I worked at a synchrotron. A contractor was installing some new equipment and thought the tamper-proof screws on the beamline radiation shielding were some kind of funky rivets, so he drilled them out. Removing the panel like that tripped a safety interlock that initiated an immediate beam dump, ruining all active experiments and causing massive schedule chaos as it takes a LONG time to get the beam up to its full operating power. Around the same time, someone got trapped inside the cyclotron down the road--they were almost exposed to high vacuum. The Department of Energy mandated a fresh round of safety training for the entire facility.
Picture this: It's your high school's chemistry lab test, and you have an unknown organic acid. You're tasked with determining its identity by titrating it and preparing a buffer solution, and for the first time in your high school days, you have to prepare everything from scratch. Wow, this'll be a tough lab! But then an idiot in the front row (me, actually) uncorks his vial, huffs the fumes up his right nostril, and exclaims, "It's acetic acid!" And to your absolute horror, the rest of the class uncorks their vials and proceeds to determine the organic acid's identity in the same manner.
My high school chemistry textbook stated that acids tend to taste sour and bases tend to taste bitter. The very next line warned us to not use this test and buy pH indicator strips instead.
The “tasting base bath” story made me think of the time I tasted hydrochloric acid. During one of our first chemistry labs in high school we had to pipet and titrate 15ml of HCl. However, the pipetting device only went up to 10ml. So our teacher told us it was fine to pipet by mouth, causing me to get a mouth full of hydrochloric acid. Luckily it was only maybe 0.01 M(olar). I washed with lots of water and was all fine, though it did taste awful. Fun fact, some time after that when I first tasted beer I said it tasted like hydrochloric acid, admittedly, it was Heineken…
Pretty sure every human being that has lived past their first week has tasted hydrochloric acid solution at some point, given that HCl is a major component of gastric digestion & vomit generally has a Ph of 1 to 2 (the stomach secretes HCl at 0.16 mol/L, and it gets diluted to somewhere between .1 and .01 depending on other factors.)
Some people in our pharmacy department were definitely guilty of pouring organosulfur compounds down the drain. We noticed everytime because our drains are similarly interconnected and every once in a while the entire place would either smell like a fart or trigger an alarm because someone assumed it was a gas leak
In the lab I used to work in, one of the research groups was doing organometallic chemistry with uranium (depleted uranium sourced from BNFL), and one of the weirdest compounds made was a funky uranium pentalene complex. Under certain conditions, this compound could pull the oxygen out of the middle of diethyl ether and leave butane behind, and at the time (this was 20 years ago), nobody understood how or why this worked. One of the follow-up experiments to try and find out was to replace the diethyl ether with diethyl sulfide, to see if the same uranium compound could do the analogous reaction, pulling the sulfur out of the middle, again leaving butane behind. This meant that the unlucky postdoc charged with doing this experiment had to use neat diethyl sulfide as the solvent! Anyway, after doing the experiment, the solvent had to be evaporated off under vacuum, and collected in a liquid nitrogen cold trap, which is the normal way of evaporating off solvents when you are doing organometallic chemistry with extremely air sensitive compounds. As soon as this was done, they removed the trap while the contents were still frozen solid, and then left it in the back of one of the fumehoods to warm up and evaporate. This was somewhere between 20 and 30 mL of diethyl sulfide, merrily wafting its way up the fumehood for the rest of the day and probably well into the evening too. Unfortunately, this was a warm and not particularly windy day, and the little wind that there was carried the outflow from the fumehood towards the residential side of campus, where all the halls of residence were. We only found out the next day that Transco (the national emergency service for reporting gas leaks) had received hundreds of calls from the student residences the previous afternoon and evening. Their engineers had been running all over that side of campus, presumably with much confusion and head scratching, trying to determine the source of an apparently massive gas leak. Turns out that the smell of diethyl sulfide is almost identical to tetrahydrothiophene, the latter being the compound added to natural gas to give it a smell for identifying gas leaks.
My prof told us a story about a acid water mixing accident he had as a undergrad. He was trying to scrub something with chromic acid. He added water and the stuff violently boiled and shot out of the container pretty much soaking him (Thank god he didn't get seriously hurt) . He then immediately threw water on himself an and got rid of all his cloths leading to him running around naked and torpefied searching for the next toilette, where he spent about 40 minutes until someone came in and he could tell the guy to get his Lab TA. Tldr: our professor almost killed himself with chromic acid and ran around naked in a Lab building.
So I did in fact work at a cyclotron which produced isotopes for medical imaging and radiotherapy. I worked in the life sciences division where we handle liquid sources of radiation (radioactive ions dissolved in solvent). This makes it quite easy to get contaminated so we had lots of training and measures in place to make sure contamination wasn’t spread. During training we heard about a guy who got his hands contaminated, didn’t wash them, and went to the bathroom. Essentially he got radioactive material on his member and had to be scrubbed clean by the safety team. That was enough to scare everyone into being pretty careful.
Me, a theoretical computational chemist watching from above: Pathetic. 😂😂❤️ The most dangerous thing that had happened to me was that one time when I almost spilled soda over my keyboard 😂😂
No, no, you almost spilled an aqueous solution of dilute phosphoric acid and carbonic acid, among other things, onto your keyboard. ;) (The exact acid may differ. Cola type sodas usually have phosphoric acid, fruit type sodas usually have citric and/or malic acid.)
I accidentally gave my lab partner a panic attack just after they had come back into the lab from having one. I agreed to watch their reflux and offered a measuring cylinder to them, thinking it was clean. It was not. I don't remember the exact contents but it reacted with a loud, high pitched bang and I was mortified seeing my friend's face in horror
Back when I worked on bio-based paints I was doing workup on some natural blue tetrapyrroles dissolved in water. It had taken weeks to extract and purify half a gram from the bacteria that produced it. We had a shitty rotavap so I decided to evaporate the last few milliliters of water by hand under mild nitrogen flow. Unfortunately, someone had turned the flow regulator all the way up and I forgot to check it. And to make matters worse, I opened the fumehood window quite far because "it's just water and non-toxic paint, right?" So a split second after I opened the nitrogen line, the entire fumehood got an involuntary paint job and I looked like a depressed smurf contemplating his life choices.
This was great! I think there's a certain morbid curiosity to hearing others' chemistry horror stories... but also it makes you feel less stupid about your own mistakes
Glad you found my earlier comment amusing. Your comments on not being shy about using the safety shower (in relation to the sulfuric acid spill in the segment at 6:00), is spot on. During the 16 years I was at the plant site where the Ph2O incident occurred, there was one death. An operator was steam cleaning a crusty pump in the 2,4-dinitrophenol plant, when he uncovered a small corrosion hole and was sprayed with product solution. He bypassed the local safety shower in favor of the more private locker room facilities. The extra time (probably less than a minute) allowed him to receive a lethal dose via skin absorption.
I think maybe regular tests of the showers should be conducted... just to get people used to it; so they don't hesitate and die. On a lighter note, our E-Shower in College O-Chem had no drain. The lab was on the 2nd Floor, and I thought repeatedly about faking it, just to see the water flow down the stairs! ;-)
@@buixotenot just to get people used to it, but to make sure that a) the shower is still functional and b) that the water in the pipes is at least mostly clean. As a club safety officer in undergrad I had a couple interesting experiences with safety shower and eye wash station testing. The nearest ones to the club lab hadn't been tested in over a decade, and the first time I tested them, the water was literally brown with rust particulates for about 5 seconds. After that I made sure to test them at least quarterly, just in case.
back in undergrad, the grad student i was working with was like “get the stir bar out of this” (freshly titrated e. coli minimal media, so it wasn’t dangerous) and i just fuckin reached in with my gloved hand and grabbed it. thankfully we were going to autoclave it next so it didn’t matter but lmao the second i put my hand in there i was like “i have made a mistake”
I've made a couple funny mistakes in the first lab I ever worked at. This one time I was cleaning out a 250L bioreactor with some glacial acetic acid and I accidentally poured way too much of it into the tank. This resulted in the entire lab being filled with acetic acid fumes which were so strong it felt like inhaling needles with every breath. I'll never underestimate that stuff again. Another time I was spinning my samples down in a benchtop centrifuge, and as I was listening to it spin up I started browsing on my phone. All of a sudden it just starts loudly, violently shuddering across the benchtop which scared the piss out of me. I hit the emergency stop and waited for it to slow down enough to open, and when I did I saw it was full of broken plastic and had gashes all over the walls. What happened was a plastic well plate (that I wasn't using) was not situated properly on the swing out attachment and slipped off as it was spinning up to ~3,000RPM. It still worked afterwards.
You haven't worked in a biochem lab if you haven't had a centrifuge mishap. I once witnessed someone start a floor centrifuge unbalanced. The noise was terrifying.
When my grad student mentor was an undergrad, HIS grad student mentor synthesized an artificial amino acid that had a high nitrogen content. Scraped the vial to get more yield... you know how this goes. Violently detonated. Blew out the sash of the fume hood they were working in AND the one six feet behind them. My mentor had glass shards embedded in him. His mentor lost fingers.
I really hope that when I do my Phd in a year that I will have a chance to use carrots for a reduction. It would be hilarious to write in a scientific paper that one of the steps was just dumping my lunch in the flask to get the reaction going.
In Undergrad, I was doing solvent screening for the reaction of fructose to HMF using HCl. Our professor told us to using a solvent called 2-methylfuran. Little did we know this solvent polymerize with acid. The result was an entire condenser and flask filled with black resin. It took a 3-month acetone/methanol bath to take it off. I think we made a teflon derivative without any fluor, we should have made a patent for that
The best way to learn what a synproportionation/conproportionation reaction is, is to pour a bunch of Sulfuric Acid and Sodium Thiosulfate solution down the drain at the same time in 1st semester lab and inhaling a good lung of SO2. Dont be mad at me for the disposal, I was young and the instructions said to just pour the solutions down the drain with water after finishing. I just turned on the water for two minutes and then left so I would not get in trouble.
It's absolutely on the organizers of the lab to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen, so it would probably have been them to get in trouble if you told. Where I'm working, I'm absolutely not allowed to put anything down the drain except when washing my hands. Honestly, I think this is good practice, I make sure to deactivate all my stuff before discarding it in my waste containers after having learned it the hard way by pouring sodium carbonate solution in my acidic waste container.
In the very beginning of chemistry classes at school, my teacher assigned us the following task: come up with a series of reactions to convert Calcium metal into Calcium Carbonate with the help of water, vinegar and baking soda. When we were done, Prof wanted to show us how Calcium oxide reacts with water. He took a miniscule amount of CaO and put it into a tiny erlenmeyer flask with water, a thermometer and indicator. As expected, the temperature rose and the indicator became pink. Then, for comparison, he wanted to show us the same thing but with Calcium Carbonate. He used a second erlenmeyer flask which was more than half full with water but otherwise the same. Well, then he put a heaped teaspoon of the "Calcium Carbonate" in there and much to his surprise, the mixture in the flask suddenly boiled and then it more or less spewed its probably boiling-hot content over his labcoat and table. It was then that he realised it was the wrong bottle that he took the stuff out of. The funniest thing was that before the whole spoon went into the flask, some of the compound fell into the water and it did turn slightly pink, but he didn't see and we were all like "uhhh...". He took off his coat immediately and everything was fine, mostly because it was a small flask and therefore not much content. But yeah, he very impressively demonstrated why it is important to work percise, accurate and cautious🤣
Rookie mistake time: I was working as an undergrad in a high pressure combustion lab, doing combustion tests of nitromethane. The one chamber we have can pressurize to 50,000psi. To place test-tubes into this chamber, there is this massive plug at the bottom that is raised into the chamber by a monstrosity of winch and pulley system. The plug itself sat upon a spring-supported platform, which sat upon another platform which was the platform that was winched up into the system. Although this chamber does have an optical port, where you could in theory use a laser for ignition, that functionality was not in place yet. Instead, to ignite the test-tube of nitromethane, we used a small piece of a plastic explosive, which would be ignited using a piece of nichrome wire held by alligator clips. At some point during the plug insertion process, this wire came out of the alligator clips. I didn’t find out until after pressurizing to 14,000psi, a process that took the better part of all day. That was a long day.
