They Secretly Dumped Their Chemical Waste in the Ocean

This is the 15th chempilation. Please dispose of your chemicals responsibly!
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ChemicalForce has a video on LIQUID OZONE: • That's how liquid ozon...

[@julian281198]

The only things you should throw into the ocean are old car batteries, so the electric eels can charge themselves.

[@That_Chemist]

Electric feel now!

[@SportyMabamba]

Free and legal thrills

[@kaboom4679]

That idea has a lot of potential .

[@1224chrisng]

but *Current* affairs might change the *Frequency* of that exercise

[@paradigm3345]

Unfortunately, electric eels are freshwater fish, so I’d recommend dumping your batteries into a river instead to charge them.

[@19nmiller1]

12:24 to me, this is legitimately the scariest story you've told on this channel. Six years ago I caught a freak case of flesh-eating bacteria in my right leg. At its worst, it was destroying up to an inch of tissue an hour; so it goes without saying they had to remove a lot of dead gunk from my leg to prevent it from spreading too far. I lost the entirety of my anterior tibialis muscle as well as some tissue in my foot and thigh. Eventually I elected to have the lower half of my leg amputated to save the pain and hassle of a defunct ankle. If you couldn't have guessed, it was staphylococcus aureus that was the flesh-eating bacteria. To this day, no one knows exactly how I got it. So when you said that this guy literally sucked it into his mouth, I gasped out loud. I know my case was 1 in a billion and thousands of people get staph A infections with minimal repercussions, but it still scared the hell out of me.

[@That_Chemist]

Oh my gosh, that is so scary - I hope your accessibility wasn’t damaged too much :(

[@That_Chemist]

Absolutely terrifying :(

[@TimPerfetto]

@@That_Chemist Not as scary as hair or having to eat hair or forming a beozar and having to resist eating it after it is removed

[@zachsuarez1830]

What the fuck 1 inch is insane

[@vincentender1486]

Makes me think how lucky I was with my staff infection on my right wrist, there's a small spot of white where the infection finally came out at huge pressure. It looked like I had a broken wrist, and the pills I took were nor fun.

[@omnirath]

The plasma ball story remind me of my early teen, I was 12 and tried to make a tesla coil in my bedroom, since I was dumb and my parents inconsiderate I used a microwave transformer and managed to get shocked. I don’t know how I survived, maybe the capacitor wasn’t full. I don’t recall exactly if the whole thing was plugged in but anyhow I got a nasty shock, my left harm was paralyzed and stayed like a wooden log on fire for the whole night, really painful and scary, also got a deep burn on my palm that stayed for a while. Moral of the story if you do something stupid tell your parents even if you feel ashamed and go to the hospital, every kind of physically threatening incident need medical attention. Don’t have parents that leave you to play with microwave transformers, that’s the biggest issue of the story tbh…This scared me from high voltage for years and I switched to making audio amplifiers, with the things I learnt I was finally able to make a tesla coil with a flyback driver later on while being a LOT more careful lol.

[@stealthboost2805]

I got shocked by a microwave capacitor, and while the high voltage could make your heart stop if it goes arm-to-arm, the low capacity means while it is painful, there is very little permanent damage when it goes through, say, a hand. In my case there isn’t even a scar

[@petevenuti7355]

Or telling your parents can save them from you!!! I had my sulphur dioxide cloud at my house, and a friend's Mom got some acid burns from some HCl and sulfuric acid I brought over to show him how easy it was to dissolve metals and concrete.

[@Xnoob545]

Me reading the story: microwave tra- YOU DID *WHAT*?

[@mnxs]

@@stealthboost2805 microwave transformers are incredibly dangerous, because high voltage is incredibly dangerous. You were lucky. Don't ever f**king play with microwave transformers, kids.

[@AaronJLong]

Haven't looked at the numbers, but I would bet that microwave transformer deaths have killed more people than shark attacks in the past 5 years. If anyone knows the stats feel free to let me know if I get to keep my hypothetical fiver. As for the plasma ball story, it reminds me of a scene from a cartoon I watched as a kid called 2 stupid dogs. I may be off on some of the details as I was a small kid in the '90s the one time I saw this episode with my brothers. One of the dogs sees a plasma globe in a museum or something and a sign that says "electricity is your friend" (he misreads electricity as electric city, which is what me and my brothers decided to name my first plasma globe, after this scene) and gets excited because it is a ball and he is a dog so he is all about chasing/biting balls. He bites the plasma globe and gets electrocuted to the point of having a hallucination or something where some being of electricity says to him "Foolish mortal, I am not your friend!" 10/10 scene from a mostly forgotten show and me and my brothers would often quote it whenever anything involving electricity came up for years afterward.

