He thought THIS was a good idea?

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[@Beargain]

Onionade = French onion soup

[@That_Chemist]

*someone watched to the end of the video*

[@waaaaantube]

Yum yum. So do I.

[@VerbenaIDK]

what? you mean it's not lemonade? i've been lied to my whole life!

[@guicky_]

@@VerbenaIDK no thats lemon soup

[@VerbenaIDK]

@@guicky_ what do you mean? onionade is lemon soup?

[@polimetakrylanmetylu2483]

I've really had only one chemistry related accident. I'm an IT student, and I was watching a NileRed video about fuming nitric acid. At one point i dropped a chip i was eating, so I thought, well, not a big deal, I'll pick it up. As I leaned to pick it up I list balance and fell from my chair. As a result I was embarrassed for a few minutes.

[@That_Chemist]

Lmao

[@hammerth1421]

You better be careful to not get shocked by USB-C quick charging.

[@JLocke573]

Once I was eating a sub sandwich and got vinegar on my hand. I then realized that I had a cut I didn't notice before and it hurt a little bit. Now I always wear gloves when eating sandwiches.

[@InterFelix]

This is a very IT-student accident.

[@georgejanzen774]

F

[@LarsEckert_Molimo]

Some wise instructor on laws regarding toxicology once said to me: "The difference between trained chemists at universities and people at home is not what they can do with chemicals, but what they can survive."

[@andresmartinezramos7513]

True, professionals develop resistance through continuous exposure

[@LarsEckert_Molimo]

@@andresmartinezramos7513 Ah, yes the Deadpool cure to cancer

[@spenserhickssh]

I worked at a chloralkalai plant for 3 years and at one point I could work in any of the fumes, I'd go home and clean my house with 14% bleach and anyone within 100 feet would be choking😂 obviously that's not sustainable but it was fun while it lasted

[@LeCharles07]

@@andresmartinezramos7513 I always carry around a vial of iocane powder incase I encounter someone who thinks they're real clever.

[@sealpiercing8476]

I'm slowly becoming convinced that a majority of geologically-educated folks either do it because they really like to lick rocks, or else developed a taste for rocks as a result of exposure to the discipline.

[@That_Chemist]

Haha

[@Fusako8]

I have no classical Geology education, though I do collect UV fluorescent minerals. (I have an extensive collection.) Because of this I follow several Geologists on Twitter, including one from just north of me in BC who frequently starts out her tweets with "So you lick the rock. . ." Side note: I often get to tell people that most of the deep colors in various rocks are likely from heavy metals. The more vibrant the color, the more likely it is something like, oh, mercury or cadmium.

[@JGHFunRun]

@@Fusako8 I want to see this "so you lick the rock" person

[@aldenconsolver3428]

Well for our undergrad you did have to kiss the coprolite. Now, this you guys might not believe, but the tongue is much more sensitive than most people realize (enter semi obscene joke of your choice here). It is perfectly possible to size test 0.002 to 0.05 mm versus particles less than .004 mm (if the fact that those ranges overlap gives you trouble you are probably not cut out for geology the vaguest of all hard sciences). The first is silt and indicates a conventional clastic depositional environment with a water velocity less than that which produces very fine sand. A very small bit wetted in the mouth will disintegrate and clearly feel grainy against the teeth. The second one is probably a shale often from a deep oceanic environment and will feel plastic wetted in the mouth and can be squeezed between the teeth like gum. Rinse the mouth with a little coffee from your canteen and you have distinguished between two very different depositional environments where the rock will appear to the eyes just the same.

[@smocaine.]

@@aldenconsolver3428 this nigga eats rocks

[@chedzeesheeda1019]

Can confirm, geologists are rock lickers and proud of it to the point where I know a guy who got told HR would be called if he licked an ammonoid in front of the secretary a second time.

[@That_Chemist]

Lmao

[@mbessey]

My final exam in High School chemistry consisted of doing qualitative analysis of 8 "unknown" salt solutions, to demonstrate that we'd actually learned how to apply our lessons. I had a bit of a history of pranks with this teacher, and I guess as his "final" revenge, he decided to give me and my lab partner a test tube filled with distilled water, because *none* of the reactions we'd learned would do anything with it. We do all of our tests, identify 7 of the 8 chemicals right away, and we have one left, and nothing works on it. So, we do a few more, non-approved tests (boiling the "solution" dry, a flame test, pH, electrical conductivity, etc), and there really does appear to be nothing in there. So yeah - must be distilled water. We go up to get graded (in front of the entire class), and I identify the first seven chemicals, and we get to the last one, and the teacher asks "and what about that one?" with a little twinkle in his eye. I answered "that one is distilled water", and drank the remaining contents of the test tube, in front of everybody. There were some audible gasps, but I didn't get in any trouble, because it was, of course, distilled water. Definitely not an approved/recommended procedure.

[@NetRolller3D]

You're lucky it wasn't a 200C homeopathic remedy prepared from paclitaxel. That stuff is used to treat cancer, so - by the rules of homeopathy -, a remedy made from it should've been super-carcinogenic (right?) :)

[@gustavgurke3389]

That's badass

[@nitroflux_o1040]

Damn thats sick

[@AllegoricSiren]

I’m sure your classmates remember having a heart attack after you drank it LOL, Absolutely amazing.

[@flopsnail4750]

That is a true power move

[@Isolanporzellator]

A few years ago we had a major incident where someone in the geology labs "accidentally" made 7 liters of aqua regia (I have no idea how you would do this accidentally, but the real reason was never made public). As you may know, concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acid quite happily react with each other to form a plethora of highly reactive compounds and toxic gases. Most of these reactions are exothermic to the point where the entire mixture started boiling vigorously while spewing out toxic fumes - Not exactly ideal conditions to face in an old lab without a working fume hood. They opened all windows, evacuated the building and firefighters were called in to dispose of the mixture. They tried to neutralize it with soda, but this only caused it to foam up and spill over, making the problem worse. At that point they were out of ideas, so they put the beaker into a big bucket and called the dean of the chemistry department for help, who requested assistance from our supervisor. They grabbed gas masks, every bottle of KOH they could find, and had us fill several buckets with crushed ice. We put all the stuff into the deans trunk and they drove across campus to the geological institute. The dean stirred the mixture with a wooden broom while our supervisor diluted and cooled it with ice before slowly neutralizing it with KOH. Fun facts: After the incident, the janitor filed a complaint to the dean, asking who would fund a replacement of his broom. Not so fun facts: The official press coverage does not mention the fact that the firefighters initially failed to clean up the mess. It also suggests that neutralization with soda actually worked, which is not true. No credit was given to the dean or our supervisor for their aid in resolving the incident - wouldn't want the public to know that a trained hazmat response team of 36 people couldn't handle a beaker of boiling acid, would we? Luckily our supervisor told both of us, and we made sure to spread the story to every chemist in our uni.

[@That_Chemist]

Send me the story in a DM on discord!

[@tsm688]

Another example of firefighters getting it wrong was a 1960's experiment with an air-dropped PA system... Essentially a giant megaphone with humongous lead-acid battery pack to blast warnings at an area, dropped from a bomber. Being the 1960's, big meant *BIG* -- thousands of pounds of batteries and amplifiers. They airdropped (or just tested - not altogether clear on that) a prototype near an air base and it developed an internal short, making lots of smoke. Their solution? Foam it. The fire chief wouldn't listen to warnings (Covering a battery fire in insulator just makes it HOTTER!) and of course the inevitable happened. A small fire became a medium explosion and large mess.

[@PandamaticBreakcore]

I just made half a litre of aqua regia two weeks ago. I wanted some because I melted a plastic brush onto the inside of a big glass jug, and as a chemist I refuse to scrub if a chemical can do the work for me. Nota bene: it did the work for me. It does emit NOx compounds though, yes, which are foul and really pretty bad to breathe in. It smells exactly like a cross between the underside of an old car and poison. If someone makes it without using a fume hood they need a solid bapping.

[@emberthecatgirl8796]

Ok, I know it’s pretty serious, but this is exactly what would happen if mages were around these days. Just… the idea of 2 chemists doing what’s essentially advanced reverse potionmaking is so entertaining

[@lordfelidae4505]

@@emberthecatgirl8796 thank you for that image. I appreciate it.

[@alanhyt79]

In the medical laboratory I worked at, we had a Chemistry department that ran fecal fat tests. The specimens were 96 hour collections and arrived in paint cans. One day, a tech who didn't follow instructions very well was running a batch of fecal fats. The procedure to obtain a representative sample of the stool specimen involved putting the paint can on a standard, hardware store paint shaker, then in the fume hood, cover the can with paper towels and open it AWAY from yourself. This tech forgot the paper towels and he opened it towards himself. The pressure that had built up caused feces to forcibly spray into his face, in his eyes, nose, and mouth. His story was afterwards used as a warning to all new techs who were learning fecal fat analysis.

[@That_Chemist]

Hahahaha

[@MrDBZFan1995]

The butyric acid story reminds me of the ingenious construction of my former school, which was connected to another school by a small hallway. In 12th grade chemistry class we did a esterification reaction. And my teacher thought the best compounds to do this are butyric acid and ethanol, to show the transition from the smell of vomit to pineapple. The reaction was done under the fumehood,nevertheless both schools smelled like butyric acid for two weeks. As my teacher wanted to know why this happened she did the obvious. She elected two students to smoke a cigarette under the fumehood. And guess what happened, both schools smelled like a bunch of students were smoking. Apparently the fumehood was connected to the schools vintilation system. I don't know if they ever fixed it.

[@That_Chemist]

F

[@word6344]

Imagine if they smoked weed in the hood instead of a normal cigarette and got both schools high... Also what kind of teacher not only lets their students smoke, but encourages it?

[@balam314]

@@word6344 for SCIENCE

[@sealpiercing8476]

That's breathtaking

[@tsm688]

imagine, a fumehood designed to fill the building with toxic vapors. A ticking bomb, a chernobyl of chemistry

[@jonathanlanglois2742]

While in secondary school, I had this teacher who was really fond of hydrogen. He had a pair of metal cones that were welded in the center. He would fill it with hydrogen and light it at the top. The flame would slowly get lower and lower until it receded into cone and produced a pop. One time, he underestimated the amount of hydrogen that he had pumped into the cones. The ceiling tiles listed and got displaced from the force. This teacher was rather easy going. One day, he answered the phone. "Sperm bank, nightly deposit department, how may I help you?". Yes, he really did answer the phone like that in front of a class full of students. We also got to see what happens to sodium or potatium when placed in a beaker of water a fair few times. Some time, he would cover the beaker and allow the hydrogen to build up. Most of the time, this was relatively harmless as all it would do is send the cover flying once enough hydrogen had built up. One of theses time, he placed a bit too much into the beaker. The school had been built barely a year earlier and already, he had managed to leave burn marks all over the table he was making this display. I really liked this teacher. He had a thing for hydrogen and explosions.

[@That_Chemist]

What an absolute legend

[@MushookieMan]

Potatium

[@sootikins]

@@MushookieMan It's right next to Carrotium in the periodic table. Never ever let it come in contact with Broccolium.

[@LeCharles07]

More than likely he didn't quite purge the air. Pure hydrogen burns but when you mix it with the oxygen it tends to go _bang_ instead of _woosh_

[@jonathanlanglois2742]

@@LeCharles07 That's the point off the double welded cone. You fill it with hydrogen, it burns for a short while with that beautiful flame that you expect, and as it does so, it draws in air from the bottom. Once the mix is just right, the flame retreats inside and within moments, it produces a small explosion.

[@palamalama]

A small tip for all those home chemists out there, doing stuff on a small scale first is always a really good idea. You have no idea how many ways things can go bad, and when half a kilo of anything goes south, it can really go south

[@That_Chemist]

Yes yes, you are totally right!

[@satibel]

What? You're telling me I shouldn't just shake sulfuric and nitric acid with glycerin in a 2l coke bottle?

[@Aaron-en5cc]

Heard a story from a geologist student once. They had a field trip with their professor and on one field next to them a farmer was putting out cow dung as fertilizer. And apparently the professor didn't bother and told the students you have to taste the substrate to determine the fertility of the soil. So she proceeded by eating the dirt. I think the takeaway message from this story is geologist are not only rock lickers but also dirt eaters.