I like the argument of t-butanol makes t-butylamine a tertiary amine, but on the contrary if triethylamine is a tertiary amine, does this make dimethyl ether a secondary alcohol?
So back in high school my chemistry teacher asked me to prepare a lab for our class. At the time we were supposed to be learning about pressure and vacuum etc. so I thought it would be a great idea to bring a decent size 2 stage vacuum pump in and a giant bell jar and hopefully boggle their minds with basic physics. As I was finishing up the vacuum hoses and fittings the teacher and the schools safety officer came in to see what I was making for the class. I thought wow here's my chance to impress him since he's also the history teacher. I placed a buzzer in the jar and then reached for the control panel completely forgetting that I had left the vent cap still on the pump... anyhow as soon as the safety officer leaned over to observe BOOM that cap made its rapid vertical ascent grazing his hat and proceeded to bounce off the ceiling and walls just like the physics in cartoons. The man just stared for a hot minute and then said "your doing great" and left the room. I certainly made history at the school being the first student to shoot at a safety officer...
One of the students in my HS lab class misunderstood the disposal directions, and poured HCL down the sink, then the sodium bicarbonate solution down the same sink. Have you ever seen a sink geyser? I have! Granted, it wasn’t very big, but it made quite a few loud pops, and filled the bottom part of the sink with bubbles. I’m sure the plumbing loved that as well…
A grad student purchased 10 mCi of Cf-252 and put left it in a coworker's desk drawer without telling anyone and then left for another job. To show how serious this is, we now keep it (at 2 mCi) in a 55 gallon drum filled with neutron absorber off-site where no one is within 30 yards of it.
Speaking of accidents, reminds me of a story I'm pretty sure is just one that old chemists pass around to scare students due to the xenomorph blood-like reaction depicted. Anyway - sorry, gotta put my old man hat on - it was 1999 when the internet was still barely a thing, and that South Park joke about Iowa was very true. After a slow class trying to teach a group of 8th graders how fun balancing equations is, my old high school chem teacher told us about some outmoded procedures in the 70s, namely mouth pipetting. And you almost certainly know where this is going. I can't recall what reagent he specified, but a female student was pipetting some solution and sucked a bit too vigorously. The 70s were a different time. Though she spit it out as soon as she realized, by the time she got to a sink to wash, her front teeth had already begun to puff up like nixtamalized corn. Dispite the washes, by the time paramedics arrived, her top two incisors had started sloughing off. Turned out he genuinely was a former student of my same school, and that was why the school said we weren't allowed to pipette our own nitric acid to put on pennies the next day.
In undergrad, my roundbottom slipped off the rotovap and spilled all of its contents into the water. I got my professor (he wasn't angry at me, he later told me that accidents happen and not to worry) to dispose of the water. He took the bath out of the fume hood, and pretty much carelessly dumped all of the water into a container and quite a bit of it spilled on the floor. Turns out that there was a lachrymator that had spilled into the water bath and now it was all over the lab, so everyone's eyes started getting teary. The lab was shut down for the rest of the week. I still take full responsibility for that incident to this day...
In school chemistry class about 40 years ago we were making soap. Usual stuff sodium hydroxide, an appropriate oil and some heat. After the experiment is finished one guy decides to see how well it will wash his hands. The "soap" contained a fair bit of unreacted sodium hydroxide and his hands didn't like it one bit. Fortunately no lasting damage done other than embarassment.
I remember HS chemistry fondly. Working with lye scared the piss out of me on account of our only PPE being safety goggles and gloves (under-funded school in rural Kentucky, so what do you expect?), though, thankfully the teacher was able to help dispose of it safely.
Man, the worst mistake I've made in the lab was when I was connecting a SO₂ gas cylinder, I knocked over some other researchers vial immediately after she told me not to. The worst thing that came from it, thankfully, was an angry glare, as her product was pretty viscous.
LOL. I can imagine. A former Phd in my lab wanted to pick up a vial at the end of her bench. I warned her to be careful as I had samples there which took me weeks to synthesize & purify[morpholine dions]. Her reply: Ah hush...........I'll manage. Not...she flipped over 2 of my costly products in rb flasks. I think she didnt dare to look me in the eye for quite a few weeks 😂
As reading all the comments on the other videos would take way too long, a best of is really nice to watch. And I can contribute a few rookie anecdotes, too (sadly, nothing more advanced since I did not finish university, but I still fondly remember the time, and have not lost interest completely, hence watching chemistry videos on youtube occasionally). 1. Hot Glassware: When still in high school, when entering the chemistry room/lab I notice the teacher burning out some glassware with a Bunsen burner, but don't really think much about it. Some time later, when everyone is asked to get some materials, and I think that funnel sitting on the teacher's desk looks much cleaner than those in the cupboard, so I try to grab it and "psssh", I can hear and smell a bit of my finger getting burnt. I was too embarressed to say anything and had a quite painful white spot for some time, luckily nothing worse. 2. In probably the first or second organic laboratory session at university, some of us had the great idea to share a large 2l beaker to collect waste. Shortly after pouring some solvent (more than 20 years later, I don't remember what it was) into the beaker, it started to get hot and froth. Someone else had put something containing H2SO4 into it earlier and I was barely able to make it to an ice dispenser and back with a bowl of ice to cool the beaker down, preventing it from spilling its contents into the fume hood. 3. Sometime later, you'd think I'd have learned that organic liquids and sulphuric acid can react violently, but I had forgotten about that and was reminded rather unpleasantly. I had a similar reaction when adding something to a flask with H2SO4 in it. The second lesson I learned that day was not to put your face in front of the flask's opening. Some of the contents of the flask sprayed out directly into my face. I asked someone to wipe my face while I was pulling my gloves off before I could wash myself, and I had lots of small marks on my face for a few weeks. 4. And another simple mistake: If you've done a reaction using Na, check if there's anything of it left in the flask before washing it in the sink. Back then the rule was to bring a cake for the lab assistants if you did something stupid, and I had to bring a few. I probably should have taken the time to step out of the lab and drink something more often, as a whole afternoon without hydration in a warm lab can really affect concentration.
One day our teacher wanted to show us some Phosphorous. After taking it out of the flask it of course self ignited and the entire building was evacuated.
I only have one radiological accident story, and luckily it didn't happen to me directly. I was working as a bench chemist at a very large company. One of the other chemists was using 14C-labelled acetyl chloride to label a compound. The reagent came in a sealed glass ampule containing about a gram of the acyl chloride. His method of opening a glass ampule was to chill it way down then touch the scored neck of the ampule with a hot glass stirring rod; the stress caused by the temp imbalance would snap the ampule open on the score mark. BTW I've never heard of this method before or since. He was wearing ppe; safety specs, lab coat, latex gloves, and company-mandated steel-toed shoes. This time instead of cleanly snapping the ampule open, the whole ampule disintegrated in his gloved hand. He knew he was in trouble immediately of course, so he stripped off his gloves and lab coat and went to the shower/locker room down the hall (did I mention this was a VERY large industrial chemical enterprise?) There he showered off and the rad safety people came and scrubbed him down with borax soap. His clothes were bagged and I assume they are in a hot landfill somewhere. Even though the dude was nominally protected by his glove, some 14C acetyl chloride made it through to his hand, then into him. He had to be monitored for a few weeks until his urine cooled off, and he had to wear a cotton glove on the affected hand. This was during the heyday of Michael Jackson and his one glove, so he endured a lot of jokes about that. Eventually all the 14C washed out of him and as far as I know he was none the worse for it. Good times.
Right after the nitrogen in glove story I got a chocolate advertisement and the first thing I hear is the crinkling of unwrapping a chocolate. My immediate imagination was not pleasant
Remembering the day I decided to wash some glassware I left out in the fumehood the day before. As soon as I’ve put them in water, my eyes remembered me what I’ve forgotten: they had benzyl bromide on them and my eyes started burning like I’ve rubbed habaneros on them. Even washing them through on the washer, my eyes ached for like an hour.
My favorite story to tell was when some walls and some of the roof was fluorecing for a few days after some glassware broke and splattered everywhere. Nothing dangerous involved. Most dangerous compound was propably NaOH
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Both real life experiences (especially ones to learn from) and funny jokes are appreciated ❤️. Would love to see more of these every now and then, when there's enough material available
When I was in the Navy my ship was going through a reactor refuel and I was restricted to the ship we had our morning muster in the usual place and halfway through rolecall someone made us aware that there was an unshielded reactor core off to our left. Lol of course they said we should be fine. Still it's been 20 plus years and no cancer yet.
DCM burns are just annoying. I once, right after a glove change, was prepping a mobile phase for a DCM+MeOH column and managed to spill a small amount of solvent onto my glove. It wasn't even enough to be even anything to normally worry about, just enough to prompt a glove change. Apparently, though, my fresh-from-the-box gloves had a pinhole in there somewhere, and immediately I felt liquid soak into the glove. In the mere moments between liquid contact and the classic burning sensation that DCM has, my stomach felt like it dropped to the floor. And then, naturally, the chemical burn started. After quite literally ripping my glove off and rinsing with copious amounts of high-pressure water (since DCM isn't miscible, you have to compensate by basically blasting it off), there was a streak of red, partially defatted skin between the ring and middle fingers of my left hand for a couple of weeks. VWR made the gloves, for those curious, they were just standard medium-size nitrile examination gloves. Moral of the story: don't rely on gloves to be bulletproof, since sometimes they can't even be DCM-proof.
DCM will go straight through most nitrile gloves. You need something like Silverstar gloves (some kinda mylar) or polyethylene with nitrile over it. Mostly we just used nitrile and ripped the glove off if we got a spill. I never had a problem with dcm, I've literally had my hand doused with it numerous times, I feel a warm sensation but no damage. I can see how others would react severely.
This reminds me of a Mistake I made while doing qualitative Analysis and we were without a Supervisor. I was just done boiling my Mixture of Salts in conc. Hcl (33%). I then went and poured it into some centrifuge Glases(acid Was still hot and i was under pressure beacause my time was running out hence the hurry) to help the stuff settle by putting it in a centrifuge for a minute. so i picked up the Glases with the hot acid in them,2 per Hand, while wearing acid resistant gloves, which were wet, so 3 of the 4 Glases, slipped out my Hands, hit the bottom Part of the bench and broke spraying my pants with hot conc acid(was wearing sweatpants altough you really shouldnt). We do not have a safety shower in our lab so i ran too nearest sink and then washed my legs one by one After taking my pants off. So there i am, in the Lab, without pants or a Coat, right as the Supervisor walks in. Yeah it was really embarrassing to explain, but my legs were fine, my pants had a bunch of holes in them and i had to throw them out. Also dryed my pants using a heat gun, that was fun.
@@That_Chemist Since it is "only a school lab" we dont, at least According to guidelines, have to have a safety shower. We are usually not working with super dangerous stuff since we are all Lab Assistants in training. But i would still rather have one. On a less serious note, we do have a river running right besides our lab (bout 1 minute on foot), when we were all first shown around, we were told that if there is a big spill/fire we could just jump into the river and be fine.
So, I have a scar from a lab accident, but the way I got it was totally stupid and I’m still upset it even happened. So, I’m running a nitration, the nasty kind where you need really concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids mixed together then you add your product and for this one in particular I then had to heat to 90C. I was wear all my PPE, gloves, lab coat, even lab goggles for face protection. Well, the nitration is humming along nicely and to monitor the rxn, I had been taking small samples of the rxn mix with a glass pipette tip which I would dilute in a vial and run TLC to check the progress. The way I got my sample with the pipette tip was to turn off heating, remove the condenser quickly, and dip the pipette in. Well, one of the times I tried doing this, I reached for the condenser and in this particular setup, I had to reach my arms quite a bit into the hood to undo the clamp and lift the condenser. As I did so, the sleeves of the lab coat I was wearing rode up exposing the TINIEST sliver of my bare skin between where the glove ended and my lab coat sleeve ended. The second that area of skin was exposed, a rogue droplet of the near-boiling nitration mix fell from the bottom of the condenser, you guessed it, right on that part of my arm. I IMMEDIATELY went to the sink which was very close by and rinse my arm for 15 mins. The acid was probably in contact with my arm for no more than 5 seconds, I moved incredibly fast. Nevertheless, I still have a small oval shaped scar the size of a pea on my arm. I was really frustrated because I had been wearing all my PPE, it just so happened that my lab coat sleeves combined with how I had to stretch my arms to reach the clamps led to a very small hole in my defenses.
