine. The main difference is that 99% of cooking is safe. 99% of chemistry is trying to kill you.
Kitchen safety test as a prerequisite to lab safety class sound like a great idea. If you can’t understand the point of best practices and PPE when handling boiling water or spicy peppers you shouldn’t even be given a chance to handle hazardous chemicals
I know I would clean it with my fingers or worst, my tongue, I chew my pills for fuck sake, thats why I am a programmer and star from labs. Didnt stop me to try to cook with ammonium chloride tho
@@sideways5153 I think making hot sauce or something would make an amazing ppe competency test. If you fail, you KNOW you failed. And you'll eventually be ok :)
These stories might be a bit less exciting, but a lot of stuff happened at my high school:
- Benzene was not allowed in the school at all. However, there were no rules about experiments outside of the school. Guess who had a vault of some banned chemicals in the forest next to the school? A teacher, who then proceeded to show us (safe) reactions with the stuff.
- The school had to remove the nitric acid from the back of our classrooms. Why? Well, it got stolen at least once and more importantly some students in the back row thought it would be really funny to just mix up chemicals in a beaker until something happens. The beaker got warm, then a lot warmer, and they quickly dumped the brown liquid down a drain. The school never found out who did it, so no punishments there, but the nitric acid became a lot harder to access.
- A teacher instructed us to put something on glass in a microwave (forgot what the chemical was). The glassware exploded.
This happened twice before she realized that it might be a good idea to stop the experiment.
Stuff that I heard from other schools:
- Someone told the teacher and an unnamed student had placed several drops of bromine in the air vents.
So, they escalated the situation and promptly evacuated a school of ~1300 people. Several experts came into the school and did a bunch of measurements. They found a ton of alarming stuff (mold in some bathrooms and the likes) but no trace of bromine anywhere.
Boss fight: ChemVault vs Chempit
"thought it would be funny to just mix chemicals in a beaker until something happens"
That right there is how you die.
Teacher with the ChemVault is based.
Okay wait a minute, judging by the kids I've dealt with in school thus far, I'm fucked when chem comes around
bromine person just wanted to get out of class lol
I used a bit of CCl4 as a solvent for application of coatings on IR detectors back in the cowboy days, but washing your hands wins hands down.
I have never had to use CCl4, but have used chloroform a number of times. Honestly that seems bad enough.
@@joshhoover1202 Does it really? I don't feel bad about using it in the lab once in a while, I'm more worried about it's presence in drinking water and chronic exposure - that seems to be the problem, not its acute toxicity or occasional exposure. I read the IARC literature on chloroform again a while ago, and that was what I was taking away from it at least, it's carcinogenicity was discovered in the general population that was exposed to it and not specifically to people being exposed to it in the workplace, while the acute toxicity seems to be an issue if you use it as an anaesthetic.
On the other hand, I'm working occasionally with it and Bis(chloromethyl)ether or an Aziridine product, so the chloroform is the most benign component of those reaction mixes. :D
@@stefangadshijew1682 It isn't the carcinogenicity of chloroform that I am most worried about, rather the hepatoxicity. I have the impression that it will mess up your liver almost as well as carbon tetrachloride.
From what I read, a single anesthetic usage could lead to delayed liver failure. Up there with leaching and blue mass in terms of bad medical practices in my book.
@@joshhoover1202 once upon a time I was a great deal younger and dumber and worked in a lab before I resolved my issues with substance abuse. I somehow decided that abusing chloroform would be a good time, and not only was it not a good time, a 2 day binge absolutely wrecked my liver and I spent the next week in the hospital waiting to see if it'd fail or get better. So yeah. Chloroform's hepatotoxicity isn't a joke.
another blacksmith here, i have two stories for you.
First, when I was just starting out, I had a soup can forge (basically a soup can with the inside coated in ceramic). I was outside, in shorts and flip flops because i was dumb and 12. So im sitting there, waiting for the forge to heat up, and i move a piece of wood on the table i was using, only to find out a swarm of ants had it made their home and were now rapidly vacating the premises. I panicked, dropped the metal, kicked my legs, flip flops flew off, tried to run, then I *stepped* on the metal. If it werent still warming up, i'd probably be crippled.
Second!
I had a much better safety mind at this point, and was hot cutting a piece of metal with my brother. note that this was one of my first times using a hot cut chisel, and this specific chisel dulls very quickly. What had happened over the course of the cuts, is the edge had been so dulled that it was now round. Couple that with the now too-cold work piece, on the final hit, the work piece snapped free, shot across the shop and hit my brother in the leg. LUCKILY, he was wearing full length pants and it only bounced off.
so yeah mandatory safety gear in my shop is now long sleeves, long pants, close toed shoes and non-flammable materials
Don't people usually have like a thick leather apron or something similar when doing this kind of work?
@@jannikheidemann3805 yes
Oh hi dad
@@621Tomcat oh hai mark
In german Highschool (12th and final year), we were supposed to shoot a video for new students who would potentially join the school (4th class). One experiment was pouring ethanol in a large metal tray, igniting it and then blowing magnesium powder from a glass rod into the fire. This whole demonstration was done in a fume hood. Our teacher told the guy who blew the magnesium into the flame to not put too much into the rod. He absolutely loaded that thing and the result was a temporarily blinding, around one cubic meter large fireball, luckily no one got hurt. In the same class, I once somehow got HCl into my eyes (I don’t know how) although I wore safety glasses. No problem because we had an eyewash which the teacher immediately used. Turns out, there was a whole somewhere in the hose, which, unbeknownst to me, flooded the room next door which was used for the storage of chemicals, fun times.
Haha
By the way: The word (chemical) "complex" comes from a conjugated form of the latin verb "complecere", wich means something like "to hug", "to embrace" or "to encircle".
Encompassing?
🥰
also, compound comes from Latin compōnō (thru French compondre) meaning to arrange.
oh, and complex actually comes from complector.
I was wondering about that, since I learned that a complex is simply a organic molecules that binds to a metal via at least 2 separate bridges.
I always likened it in my head to a complex of buildings, like several related and close-proximity facilities.