[@That_Chemist]

LMFAO

[@killmeister2271]

What the fuck why did my brain respond with the cute chemical

[@TheRolemodel1337]

as a geologist i can confirm you can determine the grainsize if its silt it will grind between your teeth while clay will not besides that you may be able to tell if the rock you're looking at is halite so its useful in some context or geological setting when you dont know anything about the soil or rock you're probing you should not do that especially not when any kind of mineralization is present as those often contain arsenic, galenite (lead) and other heavy metal sulfides which may react in your stomach to form soluble heavy metal ions and H2S (so it sucks twice, but wouldnt kill you if you're not doing it on a regular basis) however trying this technique in a uranium deposit might end your life

[@phantomaviator1318]

@@TheRolemodel1337 does plutonium taste like orange koolaid

[@TheRolemodel1337]

@@phantomaviator1318 i never tasted koolaid so i cant tell ya sorry

[@ezraweldegabriel9046]

When you said “rock licker” I was instantly reminded one time our class took a trip to a lab where they analyzed the rate of flow of walls of waste storage cavern which were primarily sodium and potassium chloride due to its low permeability or something like that. Anyway they had set out a wide array of core samples that unusable mostly due to little chips in them or were fractured during the machining process (they needed to be perfect cylinders to test). One student asked if they could lick one. The person who was guiding us around didn’t care so they proceeded to lick not one but all of the 30+ samples. Not how I would prefer to get my daily sodium but you do you.

[@That_Chemist]

Hahaha

[@amberkat8147]

As someone who has taken a geology class, I have in fact eaten a tiny bit of shale for science.

[@craigs5212]

UNC inorganic qualitative analysis lab: During the semester lab final, each student was given a small sample to analyze. No one was getting correct results, TA's were at a loss, finally they tested the distilled water spigot. Bingo, someone didn't want to fail so they spiked the distiller tank on the roof of the chem building.

[@arnautarnautsen2564]

During my Ph.D. (which had nothing to do with this, it was polymer synthesis), someone sent me a recipe for a sort of firework made by melting and mixing together sugar and potassium nitrate. You get a sort of cake, which you can then ignite. It burns slowly with a beautiful violet flame, and makes a lot of smoke, but we (me and the lab supervisor, no less) contained it to a few grams, which we would prepare and burn under a hood. After a while, we got bored of violet, and tried sodium nitrate for yellow. Oddly enough, that doesn't work: it won't take fire. So we tried lithium nitrate, which works and creates the most amazing crimson flame. I think we also tried rubidium nitrate, but that was about the same red, so no fun. Then someone asks if we can do it in green, and I immediately think of copper nitrate, which we did have. Now, imagine a small aluminium form, like the kind you use for cupcakes but with lower sides, heated to about 200 °C, where I was stirring the nitrate an molten sugar with a small steel spatula, while looking down at it. At some point, I see tiny specks of metallic copper appear in the mix. I have NO IDEA how my subconscious realized in less than 1/10 of a second that the sugar was reducing the nitrate and was about to burn, because I had no idea one's subconscious knew chemistry far better than one's conscious brain, but I yanked my head back just in time for a cone of flame to develop from the form, pass maybe 3 cm from my nose and leave a perfectly circular sooth mark on the ceiling of the fume hood (which was over 2 m tall). The bottom of the aluminium form melted almost completely, and enough smoke developed to trigger the fire alarm, which was outside of the hood, and at some distance. Luckily, by the time security came in, the smoke had been sucked in and we were able to say "It must have been a glitch" while praying the guy didn't look up. We wiped most of the sooth, but the mark is still clearly visible, over 20 years later. This isn't even the closest I've been to being killed by a lab accident, but that (an accidental reaction creating hydrogen selenide) was more bad luck than stupidity.

[@That_Chemist]

Damn!!!! I’m glad you didn’t get screwed over!!

[@arnautarnautsen2564]

@@That_Chemist The only long-term consequence was that, as I playing a lot of AD&D at the time, I was eternally teased that I successfully saved against dragon breath after failing every wisdom check. (Nerd culture at its finest, here).

[@tylisirn]

How do you *accidentally* create hydrogen selenide!?

[@arnautarnautsen2564]

@@tylisirn Potassium selenide and anything remotely acidic.

[@JCel]

But... Was it green? 🤔 😂

[@petersall1055]

"chemistry in the hood" sounds like some cool gang shit, when it only means chemistry in the fume hood xD

[@firstmkb]

I need a “Chemistry in the Hood” hoodie!

[@thomasleach1677]

When I was in sixth form (I don't know what the equivalent in the US is, between high school and college, I was 17) I was volunteering for the chemistry department at the open day, doing various visually interesting experiments for prospective 15 and 16 year olds. We were a little short on volunteers so the staff assessed whether we could safely supervise a whole bench (2 or 3 fairly safe reactions per bench). I had a bench where I had 2 experiments due to the slight toxicity associated. The first was the one where you use zinc and KMnO4 to go back and forth through the oxidation states of vanadium. The other was a titration to show the presence of base in the reaction product of calcium metal and weak HCl. So I'm showing this kid and his parents the vanadium experiment while i have paused the calcium one so i could give my full attention. Unfortunately the reaction wasn't what I should have been worried about because his snot nosed little brother (must have been between 8 and 11) is running around, evading the teachers and technicians and after a while comes up to my bench bugging me about the on hold reaction but he gets impatient and just eats the spare calcium metal off the bench (like 5 grams). I honestly thought he was going to die of stomach problems or uncontrollable gas from the inevitable hydrogen enema he was about to receive once it hit the stomach acid. I think he was fine and I was offered counselling because I thought I killed a kid.

[@That_Chemist]

What the fuck…

[@imranmohammed279]

BROOO THARS CRAZYY XDD

[@Felixkeeg]

From the names of the people in the video and my own experience being a student and a teacher: University labs do not supply students with gloves in Germany. Somehow there is is this mindset that 'improper use of gloves creates a false sense of security and thus gloves should not be used'. And instead of taking the time to teach students proper PPE usage, this is just accepted. I'm currently TA'ing 2nd semester organic chem for pharmaceutical science students and they touch every chemical that spills on their bench like it's sugar or salt. I cringe so hard every time.

[@randomprotag9329]

that sounds bad just though the fact there are stuff that has risks from skin contact. did they have students just not work with anything that could cause skin irritation or skin burns or is it still happening just without PPE

[@ffwast]

Germany sounds dumb as hell. Again.

[@aquaralahermanni4892]

It's still going on that way. Never wore any gloves. I finished training as a lab technician (which involves handling way more dangerous chemicals than the ones i remember from normal school) 2 years ago and everyone of that class had at least one chemical burn from some kind of acid (mine was from sulphuric acid).

[@craigs5212]

In college I worked part time in a small photo lab that processed 16mm movie film taken by the football coaches, we could get them a print just after half time (pre-video days). I warned my boss to be careful opening the developer tank as I could smell a little odor of HCN in the head space. So he pulls the cover and takes a big snort and exclaims " love the smell for processed film". Well a few seconds later he's stumbling out the door gasping, gets the worst headache he ever had. Was OK but never did that again.

[@karstenkunneman5219]

Since we're including home chem stories, the one that stands out for me was when I was trying out gold extraction from an old laptop, and I stored all the chemical waste in a gallon water jug. It goes missing one day, and when I asked my dad about it, he admitted to dumping it in the neighborhood pond behind our house. I bet those largemouth bass really enjoyed the taste of copper and nickel lmao.

[@That_Chemist]

Umm…..

[@mechadrake]

And this is why I never did my home chem. You just can"t trust your parents. It is the same way 20 years later, as they live downstairs from me in a house now and can hardly understand chemicals or personal property :D

[@LenKusov]

Not a chemist, but I've done a lot of home chemistry and aside from a few missing eyebrows and some tinnitus, my chemistry escapades have been relatively uneventful. However, I still managed to give myself phosgene gas poisoning... Was restoring an old Coleman camp stove, one of the ones that runs on unleaded gas, and the Good Idea Fairy™ came up with using chlorinated Brakleen to remove the hardened gas varnish from the tank and the internals, and the carbon from the generator and burner. Well, guess who forgot to empty the tank before test firing it? And guess what idiot thought "meh, it's 20F outside and the garage has plenty of air in it, no need to open the door"? I caught it early once I realized "hey wait, why's it smell like moldy grass clippings in here, didn't I clean the mower before putting it up?" and it clicked that trying to burn chlorinated solvents is one of the things you're very much NOT supposed to do, and DEFINITELY not in an enclosed space. I felt short of breath way too easily for a good 6 months afterwards...

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!!

[@realstonehead3436]

The Thumbnail made me feel uncomfortable

[@TheHongKonger]

The thumbnail made me recoil in horror

[@TACCOFSX]

the thumbnail made me fear

[@anotherdave1039]

the thumbnail made me say "oh he dead". literally said it out loud. i don't normally talk like that. i blame memes.

[@neophoys]

This reminds me of a time during my BSc in Biology. I was new to the lab and my supervisor gave me a tour. Near the end we entered a small, dark room which was used to stain and document agarose gels. He explained that they used ethidium bromide and showed me how to work the UV table and camera setup. Later that day I was talking to another lab member and the topic of ethidium bromide came up. He asked "Wanna see something kinda cool but also scary?" I promptly agreed and we headed back to the staining room. We went inside and he turned off the light, I was getting a little worried at this point but went along. He then switched on a portable UV light and the entire room lit up with bright orange spots covering everything. The benches, the keyboard, the door handle. It looked like somebody had a little too much fun with glowing paint at a rave. My lab mate then went on to explain that everything I could see glow was very toxic and concluded that I should wear gloves at all times when working in the chamber. At this point I couldn't help but remember my supervisor just a couple hours prior showing me how to stain a gel, reaching into the ehtidium bromide bath, adjusting the agarose slab on the UV table and operating the mouse and keyboard. He was not wearing gloves at any point. He is now pensioned and still cancer free (as far as I know...)

[@wanhl2440]

Etbr is quite bad but the real effect ia still unclear. Now many labs use Sybr dyes or similar alternatives because they are more sensitive than etbr and not as toxic

[@schmanduel8588]

This story isn't as crazy as most of the other ones you include in the videos, but I still think it's pretty messed up. One of my old high school chemistry teachers, who was mostly known for being strict and intimidating, but still a really good teacher in general, did some experiments with the 13th grade chemistry class. They prepared solutions of various organic acids. When a weak solution of "citric acid" was made, he told the students it would be okay to drink the solution in the beaker, since it was "basically lemonade". Even though the first rule we all learned in middle school chemistry was to never taste any chemical in the lab, one of the students actually took a sip of the "lemonade". They quickly found out it wasn't actually citric acid, but oxalic acid, which had been swapped accidentally by the teacher, since he was drrunk while preparing the chemicals for the lesson. The strudent threw up and ended up going to the hospital. I don't know if he has much lasting damage becaose of the accident, but he reportedly had stomach issues for weeks afterwards. A few months later the local newspaper posted an article about the accident, after someone from another school reported it to them, probably to hurt its reputation.

[@That_Chemist]

What the heck

[@Human-san]

Oxalic acid?? Dude probably had hella kidney stones, I feel really bad for him..

[@alexbrewer4570]

Here's one for you. Back in high school, my best friend and I decided that it would be really easy to make nitrocellulose. However, we were two idiots who could just go to home Depot, and didn't have any of the right materials. So we go and pick up some potassium nitrate stump remover, concentrated sulfuric acid drain cleaner, and a bag of shoprags. Back at his place, we took the stump remover, grounded up in a $5 blender from Goodwill, then poured that in a aluminum pie dish, and just poured in some drain cleaner until it "looked right". Again, no formal training, and a very rough idea of what we were doing. The next thing we know, the entire reaction ran away from us, and we headed up wind as thick clouds of brown nitric oxide gas go blowing down this suburban street. I can only imagine what anyone would have thought if they had seen plumes of orange gas coming off of a bookcase in a driveway, with two 17-year-old kids looking at it with very concerned expressions. The rags we put in, did not actually turn into nitrocellulose (surprised surprise), and that old bookcase is still sitting in his parents garage as a reminder that boys will be boys, and it's a miracle as many of us survive as we do.

[@Mr-__-Sy]

So did you managed to sumon Satan or he left you on hold?