@@That_Chemist lol, yeah it was so dumb, just a stray drop off the bottom of the condenser as I was lifting it on the only section of my body it could have harmed me (-_____-)
I work in a physics research lab where we use tritium gas on a regular basis. We were recently on the receiving end of a big fuckup where one of our contractors sent us a pressure vessel with glass capsules in it that was supposed to be filled with deuterium! Well turns out they filled the vessel through a line that was full of tritium and severely contaminated it without noticing. Luckily we opened it in a room with a tritium monitor which instantly went nuts upon opening. Everyone then sprinted out of the room with panicked looks and we spent like $100,000 on decontamination, bioassays for everyone, and replacing a bunch of equipment that couldn't be decontaminated. Luckily nobody ended up receiving a significant dose of radiation or breathed in a meaningful amount of tritium gas but holy shit what a disaster.
@@zockertwins yeah they reimbursed us for all the damages and now they have a totally separate fill station for tritium fills. Also our shipping/receiving department is checking all incoming vessels for radiological activity before passing them along. Still sucked having to spend 2 weeks scintillator swiping every surface and tool in the lab that could have been potentially exposed.
@@That_Chemist the guy who was doing the fills is apparently an old guy who's been working there forever and just doesn't give a fuck anymore(but he got fired obviously). And we can't switch to some other supplier because they're the only one that exists that makes all the different proprietary stuff we need.
submitting to your greater wisdom I would still say - if you are wondering if you need to use the eye rinse and/or the safety shower, USE IT. As soon as something hits eyes or bare skin the clock is ticking and the damage will worsen with almost a geometric gradient. Ie a delay of 1 second with do 1 unit of damage, but 2 seconds of exposure with do 4 units of damage. Once the skin fails then things get worse very very fast as the substance will be in the living reproducing part of the skin.
Okay so I’m not a chemist and don’t work in a lab but I have 2 ppe stories to tell. Last year I got my funeral director apprentice license. During that course, one of the professors told us about a horrific story he had with formaldehyde. Firstly, if you don’t know, formaldehyde is the chemical used to preserve human/animal tissues for open casket funerals and scientific research- it works by denaturing the proteins in your cells and kills the microbes that cause decomposition. There’s also something called cavity embalming- this is where a long trocar needle is used to suction out fluid from the abdominal cavity and then another trocar needle attached to a tube that has a bottle of embalming fluid- basically a formaldehyde solution- at the top. He told us that he was a young embalmer at the time and thought he was pretty much invincible. So, he begins to use the formaldehyde trocar and the bottle isn’t screwed on correctly. The formaldehyde begins to run down his arm but he doesn’t realize it. Once he does, he stops what he’s doing and jumps into the safety shower but it was too late. Over the next week, large patches on his arm began to harden and then when new skin pushes through to the surface those hardened patches of skin fall off in chunks. Pretty gross and awful stuff- and that’s why you should always wear gowns with plastic underneath them if you’re working with formaldehyde. The next story is from when I was in my apprenticeship and if you get grossed out by poop I would stop reading. Now, in the funeral industry most places are still pretty old fashioned and this is true in the ppe sense- especially at this awful funeral home I was working for. Things like face masks, respirators, and face/eye shields aren’t always seen as a necessity but I promise you that if you’re working with bodily fluids THEY ARE NECESSARY. So, being the naive new apprentice I was, myself and another new apprentice were washing a body to be embalmed. You basically just used soap and a mid pressure hose to wash down a body from head to toe. This includes things like the nose, mouth, and anus. We get to this decedent’s anal cavity. They are purging. Purging is when body matter seeps from the body- mouth, ears, nose, anus, sometimes vaginal cavity. But they was direct from the hospital and so they were purging feces. This feces just kept coming and coming and coming. Myself and the other apprentice were not wearing face shields. We were using this hose to attempt to flush this decedent’s anal cavity so we could plug it using cotton. The other apprentice is taking her turn flushing while I hold the decedent on their side- this was a heavier person so it was easier for us to take turns. The other apprentice begins flushing and gets splashed in the face with fecal matter. Not a little bit. A lot a bit. It was horrific to witness, I can’t imagine how she felt. Our funeral home was strict about shower and eye wash use and so she had to go to the bathroom and clean her face off in the sink. I ended up leaving the funeral home and eventually the industry for things completely unrelated but in my house we still call it “ash’s swamps of dagobah”
Love your channel. Not a chemist in the professional realm but I do enjoy reading about it and seeing how it works. I was licensed herbicide applicator for 8 years so it was interesting seeing how herbicides affected plants thru chemistry
I think my worst mistake was shaking a huge solvent waste drum to see if I had enough space to dump in more. A drop of the waste that was mostly dcm went right under my glasses and into my eye. I ran to the nearest sink and rinsed my eye for about 15min. I really thought I was going to lose sight from that eye, but I was fine. Just a scary experience. PS: There was also phenol and a bunch of other nasty stuff in that waste
I have a radioactivity story from high school. We had a University visit our school for the final year students to basically muck around with radioactivity experiments for a day (like cloud chambers, measuring how air can absorb radiation, measuring half life etc.) And someone managed to secretly attach a radioactive source to some poor guys backpack. He walked all lunch through the school (the physics class had a lunch break in the middle) with a radioactive lead source on his pack. And then when he got back into class the teacher could not understand why the geiger counters would suddenly go completely crazy (when the guy walked past them ofcourse) all the time. It took a good hour till they found out. Needless to say the teacher was pissed off. We never found out who actually did it though.
It's kind of sad. The fear of radioactivity has gone so far that my school needed a locked lead cabinet for a bit of Uranium glass, which is probably a lesser radiation source than bananas.
@@gamingmarcus it seems here where I live it's somewhat more open. Chemicals and radioactive material was still in a locked cabinet but there wasn't like a super lead lined security or anything. We were free to work with Mercury and stuff like antimony (although I understand it hasn't got a whole lot to do with radioactivity. Although i have some radioactive minerals in my collection)
I work at a cyclotron currently! We are apart of a hospital and do research grade things ( not normal PET diagnostic studies). Anyways we were making [F18]-FPEB. Now we use hot cells, with nitrogen lines, titan valves, and syringes to add our reagents. One of the steps involve heating the vessel at 150C while pressurized/ sealed for 20 min. I go to get a drink of water and came back to my personnel Geiger counter beeping when i enter the lab ( far away from the hood). I walk over and it begins beeping faster and i see the reaction had not sealed well. It was all the way to a T-valve and so i quickly opened some vents and raised the pressure to push the solution back. I need to handle the T-valve and get sprayed with a few mL of radiation. I had well over 100mCi over my chest, hair, beard. Had to shower like 5 times that day. After every shower a radiation safety officer (RSO) would scan to see the counts on me. Luckily they tested and i did not ingest and dangerous amount and I had my glasses on so none in my eyes. It was the worst incident our facility had in over a decade. Luckily no lasting damage and handled well. We have quick response and the RSOs take these situations very seriously (dangerous or not). For reference patients are typically injected with 5mCi of activity. We still make jokes about it and are dealing with lasting paperwork with overseers. So many check valves and pieces of equipment changed.
Was doing a standard sodium in water demo for a class I was teaching. Some got out of the beaker, but that was not the end of the world - I had a shield up so no students were in danger. Now, I did not want try cleaning it up with water for obvious reasons, so I went for some ethanol, since I knew the ethanol reaction was much slower. However, either there was a drop of water on the table or it was the fact that the ethanol was not absolute resulted in it catching fire. I had to use a fire extinguisher. Words can barely describe the mess a dry chemical extinguisher makes - I had purple powder inside my socks!
@@That_Chemist you never quite get over the sight of your desk on fire. My students actually thought it was cool, and none of them got the alkali metal question on the exam wrong...
god yeah that one was just... oh god, what a way to go. Honestly I've been shocked by how much their animations have improved especially recently, just, damn, they hired a damn good animation team
Once in a Lab a student tryed to make a borate proof Reaktion with Methanol on a tripod and the beaker with a bunch of Methanol stood directly near that. So he tryed to Light it on fire with a flint and Steel and the hole beaker burned too. So he grabbed it with his bare Hand and poored it down the drain, but the hole sink began to burn. Also he had some small burns on his hand.
Yeah I mean I could do a video, I know all the synthetic methodology and I’ve met all of the people working on it, but I just don’t think it would be a very popular video. Maybe I will sort out how to set up patreon stretch goals and then I can justify regularly making more lecture content
A similar ether ignition happened in one of the undergraduate labs I was a TA for. Students did a short reaction in diethyl ether, then had to later recrystallize their product in an ethanol:water solution (I believe it was like 70:30). Student are hearing their solvent on a hot plate and out of nowhere the student at the fumehood next to the students I was assisting starts calling out “Fire!”. I looked over and saw the beaker full of orange flames, and actually paused for a second and asked “why isn’t the fire blue?”. Students were panicking but i just quickly suffocated the fire and took the beaker off the hot plate. Apparently the prepared bottle of ether was right next to the ethanol:water and the students didn’t check the label properly…
A screw malfunction on a cabinet shelf led to one of those 1 l stained bottles of standardized permanganate solution, freshly made and ready to cure for a week, to be dropped 50 cm onto the hard floor. Man, I'm glad I was just a student and not the technician😂😂
didn't happen to me personally, but at my last workplace we used to make perming lotions in batches of 2 tons at a time this involved handling multiple dozens of kilograms of ammonia and thioglycolic acid, and not only would it stink the whole building out, the plant operators had to wear full-face gas masks to do it safely; on one infamous occasion, both operators had put the wrong filter in their masks (particles rather than gases), and both came down with migraines and severe nosebleeds personally I'm very fortunate not to have had any accidents in all my professional and academic years beyond minor breakages; this may be down to the fact that when I was 15, during my work experience in a factory QC lab, one of the tasks involved handling fuming nitric acid, and it gave me a healthy dose of perspective about what's safe and what isn't if everything is presented as deadly dangerous (as was typically done in schools), it's easy to get blase about it and be desensitised to the real hazards when you move onto the harder stuff
Glad you liked my comment! I should've mentioned that if I recall correctly, after disposing of the silica into the glove I believe it was thrown into another specific bin for silica. You got it exactly right, we connected one side of the column to air pressure and the second to the glove, thus disposing of it. Also apparently people in my class had plenty of other accidents which I (happily?) wasn't there in person to see, such as breaking a jug of 32% hydrochloric acid on the floor, 2 fume hoods catching on fire from overheating of volatile solvents, spreading AlCl3 all over the lab's floor and more. From what I've heard, said dude was involved in at least one of those extra stuff - my only guess is god was looking the other way that day. Also love that kind of video, keep it up!
At the PC recycling place I worked at for a while the dude training me would use a sponge soaked with sweetened paraffin (mmm delicious aromatic compounds) to soften up stubborn asset labels and stickers, then blast them with the heat gun to soften whatever adhesive hadn't dissolved. Eventually he put the hot heat gun down on the paraffin-soaked sponge after continually using it and it ignited a heap of these inflated two-layer plastic film bubbles that we used to package our merchandise that we had draped over the desk. Had to peel the melted mess off with a chisel, stank bad enough I couldn't smell the brewery next door any more.
My class' rookie mistake: Several months ago - November 2021, my class, and I, did a lead-based precipitation experiment. Why lead, and not silver? Because the chemistry book said so! Anyways, it's KI + Pb(NO3)2. I was meant to dissolve the KI, and I used a spatula which had a little bit of leftover PbI2. I was excited a bit too much, and spilled some of the solution onto my hand. The PbI2 had dissolved to form (PbI4)2-. I quickly wiped my hands off, and, after a minute or two, washed my hands. I don't think too much lead got transferred to my blood, but still. It's lead. I and my class just straight up obliterated safety. A few girls inhaled the glass vial.