Imagine the stories people dont get to tell
In high school, the first lab of the year was "distillation of wood'. The apparatus consisted of a test tube loosely held in a spring clamp, with one hole stopper with latex tube leading to a filled inverted jar in a bowl of water. There was a liquid trap proceeding this. The process was to heat popsicle sticks in the tube with a bunsen burner to the point of char, separating and collecting the 3 phases of matter. Some students would allow the jar to rest on the tubing, pinching it (at first this was unintentional LOL), and the nearly red-hot test tube would pop the stopper, launching into flight with a tail of burning wood gas / liquid. We learned rather quickly that POP! from another lab station meant DUCK.
"Not that radioactive"
Americium IS THAT RADIOACTIVE!
It isn't like Uranium with a half-life of millions or billions of years. It has a half-life of about 420 years IIRC. Which may SOUND like it should go in your vape but it is circa a 10 million times worse radioactivity than vaping DU.
@@aysnov 🤣
470 years ...
but yeah I agree 👍
Also, I'm fairly sure the main risk of Americium from a smoke detector if ingested/inhaled would be the radioactivity. This is because the amount of Am-241 is extremely tiny (290 nanograms) - not enough for chemical heavy-metal poisoning, but it's also extremely radioactive - a strong alpha particle emitter - 5 times more than Radium.
And it's gonna hang around once inhaled, too. If this is a true story, I'd be surprised if they make it a decade without lung cancer. As a former stoner, I can also totally see a stoner doing something like this. I never did anything nearly that unwise, but the whole, "taking stuff apart for no reason" I get. I just can't fathom why they thought it was a good idea to try to pry the disc out of its little holder. Had they not done that, no dust would've been generated and it would have been a _relatively_ safe activity. But creating dust? *-_-*
Fair
Typical Am241 in a smoke detector (a modern one) is about one microCurie. If vaporized and inhaled, it would cause 166 times the maximum annual dose to bone surfaces, or if in a chemical form that didn’t absorb into bone surfaces, only 100 times the annual limit. Fortunately for the vaper, the boiling point for americium is over 2000 C.
At 1 microcurie, your body will become 123% more radioactive (the human body is about 0.8 microcuries, mainly from K-40 and C-14). If all of it is absorbed, this will lead to a slightly higher incidence of cancer, but nothing immediate or dramatic will happen. There is still absolutely no reason whatsoever to vape americium though.
His lifetime dose would be 4.4Sv if he somehow managed to vape the whole Am241 source... that's not very pleasant 🤣
his chances of cancer probably would go up 10 fold maybe 100 fold.
That lifetime dose is equivalent to 44,000 chest x-rays for a lifetime or
367 full body CT scans for a lifetime.
When I was in weld school, we where learning TIG welding. Part of that is to ball the tungsten before welding aluminum because we were using the old transformer based machines. Anyway, we had weld booths that we used as our work area, and the instructors said that pennies worked great for balling up our tungsten. Needless to say a student in front of me was getting carried away, as he was using newer pennies that are mostly ZINC. Now to ball the tungsten, you simply start the arc and pump the pedal to dump a large surge of current into the tungsten to ball the end. That is not what the guy I am mentioning did, HE VAPORIZED THE WHOLE PENNY and inhaled it because he had moved his vent away from where he was welding because it was pulling away his shielding gas. Needless to say he started throwing up and missed two weeks of class because of it. Also burning Zinc coats everything with white Zinc Oxide, the tell tale sign that what you are welding has a galv coating, also the zinc burned with an epic blue green flame because of the copper coating and zincs emissions.
Dad's chemistry lab (small highschool, student body of ~70) had a bunch of nasty chemicals left over from previous teachers. When the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) did a sweep, they discovered a rusty gallon can of carbon tetrachloride likely over 50 years old. It was only being held shut via a rusty bottle cap; stored in a cabinet at the back of the room. Coincidentally, it was where we also had all of our math and chemistry lectures; I'm not sure what we would have done if it happened to blow on a hot summer day.
I was in High School chemistry class and we had a lab about burning magnesium. this involved burning a few small pieces of magnesium, lithium and zinc ribbon/foil (~2-4mm) in a Bunsen burner flame to view atomic emission. We were all given glasses so we wouldnt go blind and told to keep them on the whole time. One girl decided to set a huge piece (like 4 inches folded on itself) on fire without her glasses on... She now has a permanent spot in her vision, and went blind temporarily.
Carol never wore her safety glasses…now, she doesn’t need them
1000%
@@janmelantu7490hat is the chemical equivalent of the popular safety phrase when working with high powered lasers:
Don't look into the laser with your remaining eye...
over here in Bongland, methyl mercaptan and similar compounds are added to domestic gas supplies because their odours can be detected by the human nose at extremely low levels (as in, parts per billion), and if you can smell mercaptan-infused gas, that would otherwise be odourless, you can detect a gas leak long before it becomes dangerous
with that in mind, your man's story about the mine at 2:19 makes perfect sense - a little stench gas goes a very long way
funnily enough, the same is true of the mercaptan that acts as the principal flavouring/aroma agent in grapefruit; for some reason, the human nose is extraordinarily sensitive to it
Yeah the thiol for grapefruit is a really strong one!
funny enough there's people who can't detect it. I'm apparently one.
Americium? Personally I only go for Radium in my vape since it glows so nicely.
The Am241 in ion sources is apparently sputtered or smashed onto a metal substrate and then laminated over with something inert like gold, so as long as you're not scratching at it or heating it up substantially it's supposedly pretty stable. The source material doesn't look very disturbed, if he's lucky all that happened is it got hot enough to oxidize the surface of whatever the outer cladding layer is (or toast it if there's some lacquer coating on top) and all the Am stayed embedded. Would be interesting to have a before and after of the activity of the button.
yeah , I don't think he messes with the actual foil of gold mixed with Am241 dioxide.
the 2 are pressed and heated together so unless you dissolve the gold you're not likely to get any Am241 out of it. also it has a top layer of foil ( on top of the other foil disk with Am241) which usually is palladium.