[@maxschumacher9446]

That story about stirring HF with one's hands reminds me of one of my colleagues from my last job, where I worked for a company that produced high end aluminium tableware so we did a lot of anodising. For those unfamiliar with the process, the metal must first be etched in a NaOH solution to strip the oxide film and any grease or oil off the surface, then rinsed in a desmut (which I'm not sure the exact composition, it can be a HNO3 Solution), to neutralise the NaOH , then deionised water, before being made the anode of a redox cell in a H2SO4 solution to form the durable surface oxide layer. Our company was founded by an artistic silversmith, there wasn't a great culture of workplace safety, with TIG welding being done without proper barriers, to guards and safety features being removed from machines, but worst of all, a bad attitude towards use of PPE. This colleague, who was studying to be a nurse, would routinely be in the anodising room with no respirator and no protective eyewear. The process of finishing the products required a lot of sanding and grinding but to lubricate this we used a mixture of coconut oil based shortening and candle wax as lubrication. It worked really well at protecting the metal but when combined with the aluminium dust it meant we would go home covered head to toe in a gray film. My colleague, if it got really bad, would dunk his bare arms up to the elbow in the 70c, 3mol/L NaOH solution to strip the grease off! Glad I'm no longer working there for that among a few other reasons.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!!

[@Human-san]

I mean tbf the grease would form a barrier between his arms and the sodium hydroxide, so as long as he pulls his arms out before it starts hurting(chemical burns start), he should be fine, right? Not a good idea to play chicken with corrosive substances tho.

[@lumihd2799]

We also have an 'ion lottery' in our bachelor's program, and similar occurrences happened there. For context, this is the literal first lab you have so none of us had any experience. Also, chromates, fluorides, nickel salts and other 'fun' chemicals were available without further instructions. We were advised not to wear gloves as well to avoid contamination. Since very few of the tests actually work properly, a friend of mine set up a makeshift AAS using a cheap prism he brought from home, some cardboard, a bunsen burner and his smartphone camera. After he had a small library of references, it worked amazingly well. Another guy was just guessing his sample which you can do with surprising accuracy due to the process of how the lab assistants prepare your sample. It's technically not forbidden but the lab assistants wanted him to stop, so they gave him a white powder and he starting guessing that it was sodium, potassium, lead, magnesium and many other cations and anions. One of the lab assistants then came over, dipped his finger in the sample and licked it to the student's shock and confusion. It was sugar. I once failed to properly separate prussian blue from a sample I was evaporating with muriatic acid. Quite quickly, I noticed a smell of benzaldehyde and chlorine, quenched the mixture with a lot of water, closed the sash and waited for 10 min. However, I was wearing a mask in the lab (autumn 2020) and did not change it. I suspect there was some cyanide dissolved in droplets in my used mask which I continued to breathe in for another 3 hours. I now know what mild cyanide poisoning feels like.

[@That_Chemist]

That is exactly how I would describe the smell of cyanide - it isn’t that benzaldehyde smells like cyanide, but rather you often smell both of them together sometimes

[@darthplagueis13]

4:29 You know... I once studied a geology-adjacent topic for a semester. The professor adressed the general topic of licking rocks, explicity telling us not to do it, and then mentioned an colleague of his who had licked a rock during a field expedition in a remote forest. Suffice to say, some minerals actually include active ingredients... apparently that colleague spent the next three days in the rainy forest, practicing geology and *not wearing any pants* because because there wasn't really a time window in which he could have worn them without completely soiling them. Tl;dr: Dude licked a rock and discovered a natural laxative. That's why geologists are technically supposed to be told not to lick rocks.

[@That_Chemist]

Lol

[@luapnhaoj2472]

Well I am late but I did something similar with a mineral called Kieserit in german (dont know how its called in english)

[@tuckerhart510]

The average lifespan of a chemist must be like 20 years below the average

[@KashyBang]

I once tried to produce sodium at home. I had mixed sodium hydroxide and magnesium in mineral oil with some menthol, put a condensor on the flask and then connected the top end of the condensor with a tube to a funnel i had placed in a beaker to make an air lock. After teaking it of the heat I watched some of the liquid from the beaker slowly getting sucked up the tube towards the condensor. I had a slightly bad feeling about it and sunndenly i remeberd that I had filled the beaker with water and not mineral oil. I was able to disconnect the tube before anything happend, but that was the point i stopped doing home chem.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes! NurdRage’s chemistry looks cool - I want to try it at some point

[@cpm1003]

I have tried this experiment twice so far, with limited success. The bubbles in the air lock always stop after less than 24 hrs. While the resulting metallic paste does fizz in water, I estimated from the H2 bubble rate that the reaction was less than 10% complete. I was unable to separate the sodium in any way, although I haven't tried making Dioxane yet.

[@KashyBang]

@@cpm1003 I dindt even try the workup, so i dont even know what the yield would have been

[@ricardsjaunzems2364]

I want to share a story where I competed in the Latvian National Chemistry Olympiad, that taught me to always double check the labels. In the experimental section I had to prepare a vanadium(IV) complex to be used in the second experiment as a catalyst, in an effort to be quicker than the others(I was nervous and thought I needed more time for the second task) I mistook acetonitrile for acetoacetone and instead of the sky-blue emulsion that everyone else got, mine was pitch black, then the supervisor came over curious about my product and asked me to point out which bottle I used, then I realized my mistake. By that time it was too late to start over, so I was given the necessary miligrams of the complex from another students reaction. I still won third place, but I still wonder if I could've placed higher and gone on to compete in the Baltic Olympiad if I hadn't been in such a rush.

[@That_Chemist]

That sounds like such a cool thing that people run - I’m really glad that some places have those competitions!

[@victordonchenko4837]

@@That_Chemist Many places including the US have national chemistry olympiads as well.

[@trolleyking4002]

Story time: (not as daring or dangerous as some stories here, but I still laugh a bit when I think back about it) One Friday afternoon during my master thesis, me and couple PHD students were bored. And we decided it was a good idea to get an old CPU (that we found in the neighboring electronics lab) and to remove it from its substrate PCB. So you could see the underside of the silicon die with all the imprinted traces. (FYI, my masters was in semiconductor processing, so you can kinda see where the curiosity came from) We used fuming nitric acid on a hot plate at 70-80C in the fume hood, to try and meld away the PCB without damaging the silicon die. It worked like a charm. It melded the PCB while leaving the CPU intact. However we were left with a hot dark blue/green slurry (probably from all the copper traces in the PCB substrate). And we decided like the good students that we were to responsibly throw it away into the acid waste bin of the small chemical lab that we were in (a 5L jerrycan type thing to collect liquid waste). Almost immediately the waste bin started to boil and throw off the most orange clouds I had ever seen. Which also instantly started to burn our throats. Keep in mind this chem lab was not much bigger than 4 by 5 meters, with 2 fume hoods and a table + 4 students (so not much space). And we kinda set off an orange burning smoke bomb in there. The place filled up with orange smoke very very fast. We off course panicked, we threw the waste bin in to the fume hood closed it and taped the gaps off for good measure (all the while couching our longs out) and quickly left the room. The waste bin kept throwing off orange fumes for the rest of the day. After the weekend when we came back we could clean up the fume hood. None of us luckily had any lasting effects, just a sore throat for a few minutes, but we were kinda done with experimenting in the chem lab after that. P.s. When thinking back to it. I'm pretty sure the orange smoke was concentrated NO2. Now I'm not a chemist (not by a long shot), but if I had to take a guess I think the copper in the slurry solution acted as a catalyst for what ever nitric acid waste was already in waste bin. So pro tip: always think about what you're throwing in the waste bin and if it might react with something already in there!

[@That_Chemist]

Yeah it sounds like NO2

[@temshopquartet_8056]

a friend of my dad's was a bit of a troublemaker in school. once, he broke into the supply room and nicked a block of metallic sodium and some of the oil it was stored in. couldn't figure out what to do with it, so to prevent his actions from catching up with him, he tried to dispose of it. in the toilet. because there was so much oil relative to the amount of detergent in the loo, it was pretty slow to start. not being the brightest, he decided that he should flush to speed it up. this introduced a load of fresh detergent from a block in the cistern, stripped all the oil. the sodium went up, the toilet exploded, the pipes burst and some windows got blown out too. despite the complete obliteration of a bathroom, the sly fool was never caught. also on the topic of rock licking, i had an earth and space science teacher who sucked samples to differentiate between silt and clay. geology is weird.

[@That_Chemist]

Wow!!

[@aeonater]

I have a personal vendetta against whoever else was assigned to the same set of lab lockers as I was in first year undergrad. Half the time there was always some junk and residue on the glassware I had to clean up before I could even start, including grease, almost cut myself once because I reached into the drawer assuming that everyone would have the common sense to not put broken glassware back in, and also barely ever put things back in the right place (to be fair, I'm no saint in that regard either). One time, there was just straight-up a huge round bottom flask just completely shattered and ruined at the allocated sink, and because it was inside a sink I couldn't really use a dustpan, and they did not have glass-handling gloves on hand, I had to use tongs and forceps to pick out the smaller pieces. Never found out who it was, I have some choice words for them.

[@That_Chemist]

Totally relatable

[@davidtetard5781]

In the lab where I did my PhD, I heard the story of a male PhD student who was weighing benzyl chloride (bad lachrymator) without wearing gloves. Then he went to the loo. He came back to the lab to finish his reaction to be met with an excruciating pain down there. He was found by his supervisor, 2 minutes later, in the toilets with his gentleman bits on the sink's edge, being washed with copious amount of water.

[@That_Chemist]

:(

[@adamrak7560]

You do not have to do any chemistry to get that experience. I have heard this story from many (dozens) places with capsaicin. People really like extremely strong chili peppers where I am from, they build very high tolerance in their mouth against capsaicin, but they often forget that the pepper juice got onto their hands, and they go to the loo....

[@firstmkb]

@@adamrak7560 been there, did that ONCE. Lesson learned!

[@markshort9098]

There's a number of things that can do that, things like deep heat cream burn down there.. I haven't tried it myself but when I was a kid my father found that out the hard way

[@mad0131]

​@@adamrak7560 got not doing that drilled into me by my parents, thus far I've been lucky.

[@michaireneuszjakubowski5289]

I'm not a chemist, but I used to work in a metal plating/etching/whatnot plant that used HF for some purposes (and a bunch of other nasty stuff too). Pretty much the first thing that was instilled in new employees, even ones that had little to do with the chemicals (HF especially), was an almost superstitious fear of the stuff. The safety officer plainly told us that accident rates are inversely proportional to the respect the staff has towards whatever it is they're working with, and the shortest path to respect is through fear. Idk, my work environment now is safe to the point of being boring, but this advice stayed with me my whole life.

[@jonahperry2698]

Love the dichotomy of “one time I was in my undergrad lab and I totally messed up a reflux!” and “I was doing home chem and now my arms are gone”

[@sehrgut]

I have got another one. Back in vocational school we had to make cyclohexene by elimination reaction. At some point we all felt nauseous and a bit dizzy. It started with the girls feeling unwell and when i started to feel it too, i realized the problem. A simple ice bath probably isn´t enough to condense all the cyclohexene we were making... there were 9 people cooking in the lab. Shortly after that thought the gas alarm (outside the lab) went off and the whole school got evacuated. The next day we did the math and there probably was enough in the air to support an explosion. They never did this experiment again. And the teacher responsible for it, is the same one that got really mad at me for mathematically proving to him, that it is pure chance if i get an A or a C, because of the glassware and instruments we had to use. He hated me ever since. My big middle finger in the final practical exam didn´t sit well with him either. I told them the synthesis was bullshit the way they wanted me to do it and i just did it the way i thought it best. I had both the best quality and quantity, by a big margin. He only was able to deduct 1 point for not strictly abiding by the instructions. 99/100 points. =D

[@That_Chemist]

It’s risky to disrespect authority - always weigh ROI

[@sehrgut]

@@That_Chemist True. But if you know that you are right and already got treated unfairly in the past, you should stand your ground. Some teachers from that school actually liked me for being somewhat bright and able to question things or even challenge them. In the end you don´t get good research if everyone just mindlessly obeys procedure and noone thinks for themselves anymore.

[@veiledAutonym]

@@That_Chemist What's the ROI on hanging out in a room full of cyclohexene?