I've had a similar near miss with SoCl2 i distilled from quinoline. Changed the collected flask and distilled 10 degree os so above the BP thinking there shoudn't be much if any SoCl2 left. Moved the flask containing quinoline to a sink and i cautiously added one single drop of water which resulted in a violent release of HCl/SO2 which instinctly made me shit myself despite being prepared and drop the flask which smashed into the sink giving off even more gas as it reacted with residual water. Thankgod for PPE!
I have a bunch of stories. Rookie mistakes? Pulling tight tubing off of a glass hose barb on an adapter. Glass snapped and cut my hand. Once used a non-vacuum-rated flask as a vac trap. Imploded once it hit 50 torr and made a huge bang, no damage. Not a mistake but definitely my most fun story. Was doing a scale up in the GMP kilo lab for a process where chromatography hadnt been optimized away yet. Which meant running a column with 200L each of DCM and heptane for 8H straight. We had pre-ordered hundreds of 2L erlenmeyer flasks, and proceeded to fill every available table and shelf in the lab with fractions. Despite running the walk-in hood fans at full blast and covering each fraction with foil, by the end of the day, it got pretty heady in there. My labmate and I were having a grand old time cracking jokes and giggling from all the fumes. Definitely made 8H of stooping under the column spout with flasks more tolerable. Superviser comes in the afternoon to check on us and immediately makes a face and exclaims "Wow! How can you put up with the smell!?" We had gone totally noseblind to it, a la frog slowly boiled in water. Also we had an earthquake in the lab once. I thought at first it was a high vac pump gone unbalanced and shaking my bench, until I looked up and saw all tubing in the lab swaying and every flask sloshing. That was actually terrifying but thankfully nothing fell over. Worst accident was in undergrad o-chem lab. The school just got a new fire detector system which was suuuper touchy. As in, bunsen burners in the hood set off several false alarms. We were evaporating diethyl ether from 50ml flasks (we didn't have many rotovaps, community college) on these ancient hotplates. There must have been a spark or something and the flask caught fire. The teacher (I'm guessing because he didn't want to deal with paperwork) decides the best way to deal with this was to pick it up with tongs and place it in the large stone lab sink. Also this apparently wasn't the first ether fire that day and wasn't the first time he'd done this maneuver. But this time, as he removed it from the hood, the fumes blasted a fire geyser out and lit his face on fire. So much for avoiding hassle. Not my lab, but in the material science lab next door, someone knocked over a compressed gas cylinder while changing them out. The tech didn't know they are supposed to either be chained and/or capped at all times. Well a full tank fell over, hit the valve on the edge of a counter, and suddenly had a 2000psi cold gas rocket on his hands. It punched through multiple concrete walls like it was a gingerbread house before thankfully embedding itself several feet deep in a dirt berm.
Not the worse accident but certainly a surprising one, so I decided to make some manganese sulfate according to a home chem book, and it just said heat some manganese dioxide from a battery with sulfuric acid, so I did that and there was immediately bubbling and I thought "Huh thats odd" and then it hits me, the sharp stench of chlorine. Now it might be confusing why chlorine was being generated and it stumped me too, but thats when I realized theres ammonium chloride in the manganese as the electrolyte so there was HCl being made in situ, and it reacted with the MnO2 making chlorine :/ It also explained why when I added NaOH to a slurry of MnO2 it stunk of ammonia, the ammonium chloride ofc
Some mistakes were made when I was trying to nitrate phenanthroline. To those who do not know, phenanthroline doesn't get nitrated easily, and you need to have as concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids as possible and temperature at around 180 C. I dissolved the starting material in sulfuric acid, and was instructed to use an ice bath when adding more acid, and the to start increasing the temperature slowly. The result was that the mixture froze in the ice bath. I did the reaction in a three-necked flask and capped the extra necks with rubber septa. I did this because I have had issues with glass caps getting stuck in the necks. I have no idea why I thought the septa would survive these conditions. They didn't. This reaction produces a lot of nitrogen dioxide. I managed to breath in a nice amount when taking a TLC sample. If you have ever wondered how it feels to get a hot acidic gass in your lungs, I can tell that it hurts. A lot.
I’m in a chemistry class through my high school right now that’s equivalent to the first year of general chem at a nearby college, and one of the big benefits of taking the class is that we actually go to the college’s chemistry building and get to do labs about 6 times over the course of the year. Before we went to do a lab, our teacher was telling us about an incident a few years ago where somebody poured some chemicals they were done using down the drain (already a bad start), and unluckily for them, somebody had been working with ammonia previously and had also poured it down the sink. Since there was still some ammonia in the pipes, it reacted and the person accidentally created poison gas. The entire building had to be evacuated so a team could come in and handle it.
I once did a HPTLC with Toluene/Acetone. Finished the documentation things. Then I walked over to the sink and threw the 3 or 4 ml of mobile phase in. As the Toluene smell hit me I thought, Oh no, what have I done. Then I proceeded to not telling my teacher and acting like nothing happened.
My late father worked in a paint factory, so they used a LOT of toluene, huge barrels of the stuff, and they would sometimes catch people selling it out the back door to huffers who used it for the euphoric effects.
As the toluene hits the residual water in the sink, the sudden spike of its vapor pressure due to azeotrope formation makes the smell even more conspicuous.
@@JosephCoxH That sounds horrible, breathing toluene vapour 1m away from the source smells like you get cancer in about 3 seconds. That must be absolutely disgusting to breathe this through a soaked rag or something.
These are some interesting and funny stories lol. I even get secondhand embarrassment just reading some of them but hopefully everyone remembers that chemistry must always be treated with respect and due diligence to take necessary safety precautions.
Man some of these stories terrify me. The biggest mistake I ever made in a lab was washing out a viscometer cylinder over a waste funnel with acetone and accidentally shooting some acetone back into my face, promptly getting a few drops on my eyes since I was being impatient and not wearing safety glasses due to masks fogging them up. My eyes hurt for a solid 24 hours after that and has become my learning incident on why you always, ALWAYS wear safety glasses. If that was toluene I wouldn't be able to see.
they actually use permanganates in some kinds of water treatment. They can screw up and make 'purple water' which somehow isn't dangerous, just nasty as hell, though it's so obvious nobody drinks it
There was an incident in Goias, Brazil in 1987 where that happened with equipment from an abandoned hospital. The Cesium-137 poisoned hundreds of people, and spread radiation over a hundred miles. Scrappers liked the blue glow of the element, and shared pieces with friends & family. Similar incidents in other countries too.
iirc, nad and nadh can’t do much without an enzyme to get the redox reaction moving between the desired starting material and nad/nadh. maybe there’s some special in vitro cases and conditions where it can do things solo, but it can’t catalyze stuff alone in a biological setting
Hanztsch esters use that motif to act as an organic H2 equivalent. They are used together with an acid catalyst to reduce different functional groups. So yeah, that has been tried.
We dispose of silica in nitrile gloves sometimes, as it allows you to nicely tie up the glove and not have to deal with silica dust in the solid waste bin :)
Usually if you are working in a place where column chromatography happens frequently, you want to get yourself a separate waste container specifically for contaminated used silica. All the places I have worked at so far have had that, highly recommended!
I accidentally breathed xenon when i was like 8, I thought it was helium, i saw a ton of video of someone breathing helium and getting their high pitch, what i get instead is a deep voice and fainting
@@That_Chemistsimple, some chemistry dude came to my school and left xenon, krypton and helium balloon and when nobody was looking, i breathed the xenon one
Nitrile glove, Oh, heck yes. I used nitrile gloves to dispose of exhausted osmium catalyst waste. you packed it up, put it in a box, labeled "non-infectious medical waste - incineration required" - since at least in our area, medical waste incineration is performed in cement kilns, and anything metallic or acidic (osmium) ends up in the cement ash as stable silicates. The exhaust plume is scrubbed, and thus captures volatile metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, osmium, etc.
9:50 The days you miss things are also usually the days you take shortcuts. When your mind is telling you not to bother with precaution X, don't listen.
My dumbass thought that since acids and alkalis neutralise each other and produce water, it would be safe to drink. So i squirted in dilute hci and limewster into my mouth and promptly realised why thats a bad idea.
@thatchemist I just want you to know that I love your videos, and I’m really considering going to college for something chem related. I’ve always been OBSESSED with science my whole life and I feel like it’s the one job in the world that if I had the job, it would be something I could enjoy and make a living from it. I have been watching your videos for about a year so far and you are my favorite chem-tuber ❤️ keep it up!!!
It’s fascinating, terrifying and beautiful that all it takes for a routine experiment to go wildly off course. I’m not educated in chemistry but given the shit y’all work with, I’d rather the whole class/lab see my flat ass while I decontaminate than risk dealing with what happens when fucky chemicals are given the time to infiltrate my body
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I worked at a synchrotron. A contractor was installing some new equipment and thought the tamper-proof screws on the beamline radiation shielding were some kind of funky rivets, so he drilled them out. Removing the panel like that tripped a safety interlock that initiated an immediate beam dump, ruining all active experiments and causing massive schedule chaos as it takes a LONG time to get the beam up to its full operating power. Around the same time, someone got trapped inside the cyclotron down the road--they were almost exposed to high vacuum. The Department of Energy mandated a fresh round of safety training for the entire facility.
oh my gosh!
HOLY CRAP. That second guy could have ended up an actual horror story.
Damn, that could've been like the anatoli burgoski story
Can i just say... good. Lol. Shouldnt the contractor be able to like... verify first lol
😂😂 but how did somebody get inside the vacuum section while it was running??
Picture this: It's your high school's chemistry lab test, and you have an unknown organic acid. You're tasked with determining its identity by titrating it and preparing a buffer solution, and for the first time in your high school days, you have to prepare everything from scratch. Wow, this'll be a tough lab!
But then an idiot in the front row (me, actually) uncorks his vial, huffs the fumes up his right nostril, and exclaims, "It's acetic acid!" And to your absolute horror, the rest of the class uncorks their vials and proceeds to determine the organic acid's identity in the same manner.
Who got the butyric acid vials
okay, this is my absolute favorite one. silly enough to laugh at whilst showcasing some very real dangers.
Determination by inhalation, the best method to determine organic acids.
oh god, my sides
I hope everyone had vinegar, because otherwise wow that could have gone absolutely horribly.
My high school chemistry textbook stated that acids tend to taste sour and bases tend to taste bitter. The very next line warned us to not use this test and buy pH indicator strips instead.
In case you're wondering, my school was lame and we only ever got to handle extremely dilute solutions. Which was probably for the better.
Wise
The “tasting base bath” story made me think of the time I tasted hydrochloric acid.
During one of our first chemistry labs in high school we had to pipet and titrate 15ml of HCl. However, the pipetting device only went up to 10ml. So our teacher told us it was fine to pipet by mouth, causing me to get a mouth full of hydrochloric acid. Luckily it was only maybe 0.01 M(olar). I washed with lots of water and was all fine, though it did taste awful. Fun fact, some time after that when I first tasted beer I said it tasted like hydrochloric acid, admittedly, it was Heineken…
Hahaha
I just... drank hcl of that strength once. Not lots
Pretty sure every human being that has lived past their first week has tasted hydrochloric acid solution at some point, given that HCl is a major component of gastric digestion & vomit generally has a Ph of 1 to 2 (the stomach secretes HCl at 0.16 mol/L, and it gets diluted to somewhere between .1 and .01 depending on other factors.)
Some people in our pharmacy department were definitely guilty of pouring organosulfur compounds down the drain. We noticed everytime because our drains are similarly interconnected and every once in a while the entire place would either smell like a fart or trigger an alarm because someone assumed it was a gas leak
dang
why i shouldn’t have to follow WM protocol:
- i don’t want to
- the sink is RIGHT THERE
In the lab I used to work in, one of the research groups was doing organometallic chemistry with uranium (depleted uranium sourced from BNFL), and one of the weirdest compounds made was a funky uranium pentalene complex. Under certain conditions, this compound could pull the oxygen out of the middle of diethyl ether and leave butane behind, and at the time (this was 20 years ago), nobody understood how or why this worked. One of the follow-up experiments to try and find out was to replace the diethyl ether with diethyl sulfide, to see if the same uranium compound could do the analogous reaction, pulling the sulfur out of the middle, again leaving butane behind. This meant that the unlucky postdoc charged with doing this experiment had to use neat diethyl sulfide as the solvent!