Agreed, the heat in burning chamber not enough to release Am241 from encapsulated state. Still, an eBay detector could pick up the small gamma component if source was deposited in lungs. A small price to pay for peace of mind. If present, the alpha decay would be deadly over time but could be located (by gamma signature) in a major hospital with Medical Physics Dept. and followed by lung surgery to remove.
The Russians used alpha from Po210 to assainate a guy by injecting a pellet from the end of an umbrella. Bad way to go.
Yes, though he likely got very little, there may still have been some Am that got inhaled. It's a good idea to go to a hospital to get it checked.
Dad tried blacksmithing for a while, had a forge and everything. He had to stop making things because as it turns out, when you live in a rural suburbia, your neighbors tend to not like the sound of you hitting metal, repeatedly, for hours on end. His quenching barrel was an old 5-gallon bucket filled with transmission fluid, which also stunk to high hell every time he used it.
The only time I taught practicals for biology freshmen, one pair of students was... special. When it was time to do a simple acid-base titration, the students were supposed to use 50 mL burettes. The lab had tiny light chairs with a diameter of maybe 25 cm. From the other side of the lab, I saw the taller of the pair climbing on top of one of these chairs. Not good! Coming closer, I saw that he was holding the biggest pipette in the student set, and was proceeding to stick it into the burette. As tall as he was and standing on that puny chair, he was still pushing the burette, and was about to topple it over even if he managed to not fall over with his chair. I grabbed the burette before it got knocked over, told him to remove the huge pipette from the burette and get off the chair, and then asked for an explanation. "Well, you know how this is a quantitative experiment, and you explained how carefully we must read the initial and final positions on the burette?", why yes, I replied, "Well we were going to use the 25.00 mL burette twice to place exactly 50.00 mL into the burette".
Obviously, detailed explanations had been provided about the initial level in the burette only having to be below the first gradation, not necessarily zero (that corresponded, of course, to 50 mL plus lord knows how much volume was below the last gradation). And obviously, long-winded explanations were promptly given again. BUT!!!!!! That same thing (well, almost the same) happened a second time!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Not ten minutes had passed, and Mr. Tall Guy was on the tiny chair, with the biggest pipette in his hand, again! So I rushed over, asked him to step off, and asked for another explanation. The pair nonchalantly pointed to the burette, which they had topped up, as instructed, from a beaker with the help of a funnel, and said "You see, we've gone over the first gradation, so we must remove some solution"....
O. M. G. The experience, for me, had transcended the realm of comedy and is just etched in my mind as one big WTF moment.
😳 Americium vape juice?! I would run far away from the vape in question. Alpha particles will do the numbers on the inside (it's the soft innards that's much more vulnerable than the skins on your body).
Blacksmithing story: I was in the 6th grade, and had taken up and interest in blacksmithing. I went to a local hardware store to pick up a bucket, a pipe for an air duct, and plaster of paris. I successfully built a small forge, and within two weeks, this happened. I had finished hammering down on a piece of round stock, and reached for my pliers to put it back in the forge, when, instead, my left hand landed on the (still piping hot) piece of round stock. The burn wasn't that big, but it hurt like nothing I'd ever experienced before. At least I had a good story for my classmates the following day. I also have a cannon/black powder story if you want to hear that.
I work at a natural products lab. We run column chromatography every day and use a lot of solvents, including chloroform. So, I was distilling some impure chloroform and added 1 L of old chloroform (maybe over 10 years old) to the distillation flask. The fume hood was on, so I didn’t notice anything strange. After the distillation, I stored the chloroform on a 5 L gallon. The next day, I was alone in the lab and opened the gallon outside the fume hood, since my chromatographic column was too big for it. I was hit by a strong sweet and acidic smell; it was like a punch to the face. I started coughing immediately and felt like my throat was on fire. I run out of the lab to breathe some fresh air (in the emergency exit) still coughing and unable to breathe. When I recovered, I turned on a fan in the lab to get rid of the smell and sealed the gallon. On that day I learned that chloroform can turn to phosgene, a WWI chemical weapon and that I probably breathed some of it. It didn’t cause further consequences and I learned to never use old chloroform again.
That is terrifying
I think for the gas used in the mine, they have an incredibly low odour threshold, much lower than the exposure limits.
And once you smell it, you should be leaving the mine, so the time of exposure is much less.
That should overall make it much safer than a toxic gas, potentially at high concentrations, which you can't smell and therefore remain exposed to, or potentially explode.
In my first year of undergrad research, I had my own Schlenk Line so I could perform my air-sensitive polymerizations outside of the glovebox. It was really late one day, and being new and inexperienced I turned off the vacuum pump without lowering the liquid nitrogen dewar cooling the trap. The next morning I arrive in lab and figure out that I condensed about 500mL of liquid oxygen in the cold trap (I guess I had a leaky line), which essentially means that I made a bomb that could’ve blown up the whole lab and maybe even more. Thankfully my mentor was able to take care of the liquid oxygen, but only after he took a picture of it in the trap lol.
Haha
The "stench gas" thing, it can basically be smelled at PPB but is only toxic at PPM. Compounds like that are usually common byproducts of putrefaction, and not necessarily abundant ones, just very specific. Thus our noses have evolved to detect the faintest whiff to prevent us from inadvertently poisoning ourselves by eating spoiled foods.
Okay, so when I was in inorganic chem, one of my assignments was to make a green light-sensitive iron complex. It's used to... I guess measure how much light hits a surface? I don't really remember.
It was pretty standard fare for a while, I precipitated the complex out of solution and poured the suspension through the filter paper to do a vacuum filtration. There was a nice, relatively dry green powder sitting at the bottom of the funnel, ready and raring to degrade under harsh light.
Now, I have no idea why I thought this was a good idea, but instead of just pouring out the green powder like a sane person, i tried to... reach in with my finger and scoop the filter paper out of the funnel. With bare hands. I ended up spilling the complex all over the table and killing my yield, which had been pretty good up to that point.
I'm a competent human person I promise.
What other heavy metals can be vaped 🤔
Mercury, surely
@@tolyan9756 Personally, I like uranium. Different radioactive elements give different buzzes, but uranium’s is simply [chef’s kiss] delectable. Francium’s the worst though, weak compared to it’s volume.