[@mechadrake]

@@veiledAutonym eternal prize of kaboom possibility

[@mechadrake]

@@That_Chemist That not always helps. Respectfully point out that the problem has a wrong answer because the method of solution probably was wrong, can you please show us how was that answer calculated? And the prize is the hate and teacher changed subject. I will never know did I solve that exhaled CO2 mass calculation or not, like 22 years later :D By the way the class was full of nerds experiment and teachers were most often supportive or error checking or questioning. But they way more important people in bio or chemistry never noticed something is wrong with it, and me, nobody in chem, as in I was not taking the exams (math and physics guy), was the affront to humanity or something

[@ianpowder3187]

Averting a horrible disfigurement: For my undergad intro chem lab, I had a professor who was particularly cavalier about safety. No pre-lab safety briefings. No msds outlines for lectures. Just "read the instructions". During lab, he would often bury himself in a sports illustrated and provide absolutely no assistance to students. Now, I'm not a chemist, but I was raised by academics and had access to a vintage chemistry set from 1935 before I finished middle school. In lab, I was frequently mistaken for a TA for the sole crime of looking like I knew what I was doing. The incident: During a particular lab, we were working with bunsen burners, crucibles, Tin and concentrated fuming nitric acid, amongst other things. With the lack of supervision and fresh undergrads, the atmosphere was chaotic to say the least. I had just finished my experiment and was working on my write up when I looked up and observed a student on the other end of my table holding a pipette of nitric acid above a red hot crucible filled with molten tin, her unprotected face mere inches away from the apparatus. Everything slowed down for me as I saw her squeeze the pipette. Reacting immediately, I sprang up, practically dove around the table, threw my arm out and pulled her away just as the acid contacted the tin and detonated, narrowly missing her face. I can only describe what followed as the most beautiful and terrifying reaction I have ever seen personally. The crucible erupted with a crackling belch, sending a spicy volcano of burning stars of tin and streamers of red brown acid and NO2 up and out over the entire table. I was literally the only person in the lab wearing PPE. The student just stood there frozen like a deer in headlights. I promptly carried the sputtering apparatus to the fume hood. "This goes IN THERE," I said to the still catatonic flunkie. By this time, the entire room was filled with a brown NO2 haze and everyone had to clear out for half an hour before finishing up. The professor just moved his chair outside and continued his 'reading', totally unconcerned and dismissive when I confronted him about his negligence. I went straight to the department head. The best I could get was "I'll send out a memo about it." Moral of the story: Whether in an academic or professional setting, always take personal responsibility for your own safety and keep your PPE on even after your own work is finished. To this day, I don't think that student has any idea how close she came to a life altering facial injury.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!!

[@markshort9098]

I've seen something as dumb but what made it worse is my father knew not to have liquid near molten metal.. I used to do a lot of fishing and I was given a big lead ingot that fell off a truck, it was far to big to put in a saucepan to melt so we made lead shot by slowly melting it with a blow torch and letting it dribble into a bucket of water.. we had the shot drying on a rag on the driveway while making sinkers with the last of the lead we already had and when we running out of that my father told me to go get some shot, I told him it's still wet but he said it'd be ok so I gave him the shot and took off up behind an old fridge only to be laughed at by my father sitting there with no shirt on, he dropped a huge handful of shot in which instantly exploded molten lead everywhere, I didn't get burnt because i was smart enough to hide but my father was covered in little 3rd degree burns and we had lead splattered all over the ceiling in the garage and everything else in a 10 foot radius 🤣

[@JoshuaNorton]

I witnessed a similiar thing to the painting all the glassware with grease, though in a non-chemistry context. When I was working in locomotive maintenance, an apprentice got told to paint over the scratches on the worn paintjob. For this the overseeing worker marked a square with masking tape and handed the brush to the apprentice. Then he went inside the painting booth to spray paint another piece. The fatal error was not explicitly telling the apprentice that she was supposed to paint only within the square and so she spent 2 hours painting over the teensiest scratches all over the locomotive frame EXCEPT for the marked area. It's been like 10 year since but it stays with me as I make sure to give people clear instructions on what to do when I intend to leave them alone for a while.

[@That_Chemist]

Haha

[@giansieger8687]

This reminds me of another story. My Supervisor in senior year of HS helped me with a reaction for a paper I had to write. I was making DEET (Diethyltoluamide) from m-toluic acid and diethylamine•HCl with the help of SOCl2. The paper I was following said to be careful with opening the valve of the addition-funnel in the condensation reaction and to cool with an ice bath which I also did. My instructor wasn’t happy with how slow things were hoing and felt like it‘d be safe to turn it up a little (We were dropping m-toluoyl chloride with a bit SOCl2 in basified Diethylamine solution). As there would be production of HCl gas, we hooked it up to a scrub bottle with NaOH. The valve of the addition funnel seemed to not have been airtight as a bit solution started dripping out and the gas-flow caused sizzling. Following this, somehow, idk if we had stoppered something we shouldn‘t have or if the reaction created too much pressure too fast, but the addition funnel was blown off after the rapid addition of the reactand. Luckily the funnel was oriented vertically and didn‘t shoot up too high so it slid back into the ground glass joint after coming down but a bit of corrosive mixture was spilled in the fumehood and had to be cleaned up. Basically, If a paper says to be careful, be careful. And also, maybe use plastic clips if you‘re producing gases (and heat, as I think you can imagine happened in my case)

[@That_Chemist]

Good advice!

[@julianfernback3542]

Not one of my stories but from an undergrad lab instructor. One of the experiments in the second-year organic lab at my university is a Grignard reaction that makes the Grignard reagent from bromobenzene and then reacts the product with dry ice for benzoic acid. Apparently the term "dry ice" was confusing to one of the students as my lab instructor found them physically drying ice cubes with a paper towel and adding it to their flask. Interesting idea...

[@That_Chemist]

Lmfao

[@mechadrake]

to be fair it is confusing, if you think about it :)

[@Louis-gi1jp]

Our school had an unfortunate history of incidents but probably the most peculiar one was where some kids on my buddies class made a makeshift grenade. It was around the time where we learned about alkali metals. The teacher started the lesson off by showcasing a piece of sodium, cutting it up, talking about it’s properties etc. now here is where she might have made a mistake: another teacher came into the class and asked to talk to her, no clue what it was about but they went into the storage room behind the classroom and closed the door. After a while, some kids in the first row started playing around. Apparently it started getting crazy because soon enough they started running around the room, including the front of the classroom where the sodium and its little container was. Here’s where it gets interesting. One of them managed to knock the container over, so he started to panic and urged his mate to get a bunch of towels to clean up that clear, colourless liquid that spread around the desk. Now, to be fair, none of them reacted right at that moment because they all sat there, observing how two uneducated teenagers filled that sodium vial up with WATER!!! After they were done sorting things out, trying their best to make it look like nothing happened they quickly went back to their desk to act like they didn’t just involuntarily set the teacher up for a unpleasant surprise. Not soon after, the teacher came back. Realising she left some sodium lying around and not wanting it oxidate any further, she quickly went to put it back into the vial. I don’t know she did in her previous life but she had some really good karma because by sheer dumb luck, she went to grab a box (probably in order to show what happens if you put sodium in water) and as soon as she opened the drawer that was luckily a few meters away from the desk, there was some hissing… and BOOM! There was screaming, there was shouting and there was a perplexed increasingly angry teacher. No one was injured but there were little pieces of glass all around the front of the class. I don’t think I need to tell anyone about the shouting that occurred. Now it’s years later and I bet the school still doesn’t let any teacher leave the room when there are any chemicals around.

[@That_Chemist]

Crazy!

[@JPaterson8942]

I took a geology lab class and of course we had the usual 'identify these rocks' lab. Our instructor made sure to emphasize "Do not lick the rocks. There are plenty of other ways to identify them, and who knows what was on people's hands when they touched them."

[@That_Chemist]

Wow, the first person who doesn’t lick rocks in geology

[@viorp5267]

When I did my lab courses in my bachelor's they told me to use gloves only when needed, because then when you take them off you have open pores and your skin absorbes chemicals into blood easier. So I basically never used gloves unless working with strong acids and only like a few months back I was told they probably just said that to save money. I still have the habit of taking off the gloves whenever I am done with anything.

[@That_Chemist]

That sounds like bs to me tbh

[@viorp5267]

@@That_Chemist I got mixed feelings on it. Like skin on my hands is pretty coarse and hard usually, but if I take it out of the gloves after a long time it's like when you take them out of the pool soft, sweaty with lots of pores. I still kinda don't know when you wear gloves and when not. My general rule is that if heavy metals are involved or acids I wear them or chemicals I know are dangerous, but I wear them for short stretches of time.

[@At0mix]

@@viorp5267 You wear them when working with stuff you'd rather not get on your skin, that's really all there is to it. Just wear the correct ones, don't put on disposable nitrile gloves for concentrated acids. Always look up the MSDS if you're unsure. And it's good to wear gloves for short stretches, reduces the risk of exposure through diffusion ("penetration time" is a thing and it's never infinite).

[@nicholasneyhart396]

Jesus, I am going to start my associates of chemistry degree in the autumn and the the professor was asked this at initiation and said(they cost like 10 dollars a box, a hospital bill costs thousands. Use 1,000 for all I care just don't get hurt if you can help it.) It appears you were dealing with a cheapskate who had no care for safety.

[@viorp5267]

@@nicholasneyhart396 they did make us pay pay for broken and dirty lab equipment. I got sick the last 2 days of my Organic Chemistry lab course and couldn't clean things,so they made me pay 400 Euro.

[@purplelotus531]

3 small stories from a time when safety was more a recommendation than a rule at my university. 1) for some lab people had to take a chloroform Aliquot using a pipette, since jt was to hard to control it with a pipette valve someone decided to do it using their mouth on the pipette as a straw. Lets just say everything was quite until everyone heard a loud bang on the floor. 2) There is this particular teacher who is good at teaching but if you were unprepared for a lab he had a pranking habit. Someone forgot to open their cola that was gonna be used as a sample to let all the gas out. So his solution was to tell this poor soul to go to the ultrasonic bath an put it there. After telling the student he went outside the glass door and waited, then when she turned it on cola got everywhere even the ceiling. This was years ago and you can still some of the cola stains on the ceiling on the equipment room. 3) my university has this “university celebration week” every year, no evaluations can be done so its like a party week. On these times people liked to do a lot of pranks (it has died out today). Chem students had complete unrestricted access to labs so they would do wash bottle wars among many things with the chemicals in the labs. Since non-Chem students would get into the facility for pranks the students of the time decided that any non chem student that entered would be countered by setting traps of white phosphorus (or something like it) or some of it being thrown at them. All fun and games until they forgot a school of special ed students was visiting and every time they would take a step you would hear a loud bang putting all the students on permanent cry mode.

[@That_Chemist]

……

[@izarscharf7845]

brilliant

[@defenestrated23]

"It was just a harmless hexane wash bottle fight!" Also holy sh*t they straight-up Geneva'd some special ed students with whiskey petes, that's horrifying.

[@word6344]

It's not a war crime if it's not a war time!

[@Skythedragon]

My chemistry teacher was VERY strict about wearing safety glasses, and everytime someone forgot she'd tell them if they wanted a guide dog (for blind people) or not.

[@plasmay237]

As I started out with home chemistry, I thought it would be a good idea to begin with something simple that can’t go wrong and is considered safe. Completely disregarding that I did the bromine synthesis from TCCA, HCl and a bromine salt. As a precaution I put one of my half mask respirator on only covering my face from the nose down plus the standard PPE (Lab glasses + coat + 2 pairs of gloves). I had a full mask respirator but since I wear glasses, I decided against it because I wouldn’t be able to fit them under the mask properly. I put the TCCA and NaBr in my 1 L RBF and put my distillation apparatus together. After assembling I realized I didn’t have a good way of adding the HCl since I didn’t possess a claison adapter at that time, so immensely stupid me decided to dilute the HCl way down and pour it into the RBF and just quickly attach it to the distillation setup hoping the bromine wouldn’t generate that quickly. To my astonishment a 20 cm high fountain of bromine vapour shot out of the flask, while I tried to fiddle the flask onto my distillation head with my head 30 cm away from the brown vapours. In that moment my first thought was: “Good that I put on that respirator…”. Only soon after learning about the wonders of diffusion and the solubility of bromine in aqueous liquids like eye fluid. My eyes started burning and watering like crazy. After I finally got the flask on the dest. head I rushed to a sink to wash my eyes. Luckily, I haven’t received permanent damage, but I can attest that getting bromine in your eyes is not a fun experience.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!