Anyway, after doing the experiment, the solvent had to be evaporated off under vacuum, and collected in a liquid nitrogen cold trap, which is the normal way of evaporating off solvents when you are doing organometallic chemistry with extremely air sensitive compounds. As soon as this was done, they removed the trap while the contents were still frozen solid, and then left it in the back of one of the fumehoods to warm up and evaporate. This was somewhere between 20 and 30 mL of diethyl sulfide, merrily wafting its way up the fumehood for the rest of the day and probably well into the evening too.
Unfortunately, this was a warm and not particularly windy day, and the little wind that there was carried the outflow from the fumehood towards the residential side of campus, where all the halls of residence were. We only found out the next day that Transco (the national emergency service for reporting gas leaks) had received hundreds of calls from the student residences the previous afternoon and evening. Their engineers had been running all over that side of campus, presumably with much confusion and head scratching, trying to determine the source of an apparently massive gas leak. Turns out that the smell of diethyl sulfide is almost identical to tetrahydrothiophene, the latter being the compound added to natural gas to give it a smell for identifying gas leaks.
My prof told us a story about a acid water mixing accident he had as a undergrad. He was trying to scrub something with chromic acid. He added water and the stuff violently boiled and shot out of the container pretty much soaking him (Thank god he didn't get seriously hurt) . He then immediately threw water on himself an and got rid of all his cloths leading to him running around naked and torpefied searching for the next toilette, where he spent about 40 minutes until someone came in and he could tell the guy to get his Lab TA.
Tldr: our professor almost killed himself with chromic acid and ran around naked in a Lab building.
Yikes!
Yeaks !
Yekis!
Yeiks!
Don't you have emergency showers?
So I did in fact work at a cyclotron which produced isotopes for medical imaging and radiotherapy. I worked in the life sciences division where we handle liquid sources of radiation (radioactive ions dissolved in solvent). This makes it quite easy to get contaminated so we had lots of training and measures in place to make sure contamination wasn’t spread. During training we heard about a guy who got his hands contaminated, didn’t wash them, and went to the bathroom. Essentially he got radioactive material on his member and had to be scrubbed clean by the safety team. That was enough to scare everyone into being pretty careful.
Maybe it was all part of his plan…
Don't kinkshame.
Me, a theoretical computational chemist watching from above: Pathetic. 😂😂❤️
The most dangerous thing that had happened to me was that one time when I almost spilled soda over my keyboard 😂😂
Haha
Lmao! hell yea! theorist gang!!
No, no, you almost spilled an aqueous solution of dilute phosphoric acid and carbonic acid, among other things, onto your keyboard. ;)
(The exact acid may differ. Cola type sodas usually have phosphoric acid, fruit type sodas usually have citric and/or malic acid.)
don't you need to know the structure of chemicals?
I accidentally gave my lab partner a panic attack just after they had come back into the lab from having one.
I agreed to watch their reflux and offered a measuring cylinder to them, thinking it was clean.
It was not. I don't remember the exact contents but it reacted with a loud, high pitched bang and I was mortified seeing my friend's face in horror
Yikes!
Back when I worked on bio-based paints I was doing workup on some natural blue tetrapyrroles dissolved in water. It had taken weeks to extract and purify half a gram from the bacteria that produced it. We had a shitty rotavap so I decided to evaporate the last few milliliters of water by hand under mild nitrogen flow. Unfortunately, someone had turned the flow regulator all the way up and I forgot to check it. And to make matters worse, I opened the fumehood window quite far because "it's just water and non-toxic paint, right?" So a split second after I opened the nitrogen line, the entire fumehood got an involuntary paint job and I looked like a depressed smurf contemplating his life choices.
Hahaha
You blue yourself.
Blue by Eifel 65 starts playing
Im upset for you
This was great! I think there's a certain morbid curiosity to hearing others' chemistry horror stories... but also it makes you feel less stupid about your own mistakes
Morbius
Morbid? Morbin 😈
Glad you found my earlier comment amusing. Your comments on not being shy about using the safety shower (in relation to the sulfuric acid spill in the segment at 6:00), is spot on. During the 16 years I was at the plant site where the Ph2O incident occurred, there was one death. An operator was steam cleaning a crusty pump in the 2,4-dinitrophenol plant, when he uncovered a small corrosion hole and was sprayed with product solution. He bypassed the local safety shower in favor of the more private locker room facilities. The extra time (probably less than a minute) allowed him to receive a lethal dose via skin absorption.
that is awful :(
I think maybe regular tests of the showers should be conducted... just to get people used to it; so they don't hesitate and die. On a lighter note, our E-Shower in College O-Chem had no drain. The lab was on the 2nd Floor, and I thought repeatedly about faking it, just to see the water flow down the stairs! ;-)
oh no 🖤
@@buixotenot just to get people used to it, but to make sure that a) the shower is still functional and b) that the water in the pipes is at least mostly clean. As a club safety officer in undergrad I had a couple interesting experiences with safety shower and eye wash station testing. The nearest ones to the club lab hadn't been tested in over a decade, and the first time I tested them, the water was literally brown with rust particulates for about 5 seconds. After that I made sure to test them at least quarterly, just in case.
back in undergrad, the grad student i was working with was like “get the stir bar out of this” (freshly titrated e. coli minimal media, so it wasn’t dangerous) and i just fuckin reached in with my gloved hand and grabbed it. thankfully we were going to autoclave it next so it didn’t matter but lmao the second i put my hand in there i was like “i have made a mistake”
Oop
Magnets never existed. Just use your hands, -what can go wrong?-
That's why we now prepare all media by boiling and shaking in reused stericup bottles 😂 works!
I'm still serious on determining and catalogizing the strength of carrots as a reducing agent on research
I've made a couple funny mistakes in the first lab I ever worked at. This one time I was cleaning out a 250L bioreactor with some glacial acetic acid and I accidentally poured way too much of it into the tank. This resulted in the entire lab being filled with acetic acid fumes which were so strong it felt like inhaling needles with every breath. I'll never underestimate that stuff again.
Another time I was spinning my samples down in a benchtop centrifuge, and as I was listening to it spin up I started browsing on my phone. All of a sudden it just starts loudly, violently shuddering across the benchtop which scared the piss out of me. I hit the emergency stop and waited for it to slow down enough to open, and when I did I saw it was full of broken plastic and had gashes all over the walls. What happened was a plastic well plate (that I wasn't using) was not situated properly on the swing out attachment and slipped off as it was spinning up to ~3,000RPM. It still worked afterwards.
yikes!
You haven't worked in a biochem lab if you haven't had a centrifuge mishap. I once witnessed someone start a floor centrifuge unbalanced. The noise was terrifying.
When my grad student mentor was an undergrad, HIS grad student mentor synthesized an artificial amino acid that had a high nitrogen content. Scraped the vial to get more yield... you know how this goes. Violently detonated. Blew out the sash of the fume hood they were working in AND the one six feet behind them. My mentor had glass shards embedded in him. His mentor lost fingers.
Oh my gosh!!!
I really hope that when I do my Phd in a year that I will have a chance to use carrots for a reduction. It would be hilarious to write in a scientific paper that one of the steps was just dumping my lunch in the flask to get the reaction going.
I hope you can :)
In Undergrad, I was doing solvent screening for the reaction of fructose to HMF using HCl. Our professor told us to using a solvent called 2-methylfuran. Little did we know this solvent polymerize with acid. The result was an entire condenser and flask filled with black resin.
It took a 3-month acetone/methanol bath to take it off. I think we made a teflon derivative without any fluor, we should have made a patent for that
Wow that’s a slow process!
A good sovent for polymers is usually dmf
The best way to learn what a synproportionation/conproportionation reaction is, is to pour a bunch of Sulfuric Acid and Sodium Thiosulfate solution down the drain at the same time in 1st semester lab and inhaling a good lung of SO2. Dont be mad at me for the disposal, I was young and the instructions said to just pour the solutions down the drain with water after finishing. I just turned on the water for two minutes and then left so I would not get in trouble.
It's absolutely on the organizers of the lab to make sure that stuff like that doesn't happen, so it would probably have been them to get in trouble if you told.
Where I'm working, I'm absolutely not allowed to put anything down the drain except when washing my hands. Honestly, I think this is good practice, I make sure to deactivate all my stuff before discarding it in my waste containers after having learned it the hard way by pouring sodium carbonate solution in my acidic waste container.
In the very beginning of chemistry classes at school, my teacher assigned us the following task: come up with a series of reactions to convert Calcium metal into Calcium Carbonate with the help of water, vinegar and baking soda. When we were done, Prof wanted to show us how Calcium oxide reacts with water. He took a miniscule amount of CaO and put it into a tiny erlenmeyer flask with water, a thermometer and indicator. As expected, the temperature rose and the indicator became pink. Then, for comparison, he wanted to show us the same thing but with Calcium Carbonate. He used a second erlenmeyer flask which was more than half full with water but otherwise the same. Well, then he put a heaped teaspoon of the "Calcium Carbonate" in there and much to his surprise, the mixture in the flask suddenly boiled and then it more or less spewed its probably boiling-hot content over his labcoat and table. It was then that he realised it was the wrong bottle that he took the stuff out of. The funniest thing was that before the whole spoon went into the flask, some of the compound fell into the water and it did turn slightly pink, but he didn't see and we were all like "uhhh...". He took off his coat immediately and everything was fine, mostly because it was a small flask and therefore not much content. But yeah, he very impressively demonstrated why it is important to work percise, accurate and cautious🤣
Wow!
Rookie mistake time:
I was working as an undergrad in a high pressure combustion lab, doing combustion tests of nitromethane. The one chamber we have can pressurize to 50,000psi. To place test-tubes into this chamber, there is this massive plug at the bottom that is raised into the chamber by a monstrosity of winch and pulley system. The plug itself sat upon a spring-supported platform, which sat upon another platform which was the platform that was winched up into the system. Although this chamber does have an optical port, where you could in theory use a laser for ignition, that functionality was not in place yet. Instead, to ignite the test-tube of nitromethane, we used a small piece of a plastic explosive, which would be ignited using a piece of nichrome wire held by alligator clips. At some point during the plug insertion process, this wire came out of the alligator clips. I didn’t find out until after pressurizing to 14,000psi, a process that took the better part of all day. That was a long day.
High pressure anything is extremely terrifying. Honestly more scary than acids or bases most of the time.
I like the argument of t-butanol makes t-butylamine a tertiary amine, but on the contrary if triethylamine is a tertiary amine, does this make dimethyl ether a secondary alcohol?
This comment will DEFINITELY be in the next episode!
That's pretty funny. Ngl
the irony is I forgot to include this...
@@That_Chemist No worries, I've been enjoying the content a lot
I remembered this time though - it will be in #4
So back in high school my chemistry teacher asked me to prepare a lab for our class. At the time we were supposed to be learning about pressure and vacuum etc. so I thought it would be a great idea to bring a decent size 2 stage vacuum pump in and a giant bell jar and hopefully boggle their minds with basic physics. As I was finishing up the vacuum hoses and fittings the teacher and the schools safety officer came in to see what I was making for the class. I thought wow here's my chance to impress him since he's also the history teacher. I placed a buzzer in the jar and then reached for the control panel completely forgetting that I had left the vent cap still on the pump... anyhow as soon as the safety officer leaned over to observe BOOM that cap made its rapid vertical ascent grazing his hat and proceeded to bounce off the ceiling and walls just like the physics in cartoons. The man just stared for a hot minute and then said "your doing great" and left the room. I certainly made history at the school being the first student to shoot at a safety officer...
One of the students in my HS lab class misunderstood the disposal directions, and poured HCL down the sink, then the sodium bicarbonate solution down the same sink. Have you ever seen a sink geyser? I have! Granted, it wasn’t very big, but it made quite a few loud pops, and filled the bottom part of the sink with bubbles. I’m sure the plumbing loved that as well…
S-tier
A grad student purchased 10 mCi of Cf-252 and put left it in a coworker's desk drawer without telling anyone and then left for another job. To show how serious this is, we now keep it (at 2 mCi) in a 55 gallon drum filled with neutron absorber off-site where no one is within 30 yards of it.