Art isn’t typically seen as a high risk profession but I regularly work with cadmium and cobalt pigments and one of my professors is a sleep deprived state (not for teaching thankfully) decided to put some soft body (refers to the thickness of medium) cadmium into his airbrush. Cadmium pigments in a medium are pretty safe but in power form such as the actual pigment dust and soft pastels or if you aerosolize the pigment ups your likely of exposure a lot. So basically he probably is getting cancer just a bit quicker. Also basically every oil painter has almost passed out from solvent fumes once in their career.
Americium? more like America- um im dying
Wow. I don't even know what to say. People are scary...
These chempilations are fascinating. Also, I like the adjustment.
thanks!
One of the first times I melted zinc was in a big spoon in a wood burning stove, it boiled, and I saw it making strings of oxides on contact with the air sucked in and thought "YIKES I don't want that in my lungs"
Yeah, I don't know why one would use methyl mercaptan in an alert system, sounds like a nice way to accidentally overshoot and cause CNS toxicity or death.
Ethyl mercaptan seems to be way less toxic (NFPA 704), and in underground mining, they actually use it as a "stench gas" as an alert system in case of emergency. In fact, it is law in Ontario they use either ethyl mercaptan or an equivalent in an alert system.
I rusted a shelf with nitric acid once 😂. Also found a leak one time when I realized none of my battery devices stored in the immediate vicinity we're working. The batteries had some white dry marshmallow looking stuff leaking out of every single battery. The lid on my nitric acid was cracked.
:(
You just gave me a funny idea. A vape that "functions" as a smoke detector and for 5 seconds after a drag on a vape, it will start beeping like a smoke detector.
for how they control the amount of "Scent alarm" in mines, I'd assume they meter out the release into the air getting pumped down into the mine that it's not going to cause issues. Most mine airflow goes from the entrance to the working face in terms of airflow, that way any airborne hazards (like hitting a gas pocket) don't go the same way as the people trying to escape the hazard.
Either that or they have wire triggered stink bombs around the mines, but i'd bet they just meter it into the air intake as the vents handle the distribution (have to have full air circulation in a mine so you don't wind up with a pocket of bad air) and it'll do it pretty damn quick too as most mines use diesel equipment and thus have to have at least 0.6 m3/s of air for ever kilowat of diesel power they have underground. That isn't taking into account breathing air and other things like air powered tools which are used in some places to avoid needing to burn as much diesel.
Edit: Storytime! Ok so in college i took forging as part of a required metallurgy course and during this we each got to sand cast, forge, and machine a chisel, wrench, and machinist's square. pretty basic stuff, make a ceramic mold to make the stock, fire it in the kiln, pour molten steel into the mold, let it cool, and then forge and grind to shape. Well, thanks to another classmate's forgetfulness, things got a bit... jumpy on me. We'll call him Dan.
He did step 1 fine, but improperly fired his mold. Now, firing here does 2 things. It burns out the wax used to make the mold's internal shape, and most importantly it removes the water from the ceramic paste/slurry we used to make the mold. He only stuck his mold in the kiln when it was cooling off to melt out the wax. Those who have cast metal in the past can already see where this shitshow is going.
Well, time comes to pour and we head out into the hot work area of the campus. Teacher is already out there and has us set our molds up in metal buckets of sand so they're nice and stable, and things cool at a good rate. I notice as I'm pouring sand around my mold that his looks a touch cracked, and is... crumbly? odd but i don't think much more of it because at this point everyone's molds were fired... right?
My pour goes off without a hitch. If you ever get the chance to cast metal, do it. It's hard work but very fun, and if you're lucky you get a tool or something that'll last. everyone else's has been fine as well. Then it's Dan's turn.
The instructor has to take a call, so he gets me and another student to supervise as we're the ones he didn't need to help with the pours. the other guy had experience casting before, and I'd seen enough videos to know how not to kill anyone. We'd also been helping the other students by that point. Well, we get set up and force Dan to put on his PPE (he was a massive vegan and hated wearing anything made of leather). Dan pulls out the crucible almost dropping it 3 times he was so nervous, so i take over as he's way too antsy to be handling molten metal. I line up the pour, and i watch through my face shield as the glowing yellow stream of liquid steel falls down towards the mold.
Now, we're going to pause the story a moment so i can explain something. For those of you that don't know, molten steel is at a minimum of 2500°F or 1371°C. If there is any water left in the mold you're pouring it into, this water will flash boil at those temperatures and explode. With lead, as was the case in the story in the video, this will cause the lead to splatter around the room and that's only at around 320 - 600 celsius.
In Dan's case, there was a LOT of water left trapped in the thick layer of unfired ceramic. The outer layer was dry, which probably saved my ass, but once the heat reached the damp layer that started turning to steam, creating pressure and a hissing noise.
As soon as i heard this i stopped pouring and stepped back. Damn glad i did too because not a second later the contents of the bucket (including the molten steel) erupted loudly into the air sending everyone running. my PPE took the worst of it, but i still have a shiny spot on my arm where a bit of the steel made it through and burned me. I'm glad i was using one of the metal face shields, as the first plastic layer and the glass in the lens had been destroyed by something hitting them. Rung my bell pretty good too. 'course the instructor comes running out asking what happened and all i could reply was "I have no fucking idea. Also, some steel made it through the arm of the coat, where's the burn cream?"
we figured it out after the ceramics instructor came in asking who left the wax in the bottom of the kiln as that should have burned off. Dan later profusely apologized, he had missed the class where we went over the procedure and thought that everyone was just putting their molds in the kiln to melt out the wax. He got one chance to redo it (under close supervision) and nailed it that time.
We had the CCl4 funsies, how about some phenol now?
One funny observation with phenol can be made in molecular bio lab. We use a mixture of Chloroform, Phenol and Isoamyl Alcohol in DNA / RNA extraction protocol, it forms an OBVIOUS two phase system with phenol layer being the lower one, which is the part you're supposed to use in the protocol.