[@alextaunton3099]

I have a story for you. Not a chemist, just interested in chemistry, but this was at a job of mine. So I was the store manager for a cafe, and because the owners were cheapskates, they bought a used dishwasher instead of renting a new one (when you rent appliances, THEIR GUYS come and fix it for free, as opposed to when you buy one used, you're on your own). Anyway, the thing predictably broke and started spewing this chemical stew all over the floor. Well, it started dissolving the flooring so I immediately started cleaning it up with the only materials I had, which were clearly insufficient. I once I finished cleaning up and actually took to fixing it, I realized the problem... the dishwasher used two chemicals, one was a chelator (EDTA, if I recall correctly) and the other was a base... KOH. Well, guess what leaked all over the floor because of a leaky hose? That's right, KOH. Guess what I had all over my hands that had eaten through the foodservice gloves? That's right, KOH. Guess what had eaten away all the floor? That's right, KOH. My fingernails were fucked for months afterwards and and my cuticles are all scar tissue nowadays. On the plus side, I can play guitar for long periods of time without pain because I no longer have any feeling on my fingertips. On the downside... I no longer have any feeling in my fingertips lol. That is when I learned exactly how much more noxious KOH is than NaOH.

[@That_Chemist]

Wow

[@defenestrated23]

KOH is the big brother that comes and beats you up because you made NaOH cry.

[@alextaunton3099]

@@defenestrated23 potassium in general is awful

[@Kevinfreddo]

The greatest undergraduate chem story I heard was from my friend. She TAed a general chemistry lab where a student spilled HCl on the ground in a beaker. He looked around, shrugged, then took both his shoes off and used his socks to wipe up the spill…

[@That_Chemist]

Haha

[@the_hamrat]

A story from work with a university I work with. We'd sold them a GC with a TCD and a gas sampling valve. Worked well for years, until it didn't. There was excess pressure in the loop, and no peaks were being generated (even CO2 at 100% wasn't showing up). Turns out some bright spark had tried to analyse *LIQUID* KOH on a gas analyser and had completely destroyed all of the plumbing, valving, columns and detector cell. The HOD was not impressed and couldn't find out who'd done it Sadly the machine needed to be replaced afterwards and students were only to use that new analyser with the strictest supervision from one of the senior members of the department

[@seanburton6007]

When I was in high school I decided it would be a great idea to make butyric acid by fermenting milk powder in a 2l soda bottle with a pinhole in the cap and a balloon over the top as an air lock. Needless to say, the hole got clogged and when I went to unscrew the lid I was greeted with a 20ft fountain of rancid dairy. Luckily I did it outside and there was CaCO3 in the mix so I didn't stink up the entire neighborhood.

[@Peaserist]

This story is pretty tame compared to some of these. I'm a home chemist, amateur on a good day. I had recently went sober (8 months sober as of writing this) and had a lot of booze collecting dust, so I had a brilliant Idea of distilling off the EtOH for solvent purposes. I mixed all the booze together in a 1L 2-necked flask and set it up for a fractional distillation on the kitchen stove, which used gas burners. The side neck had a stopper and I would add more booze to it as it boiled away, I figured. It worked for the first couple minutes, collected about 150mL of fruity smelling EtOH, probably contaminated with acetate esters, but liquid stopped coming over. The temperature on the thermometer wasn't increasing, and the liquid wasn't boiling Do you see where this is going? At the time, I didn't. So I thought I'd stick a glass stir rod in the side neck to stir it. FWOOOSH, In the blink of an eye, 80% of the 1L flask sprayed out the neck and coated the kitchen wall and cabinets in this sticky purple liquid. There are still some stains there that a dilute bleach spray couldn't manage to get rid of. Lesson learned that day: boiling chips

[@firstmkb]

Funny! I made 5 or 10 gallons of wine just before I got sober, and eventually decided to distill out the ethanol for a reagent as well. I went as far as to use molecular sieves to remove water from the azeotrope. It never smelled right though, so I used it as cleaning fluid.

[@science_and_anonymous]

I have worked as a home chemist and an experimental chemist in a professional academic lab. Despite the many times I have nearly asphyxiated on chlorine, accidentally made TATP, and performed LAH reductions in possibly wet solvents, the worst experience I have ever had as a home chemist was with MEKP (methyl ethyl ketone peroxide). I had previously synthesized the product about 2 weeks prior as a mild academic exercise, a feat of my chemical skill at the age of 16. During that period of my life, my ability to thoroughly clean glassware was mediocre at best and this left lots of impurities, which I now do not have having been appropriately trained in an analytical lab. I remember I had invited my friend over, we'll call him Chris. Chris loved watching me perform chemistry, and thought it was neat, having been on the spectrum and not having had the ability to perform labs in school. I stated I wanted to show him the reaction of sulfuric acid with some material, I believe some metal. I had the hindsight to give him safety specs, but as I only had one pair, I assumed my glasses alone would keep me safe. As I pipetted the sulfuric acid there was a massive bang, which made my ears ring. There was MEKP still inside the pipette...Sulfuric acid sprayed all over me (most notably my face and glasses). It was dripping down the walls leaving black trails of carbon. I rushed to the sink and washed with water as my friend watched (me comforting him during the experience so he would stay calm). Eventually, I got washed, changed clothes, and cleaned the lab with bicarbonate. This memory is still burned into my mind whenever I work with any chemical, and I believe it made me a better chemist. Still, to all home chemists, be humble, be safe, and understand that you are given only one life, two eyes, two lungs, and one brain. Chemistry is a beautiful science, but it is unforgivable if you do not respect it. Give caress to molecules, and they will do the same. #staynerdy

[@matthewellisor5835]

Mother of Satan! Don't make that unless you have a really good reason. Actually, that goes for and ketone+peroxide.

[@science_and_anonymous]

@@matthewellisor5835 agreed! Would not recommend anyone make this compound

[@That_Chemist]

Oh my gosh

[@MawoDuffer]

I have a biology class lab story. This is because my chemistry lab story is boring, I touched acid and cleaned it quickly This was high school. We were going to look at our own blood under a microscope and had to prepare slides. You can imagine that blood stuff can go wrong. One of the kids wiped his own blood on a prepared slide that already had blood on it. Meanwhile I was having a panic attack because of the prick on my finger and I passed out. I didn’t finish my slide. Edit: I should probably explain I was mostly fine. I was helped to my senses by the teacher and wheel chaired to the nurses. Then I left school early. But I want this to serve as a lesson. Get on the floor if you think you’ll pass out. I was sitting and I don’t remember but I must have stood up and fallen. Luckily I didn’t get a head injury

[@DerunerlaubteName]

Since there are so many stories here about the inorganic internship in the first semester: For the arsenic detection, I had to do the Marshschne assay, where you either use a Bunsen burner or a lighter to light the gas (AsH3) coming through a gas tube and hold it to a cold surface, creating an arsenic (or antimony) mirror. In any case, my lighter was empty just when I wanted to light it and after several attempts with my head a little too far in the trigger, I noticed an intense smell of garlic and felt dizzy. So I put everything down and sat down for the time being and after a few minutes I was fine again, but I can say today that I identified arsenic by smell. PS: In this internship, despite toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, it was forbidden to put on gloves because you are supposed to learn to get along without them. Complete dangerous bullshit.

[@lapisinfernalis9052]

That reminds me of one of my collegues from under grad organic lab where he needed to go to the "toxic room" to get hydrazine for his reaction. when he opened the cabinet door, he smelled marzipan, got suspicious and asked the lab supervisor if something was wrong. The supervisor just went to the room with my collegue and told him that he just smelled a bit of HCN and that it was still fine because he did not taste it yet. About the gloves: There are some situations where you need to make the decision if you rather wear gloves or not. Our inorganics prof in the 1. semester told us, that if you are working with a bunsen burner and the chemicals are not that bad, you should probably don't use gloves, because there is higher risk for beginners to burn themselves when they can't feel the heat properly. And if you burn yourself with gloves ion, the melting plastic on your skin is something that is worse than a lot of the stuff beginners use in our inorganics lab. But what you tell is just irresponsible....

[@mechadrake]

My chem experience was without gloves, labcoats or glasses :D This includes only high school, and uni chemistry introductions, as engineers had a minimum of chemistry. They did not let us do experiments in uni though. I am much more safe at home nowdays, doing hobby carpentry, farming or cleaning, lol, always using proper ppe. except shoes, need to get steel toed shoes before some tractor implement modifies my toes.

[@firstmkb]

The glove rules are crazy. Might as well lop off a finger at the beginning of the program so you can learn to get along without it.

[@NNNILabs]

I think I should talk about some of my experiences in an Indian high school chem lab. First off, safety is non-existent. If you check out some of the pictures in the school website and magazine, you might see some students wearing a proper lab coat and safety goggles. But who has time and money to do that for every class every day? We never wore PPE of any kind. There was also no eye/full body shower. IIRC there was one lonely, ancient fire extinguisher in a corner that looked like it hadn't been checked in years. The tripod stands were rusty and I always checked them before putting anything on them, same with the wire gauze. Bunsen burners were originally copper but caked in crud of some kind and lighting them was as easy as trying to set a wet blanket on fire. And when they did burn, they coughed a lot. We did a lot of titration. Sometimes they required acids, and they were always handled in droppers whose rubber bulb was half-melted. Concentrated H2SO4, HCl and HNO3 were just left on a tray filled with sand in the open. We had to drop some into our test tubes ourselves, trying not to get any on fingers (no gloves) or clothes (no coat). One day the chemistry teacher walked in with a corner of her dress melted, turns out some concentrated H2SO4 had dipped on it. There were also a lot of fumes produced, and while analyzing salts, we were encouraged to take a whiff to try to identify what gas it produced. Of course, nitrate salts produced nitrogen oxides, and I guess I was the only person who knew how dangerous that was. Edit: no fume hoods. All waste was poured down the drain. Sometimes the erratic bunsen burner would melt the hairs on my fingers (I'm a hairy person) but I couldn't pull back because I was holding glassware. That happened during my final practical exam and there was nothing I could do, can't afford to make a fuss in front of the central government appointed examiners. Oh, and of course, making mistakes was a no-no, so even if something went wrong it was hardly reported. Can't be good practice at all.

[@That_Chemist]

Immediately saved for an upcoming video

[@NNNILabs]

@@That_Chemist hehe...😅 I wish I had a picture to show you but no phones allowed...I have a couple of magazines, I'll try to dig one out.

[@leon3831]

I remember my inorganic lab in the 2. semester. We got a shiny brand new lab and everything was still clean and white. I worked on my ion lottery on the bench, when I noticed it`s getting dark behind me. I turned around and the whole fumehood was full of NO2. Absolutely dark brown. Apperently some guy told a girl to dissolve her sample in conc. HNO3. Like 150 mL and then boil it down. Soon a lab assistant arrived and turned the bunsen off while we all watched the deep brown gases to slowly suck up the vent. The air around the institute wasnt really good this day.

[@That_Chemist]

Ffs

[@davidreznick9902]

Best story I have was in hs. I had quite possibly the stupidest lab partner ever (her actual presence was detrimental to my grade). One example was her dropping our sample all over the ground like 5 seconds after receiving it from the teacher. However, the worst was when she was asked the time while holding an uncapped flask of concentrated hcl. Thankfully we were able to wash off all the acid from her before she got anything more than 1st degree burns on her hand.

[@That_Chemist]

S-Tier

[@defenestrated23]

That's some sitcom material right there.

[@timveldhuijzen4944]

Right, so I used to do a bachelor study in organic and analytic chemistry. For our final 1st year exams we had to produce esters (substitution reaction between an alcohol group and a carboxylic acid group), and apply it to a sellable product. In a stroke of "genius" I decided to do one ester and a...thiole. I made 2-Furanmethanethiol (made with a reaction between furylalcohol and thiourea in hcl solution), which has the distinct fragrance of roasted coffee. But, as thioles do, that smell is distinct in a few ppm. In high doses, it smells like a skunk's butthole after one too many coffees. And would you guess it, when I tried to isolate a sample for gas spectrometry analysis, I spilled all of my whole 50ml of product on the floor outside the fumehood. The stink was unbearable, and even after cleanups the stench persisted for a long while. I stopped after the 1st year to follow a different carreer path, but I've heard stories that the smell still persisted after the summer. I wouldn't say it was disastrous, but it definitely showed how easy a disaster can unfold if you don't pay attention.

[@That_Chemist]

Oh no!