Oh my gosh!
Videos coming out at a serious cadence. They're very good
:)
Speaking of accidents, reminds me of a story I'm pretty sure is just one that old chemists pass around to scare students due to the xenomorph blood-like reaction depicted. Anyway - sorry, gotta put my old man hat on - it was 1999 when the internet was still barely a thing, and that South Park joke about Iowa was very true. After a slow class trying to teach a group of 8th graders how fun balancing equations is, my old high school chem teacher told us about some outmoded procedures in the 70s, namely mouth pipetting. And you almost certainly know where this is going. I can't recall what reagent he specified, but a female student was pipetting some solution and sucked a bit too vigorously. The 70s were a different time. Though she spit it out as soon as she realized, by the time she got to a sink to wash, her front teeth had already begun to puff up like nixtamalized corn. Dispite the washes, by the time paramedics arrived, her top two incisors had started sloughing off. Turned out he genuinely was a former student of my same school, and that was why the school said we weren't allowed to pipette our own nitric acid to put on pennies the next day.
It sucks to suck (but fr, sad to hear)
In undergrad, my roundbottom slipped off the rotovap and spilled all of its contents into the water. I got my professor (he wasn't angry at me, he later told me that accidents happen and not to worry) to dispose of the water. He took the bath out of the fume hood, and pretty much carelessly dumped all of the water into a container and quite a bit of it spilled on the floor. Turns out that there was a lachrymator that had spilled into the water bath and now it was all over the lab, so everyone's eyes started getting teary. The lab was shut down for the rest of the week. I still take full responsibility for that incident to this day...
Yeah, stuff like this happens
Wooow... and I thought when I spilled my product in rotary evap. it was bad
That's a pretty tame story compared to your meth making ones... 🤪
In school chemistry class about 40 years ago we were making soap. Usual stuff sodium hydroxide, an appropriate oil and some heat. After the experiment is finished one guy decides to see how well it will wash his hands. The "soap" contained a fair bit of unreacted sodium hydroxide and his hands didn't like it one bit. Fortunately no lasting damage done other than embarassment.
haha
Yeah, lye soap needs to "cure" for a while before it's fit to use.
I remember HS chemistry fondly. Working with lye scared the piss out of me on account of our only PPE being safety goggles and gloves (under-funded school in rural Kentucky, so what do you expect?), though, thankfully the teacher was able to help dispose of it safely.
I was the base bath in mouth one...thanks for putting it the thumbnail! Love this channel!
Thank you for your legendary comment ;)
what did it taste like
@@OutbackCatgirl Bad....can't really describe it any more than that, just bad...
Man, the worst mistake I've made in the lab was when I was connecting a SO₂ gas cylinder, I knocked over some other researchers vial immediately after she told me not to. The worst thing that came from it, thankfully, was an angry glare, as her product was pretty viscous.
You got lucky
LOL. I can imagine. A former Phd in my lab wanted to pick up a vial at the end of her bench. I warned her to be careful as I had samples there which took me weeks to synthesize & purify[morpholine dions]. Her reply: Ah hush...........I'll manage. Not...she flipped over 2 of my costly products in rb flasks. I think she didnt dare to look me in the eye for quite a few weeks 😂
@@Kloashut F
Fuck a publication, I want to be in a that chemist comment awards video
As reading all the comments on the other videos would take way too long, a best of is really nice to watch.
And I can contribute a few rookie anecdotes, too (sadly, nothing more advanced since I did not finish university, but I still fondly remember the time, and have not lost interest completely, hence watching chemistry videos on youtube occasionally).
1. Hot Glassware: When still in high school, when entering the chemistry room/lab I notice the teacher burning out some glassware with a Bunsen burner, but don't really think much about it. Some time later, when everyone is asked to get some materials, and I think that funnel sitting on the teacher's desk looks much cleaner than those in the cupboard, so I try to grab it and "psssh", I can hear and smell a bit of my finger getting burnt. I was too embarressed to say anything and had a quite painful white spot for some time, luckily nothing worse.
2. In probably the first or second organic laboratory session at university, some of us had the great idea to share a large 2l beaker to collect waste. Shortly after pouring some solvent (more than 20 years later, I don't remember what it was) into the beaker, it started to get hot and froth. Someone else had put something containing H2SO4 into it earlier and I was barely able to make it to an ice dispenser and back with a bowl of ice to cool the beaker down, preventing it from spilling its contents into the fume hood.
3. Sometime later, you'd think I'd have learned that organic liquids and sulphuric acid can react violently, but I had forgotten about that and was reminded rather unpleasantly. I had a similar reaction when adding something to a flask with H2SO4 in it. The second lesson I learned that day was not to put your face in front of the flask's opening. Some of the contents of the flask sprayed out directly into my face. I asked someone to wipe my face while I was pulling my gloves off before I could wash myself, and I had lots of small marks on my face for a few weeks.
4. And another simple mistake: If you've done a reaction using Na, check if there's anything of it left in the flask before washing it in the sink.
Back then the rule was to bring a cake for the lab assistants if you did something stupid, and I had to bring a few. I probably should have taken the time to step out of the lab and drink something more often, as a whole afternoon without hydration in a warm lab can really affect concentration.
Yeah dehydration is always an issue - lab assistants definitely deserve many cakes!!!
Putting things down the drain you say? *Hides mechanic shop logo and takes off matco hat* I know nothing of what you speak of
My biggest balls up is just a simple sentence, no big story:
Steel + concentrated nitric acid 💀
Fizzy
Special brown gas forms
@@That_Chemist the forbidden fart
One day our teacher wanted to show us some Phosphorous. After taking it out of the flask it of course self ignited and the entire building was evacuated.
yikes!
I only have one radiological accident story, and luckily it didn't happen to me directly. I was working as a bench chemist at a very large company. One of the other chemists was using 14C-labelled acetyl chloride to label a compound. The reagent came in a sealed glass ampule containing about a gram of the acyl chloride. His method of opening a glass ampule was to chill it way down then touch the scored neck of the ampule with a hot glass stirring rod; the stress caused by the temp imbalance would snap the ampule open on the score mark. BTW I've never heard of this method before or since. He was wearing ppe; safety specs, lab coat, latex gloves, and company-mandated steel-toed shoes. This time instead of cleanly snapping the ampule open, the whole ampule disintegrated in his gloved hand. He knew he was in trouble immediately of course, so he stripped off his gloves and lab coat and went to the shower/locker room down the hall (did I mention this was a VERY large industrial chemical enterprise?) There he showered off and the rad safety people came and scrubbed him down with borax soap. His clothes were bagged and I assume they are in a hot landfill somewhere. Even though the dude was nominally protected by his glove, some 14C acetyl chloride made it through to his hand, then into him. He had to be monitored for a few weeks until his urine cooled off, and he had to wear a cotton glove on the affected hand. This was during the heyday of Michael Jackson and his one glove, so he endured a lot of jokes about that. Eventually all the 14C washed out of him and as far as I know he was none the worse for it. Good times.
Oh my goodness!!!
Right after the nitrogen in glove story I got a chocolate advertisement and the first thing I hear is the crinkling of unwrapping a chocolate. My immediate imagination was not pleasant
some of the time i have no clue what you're talking about but i do enjoy your videos and i always learn something .
losing your eyes: just a little foolish
14:31 im pretty sure we went to the same high-school and the teacher still tells that story.... or this has just happened more than once...
Remembering the day I decided to wash some glassware I left out in the fumehood the day before. As soon as I’ve put them in water, my eyes remembered me what I’ve forgotten: they had benzyl bromide on them and my eyes started burning like I’ve rubbed habaneros on them.
Even washing them through on the washer, my eyes ached for like an hour.
@@00bean00 Maybe milk
We have separate sinks for chlorinated and non-chlorinated waste
hahaha
My favorite story to tell was when some walls and some of the roof was fluorecing for a few days after some glassware broke and splattered everywhere. Nothing dangerous involved. Most dangerous compound was propably NaOH
Both real life experiences (especially ones to learn from) and funny jokes are appreciated ❤️. Would love to see more of these every now and then, when there's enough material available
You got it!
When I was in the Navy my ship was going through a reactor refuel and I was restricted to the ship we had our morning muster in the usual place and halfway through rolecall someone made us aware that there was an unshielded reactor core off to our left. Lol of course they said we should be fine. Still it's been 20 plus years and no cancer yet.
yikes!
I’m a mechanical and physics major, none of this made sense but I still laughed when prompted
DCM burns are just annoying. I once, right after a glove change, was prepping a mobile phase for a DCM+MeOH column and managed to spill a small amount of solvent onto my glove. It wasn't even enough to be even anything to normally worry about, just enough to prompt a glove change. Apparently, though, my fresh-from-the-box gloves had a pinhole in there somewhere, and immediately I felt liquid soak into the glove. In the mere moments between liquid contact and the classic burning sensation that DCM has, my stomach felt like it dropped to the floor. And then, naturally, the chemical burn started. After quite literally ripping my glove off and rinsing with copious amounts of high-pressure water (since DCM isn't miscible, you have to compensate by basically blasting it off), there was a streak of red, partially defatted skin between the ring and middle fingers of my left hand for a couple of weeks. VWR made the gloves, for those curious, they were just standard medium-size nitrile examination gloves.
Moral of the story: don't rely on gloves to be bulletproof, since sometimes they can't even be DCM-proof.
Yeah some people have said that they didn’t have issues with DCM/chloroform on their skin, but I know that I definitely have
Remember the Karen Wetterhahn story. You must never trust your gloves blindly.
DCM will go straight through most nitrile gloves. You need something like Silverstar gloves (some kinda mylar) or polyethylene with nitrile over it. Mostly we just used nitrile and ripped the glove off if we got a spill. I never had a problem with dcm, I've literally had my hand doused with it numerous times, I feel a warm sensation but no damage. I can see how others would react severely.
This reminds me of a Mistake I made while doing qualitative Analysis and we were without a Supervisor. I was just done boiling my Mixture of Salts in conc. Hcl (33%). I then went and poured it into some centrifuge Glases(acid Was still hot and i was under pressure beacause my time was running out hence the hurry) to help the stuff settle by putting it in a centrifuge for a minute. so i picked up the Glases with the hot acid in them,2 per Hand, while wearing acid resistant gloves, which were wet, so 3 of the 4 Glases, slipped out my Hands, hit the bottom Part of the bench and broke spraying my pants with hot conc acid(was wearing sweatpants altough you really shouldnt). We do not have a safety shower in our lab so i ran too nearest sink and then washed my legs one by one After taking my pants off. So there i am, in the Lab, without pants or a Coat, right as the Supervisor walks in.
Yeah it was really embarrassing to explain, but my legs were fine, my pants had a bunch of holes in them and i had to throw them out.
Also dryed my pants using a heat gun, that was fun.
wow - working in a lab without a safety shower is a no-no!!!
@@That_Chemist Since it is "only a school lab" we dont, at least According to guidelines, have to have a safety shower. We are usually not working with super dangerous stuff since we are all Lab Assistants in training. But i would still rather have one. On a less serious note, we do have a river running right besides our lab (bout 1 minute on foot), when we were all first shown around, we were told that if there is a big spill/fire we could just jump into the river and be fine.
So, I have a scar from a lab accident, but the way I got it was totally stupid and I’m still upset it even happened.
So, I’m running a nitration, the nasty kind where you need really concentrated sulfuric and nitric acids mixed together then you add your product and for this one in particular I then had to heat to 90C. I was wear all my PPE, gloves, lab coat, even lab goggles for face protection. Well, the nitration is humming along nicely and to monitor the rxn, I had been taking small samples of the rxn mix with a glass pipette tip which I would dilute in a vial and run TLC to check the progress. The way I got my sample with the pipette tip was to turn off heating, remove the condenser quickly, and dip the pipette in. Well, one of the times I tried doing this, I reached for the condenser and in this particular setup, I had to reach my arms quite a bit into the hood to undo the clamp and lift the condenser. As I did so, the sleeves of the lab coat I was wearing rode up exposing the TINIEST sliver of my bare skin between where the glove ended and my lab coat sleeve ended. The second that area of skin was exposed, a rogue droplet of the near-boiling nitration mix fell from the bottom of the condenser, you guessed it, right on that part of my arm. I IMMEDIATELY went to the sink which was very close by and rinse my arm for 15 mins. The acid was probably in contact with my arm for no more than 5 seconds, I moved incredibly fast. Nevertheless, I still have a small oval shaped scar the size of a pea on my arm.