Over the years we are yet to see a student who would not instinctively shake it to mix without even asking, which is exactly what they are not supposed to do :D We have to keep a hidden 2nd bottle of it in the fridge just to have a well separated one in case someone does it again.
(It's not like the protocol won't work when using a shaken mixture but it's suboptimal yield / purity, and we keep the phenol under chloroform layer after mixing and saturation cause it preserves much better).
Another semi-yikes story I can share is with preparing the phenol solution for this protocol. Pretty casual stuff, you just melt some phenol, wash it with EDTA buffer a few times, and right into the freezer it goes to prepare the chloroform mixture later. We usually do a bunch at once cause it's a pain, and small batches take just as long as large ones (still not a lot, in the order of 500-1000 mL at most which lasts for a few years).
Anyway, for the separatory funnel mixing the PI told me to make sure the stopper fits the funnel, cause there are some bad ones, and to stop and wash my hands and get a better stopper if i feel it's getting wet. But thinking naah i have gloves, ain't nobody got time for that i just used a towel to hold the stopper end in case it'd get wet - of course i picked a crappy one and it had a tiny leak so it did get wet but i couldn't feel it in the gloves.
What i didn't realize is that the nitrile gloves will get absolutely destroyed by the still warm phenol, and when i finally got to cleanup i had to wash off the disintegrated pieces of gloves off of my hands.
ALWAYS ALWAYS check the glove compatibility if you're not sure :D if I did it bare handed i would at least know it's wet and stopped immediately, instead i had to deal with my hands reeking of phenol and skin being super dry cause of the ethanol i used to wash the phenol and glove pieces off.
Also a fun idea if you have no clue what could be a wedding gift for mol bio researchers, the reason we make our own phenol solutions is my PI got 40 kilos of super high purity phenol as a wedding gift from his former boss in a reagent supply company. FR works much better than the premixes you can buy nowadays, especially for our own optimized protocols.
that methanethiol mine alarm thing is something i’ve heard about in lots of places. supposedly it’s a very widespread solution.
Might share two short stories from my middle school - nothing major, but still, perhaps some folk can have a giggle at them
In one of the classes, we were learning about sodium, and how it reacted with water. So, since I was one of the best students at chemistry at the time, I would often go to the teacher's desk to make small experiment. I simply cut a tiny chunk of sodium with a kitchen knife, and put it into a large glass bowl of water, to see its start reacting, nothing special. But the thing is, I didn't really know what a "tiny" chunk of sodium should be, so I made it bigger than I should've, and it ended up exploding after a while. The teacher then told us not to move and to carefully look for the chunk of sodium to take care of it. We couldn't find it on any desk or anywhere on the floor - and after I looked up, I found where it went. It launched vertically up, and ended up making a small crater in the ceiling. Nobody was hurt, but it's one of my most memorable moments of middle school chemistry classes. In fact, it's half of the reason why my username is what it is, I still have a thing for this metal. And - allegedly - the crater was never taken care of, since it wasn't *that* big, so it's in the ceiling to this day, a decade or so later.
(In case you're curious, the other half is a short sci-fi story by Stanisław Lem that included sodium, but, I digress.)
The other story is from my chemistry teacher herself. It happened back in the late 80s or early 90s, when some student told her that they have a bit of mercury in their house that was not in use by anyone, and they could bring it to the class, perhaps it could be used in some experiment. The teacher said, sure, she assumed it would be a tiny vial of mercury from a broken thermometer or something like that, nothing major, just a tiny amount that she could take, so it would at least not hang around in a random house. The next chemistry class, the student brings the mercury to her. And it was not a vial, they brought a bloody mason jar full of mercury, and a large one at that. She asked them where the heck did they get this stuff from - they didn't know, it was just, there, in their house, and they asked their parents, who said they could have it and bring it to chemistry classes. My teacher was still shocked a couple decades later, and when this happened, she was especially terrified that the jar's bottom might break off at any moment, since, y'know, mercury's pretty heavy. She handled it carefully, and handed it away to some laboratory her friends worked at to take care of it, since she was NOT keeping all that garbage around.
Middle school chemistry classes are some of my fondest memories I've had from all my years of education, and these two stories are part of it.
when you mentioned the correct dose of memethyl mercap, wasnt there a story in a previous episode that a mine just poured a 10lb bottle into the ventilation to raise the alarm
yeah but I can't believe that they just yeet a bottle and assume that it's safe
@@That_Chemist those systems move a absolutely stupid amount of air so I'm assuming the sheer volume let's them use a dose about yae |----| big.
From what I've learned in this channel, tetra-anything is usually a surefire way to damage oneself.
1,1,1,2-Tetrafluoroethane ain't so bad, they use it cans of air duster
I have a story from when I was a dumb young student who didn’t take lab seriously. Allergies were getting to my eyes, and I had been lifting my goggles all day to rub them. We were working with concentrated H2SO4 (16m I think) and I didn’t think much of it. I was about to rub my eyes again after I tested pH. With one hand I grabbed litmus paper and the other I lifted my goggles. At the last second I noticed the paper was bright red from the insane amount of acid my gloves. I think I should be blind, thank god I randomly looked before doing something that stupid
You are indeed very fortunate!
I'd say they could just approximate amount of the methyl mercaptan in the mine. That stuff is VERY stinky at low concentrations and the difference between stinky and toxic levels are huge
Aluminum bronze is a fun metal to practice sand casting it melts at a rather low temp and it has a beautiful gold color to it when it's cleaned up. Ware the proper PPE. Casting metals you rarely get a second chance
I have a boneheaded story. Last video, I shared a story involving chlorine. The theme hasn't changed...
I was in middle school (7th grade I believe) and I read about mixing acid and bleach. Of course, with me being the dumb teen I was, I decided to mix them together. I got a hundred mLs each of vinegar and bleach (damn that rhymed) and mixed them together. A few seconds afterward, it gave off a small amount of green gas, then it picked up steadily. Soon it looked like I had an XXXL size smoke bomb burning. My dad came home, and he saw the cloud of chlorine. He flipped his lid, and I still hear about it to this day.