[@firstmkb]

I’ve had coffee from truck stops that tasted like a skunk’s butthole, and now I know why.

[@Blackdiamond2]

I did my degree in earth sciences (geophysics) and yeah, we had some stories from our lecturers of old-school geologists stirring dilute HF with bare fingers too. Absolutely mental to think about.

[@HYTEOMEGAP]

Not really an accident or dangerous lab story, but a funny memory nonetheless from my Organic 1 lab during my undergrad. I had this amazing (albeit a bit eccentric) Organic professor for Orgo 1 and 2, but sadly was not able to get into his lab section; I was in a different section with a different professor. Both sections had the same labs however, and one of them was a Fischer Esterification of isoamyl alcohol and acetic acid to form the ester isoamyl acetate, AKA banana fragrance/oil (if you need a reference, basically exactly the smell of a banana Laffy Taffy) According to my friend in the other lab section with the amazing professor, he mentioned how at the beginning of the lab the professor told them that they could keep whatever they synthesized today (roughly 6-7 mL’s) and reminded everyone that, “You know, April 1st is right around the corner and if you really wanted to get someone good… their car, a hot day and a few mL’s of banana fragrance would get the job done. I’ve heard the smell could last for a few weeks… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯” My friend, telling me this story after the fact, then brandished a small glass vial from his backpack to show me. I thought that was pretty funny, so the next day when I performed the synthesis, I asked my more strait-laced professor if we could keep our samples of fragrance, with me thinking that it was a normal occurrence for this lab. To my dismay, I was promptly met with a “No?” so incredulous that I might as well have asked if I could drink from the acetone wash bottle like a sports cap Gatorade. Granted, I understand that taking things from the lab should not be an encouraged practice, but I still found it amusing that my other professor was essentially giving students mL’s of pure banana fragrance for the sole purpose of pranking people and, in doing so, also simultaneously encouraged good lab technique to get them to strive for a high yield during the procedure. Ah, the brilliant Dr. C, a beautiful agent of chaos that was my Orgo professor.

[@That_Chemist]

lol

[@janvisagie231]

Yeah, I started my first year in undergrad in earth sciences. I switched to chemistry the day I heard my lecturer say that the amplitude and frequency of an earthquake is one in the same thing. Luckily I never got to the point of licking rocks, at least not the kind that rhymes with trolley.

[@hudsonserrit4810]

My worst mistake was when I was in early highschool and just got interested in chemistry, mainly anything energetic. I was at my friends house in the middle of nowhere and we were mixing NaOH in water with some aluminum balls to generate hydrogen gas and watch it pop. Eventually we ran out of bottles and I went inside to piss. I learned after taking this piss why PPE and washing your hands it so important, because when I was my hands I readjusted my under regions and started to feel a terrible burn all over it. Turns out I had trace amounts of lye still on my hands and when i washed and readjusted simply activated it to burrow through my skin. I ended up drenching my underwear in vinegar and sitting in a bathtub waiting for it neutralize. I now always wear gloves.

[@That_Chemist]

Making hydrogen bottles explode is a little terrifying

[@walek92SFC]

Might as well share my small story about the inorganic lab class i had at uni at some point as well. Classic analytics, you get a rando mixture and have to identify the ions. Having worked in the lab before i didn't have that much problem with things that usually went wrong for students like evaporating benzene from vials using a bunsen burner (most people just set it on fire, luckily under a fume hood), my biggest gripe was disposing of the solutions after we were done with the analysis, because we were told to just dump stuff down the drain. *Not under a fume hood*. You can imagine my delight when I had to dump CCl4 solution down the drain, and even more so when i had to dump 80% H2SO4 down the drain someone just dumped CCl4 into... Granted those were like 5 or 10 mL vials but even running a constant stream of water while and after doing that i could smell that. In my lab we had separate dump flasks labeled for hexanes and petro-derived solvents, chloroform, phenols, quenched acid and base solutions (and we didn't use strong acids or bases in the first place), stored under a fume hood and disposed of by a hazardous waste service. But hey "we were bio people, what do we know about chemistry"... I know i hate the smell of CCl4 for sure.

[@That_Chemist]

Wtf

[@mopippenger7373]

For some god-awful reason my uni's bookstore only sells these thin gloves that rip at the slightest tension and look exactly like condoms. The worst part is that for an entire semester they only had size small or XL. My hands are medium so I had to choose either ripping my gloves every few minutes or leaving my wrists wide open and my fingers drooping.

[@firstmkb]

Try Amazon. Or a hardware store. Or Wal-Mart.

[@word6344]

First lab of high school chem, comparing properties of ionic vs covalent compounds. One of the experiments was "sucrose" on aluminum foil being heated up on a hotplate. On my friend's hotplate, the "sucrose" was heated so much that it exploded, and what was left of the former sugar turned pink? The "sucrose" came from a grocery store bag of indeterminate age, so it was never really reagent grade purity in the first place. The stuff only got more contaminated over the years, especially since it's used by high school kids fresh into chem.

[@That_Chemist]

Weird

[@Abdcwyxz]

I'm currently doing a masters in organic synthesis. But, before that i did an undergrad internship where i had to add H2SO4 inside an addition funnel. The reaction was under argon, so i needed to add the acid with a syringe through a septum. What is important to know with H2SO4 is that it is really viscous. Anyways, i press the plunger of the syringe full of H2SO4 a little to hard, and the needle disconnects from the syringe. I sprayed 98% H2SO4 everywhere in my hood and on my lab coat. Short story, my lab coat is like a slice of swiss cheese and i burned a hole in my arm the size of a dime. Take home message : ALWAYS hold the needle when adding chemicals and don't press on the plunger of the syringe with such sheer force 😂

[@That_Chemist]

Scary!

[@Joghurt2499]

I'm in physics, so our fuckups are usually a bit less smelly and usually not as dangerous. My "favorite" stories are of a student adjusting lenses for a laser based experiment. She couldn't see the laser on the set up screen so she PUT HER FACE IN FRONT OF THE LENSES so see where the laser was shining (instead of taking a piece of paper to look where it's going). Luckily the lasers we use are not strong enough to seriously injure eyes. Still not nice. Another one was someone putting the caloriemeter (basically a metal bucket in a styrofoam casing) on a hot plate to boil water. Sticky situation. Besides that I did have the strong urge to just. eat. the alpha emitter. after I was repeatedly told not to.

[@waxpoetik_]

I have one of these stories! I was doing the first step of my natural product synthesis, and was finally scaling it up to a 25g scale. It was a diazotization reaction of D-glutamic acid to form the lactone, done in 86% HCl, and then with a solution of sodium nitrite added in. Normally, I used a syringe pump and added the NaNO2 slowly over about an hour. For some reason, this time my brain skipped a step, and I dumped all 20+g of NaNO2 directly into the flask of acid. As you can imagine, this caused an immediate, huge evolution of nitrogen dioxide. I have never seen a fume hood go so dark so quickly. I panicked for half a second, then slammed the hood shut and hit the emergency vent. My lab mate and I left the room, and I spent the evening worried I was going to have a sudden onset pulmonary edema. I turned out fine, so all's well that ends well!

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes! That is scary

[@eleanorshuttleworth9346]

I just realised I do actually have a chemistry lab story. I am an avid rock climber, and my Uni club always goes together to the local centre on Monday evenings, and then to the pub afterwards. Rock climbing is very abrasive, particularly to the fingertips, so often I have skin deep grazes on the tips of each of my fingers the day after. Well, I had chemistry labs every Tuesday morning, starting at 9 AM, for my first year (you might start to see where this is going...) One day, we were doing a physical chemistry lab on cell potential using simple ionic cells. One of the key points of this is that you need a salt bridge (basically a U-tube filled with salt solution stuffed with cotton at each end). The solution we were supposed to be using was 2M NaCl. I have ADHD, and was tired from getting back from the pub at half midnight, so I just saw 2M and Cl and assumed I was good to go. So I filled up this U-tube with 2M HCl by mistake! The experiment still worked fine, as the H+ ions just replaced the Na+ ions, but we weren't using gloves for this experiment since we weren't handling anything particularly toxic. I spilt some of the "salt" solution over my hands and immediately felt a burning sensation in my fingertips. Well I figured, "salt does hurt when you get it in a cut, so that's normal" so I didn't bother washing it off since I have a very high pain tolerance so I can just ignore pain unless it's really bad. And that's the story of how I got 2M hydrochloric acid in my fingers. Also bonus story, one time we were doing a titration with potassium iodate (KIO3), and a student asks the demonstrator "hypothetically speaking, what would happen if you got some of the potassium iodate in your mouth by mistake"! It was not a hypothetical for the student.

[@balam314]

14:50 A few days ago at my chemistry lab in school, we were doing a salt analysis(on 4 solutions at once). I just went through the tests specified in my book. The gloves we had were terrible. If they got wet at all they would start leaving a white residue on all the test tubes, and cover your hands in white powder. I mean, my hands were still dry, but I don't trust them to stop chemicals. But I wasn't working with anything toxic or concentrated, right? (Except the nitrogen dioxide gas from the nitrite test that I know to avoid breathing) So I took my gloves off. Also, I had to rinse the test tubes a total of 20 times, so there's no way I didn't get some of the dilute residue on my hands. We were only given 2 pipettes, and even though I tried to rinse them as much as possible, eventually I messed up and used the wrong one. I used a dirty pipette of solution 1 to suck up some of solution 3, and it caused small bits of yellow precipitate to form in solution 3. Weird. Anyway, the last test was to add dilute HCl to all the solutions, which was a test I hadn't seen before. Only solution 1 did anything, and it changed color from yellow to orange. Weird. I consulted my qualitative analysis sheets, and turns out I had been unknowingly working with a chromate solution. So that's why the yellow color didn't get rinsed off. I knew how dangerous Cr6+ is, so I asked my teacher, and she said "Don't worry about it." Also from the same session, my friend said their sink started smoking. Idk why it didn't happen to me, we were doing the same tests and dumping the same things. I realize now we have probably been pouring things down the drain that should not be poured down the drain for a long time. Also from the same session, at the end as we were about to leave, I saw the lab assistant cleaning up the test tubes and miscellaneous equipment... by roughly dumping everything, including the glassware, into a tray. Another story from a few weeks back, after one of the other students finished their tests, they had the brilliant idea to mix random things together in a boiling tube. (H2SO4, NaOH, HCl, AgNO3, BaNO3, and maybe a few more) They said it started smoking and that they put it on a rack and left. Best part is, if you add concentrated AgNO3, then ammonia, then concentrated NaOH, which are all reagents we have each session, according to an Ex&F video you would make fulminating silver. Good thing we only have the dilute versions.

[@That_Chemist]

Crazy!!!

[@TheHammy2211]

As a geology enthusiast, I have never licked a specimen. That being said, I would be lying if I wasn't occasionally tempted to do so by amethyst. At least that genuinely looks like grape rock candy though.

[@That_Chemist]

Ok I can relate to that one

[@nickkurzy2246]

Mmmmmm... Rocc

[@nekomimicatears]

Gems are very tempting. A shame they don't taste how they look

[@TheodorBsson]

Alright here goes: During my Master's thesis, I was dismantling a distillation apparatus after distilling over a chemical precursor that I was going to use to complex with group 13 metals. During the dismantling, I forgot to remove the thermometer (a mercury thermometer I might add) before I took off the connector between the condenser and the 3-headed round bottom flask which meant the thermometer slipped out and landed on the floor breaking and spilling mercury on the floor. Instead of asking what I should immediately do, I, most likely fueled by confused panic, started to sweep up the mercury-laced glass from the floor with a dustpan and a broom. I then tossed the dustpan with the glassshards and the broom into an empty container before coming to (what I should have done first) the sensible decision to say to my supervisor about what had happened and what I had done. He was not happy with me sweeping up the mercury the way I did it. Also: I had done a terrible job of picking up the mercury anyway so I and my supervisor spent a good while looking for any beads of mercury on the floor and on my clothes (luckily no mercury was found on me).. I went home early from the lab that day in shame.