[@friendcomputer5276]

The story about the oold chemicals just lying around at scool reminds me of that one time back in school when we suddenly had to leave in the middle of class and got to see the bomb squad show up. Apparently, one of the teachers had been cleaning out the storage area of our biology cassrooms/labs and found an old bottle of dye for preparing microscope specimens that had dried out. Said dye was a solution of picric acid. And the bomb squad later found a whole bunch of such bottles just sitting around in various forgotten storage closets all over the school. For those who don't know, picric acid was used as an explosive in artillery shells in the early 20th century until it was replaced by the much safer TNT. Mainly because picric acid has a nasty habit of forming extremely shock-sensitive salts when in contact with metal and it's also kinda shock-sensitive by itslef when dry. That stuff is one of the reasons why divers tend to stay the fuck away from the wrecks of warships from the period of around the late 1890s til WW1.

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

It's not nearly as sensitive as it has a reputation for. Dry picric acid is surprisingly hard to detonate. Try hitting a tiny amount with a hammer and you'll see. The picrate salts are sensitive though and lots of those old bottles had metal lids.

[@friendcomputer5276]

@@chemistryofquestionablequa6252 I said that it is kinda sensitve, not extremely sensitive. In most cases where the stuff is a problem, it's either due to contact with metal (like in the case of old shipwrecks with metal shells filled with the stuff) or local laws. In the case of our school, the only reason why the bomb squad was there is because it's the law that only licensed personell is allowed to handle or dispose of explosive substances. If a teacher was to just dump some water into the bottle and then hand it off to a waste disposal company, they's go to jail for messing around with explosives without a licence. And the only way to get such a licence is to have a job that requires you to handle explosives on a regular basis. Even owning fireworks can get you into trouble around here unless it's the last or first week of the year.

[@bradcoulter4437]

Here's a story for you. A few days ago, my mom was doing some laundry and ran out of bleach, so she decided to top it up with some oxygen bleach. She then noticed that the mixture bubbled extremely rapidly, and called me over to see if I knew what was going on. I decided to look up the reaction and discovered that mixing sodium hypochlorite and hydrogen peroxide (bleach and oxygen bleach respectively), creates singlet oxygen, and the reaction can generate this gas so violently that it can explode. I am not too educated on singlet oxygen but I do know that it reacts much more violently with hydrocarbons than regular oxygen gas does, and can destroy your lungs if inhaled. Luckily we didn't inhale any of the gas, and she didn't mix enough of the bleaches to cause an explosion, but still, scary stuff.

[@That_Chemist]

Yeah it’s very scary

[@jackwastakenx2]

Do NOT cross the bleaches

[@chuckcrunch1]

i worked at a landfill and my boss would always quote "delusion is the solution to pollution"

[@teamseshmason]

The solution to pollution is dilution

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

​@@teamseshmason It's actually almost accurate if the amount of pollution is low. If five people in the world are burning fossil fuels they're fine to use the atmosphere. But when every single person is polluting, there's not enough atmosphere per person.

[@leothecrafter4808]

It's likely someone dumped a lot of chemical waste into the oder and now all the fish are dying and locals are advised not to use the water and now we have an environment disaster

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

"It's just nature. Who needs nature?" - capitalists

[@monarchatto6095]

@@thewhitefalcon8539 Water just magically turns anything into itself with enough dilution, right?

[@LexYeen]

@@monarchatto6095 Hang on just a second there, pal. The homeopaths told me that water remembers what's been put in it. Both these things can't be true at the same time. 🤔

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

@@monarchatto6095 Consider reading what I wrote.