I know this is quite boring but this sparked a hatred for acids that still remains years later. Once in year 7 chemistry, we were making copper sulfate. There were 3 groups at my table and I was by myself, the group next to me didn't add enough copper oxide to the sulfuric acid. Our teacher made it extremely clear to add enough so that there was extra copper oxide. After about 1 minute of their evaporating dish being on the Bunsen burner (that they left and I was tending to), I started getting a sore throat. After this, I had quite a bad cough for about 2 months and even had to go to the doctor (I hated the doctors office).
Amateur blacksmith and metallurgist here. Years ago I was melting brass bullet casings with an electric foundry and forgot to properly preheat my little cast iron ingot mold. I poured the molten brass in and immediately there was a steam explosion, which resulted in it flinging a gobbet of molten brass into my mouth.
Thankfully the Leidenfrost effect is a thing, so it ended up vaporizing all the saliva in my mouth first which gave me time to spit it back out before it actually seriously burned me. All that ended up happening was that I needed some water, and my tongue felt like I burned it on a hot drink.
You'd better believe I'm a heck of a lot more careful these days.
The mine I worked at back in the 90's had pressurized bottles of ethyl mercaptan (remote electrical release/local manual release as a backup) on both the intake fan for the fresh air raise as well as on the header that ran from the compressor house to the underground workings. It was explained to me that they were sized such that they would fill the entire mine with a very easily detectable amount of gas, while still being below the danger threshold. Considering the alternatives (collapse, fire, explosion, SO2 & NOx, flooding), and the fact that the volume of the mine naturally increased over time, I'm sure they pushed up against the upper limit as much as could be considered practicable when they installed the system. Previous to it, there were glass bottles of mercaptan that the surface crew would throw into the intake fan, and those continued to be stored in both the shift bosses office in the headframe as well as in the security gatehouse, just in case.
6 yeas ago I was preparing nitration acid for the whole hall. Everyone gave me their beaker and I mixed the chilled Sulfuric and Nitric acid (with the thick black rubber gloves on inside the fumehood with my upper body behind the lowered glass shield).
The first beaker fine the second, third and fourth also fine but one the fifth one I just hear a small bang, and the whole fumehood is filled with brown nitrogen oxide. To this day I have no idea why that happened but I was happy I was wearing my PPE
nitrous oxide is N2O aka laughing gas. What you mean is nitric oxide or nitrigen dioxide. A lot of people seem to be getting this wrong. Just letting u know
@@giansieger8687 thanks a lot in German it's ''Nitrose Gase'' or ''Stickoxide'' I translated it too literally
@@mdobbelja1505 ich hab noch nie gehört dass es jemand Nitrose Gas genannt hat aber danke für die Info, hab mich immer gefragt ob es einen besseren Namen als den systematisch Chemischen gibt.
Turn your back to the explosion. According to action movies, you can walk away dramatically.
Equivalent of high school, we had a chemistry club as an extra curricula thing where we would do some of the more fun experiments one could do. One was filling a 2 litre carbonated beverage bottle with hydrogen and oxygen mix and igniting our new rocket :D, now only the staff or the students in the final year of school that were technically adults actually got to handle this contraption, so yeah, I was handling it. So we I the bottle, take it out to the school tennis courts where all but the one igniting is behind a chain link fence. When doing this we used a Bunsen Burner Tripod as a launch stand. I set it up, lit it, and well, I'm pretty sure the mix was perfect 2:1 ratio as there were 3 bits of tripod rocketing horizontally across the tennis courts as it blew out the welds.
No-one hurt, one bounced off the fence and due to lighting between the legs none came my way, but from then on new policy was to use the tripods where the top was a single piece of metal rather than formed from 3 pieces or bent metal welded together.
One of the Chem videos I was watching mentioned Diethyl Ether, and now I can't get the "die potato" asdf animation out of my head with the "die thyl ether" in the potatoes' place.
I blame you for making me think of chemistry on a daily basis.
As a kid I sprayed canned air upside down in a soda can I cut in half, then tried to ignite it in my dad's garage. I was expecting it to just I dunno, boil off, I thought they used inert gasses in canned air. Then my eyes and lungs started to burn. I tried stomping the fire out and instead spilled the halogenated hydrocarbons that I did not know were halogenated hydrocarbons all over the concrete, prompting them to spread out, evaporate, and burn even faster! I ran out of the side door of the garage and stumbled on my way out, landing on the grass, heaving and gasping heavily for a few minutes. I didn't tell anyone, I was lucky nothing else caught on fire. I punched in the code to the outdoor garage opener later to make sure nobody else got exposed.
Oh man, that’s so scary!
@@That_Chemist I was extremely confused, and really scared.
Anitmony pills were used during the 15th and 16th century as a laxative. Since antimony pills were expensive, you then dug through the resulting pile (or, rather, you had one of your servants do it) to retrieve it.
Tame lab story:
As part of an inorganic chemistry lab course we were tasked with the synthesis of metallocenes (the students were put into pairs and each pair had to synthesize a different metallocene).
The synthesis is hell for anybody who doesn’t like working with Schlenk lines (me), but at least the product forms as these really pretty, dark green crystals (nickelocene). Nothing went wrong for me and my partner but I later heard that a different pair, who probably had to handle a more sensitive metallocene, had their product spontaneously catch fire. Nobody was hurt and I didn’t get to see it but that must have been scary.
when I was doing blacksmithing as a hobby, I had a VERY scuffed forge. made it myself from an old charcoal grill, a hairdryer and a bunch of pipe sections. got steel white-hot so it worked well.
one day I was working on something and on my upswing the head of my hammer broke off and time slowed. I had hot metal in my left hand and the handle in my right, so I did the thing any genius would. tried catching the head with my arm. 3lb head proceeded to hit the fuck out of my right forearm and cause a hairline fracture that I didn't go to the doctor for.
all in all, made a few fugly-yet-functional knives
We made acetylene in grade 10 chem. I made a torch out of a pop bottle.
👀
“You guys got the good stuff? Yknow, americium Juuls…?”
Methyl mercaptane can already be smelled at ppb concentration (yes, parts per billion). So just give a drop of it into the air vent and everybody will smell it pretty quickly while toxicity is not even remotely an issue.