[@That_Chemist]

Sorry to hear that :(

[@sungyunkim7450]

One time I had to run some samples through a GCMS. But the person who helped other students using it was absent at that time. And it was my first time using such awsome equipment. So, I took it as an acceptable challenge. I searched through the manuals and other literature using the same machine, programmed the sequence by myself and even got decent results(it was a small highschool project on fischer esterfication on chrysanthemates). I was so proud of it until the person incharge of the GCMS came back... apparently I forgot to do 2 things. One was to wash the injection needle(I wondered what was the needless actuation step on a empty vial slot which was labeled "Wash") and the other was that I never neutralized the residue sulfuric acid in the samples... luckily nothing went seriously wrong on that cool 120k$ GCMS : D

[@That_Chemist]

Lucky duck

[@T3Mantis]

I am a chemical weapons specialist in the swiss military, during bootcamp, we had a big military exercice involving live blistering agents. We had loads of samples coming in for analysis and we had to work quick. I was working at the fume hood with a gasmask and the guy a few meters away working the GC MS yelled at me that he could smell geranium, thats a big nono as lewisite (a dangerous blistering agent) can produce said smell as it degrades. We quickly found a sample bottle that was filled with contaminated soil and that wasn't correctly cleaned... I heard next year they had the same problem but couldn't find the source of the contamination in time and had to evacuate the lab...

[@That_Chemist]

I would love to hear more of your stories!!!

[@T3Mantis]

Well there was that one time where we were analyzing in our mobile labs which are basically an armored truck with a 50cal turret on top, but inside its actually fully equipped lab with a mobile GC MS ! The thing that had me the most excited was to use the glovebox ! Well you see usually gloveboxes are usually under pressure to keep moisture and oxygen out, so the gloves inflate outward when removed. But in our case, the glovebox is under slight vacuum as we work with chemical warfare agents and you want them to stay inside incase of a leak. As a consequence of that, the gloves inflate inward into the glovebox when removed.... YEAH so I removed my glove once, it reverted inside of the glovebox and it punched and broke a becher ! At lest it was just filled with DMC and nothing nasty xD. I don't like gloveboxes now :(

[@gio9789]

there is a story told in my high school that i think it's very funny basically they decide to distill ethanol from wine, pretty easy right, well they started the distillation and leave it overnight , the morning after before the technician opens the lab they hear an explosion succeeded by splashing noise and glass shattering. turns out something clogged the distillation column and the whole thing blew up, we still have a faint purplish stain on the ceiling of the lab

[@That_Chemist]

Doing a distillation unattended is never wise

[@monarchatto6095]

I remember when I was younger that I coincidentally had potassium permanganate (medicine) and sulfuric acid (drain cleaner). So I decided to mix them, and it made manganese heptoxide. I didn’t know what this was, so I searched it up and found out what it was and what it could do. I decided this was a great idea to detonate it and make two other batches of it to also detonate, and in the process splashed concentrated sulfuric acid to my eyelids. The reason I didn’t go blind is because I blinked right as it splashed because I apparently wasn’t wearing any goggles while making it, luckily nothing much happened after but one of the explosions did spew manganese dioxide dust into my face. Conclusion: Don’t mix random chemicals

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes - glad you didn’t get hurt!!

[@cassandralyris4918]

So, back in college I had chemistry and microbiology at my local community college. My story is actually about the micro bio lab. Near the end of the semester we were all going to do a swab of our throats to determine what bacteria we have back there. Now, I have a compromised immune system and suffered a horrible bout of meningitis when I was five that almost killed me. Anyways, fast forward back to my micro bio class. So we set up our petri dishes and leave for the weekend to let it all get nice and ripe for next Tuesday. So, Tuesday comes and we all get our dishes out and the professor has us set up all of the testing equipment and liquids. We go through the basics, your streps, your staph aureus, and then she gets to her last vile and she says, "This will test for Neisseria meningitidis." So, I drip it on my sample and it turns BRIGHT violet and starts crackling. The professor is absolutely horrified at this point. The office gets called. The hazmat team comes in. Everyone gets to go home, but the professor pulls me aside and tells me that in 30 years of teaching she had never actually had an infected sample happen before. It's so uncommon that they had to burn all of my samples and specially dispose of the ashes. So basically I've lived most of my life as a Neisseria meningitidis carrier. I don't believe I've ever made anyone sick, but there's no actual way to know. I earned the nickname "Meningitis Mary" which I still proudly own to this day. I spoke to my doctor and they said I'm relatively safe since I don't hawk loogies everywhere I go. Surprisingly no outrageous Chem stories. Everyone in my class was mostly older like me. I guess we all mostly knew better at this point. I think the most dangerous "home chemistry" accident I've ever been a part of is when my friends and I were teenagers and two of my friends decided (after having a few bong rips) to microwave an egg after I told them "You probably shouldn't do that." Pro tip, they shouldn't have done that.

[@arc8920]

not strictly a chemical related incident, but i once worked in a chem engineering lab on reverse osmosis membranes. We had to prepare them on a layer of polysulfone, and then test them by clamping them in a small pressure chamber with saltwater. We would then apply 10 bar of pressurized N2 through the top to force the water through the membrane. So since this lab was shared among quite a number of research groups, N2 cylinders were in short supply and we often had to wait for another group to finish their experiment before we could hook ours up to one. this meant synthesizing the membrane, then waiting hours at a time for our turn. and given that each test of the membrane took up to 3 hours, our progress was generally really slow. you can imagine my happiness when one day, i found an unused cylinder stashed in the corner of one of the labs. maybe it shouldve crossed my mind to ask my supervisor why exactly it was unused, but it was nearing 5pm and i was desperate to finish labwork so i could go home and have dinner for once. I screwed the pressure hose onto the top of my vessel, tightened it with a wrench, and opened the valve on the regulator. what happened next was that the hose promptly broke off and sent 10 bar of N2 screaming through the outlet in the loudest, most earsplitting sound ive ever heard. it was just about as loud as a fire alarm, and i'm pretty sure everyone on at least the same floor heard it. i stood there in shock for a few seconds until i had the presence of mind to turn the valve off. surprisingly, no one came rushing in to check what went wrong which makes me think it mightve been a semi-regular occurence in that particular lab. I've been wary of working with compressed gas ever since.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!!

[@PowiLUXS]

Oh, you want a story. Alright, I have a background in clinical microbiology and infectious diseases. I've been working in a lab of a very representative and WHO-affiliated center in France as a medical microbiologist, so I was dealing with the consultation on what's growing on the plates and how we should approach figuring that out. We had a case of a mid-age gentleman with fever and rash for no obvious reason. The patient was from a rural area of France and he injured himself while skiing a rabbit. As a routine diagnostic the blood samples were obtained from BackTeck bottles to elucidate the sepsis. The samples got positive after 7 days (many red flags should have been raised there). The bottles have rubber septa, so we have to use a syringe or special device to open them and take a sample and they always have pressure inside. We were a very busy lab with 3 shits, so not enough safety hoods that we could use. Sometimes we used to open those bottles on a bench (another red flag!!!!!) as per internal guidelines. Long story short, my tech opened the bottle, took a sample, initiated the cultures, and prepared the microscopy slides on the BENCH!!! long story short that shift had 30 people that night including supporting staff and that gentleman got infected with Tularemia which is known as a plague little nasty sister. So the whole lab got potentially infected just due to opening that sample. Once we got the internal diagnosis, we all received preventative antibiotics, and samples were taken by the European CDC equivalent and lab fumigated. A month later we all had to submit our blood samples for antibody typing and apparently, most people in the lab tested positive for contact with that bug. so just by opening a bottle, almost 30 people got infected. Fun Fun Fun.

[@That_Chemist]

What the fugg

[@PowiLUXS]

@@That_Chemist Yea, that's called biology. The one that literally could kill you :D

[@H3R10N]

Once during my bachelor, another student (friend) and me wanted to be done quickly with our practical because of the nice weather outside. Therefore, we prepared chemicals for each other to speed things up. In my case, I needed to heat the solution whereas my friend needed to cool his down. At some point, I added a solution to my reaction which apparently was meant for my friends reaction. All of a sudden a yellow gas started forming which quickly filled the fumehood. We just looked at it stupidly until we inhaled some of it and started coughing a lot. The professor came in, quickly closed the fumehood and started recording the gas formation with his phone. All he said was: 'Well guys, this is Chemistry'. We went out for some fresh air and laughed it off. Still don't know what we acutally made.

[@That_Chemist]

YELLOW GAS is what you made

[@onionluigi6795]

So here are my 5cents I was adding DMAP and DCC solution in DCM to catalyze my reaction which was under protective argon atmosphere so I had to add it using syringe and needle. I was rushing home so I didn´t let the DCC dissolve properly and one of the particles blocked the needle. I decided that the best coruse of action is to press on the syringe as hard as I could to declog it. What happened instead was that the needle popped off from the syringe and I splashed my whole face (including one eye I wasn´t wearing any goggles cause I ain´t no coward) I washed the eye for like 15seconds and finished my lab. It didn´t hurt or anything only teared up a little so I just went home. In the morning when I woke up my eye hurt like hell and I couldn´t open it so I went to a doctor to discover I had slightly burnt cornea. I got some ATB cream and eye patch adn went home. Over the course of next 2 weeks it got worse I bascially lost all sight in that eye then doc fianlly realized that DCC got stuck in the eye and tears wouldn´t flush it out. So I got boric acid solution and within 4 days my eye was back at 100% + I got insurance money. Moral of the story: Be retarded and you will get insurance money.

[@That_Chemist]

Fuck - that’s so awful :(((((

[@Teyore]

As a geologist... I never lick rocks. you go out to the desert and you're never quite sure where that rock has been. or if its dried poop.

[@wnfeo4518]

I find chemistry fascinating, but I am so glad I didn't become a chemist. My clumsy and easily distracted self would probably end up with an even worse story, probably involving a closed casket. That being said, I have a small geology-related story. And yes, it involves rock tasting. I was in a high school that also gave you a small diploma on metallurgy in South America (not sure what it would be called in English) and we were learning how to recognize different copper minerals we had brought to class. I had some my father had collected, and brought them over, and my teacher was telling me which were which and how to recognize them. Then we came to a very soft, deep-blue stone I had, and my teacher tells me it might be chalcanthite. So my teacher told me to lightly scratch some with my nail and taste it, but stressed a lot that I had to just scratch a tiny bit and not get a lot of it to my mouth. Reassuring. Anyway, chalcanthite's formula is CuSO4 · 5H2O. So basically, when in contact with water (or dare I say, saliva) it breaks down into a bitter mouthful of copper all at once. So yeah, I scratched a tiny bit, tasted it, and immediately cringed because of all the bitterness. My teacher didn't wait for me to say it was bitter to say that, yes, that was chalcanthite alright. Fast forward to our first geology test, classroom was divided in rows and for the last section of the test each row was assigned a set of three minerals to recognize. So we would take turns to stand up and examine the minerals up close, try to scratch them and get them to scratch something else, and then sit down and write what we thought they were. And yup, I got the chalky blue mineral again. Dreading it a bit but not wanting to fail the test I scratched a bit of it and licked it... and then retched. I know the entire class stared at me and no one got that answer wrong in my row. Also I have to say that I have no idea how safe this was and this was a crappy school in a crappy country, so... don't go around licking different minerals because I have no idea how safe or unsafe that can be.

[@That_Chemist]

Wtf

[@pialamode]

One of our early high school labs was figuring out the concentration of sodium bicarbonate in a mixture of that and sodium chloride by measuring the mass loss on heating. I wanted to be really sure that all the sodium bicarbonate decomposed, so I left it on the burner until it turned orange-hot. I suspected that may have been too long when the mixture started melting. After letting it cool I got really good results on the lab- it was a shame I had to be late for the next class because I had to run it under the sink until the solid puck of sodium carbonate and sodium chloride finally dissolved out of the crucible. That was also the class where a friend got a burn in the shape of a ring in the center of his palm from trying to pick up an iron ring before letting it cool down. Good memories all around.

[@That_Chemist]

Overkill but definitely relatable

[@fonesrphunny7242]

Short second hand story that took place around 20-25 years ago: Students were making circuit boards the 'old fashioned' way. Every group was given a tool to handle their board during the etching process. Despite all warnings, and everybody around doing it right, one student somehow forgot about the tool and used his bare hand to extract the board. Nobody noticed until he said "my hands are feeling weird" and they were turning red. Luckily he didn't suffer any permanent damage, but it must have been a major facepalm moment. Thank god he didn't facepalm himself and spread the stuff all over his face.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!!