[@itsjustthatsimple628]

@@thewhitefalcon8539 its joke but I agree

[@karlharvymarx2650]

The zinc and hot wheels stories reminded me of another stupid thing I did as a kid. We had a gas stove that was nice for melting lead in an old spoon. I did at least turn on the blower over the stove to hopefully vent any overheated vapors out of the house and kept my face away from the stuff. But one day I accidentally overfilled the tablespoon so only surface tension was keeping it from spilling over. I tried to carefully use the lip of the stove to keep the spoon kind of level while I cooled but somehow spilled all of it on my bare right foot. The sensation was the sort where for a moment you can't tell if it is hot or cold, but it was over before my nerves finished making up their mind. I was afraid to look down imagining I had cooked the nerves to numbness or had some kind of freaky localized lead poisoning. Some it was molded to the top of my foot but it peeled off easily and I've had worse looking sunburns. Cold water and soap took care of it. I guess a combination of leidenfrost effect and lead's low thermal conductivity saved the day. I did stop cooking it on the stove though. I eventually BBQ'ed enough batteries to make a gag 60 pound paperweight--the high density meant it looked deceptively small so it was fun to leave on a teachers desk or whatever. I'm not aware of any toxic effects from playing with all that lead, except possibly that I was dumb enough to play with all that lead.

[@Octanitrocubane-enjoyer]

you've quickly become my favourite youtuber solely due to the level of comedy that you can fit into education

[@That_Chemist]

glad to hear it :)

[@Octanitrocubane-enjoyer]

@@That_Chemist also, god damn, nobody has this level of community interaction besides you it seems.

[@peggedyourdad9560]

@@Octanitrocubane-enjoyer probably because he’s still a relatively small channel, once he gets bigger I’m sure the interaction will drop because of how difficult it would be to have any kind of meaningful interactions with so many people. Not giving shade, just stating facts.

[@user-hv6wb5gk8p]

Environmental story: Obligatory military training got abolished a while ago but a guy I met told me about how they'd change oil on vehicles. They'd dig a hole in some random field, drive the vehicle over it and just open up the oil drain. Then they'd just fill up the engine again. Occasionally they'd even fill up the hole they dug. Gotta make sure the environment stays intact. Oh and this didn't just apply to cars. They'd do that to basicly every ground vehicle with an easily accessible drain.

[@kaboom4679]

They were recycling it . They put it back where it came from , lol .

[@sarahamira5732]

​@@kaboom4679it's not really recycling when the oil is now full of metal shavings and other various engine/fluid bits

[@Gunbudder]

12:00 i went to a high school that was over 100 years old, and one of my teacher assistant jobs was to help the chem teachers catalog the stores. once a year they would go through and take inventory. there were some ancient things in there, but it was all accounted for. the most exciting was a sample of pure cesium! we used it for a detonation that completely destroyed the blast shield and reaction vessel. cesium is super fun

[@Breakingcraft]

Can you dig a bit more deeper into the story of Kenneth Bentley who discovered Etorphine (a super potent opioide)? As he and his team are from the UK they drink a lot of tea, and someone in the staff used an glass rod to stir the morning tea. The whole team were found blacked out on the floor, but there were given Diprenorphine as antidote and were fine.

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

They were incredibly lucky, damn.

[@firstmkb]

That would never have happened if they drank coffee!

[@KnakuanaRka]

@@firstmkb If it was string enough to make them black out, I doubt coffee would have helped. x_x

[@firstmkb]

@@KnakuanaRka it was just a joke at people who drink tea instead of coffee.

[@somethinggeeky]

Safety shower story: After high school and before college, I got a job as summer help at a (now closed and gone) lab facility for a major oil company. Interesting place, built in the 1960s, asbestos and mercury contamination everywhere, and one room you didn’t go in because it had something really radioactive buried in the floor. As for the safety showers each lab had at least one usually just past the door, all fed by 2 inch pipes. These are supposed to get tested weekly. But the building was built without floor drains, so they only got tested once a year when summer help was hired. The procedure was to wheel this catchment contraption that was nicknamed the ‘dumbo hump’ cause it kind of looked like and elephant under each shower, extend a collar up around the shower to prevent splashing, and pull the chain to test the shower. Because these shower were all fed by 2 inch pipes, the ‘dumbo hump’ had to be wheeled outside and emptied frequently. That is unless the shower didn’t work, once we had tested all the showers down a line of labs. We would have to shut the down all the showers on that line. Only one valve for each line of maybe a dozen showers. Again, building built in the 1960s. Then service the pull chain valve on the shower its self, mop up all the water that leaked out, open the valve for the line, test the shower again, and move on to the next line. Going down one hallway, the first shower didn’t work. Then the second shower also didn’t work. The third shower didn’t work either. We went and found the valve for the line in a pipe chase confirmed it was open, then tested the forth shower. My coworker walked in the lab, said to the scientists working in there something to the effect of “first three didn’t work what are the odds that this one will” and standing under the shower, pulls the chain. Not only did the shower work, but the valve broke open. I had to run down the hall, around the corner, down the pipe chase, and up a ladder to turn off the valve for that shower line. It took us the entire rest of the day to vacuum up all the water from that lab and hallway. We did fix all the showers the next day.