I was really frustrated because I had been wearing all my PPE, it just so happened that my lab coat sleeves combined with how I had to stretch my arms to reach the clamps led to a very small hole in my defenses.
I just relived your pain and terror in reading this - glad that you weren’t seriously injured!
@@That_Chemist lol, yeah it was so dumb, just a stray drop off the bottom of the condenser as I was lifting it on the only section of my body it could have harmed me (-_____-)
Swiss cheese safety theory in a microcosm right here.
I work in a physics research lab where we use tritium gas on a regular basis. We were recently on the receiving end of a big fuckup where one of our contractors sent us a pressure vessel with glass capsules in it that was supposed to be filled with deuterium! Well turns out they filled the vessel through a line that was full of tritium and severely contaminated it without noticing. Luckily we opened it in a room with a tritium monitor which instantly went nuts upon opening. Everyone then sprinted out of the room with panicked looks and we spent like $100,000 on decontamination, bioassays for everyone, and replacing a bunch of equipment that couldn't be decontaminated. Luckily nobody ended up receiving a significant dose of radiation or breathed in a meaningful amount of tritium gas but holy shit what a disaster.
Oh my god! Imagine if the tritium detector hadn't been there! Was the contractor held accountable at least?
@@zockertwins yeah they reimbursed us for all the damages and now they have a totally separate fill station for tritium fills. Also our shipping/receiving department is checking all incoming vessels for radiological activity before passing them along. Still sucked having to spend 2 weeks scintillator swiping every surface and tool in the lab that could have been potentially exposed.
What the actual fuck is wrong with the supplier!!!!!!
@@That_Chemist the guy who was doing the fills is apparently an old guy who's been working there forever and just doesn't give a fuck anymore(but he got fired obviously). And we can't switch to some other supplier because they're the only one that exists that makes all the different proprietary stuff we need.
@@That_Chemist they must be affiliated with BlastaDeck
submitting to your greater wisdom I would still say - if you are wondering if you need to use the eye rinse and/or the safety shower, USE IT. As soon as something hits eyes or bare skin the clock is ticking and the damage will worsen with almost a geometric gradient. Ie a delay of 1 second with do 1 unit of damage, but 2 seconds of exposure with do 4 units of damage. Once the skin fails then things get worse very very fast as the substance will be in the living reproducing part of the skin.
Okay so I’m not a chemist and don’t work in a lab but I have 2 ppe stories to tell. Last year I got my funeral director apprentice license. During that course, one of the professors told us about a horrific story he had with formaldehyde. Firstly, if you don’t know, formaldehyde is the chemical used to preserve human/animal tissues for open casket funerals and scientific research- it works by denaturing the proteins in your cells and kills the microbes that cause decomposition. There’s also something called cavity embalming- this is where a long trocar needle is used to suction out fluid from the abdominal cavity and then another trocar needle attached to a tube that has a bottle of embalming fluid- basically a formaldehyde solution- at the top. He told us that he was a young embalmer at the time and thought he was pretty much invincible. So, he begins to use the formaldehyde trocar and the bottle isn’t screwed on correctly. The formaldehyde begins to run down his arm but he doesn’t realize it. Once he does, he stops what he’s doing and jumps into the safety shower but it was too late. Over the next week, large patches on his arm began to harden and then when new skin pushes through to the surface those hardened patches of skin fall off in chunks. Pretty gross and awful stuff- and that’s why you should always wear gowns with plastic underneath them if you’re working with formaldehyde.
The next story is from when I was in my apprenticeship and if you get grossed out by poop I would stop reading. Now, in the funeral industry most places are still pretty old fashioned and this is true in the ppe sense- especially at this awful funeral home I was working for. Things like face masks, respirators, and face/eye shields aren’t always seen as a necessity but I promise you that if you’re working with bodily fluids THEY ARE NECESSARY. So, being the naive new apprentice I was, myself and another new apprentice were washing a body to be embalmed. You basically just used soap and a mid pressure hose to wash down a body from head to toe. This includes things like the nose, mouth, and anus. We get to this decedent’s anal cavity. They are purging. Purging is when body matter seeps from the body- mouth, ears, nose, anus, sometimes vaginal cavity. But they was direct from the hospital and so they were purging feces. This feces just kept coming and coming and coming. Myself and the other apprentice were not wearing face shields. We were using this hose to attempt to flush this decedent’s anal cavity so we could plug it using cotton. The other apprentice is taking her turn flushing while I hold the decedent on their side- this was a heavier person so it was easier for us to take turns. The other apprentice begins flushing and gets splashed in the face with fecal matter. Not a little bit. A lot a bit. It was horrific to witness, I can’t imagine how she felt. Our funeral home was strict about shower and eye wash use and so she had to go to the bathroom and clean her face off in the sink.
I ended up leaving the funeral home and eventually the industry for things completely unrelated but in my house we still call it “ash’s swamps of dagobah”
Love your channel. Not a chemist in the professional realm but I do enjoy reading about it and seeing how it works. I was licensed herbicide applicator for 8 years so it was interesting seeing how herbicides affected plants thru chemistry
Cool!
"It is one of the funniest things ever to see a mother scrubbing dirt off her kid's face"
-That Chemist 2022
One time in 7th grade someone knocked over the alcohol lamp and set the entire top of the table on fire
I think my worst mistake was shaking a huge solvent waste drum to see if I had enough space to dump in more. A drop of the waste that was mostly dcm went right under my glasses and into my eye. I ran to the nearest sink and rinsed my eye for about 15min. I really thought I was going to lose sight from that eye, but I was fine. Just a scary experience.
PS: There was also phenol and a bunch of other nasty stuff in that waste
dang!
My grandpa knew a guy who went into a cyclotron while it was operating. Yes, the poor man was dead in a short enough time.
:(
I have a radioactivity story from high school. We had a University visit our school for the final year students to basically muck around with radioactivity experiments for a day (like cloud chambers, measuring how air can absorb radiation, measuring half life etc.) And someone managed to secretly attach a radioactive source to some poor guys backpack. He walked all lunch through the school (the physics class had a lunch break in the middle) with a radioactive lead source on his pack. And then when he got back into class the teacher could not understand why the geiger counters would suddenly go completely crazy (when the guy walked past them ofcourse) all the time. It took a good hour till they found out. Needless to say the teacher was pissed off. We never found out who actually did it though.
Damn that is actually terrifying
It's kind of sad. The fear of radioactivity has gone so far that my school needed a locked lead cabinet for a bit of Uranium glass, which is probably a lesser radiation source than bananas.
@@gamingmarcus it seems here where I live it's somewhat more open. Chemicals and radioactive material was still in a locked cabinet but there wasn't like a super lead lined security or anything. We were free to work with Mercury and stuff like antimony (although I understand it hasn't got a whole lot to do with radioactivity. Although i have some radioactive minerals in my collection)
@@gamingmarcus Uranium glass actually can be quite active. But not enough to be dangerous, unless you constantly carry it close to you.
I work at a cyclotron currently! We are apart of a hospital and do research grade things ( not normal PET diagnostic studies). Anyways we were making [F18]-FPEB. Now we use hot cells, with nitrogen lines, titan valves, and syringes to add our reagents. One of the steps involve heating the vessel at 150C while pressurized/ sealed for 20 min. I go to get a drink of water and came back to my personnel Geiger counter beeping when i enter the lab ( far away from the hood). I walk over and it begins beeping faster and i see the reaction had not sealed well. It was all the way to a T-valve and so i quickly opened some vents and raised the pressure to push the solution back. I need to handle the T-valve and get sprayed with a few mL of radiation. I had well over 100mCi over my chest, hair, beard.
Had to shower like 5 times that day. After every shower a radiation safety officer (RSO) would scan to see the counts on me. Luckily they tested and i did not ingest and dangerous amount and I had my glasses on so none in my eyes. It was the worst incident our facility had in over a decade. Luckily no lasting damage and handled well. We have quick response and the RSOs take these situations very seriously (dangerous or not).
For reference patients are typically injected with 5mCi of activity. We still make jokes about it and are dealing with lasting paperwork with overseers. So many check valves and pieces of equipment changed.
Oh my goodness that is awful :(
After all the lecture, it's nice to see a video that's all reactions
Glad you enjoyed it!
Was doing a standard sodium in water demo for a class I was teaching. Some got out of the beaker, but that was not the end of the world - I had a shield up so no students were in danger. Now, I did not want try cleaning it up with water for obvious reasons, so I went for some ethanol, since I knew the ethanol reaction was much slower. However, either there was a drop of water on the table or it was the fact that the ethanol was not absolute resulted in it catching fire. I had to use a fire extinguisher. Words can barely describe the mess a dry chemical extinguisher makes - I had purple powder inside my socks!
Haha
@@That_Chemist you never quite get over the sight of your desk on fire. My students actually thought it was cool, and none of them got the alkali metal question on the exam wrong...
The CSB has a video about a heat gun causing explosion and deaths
oh yeah boy, the bucket of resin starts a fire in a (flammable?) silo
@@That_Chemist that's the one
god yeah that one was just... oh god, what a way to go.
Honestly I've been shocked by how much their animations have improved especially recently, just, damn, they hired a damn good animation team
Once in a Lab a student tryed to make a borate proof Reaktion with Methanol on a tripod and the beaker with a bunch of Methanol stood directly near that. So he tryed to Light it on fire with a flint and Steel and the hole beaker burned too. So he grabbed it with his bare Hand and poored it down the drain, but the hole sink began to burn. Also he had some small burns on his hand.
Hey, would you make a video about that relatively newly discovered pentafluorosulfanyl (R-SF5) group? It's pretty crazy.
Yeah I mean I could do a video, I know all the synthetic methodology and I’ve met all of the people working on it, but I just don’t think it would be a very popular video. Maybe I will sort out how to set up patreon stretch goals and then I can justify regularly making more lecture content
Hey, 3teeth fan!
@@defenestrated23 Yeah, I listen to quite varied electronic music. Want to hear about it?
A similar ether ignition happened in one of the undergraduate labs I was a TA for. Students did a short reaction in diethyl ether, then had to later recrystallize their product in an ethanol:water solution (I believe it was like 70:30).
Student are hearing their solvent on a hot plate and out of nowhere the student at the fumehood next to the students I was assisting starts calling out “Fire!”. I looked over and saw the beaker full of orange flames, and actually paused for a second and asked “why isn’t the fire blue?”. Students were panicking but i just quickly suffocated the fire and took the beaker off the hot plate. Apparently the prepared bottle of ether was right next to the ethanol:water and the students didn’t check the label properly…
Oh no!
A screw malfunction on a cabinet shelf led to one of those 1 l stained bottles of standardized permanganate solution, freshly made and ready to cure for a week, to be dropped 50 cm onto the hard floor. Man, I'm glad I was just a student and not the technician😂😂
F
OH GODDD
didn't happen to me personally, but at my last workplace we used to make perming lotions in batches of 2 tons at a time
this involved handling multiple dozens of kilograms of ammonia and thioglycolic acid, and not only would it stink the whole building out, the plant operators had to wear full-face gas masks to do it safely; on one infamous occasion, both operators had put the wrong filter in their masks (particles rather than gases), and both came down with migraines and severe nosebleeds
personally I'm very fortunate not to have had any accidents in all my professional and academic years beyond minor breakages; this may be down to the fact that when I was 15, during my work experience in a factory QC lab, one of the tasks involved handling fuming nitric acid, and it gave me a healthy dose of perspective about what's safe and what isn't
if everything is presented as deadly dangerous (as was typically done in schools), it's easy to get blase about it and be desensitised to the real hazards when you move onto the harder stuff
What on earth - that’s insane!