[@bobolab741]

I remember when we were doing basic lab tech course where they teach new students how to operate basic lab equipment there was a student in our group with slight mental disability. He was doing preparation of persulfates using electrolysis. He was supposed to put sulfuric acid and sulfate salt to the electrolysis chamber and ethanol with dry ice around it as ice bath. For some reason he poured the sulfuric acid to the ice bath, dumped dry ice into it and then proceeded to fill the electrolysis chamber with ethanol and sulfate salt. He then pumped current into it for solid hour before the lab instructor noticed something was wrong. I guess the dry ice prevented buildup of alcohol vapor in the chamber, otherwise he would have build himself glass pipebomb. Same student then proceeded to open the lid of running Uv/vis spectrometer because "it needed some light in there". The software of the spectrometer did not like it at all and bricked the machine for solid 30 minutes.

[@That_Chemist]

That is terrifying

[@megoesmo0]

These stories remind me of the OC lab during my bachelors in chemistry. We were given tasks by PhD students to synthesize some chemicals they needed during their research. One of the reactions some of us got, was done in a huge 5 liter flask. The flask was about half full when the instructions demanded to add 500 ml of concentrated permanganate solution. A sensible chem student would use an addition funnel. The guy I shared a fume hood with didn’t. He proceeded to dump the whole 500 ml of permanganate solution in at one go. The reaction was instant, resulting in a fountain of boiling brown liquid showering the fume hood and his arms. He was then hospitalized for severe burns on his arms and hands but gladly was able to come back to the lab after about two weeks. The same instructions lead to a similar incident a few days later, this time thankfully without injuries. They were then updated to “carefully add the permanganate” after which no more accidents happened

[@That_Chemist]

Oh my gosh!!

[@garmancathotmailcom]

I've heard geologists remind each other not to lick the core samples because we were doing uranium exploration. They are easier to see when they are wet so usually they lick them.

[@That_Chemist]

lmao

[@firstmkb]

What a weird thing for all of them to do!

[@nickkurzy2246]

Geologist 1: mmm rocc Geologist 2: careful, it's got Uranium Geologist 1: oh, a spicy rocc

[@christineg8151]

I have been lucky enough to have no significant lab accidents. I do make handmade soap, though, and had a bit of an issue one day while making a batch of handmade soap. If you've never made soap, there are two main ways home soapmakers make soap, hot process and cold process. Cold process is easier but takes longer (add ~12M NaOH solution to melted oils, pour into mold, let sit about 30 days for the reaction to reach completion). Hot process is faster, but the soap tends to be lumpier/less pretty. For hot process, you add ~12M NaOH solution to melted oils, then heat it (often in a crock pot or oven) until the saponification reaction is done. When you start the reaction, you have something that's about the color and consistency of cake batter. Once the reaction is done, it's more like lumpy mashed potatoes. The soap is safe to use as soon as it's cool enough to handle, no one month wait, so I tend to use hot process to test new recipes. Anyway, one extremely warm day, I was making hot process soap in my garage. Because of the heat, the soap got much hotter than expected, faster than usual. As a result, even though it usually took about an hour to cook, after only about 15 minutes, I had that "lumpy potatoes" texture I was expecting for a completed batch. I then proceeded to do what's called a "tongue test" among soapmakers. Basically, you take some of the hot soap mixture and touch it to the tip of your tongue. If the NaOH hasn't completely reacted, you get a "zap", similar to the effect of licking a 9V battery. No zap, you have a very mild soap taste, and the soap is ready to use. I had done this dozens of times in the past with no issues. This time, though... Because of the heat, it LOOKED Like it had reacted fully, but was actually nowhere near. And soap that's still reacting is also a lot stickier than soap that's reached completion. Not only had I touched my tongue to a batch of soap that was at least 60C, but there was a significant amount of NaOH still present, and it was STICKING to my tongue. Of course, instinct is to pull back from what's painful, so I pull my tongue back into my mouth, where I proceed to burn the roof of my mouth with both the heat and the NaOH. It was Not Fun. I had blisters and couldn't taste anything properly for a couple weeks. I also went out the next day and got pH strips for testing.

[@That_Chemist]

:((((

[@softcookie4507]

The “guy with the smelly backpack” story had me in tears. 🤣

[@retrograde7156]

Well I don’t have any crazy stories about chemistry but my chemistry teacher most certainly does. Let’s just say that the reason the chemistry department in my school was not allowed excess chemicals for practicals was because of my chemistry teacher. One time he was doing the usual thermite reaction and as he just casually mentions that he used to do this reaction with way, way more thermite, while the one we was watching was probably 50g max, he used to do this with way way more…. In a secondary school, where there are like 30 students huddled around a small plastic shield with no eye protection. Oh in addition he mentioned a time when he had made a impact explosive in the school labs and had accidentally left it on the table, next thing you know a student walks in and throws his bag onto the now dry and very much sensitive explosive and you could probably guess what happened, Yh that student had to get a new bag and school supplies. He would just casually mention how he would rob a bank by using a concentrated solution of ammonia to literally knock everyone unconscious, and proceeds to get a 1 mol solution of ammonia from the lab technicians and ask the students to smell it, Yh that wasn’t a fun time. Oh and any time a student wasn’t working or being too annoying he would tell them that they can get a first hand experience with Chlorine gas in the fume cupboard. He also mentioned a time where in his degree someone had thrown a very large, charged capacitor at him and it proceeded to send him flying across the room when he accidentally connected the terminals, with both of his hands. There was also a time when one of his friends had made his car battery explode by shortening it and getting concentrated H2SO4 all over the car. I have probably only just scratched the surface with what he has done but all in all he was a incredibly good teacher and he is probably the only reason I’m now going to do chemistry at university. Man such good times.

[@That_Chemist]

He sounds scary

[@retrograde7156]

@@That_Chemist nah he was probably the coolest teacher I ever had, his sarcasm was through the roof

[@mcb187]

14:30. No. NONONONONONO. As a photographer, I have contemplated using this stuff as a bleach for black and white reversal development, for making slides. I considered it for about 5 minutes, before reading the PubChem entry. The ONLY way you will get me to use that stuff, solid or aqueous, is in a sealed glove box, outside, wearing a respirator. I think I’ll try using ferric chloride and ammonia instead, definitely safer. Ferric chloride isn’t great, but at least it doesn’t absorb through skin, and I’ve used ammonia to clean the house, albeit in a slightly less concentrated form, so I feel reasonably comfortable with it.

[@drrocketman7794]

My electronic instructor in the Army 20 years ago worked as a safety guy at Intel. He saw a guy working with phosphoric acid and he said "Why aren't you wearing gloves?" The guy said "Look at the ingredients on a can of Coca-Cola. It won't hurt you." He went on to say that someone spilled HF on his finger and didn't get it off on time. A few days later he felt like he'd got his finger slammed in a car door, and they took him to the ER, where they had to stick a needle into his finger BONES and inject the antidote! He said there's really nothing they can do for the pain, and it's horrible. After that instruction, I saw hydrogen fluoride as an ingredient in wheel cleaner for cars and I was like *NOPE*

[@ortholux2343]

In the lab part of the pharmaceutical chemistry course they let us play with all sort interesting stuff (Na metal, Me-I, grignard, ...). So in one lab we had to use benzoyl chloride. We get plenty of warning that it's a lacrimator and I seem to remember we has to measure it out in the fumehood. As you can imagine when 20 students are toying with it the whole lab gets infuse with its vapours. So the assistant open the windows to let the vapours escape. Being an o-chem lab the room was kept in over pressure so by opening the windows the fumehoods stopped working. Fun. That wasn't the worst part. The next week we had another synthesis and not all students had cleaned their personal glass meticulously. So the moment they opened their cabinets vapours that had a whole week to accumulate had a chance to escape bringing tears to everyone eyes, again.

[@That_Chemist]

Ugh

[@niklas9496]

First of all, I'm not a chemist. I'm a brewer and we have to work with a lot of chemicals for cleaning on a daily basis. A few years ago a apprentice decided it was a good idea to mix a chloride or chlorate containing basic cleaning solution, wich is made to produce a lot of stable foam with an acidic also chlorine containing cleaning solution. He added waaaayyyyy too much of each to a bucket with no water in it. I don't know what ge thought would happen, but of course it produced a lot of foam wich was slightly yellow from chlorine gas. He didn't think any bad about this and he still wanted to clean the hall with it, but luckily someone else noticed. And another time one coworker wanted to clean a 1L all aluminium container with rubber sealing, wich we get our yeast in. He decided that it was a good idea to fill the whole thing with 50% NaOH solution an screw the lid on REALLY tight and leave the thing alone to take a break. About 20 min later, the person in the lab down the hall heard a very loud bang. The reaction of the Al and the NaOH heated up and this spead up the reaction and of course also the pressure built up. To the point that wich the treating of the containcer blow of and sprayed the room with very hot concentrated NaOH solution. Luckily no one was in the room at the time and no one was hurt. Also a lot of people completly neglect safty rules when it comes to working with chemicals. Seeing people cleaning with the chloride containing base from the first story without goggels and gloves is a sad regular. At certain containers we have sleeve lobg gloves, one pair of wich I used just today. I was almost done filling some 50% NaOH solution in another container when I noticed slight bruning sesastion on a few places on my lower arm, inside the glove, wich was getting worse quite fast. So I paused the filling and removed the gloves to find wet NaOH critals dissolving into my skin. So someone somehow got NaOH into the glove and thougt it wasn't necessary ro wash it. After several minutes of washing with cold water it still burned a lot, after some more minutes it got better. But it still begins to hurt whenever it gets even just a little wet. Let's see how long this will last.

[@gostlymovement]

Yikes, luckily there was no flame close because that would have caused a nice explosion to add to the chaos that is hot NaOH everywhere

[@That_Chemist]

That is so crazy

[@niklas9496]

@@That_Chemist Yes, a lot of bad stuff can and will happen when people who work with chemicals don't treat the chemicals with enough respect.

[@niklas9496]

@@gostlymovement Yes, very lucky. Because when we work with new yeast, we sterilies surfaces with a burner

[@craigjohnson775]

The greatest mishap in my lab experience was at my old company, my boss was doing a hydrogenation on 10-12grams of some tetra-CBZ protected steroid. The reaction would only go partially even after filtering old and adding new catalyst leaving a mixture of deprotected cmpd. So he decided the hydrogenator, which was named hilariously "Steely Dan", needed to be more pressurized and hell he decided it need to be heated too cuz that will be good. Well, little to anyone one's knowledge, Steely's shaker arm failed at some point leaving the mixture with 200mL of methanol and Pd-C to sit undisturbed and heating. After time the whole thing detonated. He had placed this hydrogenator across the lab where no one was so no one got hurt but the explosion rocked the 3000ft. Building and I'm sure the one next door. It literally blew a hole in one of those heavy blast shields, and put black carbon and Pd all over the Pleb hood that was only used for wacky ideas and it was also l the location of our "Chem-Pit". (Saw the chemist comment and was dieing, I've used one of those for years but never had a name for it!)

[@That_Chemist]

Oh my gosh!!!

[@tsm688]

what exactly detonated? I am just with-it enough to know what pd/c is but not what you were doing with it here

[@craigjohnson775]

@@tsm688 the 500mL pressure vessel erupted inside the shaker machine blowing out the inards lol

[@tsm688]

@@craigjohnson775 why?

[@craigjohnson775]

@@tsm688 you know what, my boss said the exact same thing while scratching his head lol Edit: Being a chemist, not a physist, my boss scratched his head and asked the same thing, while looking at me puzzled.. Simply put hydrogen is extremely flammable, methanol is flammable and under pressure it makes a nice combo that is highly explosive, however this is a standard transformation in most labs.

[@viagra5207]

When I was about ten years old, my dad had a can of air duster computer cleaner. I played around with it and quickly figured out that you could take out the cryogenic liquid gasses by turning the can upside down. I also decided that it would be a good idea to fill up a small bottle cap with the liquid gas and try to light it on fire in an enclosed garage. It turns out that burning the air duster like this produces HF. I got several breathfulls of HF while trying to evacuate the gas chamber that I had just created. I had severe irritation and couldn't stop coughing for 15 mins straight and was severely nauseous for the rest of the day. Even months later, I would still break into coughing fits.

[@colesherrill7472]

The licking rocks thing was told to me, early on in school. Then, after a few years, for obvious safety reasons, they had to tell us NOT to. I think some public schools used that as a cheap way to get the physical properties of a mineral for identification. But there are a lot of nasty minerals that would give you minor heavy metal poisoning at best, so they had to stop.