[@Artemis-zl5cs]

Now I kinda want to know about that supposedly radioactive room.

[@defenestrated23]

"do you feel lucky, punk?"

[@torinnbalasar6774]

14:20 my dad does occupational health and safety at a local college, and they "partially" rebuilt their science building almost a decade ago. It was split into 2 separate square buildings, Science West and Science East, and they decided to expand Science East. First of all, they decided this after they discovered that the brick outer wall wasn't load-bearing and just a facade: whose rebar mounts had long since rusted off and left a free-floating brick wall that could fall on someone at any time. As they began work, they also discovered that there was significant damage to the floors from leaking pipes that had chemicals dumped down them in smaller quantities over it's lifetime. Not enough damage to be imminently dangerous, but enough to require demolishing everything other than the steel frame. At that point, someone in upper management had the idea that it might be cheaper to keep said frame because it would be cheaper than demoing and doing a full rebuild. The added cost of redesign and additional inspections meant this was false, but that didn't stop them from trying and leaving the new Science Center building that was about 3 times as long with a ~3 ft drop a third of the way across each floor. At least it meant that it wasn't difficult for them to also add a 2-story indoor bridge between the 2 buildings...

[@ankaarne]

That eye-story happened to me as child, same too that it was only mm's from the cornea/iris, no idea how it got there. When we got to the doctor they first used a sharp metal thingy to try to pick it out of the eye and after he'd gotten a piece out he went "Oh hmmm it seems it has already started to rust" and took out a minidrill, applied the numbing cream the other story mentioned, told me to sit still, not to blink and look straight forward as he took the drill to my eye. That was quite the "eye-opening" experience for a 7 year old.

[@Patmccalk]

The worst thing I’ve ever done with chemicals and shit was back when I was in high-school, we had co-op (work placement) program and I got brought in to a tire shop for a semester. Well, one of the jobs I was given later in said co-op, was to clean out the shop’s floor pit, which was nicely filled with oily, greasy sludge. The shop owner, environmentalist that he was, told me that the only place we could dispose of it was in the trees behind the shop. Sadly, 16 year old me didn’t realize how terrible that actually was to do and just did as I was told

[@That_Chemist]

:(

[@Patmccalk]

@@That_Chemist exactly how I felt/feel as well

[@mindbound]

If the atmosphere is nature's bin, the ocean has to be its sink

[@eier5472]

Toilet, to be more exact... and also sometimes rubbish bin

[@2gabrieu]

The solution for pollution is dilution. As they say

[@defenestrated23]

Your plasma globe story reminds me of my own. I was about 13 and realized you could pull sparks by putting aluminum foil on the globe and shorting it to the DC barrel jack. Logically, the best way to harness this capability, teenage-me thought, was to make an electric chair for bugs. I caught a bunch of flies and executed them this way. It smelled horrible. Later that afternoon it dawned on me this was a serial killer trait... so I knocked it off. Highschool boys, in addition to being near-terminally stupid, all have a touch of psycopath in em. It's no worse than taking a magnifying glass to ants...right?

[@That_Chemist]

Shocking stuff with aluminum foil is a forbidden plasma globe life hack

[@That_Chemist]

I like lighting up fluorescent bulbs with them

[@mnxs]

I have personally always liked to call kids "functional psychopaths."

[@sadtown]

Oh god, the staph pipette is painful to even think about. I've been unfortunate enough to have a methicillin resistant staph infection and it was persistent. It took 3 months of Doxycycline to control, which is a bit of a crappy antibiotic to be stuck on in the new Zealand summer. I spent a lot of time running errands at nighttime.