I LOVE THE TASTE OF ALPHA PARTICLES
Probably way too late, but will try to contribute my part.
So, obligatory, not a chemist, but a former electronics repair tech in a third world country, and had a fair share of accidents.
1) In one of the places i worked, a colleague tried to recover data from a damaged laptop, the battery has been holding it's structure just good enough to combust right after removal and smoke up the place in an unventilated room with no sand bucket, we both had to leave it burning there on the metal table and run out. All my cloth items stunk of burning lithium for the next month, luckily nobody was injured;
2) Had a fairly big blob of molten solder shoot out right into my eye, somehow reacted in time. Now i have a scar on my eyelid and a story to tell;
3) This is commonly overlooked, but this is why you don't wear flip-flops in commercial environments: a capacitor i was trying to remove from a board, exploded in a violent fashion, showering everything under it in boiling electrolyte, thankfully i had socks on;
4) Occasionally we had to melt plastic to make a patch or reinforce structure on some plastic parts, didn't really have any good methods of doing so, so a fair bit of it burned and the room had to be vented out;
5) Me, being stupid back then, tried to stop superglue from bonding by pouring acetone onto it. I think this is where i've got my persistent cough from, because i had a violent reaction for half an hour after smelling that;
6) Had a 10L canister of isopropyl alcohol knocked over in the shop right when the whole deal with the facemasks started, so basically had the floor accidentally perfectly disinfected;
7) Had several accidental acetone spills on the desk, that i've noticed only after an hour or so, when my arm was basically soaked in it;
8) Had several electrecution attempts from computer power supplies, still have small marks of electrical burns from some;
Left the field last year because of professional growth aspirations, with some permanent damage and a lot of experience.
Moral: try to think what you're doing, and have safety practices and equipment in place, because any of the incidents i've had could've been a lot worse if i was less lucky and/or careful. Considering the power supply experiences, it's a miracle i'm even alive.
Gladly, moved to an industry where the worst i can do is accidentally bring down a website for about an hour.
I love the internet because no one ever lies or makes up ridiculous stories about their life.
Ah... radioactive isotopes! Mmmmm!
Professional Stank Juice is detectable at such low levels that by the time it caused a risk of asphyxiation/toxicity, you'd already be functionally disabled by the extreme nausea of such high concentrations.
I have a yikes story. In the 1950s, my grandfather saw some P4 being used as a weapon on television. He then saw some in his high school and he picked the lock and then stole it. He was going to put the P4 sample, about a cubic inch, in the sink. But before he can, it exploded in a 1-2 foot tall fire. He still has that scar on his hand.
BTW, P4 is white phosphorus
I also hav egot quite some stories:
- One time in the building next to us (which was a different school) They did something involving bromine where the teacher thought it would be a good idea to let a student hold a Beaker with Bromine and do the reaction... the slipped and dropped the beaker which resulted in the school being shut down for 2 weeks.
- another time i was helping our chem teacher sorting the chem cabinet and we found some very interesting chemicals there like half a fucking Kilogramm of Potassium permanganate and like a completely oxidized block of sodium and some carbon tet
- Once there was an "explosion" in the acid cabin because someone didnt ventilate the pure nitric acid and the No2 blew the cap off and blew the bottle into smithereens
I work in the fire alarm industry, and i've done HUGE replacment jobs replacing old, radioactive Ion detectors with new, safer, photo detectors. I've left jobs with PILES of those detectors in boxes, and i've always wondered:
Would it be possible to gather enough Americum to go critical? and if so, how many Ion detectors would need to be one place at one time? I'm sure (hopefull) its either impossible or some unresonably large number.
The one with the Powdered Magnesium generating hydrogen, that was funny, but damn. Very lucky no one got hurt with that.
Vaping Americium-241... Yikes. Why would you even take apart a smoke detector to get at that piece of Americium? Madness
The hair pun at the end... I chuckled at that. Help me, my sense of humour is broken.
I work as a safety tech and IH in an oil refinery that shall not be named. I was told by one of the OLD Operators that they would make their own crud buster hand wipes by soaking rags in benzene. They would use them to wipe raw crude oil off of themselves. It's amazing how little people understood toxic chemicals even in the 70s. Especially shocking because they work with them regularly. Though that happens today as well. Had to explain to a guy less than a month ago why it is a bad idea to hang out under a SO2/SO3 leak without acid gear while it is raining.
I've vaporized zinc out of brass but that's about the most exciting thing I've done with metalworking
Not a blacksmith but a former welder. I think most chemists would be shocked at the normalization of toxic fume exposure, especially to things like chromium (from stainless) and aluminum vapors. I was always very careful and wore a respirator, but we basically never used fume extraction. we theoretically had a couple of portable extractors around the shop, but they were huge and always stored in inconvenient locations because the layout of the shop had not been designed with their use in mind, so no one used them. because we were using processes with inert gas shielding, no one liked to keep the bay doors open either except on really hot days because the drafty air would mess up our gas. As a result, the air in that shop would become thick with welding fumes. The aluminum always smelled the worst. Once or twice I remember welding aluminum when I had forgotten my respirator and ending up with blueish-black aluminum oxide in my boogers when I went to blow my nose later. Other guys weren't nearly as careful as me though. There was a saying that they didn't need a respirator because everything was filtered through a cigarette, or that tar built up in the lungs would protect against fumes. Many of my coworkers were old and many had health problems - one guy had COPD, but it didn't stop him from smoking like a fish and wearing no respirator.
As they say, don't get high off your own radioactive materials supply.
Back in high school, we had a physics teacher who was the most chill man on the planet. he would often make jokes like "I mean I could make crack, but everyone's seen breaking bad so..." or just do random things in the lab while he was bored. His favorite thing to do was spread a bunch of isopropyl alcohol on a lab table and light it on fire, yo make this big flame that would last for 10 seconds and go away. What he didn't realize was that the smoke detectors had grown dirty over the years, and there was an accumulation of dirt and dust in the detector. so, when he lit a lab table up underneath the detector, and a gust of warm air started rushing up, it freed all the particles chilling on the dusty detector, and it decided that these were smoke particles. we all had to evacuate the building and wait for the FD to show up, but I got to miss a class and a half so it was pretty cool
The only positive to be drawn from the Americium story is that it's melting point far exceeds any temperatures that a vaporizer will reach. The strange taste was probably the coating on the new vaporizer. But there is always the danger of inhaling microscopic pieces of the substance that have become airborne inside the smoking device.