Glad you liked my comment! I should've mentioned that if I recall correctly, after disposing of the silica into the glove I believe it was thrown into another specific bin for silica. You got it exactly right, we connected one side of the column to air pressure and the second to the glove, thus disposing of it. Also apparently people in my class had plenty of other accidents which I (happily?) wasn't there in person to see, such as breaking a jug of 32% hydrochloric acid on the floor, 2 fume hoods catching on fire from overheating of volatile solvents, spreading AlCl3 all over the lab's floor and more. From what I've heard, said dude was involved in at least one of those extra stuff - my only guess is god was looking the other way that day. Also love that kind of video, keep it up!
Yeah usually people responsible for one lab mishap also cause many other mishaps - thanks for contributing :)
At the PC recycling place I worked at for a while the dude training me would use a sponge soaked with sweetened paraffin (mmm delicious aromatic compounds) to soften up stubborn asset labels and stickers, then blast them with the heat gun to soften whatever adhesive hadn't dissolved. Eventually he put the hot heat gun down on the paraffin-soaked sponge after continually using it and it ignited a heap of these inflated two-layer plastic film bubbles that we used to package our merchandise that we had draped over the desk. Had to peel the melted mess off with a chisel, stank bad enough I couldn't smell the brewery next door any more.
Burning plastic is the worst
My class' rookie mistake: Several months ago - November 2021, my class, and I, did a lead-based precipitation experiment. Why lead, and not silver? Because the chemistry book said so! Anyways, it's KI + Pb(NO3)2. I was meant to dissolve the KI, and I used a spatula which had a little bit of leftover PbI2. I was excited a bit too much, and spilled some of the solution onto my hand. The PbI2 had dissolved to form (PbI4)2-. I quickly wiped my hands off, and, after a minute or two, washed my hands. I don't think too much lead got transferred to my blood, but still. It's lead. I and my class just straight up obliterated safety. A few girls inhaled the glass vial.
I've had a similar near miss with SoCl2 i distilled from quinoline. Changed the collected flask and distilled 10 degree os so above the BP thinking there shoudn't be much if any SoCl2 left. Moved the flask containing quinoline to a sink and i cautiously added one single drop of water which resulted in a violent release of HCl/SO2 which instinctly made me shit myself despite being prepared and drop the flask which smashed into the sink giving off even more gas as it reacted with residual water. Thankgod for PPE!
Oh no!
These horror stories in the lab make me grateful to be a music major and not a chemistry major. Y’all are so awesome, but a little insane😅
I just want to comment on the absolute banger of a custom emoji in the thumbnail. 10/10 that's not an emoji anymore, that's artwork!
Thanks - I really like the melting lab emoji, I originally made it for the solvent tierlist
Reminds me of that time when I used buckthorn tea as a negolyte for a redox flow battery
what...
I have a bunch of stories. Rookie mistakes? Pulling tight tubing off of a glass hose barb on an adapter. Glass snapped and cut my hand. Once used a non-vacuum-rated flask as a vac trap. Imploded once it hit 50 torr and made a huge bang, no damage.
Not a mistake but definitely my most fun story. Was doing a scale up in the GMP kilo lab for a process where chromatography hadnt been optimized away yet. Which meant running a column with 200L each of DCM and heptane for 8H straight. We had pre-ordered hundreds of 2L erlenmeyer flasks, and proceeded to fill every available table and shelf in the lab with fractions. Despite running the walk-in hood fans at full blast and covering each fraction with foil, by the end of the day, it got pretty heady in there. My labmate and I were having a grand old time cracking jokes and giggling from all the fumes. Definitely made 8H of stooping under the column spout with flasks more tolerable.
Superviser comes in the afternoon to check on us and immediately makes a face and exclaims "Wow! How can you put up with the smell!?" We had gone totally noseblind to it, a la frog slowly boiled in water.
Also we had an earthquake in the lab once. I thought at first it was a high vac pump gone unbalanced and shaking my bench, until I looked up and saw all tubing in the lab swaying and every flask sloshing. That was actually terrifying but thankfully nothing fell over.
Worst accident was in undergrad o-chem lab. The school just got a new fire detector system which was suuuper touchy. As in, bunsen burners in the hood set off several false alarms. We were evaporating diethyl ether from 50ml flasks (we didn't have many rotovaps, community college) on these ancient hotplates. There must have been a spark or something and the flask caught fire. The teacher (I'm guessing because he didn't want to deal with paperwork) decides the best way to deal with this was to pick it up with tongs and place it in the large stone lab sink. Also this apparently wasn't the first ether fire that day and wasn't the first time he'd done this maneuver. But this time, as he removed it from the hood, the fumes blasted a fire geyser out and lit his face on fire. So much for avoiding hassle.
Not my lab, but in the material science lab next door, someone knocked over a compressed gas cylinder while changing them out. The tech didn't know they are supposed to either be chained and/or capped at all times. Well a full tank fell over, hit the valve on the edge of a counter, and suddenly had a 2000psi cold gas rocket on his hands. It punched through multiple concrete walls like it was a gingerbread house before thankfully embedding itself several feet deep in a dirt berm.
Crazy stories!
Not the worse accident but certainly a surprising one, so I decided to make some manganese sulfate according to a home chem book, and it just said heat some manganese dioxide from a battery with sulfuric acid, so I did that and there was immediately bubbling and I thought "Huh thats odd" and then it hits me, the sharp stench of chlorine. Now it might be confusing why chlorine was being generated and it stumped me too, but thats when I realized theres ammonium chloride in the manganese as the electrolyte so there was HCl being made in situ, and it reacted with the MnO2 making chlorine :/ It also explained why when I added NaOH to a slurry of MnO2 it stunk of ammonia, the ammonium chloride ofc
Oh no :(
Some mistakes were made when I was trying to nitrate phenanthroline. To those who do not know, phenanthroline doesn't get nitrated easily, and you need to have as concentrated nitric and sulfuric acids as possible and temperature at around 180 C. I dissolved the starting material in sulfuric acid, and was instructed to use an ice bath when adding more acid, and the to start increasing the temperature slowly. The result was that the mixture froze in the ice bath.
I did the reaction in a three-necked flask and capped the extra necks with rubber septa. I did this because I have had issues with glass caps getting stuck in the necks. I have no idea why I thought the septa would survive these conditions. They didn't.
This reaction produces a lot of nitrogen dioxide. I managed to breath in a nice amount when taking a TLC sample. If you have ever wondered how it feels to get a hot acidic gass in your lungs, I can tell that it hurts. A lot.
oh no!! :(
I’m in a chemistry class through my high school right now that’s equivalent to the first year of general chem at a nearby college, and one of the big benefits of taking the class is that we actually go to the college’s chemistry building and get to do labs about 6 times over the course of the year. Before we went to do a lab, our teacher was telling us about an incident a few years ago where somebody poured some chemicals they were done using down the drain (already a bad start), and unluckily for them, somebody had been working with ammonia previously and had also poured it down the sink. Since there was still some ammonia in the pipes, it reacted and the person accidentally created poison gas. The entire building had to be evacuated so a team could come in and handle it.
Dumbest chemistry-related thing I've ever done with take a shot of white vinegar. It was food grade but still
lmao
a heat gun being used in an area which banned ignition sources was the subject of a recent USCSB report on their youtube channel.
exactly!
I once did a HPTLC with Toluene/Acetone. Finished the documentation things. Then I walked over to the sink and threw the 3 or 4 ml of mobile phase in. As the Toluene smell hit me I thought, Oh no, what have I done. Then I proceeded to not telling my teacher and acting like nothing happened.
LOLLL this one.
My late father worked in a paint factory, so they used a LOT of toluene, huge barrels of the stuff, and they would sometimes catch people selling it out the back door to huffers who used it for the euphoric effects.
As the toluene hits the residual water in the sink, the sudden spike of its vapor pressure due to azeotrope formation makes the smell even more conspicuous.
@@JosephCoxH That sounds horrible, breathing toluene vapour 1m away from the source smells like you get cancer in about 3 seconds. That must be absolutely disgusting to breathe this through a soaked rag or something.
These are some interesting and funny stories lol. I even get secondhand embarrassment just reading some of them but hopefully everyone remembers that chemistry must always be treated with respect and due diligence to take necessary safety precautions.
100%
Man some of these stories terrify me. The biggest mistake I ever made in a lab was washing out a viscometer cylinder over a waste funnel with acetone and accidentally shooting some acetone back into my face, promptly getting a few drops on my eyes since I was being impatient and not wearing safety glasses due to masks fogging them up. My eyes hurt for a solid 24 hours after that and has become my learning incident on why you always, ALWAYS wear safety glasses. If that was toluene I wouldn't be able to see.
Oh no!
The I F$&@ed up and here’s how series is great. My stomach hurts
Suggestion, The Ruh Roh series
Ruh roh
I am making a digital chemical lab! There are a few glitches, the atoms simply combine with each other for now
1:58
When I started doing chem, I suppose permanganate ion levels in my cities sewage fuckin' doubled.
F
they actually use permanganates in some kinds of water treatment. They can screw up and make 'purple water' which somehow isn't dangerous, just nasty as hell, though it's so obvious nobody drinks it
I want to see the plume of smoke from burning Phosphorus illuminated by a UV lamp but I would definitely end up making a disaster zone!
Speaking of nuclear radiation sources just getting picked up and carried around, that's actually the cause of I think
There was an incident in Goias, Brazil in 1987 where that happened with equipment from an abandoned hospital. The Cesium-137 poisoned hundreds of people, and spread radiation over a hundred miles. Scrappers liked the blue glow of the element, and shared pieces with friends & family.
Similar incidents in other countries too.
8:37 ooh free cancer coin
Has anyone tried dihydropyridine-pyridinium redox thing that is so prevalent in biology? Ya know the whole NAD and NADH thing.
iirc, nad and nadh can’t do much without an enzyme to get the redox reaction moving between the desired starting material and nad/nadh. maybe there’s some special in vitro cases and conditions where it can do things solo, but it can’t catalyze stuff alone in a biological setting
Hanztsch esters use that motif to act as an organic H2 equivalent. They are used together with an acid catalyst to reduce different functional groups. So yeah, that has been tried.
We dispose of silica in nitrile gloves sometimes, as it allows you to nicely tie up the glove and not have to deal with silica dust in the solid waste bin :)
Usually if you are working in a place where column chromatography happens frequently, you want to get yourself a separate waste container specifically for contaminated used silica. All the places I have worked at so far have had that, highly recommended!
Cool!
I accidentally breathed xenon when i was like 8, I thought it was helium, i saw a ton of video of someone breathing helium and getting their high pitch, what i get instead is a deep voice and fainting
How on earth did you get xenon when you were 8? It’s hard for me to get xenon now and I’m almost 28
@@That_Chemistsimple, some chemistry dude came to my school and left xenon, krypton and helium balloon and when nobody was looking, i breathed the xenon one
Nitrile glove, Oh, heck yes. I used nitrile gloves to dispose of exhausted osmium catalyst waste. you packed it up, put it in a box, labeled "non-infectious medical waste - incineration required" - since at least in our area, medical waste incineration is performed in cement kilns, and anything metallic or acidic (osmium) ends up in the cement ash as stable silicates. The exhaust plume is scrubbed, and thus captures volatile metals (mercury, lead, cadmium, osmium, etc.
9:50 The days you miss things are also usually the days you take shortcuts.
When your mind is telling you not to bother with precaution X, don't listen.
That guy who "found a pretty coin with a cool logo" is a Plainly Difficult video in an alternate timeline...
My dumbass thought that since acids and alkalis neutralise each other and produce water, it would be safe to drink. So i squirted in dilute hci and limewster into my mouth and promptly realised why thats a bad idea.
howd it taste?
TC: "Today I'm reading your comments..."
Me: *gets excited*
TC: "...from last month."
*sad me noises*
@thatchemist I just want you to know that I love your videos, and I’m really considering going to college for something chem related. I’ve always been OBSESSED with science my whole life and I feel like it’s the one job in the world that if I had the job, it would be something I could enjoy and make a living from it. I have been watching your videos for about a year so far and you are my favorite chem-tuber ❤️ keep it up!!!
thank you! I wish you luck in your endeavors :)
It’s fascinating, terrifying and beautiful that all it takes for a routine experiment to go wildly off course.
I’m not educated in chemistry but given the shit y’all work with, I’d rather the whole class/lab see my flat ass while I decontaminate than risk dealing with what happens when fucky chemicals are given the time to infiltrate my body