[@That_Chemist]

:(

[@samuellima6193]

People dumping the chemical waste in the ocean The fish and animals in the area: oh crap

[@samuellima6193]

@I don't deserve subs exactly lol

[@happy24mr]

chemists in 2122: dumping the ocean into chemical waste

[@That_Chemist]

how else could they dilute it?

[@polygorg]

About the plasma cube: when going through the transformer it should be lower current (amperage) and but higher voltage - although the power is so low its barely dangerous. its also super hf btw.

[@That_Chemist]

it went from 120V AC to like a few volts DC

[@sealpiercing8476]

@@That_Chemist That is not correct. The discharge for a plasma ball needs a high voltage, and it has to be high-ish frequency AC so that the electrode can be insulated with a mm or so of glass and still pass a bit of current.

[@RicoElectrico]

@@sealpiercing8476 Usually these plasma globes have a step down transformer to a low voltage, and only then a second one that turns DC into high voltage AC.

[@pialamode]

Yeah RicoElectrico is correct- I’ve taken one of them apart and there was a 12 VAC step-down transformer that lead into the enclosure of the plasma globe. The actual high voltage generating circuit is inside the enclosure and you have to take the thing apart to get to it, presumably so you won’t die if you lick the contacts like That Chemist.

[@sealpiercing8476]

@@RicoElectrico I see. That makes sense.

[@eier5472]

On the note of dodgy disposal methods: A friend of mine, who was an undergrad chem student at that time, somehow got some picric acid. His girlfriend didn't want to have explosives in their apartment - which is understandable - so he gave to me a 50ml grad cylinder full of *dry friggin picric acid.* Transporting this was... a blast, to say the least; pun definitely intended. When I came home, I first of all carefully phlegmatized it with a whole bunch of water and transferred it into a plastic bottle, far away from any metal contamination. Now I have a chemical sample which is at least somewhat legal to own and looks nifty

[@xxxm981]

@@tonyvelasquez6776 Well, in the rest of the world it is.

[@eier5472]

@@tonyvelasquez6776 In the EU pretty much anything regarding amateur chemistry will be illegal. That said, neither I nor my friend made any picric acid

[@LexYeen]

@@tonyvelasquez6776 Try telling any of that to the cops if they show up to investigate reports of explosions and/or a weirdo doing things with chemicals. I look forward to seeing the headline if you attempt this experiment in the wild.

[@matthewellisor5835]

@@tonyvelasquez6776 "Transportation" is worth investigation for personal production of energetic materials. Not wanting to discourage, just to reduce risk of time in the clink for our budding chemists. TL;DR, just make the excitable compounds in the same place that you'll safely be disposing of them.

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

@@xxxm981 not illegal in Canada either. You can make a small amount for research purposes

[@rhoewnarny4353]

I have this story from my childhood, nobody in the house had a very good chemistry education but my dad worked on cars as a hobby. So one day when I was around 8 or 9, my dad was letting me help with prepping a car for paint; I had already been hanging around his shop for a while helping out with menial tasks here or there. So all we were doing is cleaning the surfaces that were receiving paint ( I got to help with the floor under the dash on the passenger side) anyhow my dad decided it was a good idea, neither of us knowing any better at the time, to use a green metal prep solution of phosphonic acid and dichromates... being sprayed from a bottle... and the only ppe was a pair of nitrile gloves, and when we were done we were just supposed to spray our arms with ammonia based window cleaner. I now work with my dad at his shop and he still has the stuff laying around but I have since educated him on the toxicity of many of the chemicals we use around the shop; and I also wear appropriate ppe for anything around the shop, (ie. hearing pro, eye pro, gloves, and an nosh approved organic vapor/particle respirator mask)

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!