If any decent amount of Americium is inhaled I would expect the person to die within a matter of weeks due to acute radiation syndrome. If they survived or avoided that, I'm sure the chance of developing lung cancer or leukaemia to be around the one hundred percent mark.
Im pretty sure the “issues at hand” in a mine are going to cause more harm. You could tell me the only reliable warning system is a device strapped to my ankle that stabs me in the leg with a nail and I wouldnt complain
You know if I saw a chemist crouch down during an experiment, even if I was just 11, I would be AFRAID
One history that happaned on the lab I do undergrad research is that the lab technician was exposed to more than a years maximum dose of radiation in a day. The older X-ray diffractometer worked with its door open... So, he basically took a paid leave for 10 months. He was not allowed by law to work. He still works in the lab. Newer diffractometers don't work with the door open, but we still have the old one kind of accumulating dust. Every technician still gets 30% a month of additional salary for dangerous work as they should.
Watching this brought back memories from high school. The chemistry class/lab was on the first floor of the building so that in of itself was a good and bad thing, there’s was only ever two occasions where something happened but I have no knowledge of this stuff but anyway the teacher planned a lab to create some type of liquid to gas back to liquid, trying to mix stuff together, the teacher said to follow the steps exactly or it could result in a dangerous gas. He did the lab all day with no problem until lunch time. A kid misread and put the last ingredient or whatever first and it resulted in a very abrupt cloud in the whole room. Had to evacuate the building until it cleared and settled
awesome to see you're getting sponsors already! love your videos
Glad you like them!
i would guess there are charts or something for the "stench gas", but the easier answer is, you better get moving before it becomes toxic, plus you have a second reason to gtfo as fast as you can, toxic gases might be a great motivater that get even the laziest guy moving quickly
i remember that one time back in 2016 in chem class, we were supposed to use hydrochloric acid and a few other solvents and such, and the idea was to prove what (x) looked like under certain circumstances. One of the processes involved a bunsen burner and the acid.
I have no idea how they did it but a group of 3 girls managed to make what was essentially a chlorine bomb. It didn't explode perse but what it did do was;
1) turn black, into some sort of glue/resin texture, which soon hardened.
2) burn extremely quickly
3) put a burning mess of compounds together to create what could only be described as chlorine gas mixed with a couple other off-gasses.
Someone should draw a guy vaping a chunk of americium 241, in a similar vein to the mouth pipetter drawing That Chemist posted.
That guy ducking under the table was a genius
Blacksmith here, I have one time burned my steel so violently I had to toss the whole fire and bar into a safe earthen firepit. The forge is cast iron, which when insulated with coal/ash/air won't burn in atmosphere. If the already burning steel touched the cast iron, it could have the risk of burning it too, and sending shrapnel all across my shop. I did manage to partially melt/burn my grate, but the coal forge survives. I'll replace the forge with a better coal forge when it breaks one way or another. Most of the time I get coal that's too wet, or throw too much on as I'm a "seasonal" blacksmith. I live in the south and the summers are too hot with no fans to be burning a coal forge, especially when I have a job during the week, and blacksmith on the side
I remember in the 6th grade during chemestry class, we had a lock down.
Now the chemical closet was our safe hiding spot during lock downs.
Everyone huddled back there, and got down, being me I didn't do that.
I got up and being the nerd I was I looked at the chemical rack.
I recognized a bunch of suspicious stuff, but the worst of it was Uranium and Yellow cake.
I kept trying to tell the teacher about it, but she wouldn't listen to me saying "there's no way that's back there"
A few months later a bunch of men in white suits are there cleaning stuff out.
Apparently the seventh grade teacher from the year before was using it for demonstration purposes.
Worried, yes, and I really hope they'll get to a doctor. But at least it is not fatal, according to the papers:
---
No reports were located regarding death in humans resulting from acute-, intermediate-, or chronic-duration inhalation exposure to americium.
Death was noted within 6 months in an unspecified number of dogs following acute exposure to 241Am aerosols (as americium nitrate) resulting in inhaled activity of 1.5 µCi/kg (55.5 kBq/kg) (Buldakov et al.
1972). Significant early mortality, attributed to radiation pneumonitis, was noted in rats following acute inhalation of 241AmO2 particles (activity median aerodynamic diameter [AMAD] 0.75-1.39 µm) resulting
in an approximate initial lung burden of 1.3 µCi (48 kBq) and radiation dose to the lungs of 1,500 rad (1.5 Gy) (Sanders and Mahaffey 1983).
---
(amount in modern smoke detectors is around 37kBq)
pretty scary
When I was in grade 9 we were in a basement level, high school lab. Lots of sinks, glass, shelves, lots of gas lines, and One back door that lead out of the building. The hippie children turned every gas handle 360 degrees. It went on for 3 days. Maintenance was dumbfounded. The quiet kid in the back, tried to smoke a puff of cannabis under his thick winter coat. A shelf, easily 100 feet away, blew a bunch of glass around. They later found burn marks on the ceiling above, and the shelf itself. They also cut all direct gas lines, but didn't replace the actual faucets until after I graduated. True story, but I am still unclear on how it happened..
Blacksmith here.
One thing a lot of newer blacksmiths do is look for free or cheap steel to forge stuff out of. This is all fine and dandy, recycling and all that, but a lot of people aren't aware of galvanized steel (prevents rust from forming, really useful stuff) and that's where issues can arise.
When galvanized steel is heated to around 400 degrees Fahrenheit it'll begin to create zinc fumes, which really aren't the greatest to inhale. Causing what we refer to as "heavy metal fever", flu like symptoms and feeling terrible etc. Welders are typically warned about this stuff too, at least I was when I was taking classes.
So for any of you new smiths out there, be aware of galvanized steel.