[@anonvideo738]

The university building I studied chemistry at was rather old, (50s, maybe 60s) and as such had windows you could open in the lab rooms. The safety protocol was updated that you arent allowed to open them. Naturally, I can tell you some stories of people opening lab windows. 1) Like everywhere else, people clean their glassware with acetone. Normally they dump it in the liquid organic waste bin, but if that is full, or if they are bored, they open a window and toss it out. Its fun to see the acetone evaporate before it hits the ground. However, over time the paint starts to peel off the window frames. Some labs had strict adherence to the rules than others, so they could tell which were dumping acetone. Once they found out what caused the paint to peel, they asked everyone to please stop dumping acetone out of the windows. 2) One research group their primary research was slapping on nitro groups on various organic compounds and investigate the product. They were put in the far back of the building, just in front of the sulphur research group (people rather get blown up than have to smell thiols). One fun thing you can do is pipet a few droplets of your nitro stuff on the floor of the fumehood, hit the puddle with a hammer, and have the explosion knock back the hammer. Another cool thing they figured out was tossing nitro compounds out of the window. The few storeys high drop was enough to make the nitro stuff explode. If you threw it test tube and all, you would even get rid of the evidence because the glass would get blown up. Once safety officers found out they became more secretive about tossing stuff. Mostly people tossing their work after they went through some long synthesis, did all the analysis and wanted to see their work go with a bang. 3) Sometimes PhDers and postdocs would open a window in the lab and people would look the other way if it was hot enough. It was very hot one summer, an open window wasnt enough. A PhDer noticed that he felt a strong draft if he opened the door to the hallway. Naturally the doors have springs to close them automatically. So he grabbed a fire extinguisher and used it to jam the door open. A bit later someone noticed the door was stuck open with a fire extinguisher sticking out. So he went to the lab to ask wtf was going on. He saw the PhDer knocked out on the floor. The draft was so strong it overpowered the fumehood ability to suck away dangerous fumes so he gassed himself with the solvents he used. He was okay, but they were surprised someone on his level would make such a stupid mistake. Also the mercury story reminds me of a similar one. In the good old days a group worked with a ton of mercury and sulphur. Although back then the sink was okay for dumping most waste, mercury was a bit much. So they found some big empty jars of 6 liters, poured in the mercury, and then put those jars in the back of some storage room. Fast forward 60 years and people inventory everything in the building (for reasons) and stumble upon the mercury. They were afraid of moving it since the weight of the mercury could make the bottom fall out. But they found a volunteer who was willing to pump over the mercury into smaller vessels. People joke he has a vitamin deficiency so he would be less sensitive to mercury poisoning. I have tons of more stories, every lab and professor had something. Although my own lab experiences were a lot less exciting. I think they managed to close most of the pitfalls that hurt students by the time I was trained.

[@That_Chemist]

Thanks for sharing :)

[@jarrydcuthbertson2739]

In my undergrad organic lab we only used bunsen burners and one group opened their flask to add something (maybe bumping stones). The problem was that they left the flame on and ended up igniting the vapors and created a 2 ft flame. They switched the gas off and took a step back wondering what to do next. This caused a crowd to form and through the crowd the lab tech made his way to the flask and BLEW IT OUT, turned around and walked away with a smirk. Some gangster shit imo. Good times.

[@That_Chemist]

Lol

[@Tser]

I'm not a chemist, but the glaze and clay body creation aspect of ceramics is a favorite part of it for me. Knowing the chemistry mean we can build a recipe from the base up to have exactly the properties we want. My professor told me about when he inherited a university studio when he became a professor at a previous job in the 70s, and as he was exploring the glaze mixing room and ingredients he had to work with he found a lead envelop tucked on a top shelf, covered in dust, and full of uranium powder. He had to call a hazmat team in. In an intact glaze or glass, in the small amounts it's used as a colorant, it's just cool, and I would buy a piece of uranium glass if I came across it at a thrift store. But I wouldn't want to work with the raw material personally, or have a lead envelop full of uranium powder around a bunch of college students. Haha.

[@Tser]

Also the last story, I've seen in allotment and communal garden communities that many have a pee bale... a strawbale at the edge of the garden where they want folks to pee on it. Quick composting with the magic of chemistry.

[@MajorMoth]

This one is from my chemistry teacher: She had been working in a lab with some dilute sulfuric acid among other reagents. Some of the reaction mixture she was working on splashed onto her gloves and she thought nothing of it, wiping them on her lab coat. After finishing the lab she went to a grocery store, and noticed people were giving her some strange looks, but again, she thought nothing of it. After getting home she changed her clothes and noticed that her shirt had holes in it. Turns out, the reaction mixture she wiped on her lab coat had sulfuric acid in it.

[@That_Chemist]

Lol

[@stevengill1736]

My dad was in the US Coast Guard during WW II and after. One of his jobs in the 50s was helping dispose of low level nuclear waste from various government programs in the SF Bay area, probably related to nuclear tests. The 55 gallon drums filled with PPE, dust filters, even scooped up radionucleides in small quantities ended up off the coast near the Farallones Islands and tens of thousands of them are still there. Thinking back on the history of tests in the Pacific, there were some Navy ships that were irradiated in an underwater a-bomb test. Most were scuttled in deep water, but a couple were towed to the Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard in South San Francisco and an attempt was made to decontaminate them. Rather than cleaning them up, the area where the work was performed was contaminated, so they finally ended up with even more radwaste. I believe some of those materials ended up with the other 55 gallon drums my dad helped move. Like everyone else he learned in the 80s that the barrels had corroded, but to this day the contamination is believed to be comparatively minor. Thank goodness, because it's unlikely anyone's gonna clean 'em up!

[@jeremyfisher8512]

"get some Gatorade and brace yourself" something I'd never want to hear from a chemistry professor

[@HighMansx]

Not too interesting, but definitely a fun one here: When I was around 13, I was bored one day and decided to put some baking soda and vinegar in a bottle to make a few volcanoes -- nothing crazy. After doing that a few times, I decided it was a good idea to put a cap on it... As one would expect, the bottle expanded about doubled in size and without thinking too hard, I decided to just pierce it instead of uncapping it... BOOOOOOOOOM. The bottle exploded, the whole solution blew up in to the air and splattered a good chunk of the sealing and also caused a bit of ringing in my ears. My mom, who was not 15 feet away, was *not* happy about that.

[@unlockeduk]

when i used to do home chemistry i used to keep all my waste in plastic bottles as i didnt want to dispose of it irresponsibly untill the police thought i had a drug lab (i didnt just had most of the chemicals to do it ) and nicely disposed of all my mercury and other waste for me for free but when i moved out of home my mum just flushed ALL my chemical down toilet red p , formaldehyde, acetic anhydride mercuary salts ,lead salts things that do not belong down the toilet so all my trying to stop contaminants getting ito the environment was wasted

[@That_Chemist]

Wtf…..

[@unlockeduk]

@@That_Chemist thats why you take chemicals with you when you move people do stupid shit

[@Crafterrian]

Here's a cool physics moment that happened when I was smoking a brisket for Christmas. I use a stereotypical backyard charcoal grill that all old suburban dads seem to have. And so I filled the bottom with charcoal and let it burn until there were no flames before I put the brisket on. After which I closed the lid and the vents and went back inside. later when I went back outside to check on it I closed the door, and right when I turned around I heard a loud "FWOOMP!" as flames shot out from every gap. My guess is as all the oxygen was being used up the embers were dying, and as it was cooling down allowed fresh air to come inside and mix around before touching one of the embers.

[@misswhovivian868]

Speaking of sketchy highschool labs... while in highschool, I took a chemistry lab elective from year 8 to 12. Around the time I was in year 10 or 11, the switch from EU hazard symbols to GHS happened, and so some of the older students in that class, myself included, had the questionable honour of sorting through and re-labelling every single chemical in that lab. We were handed a literal stack of pre-printed labels and got to work. The chemicals were kept in two large cabinets, from memory I'd guess with about five or six shelves each, just all together, and while I'm sure there was some system to it, sometimes you'd just find a random bottle of something haphazardly tucked somewhere it had absolutely no business being. Some of the bottles at the back of the shelves were so old, we had trouble deciphering what was supposed to be in it, and in some cases even the teacher could only barely figure it out. Some chemicals we found we weren't even supposed to have based on the labels we got. There was indeed so much lead, in every conceivable form; powder, granules... I don't know what we needed so much lead for. Sodium and potassium, too... when I found NileRed's videos on cleaning sodium and potassium years later, I cringed remembering how dirty the stuff at my school was. We used that sodium. I can't remember whether we had any mercury (though I'm pretty sure we did), but the physics lab had a radioactive cabinet that I don't know whether we were (still) allowed to have.

[@archerymidnight3422]

Pretty sure schools were allowed to have radioactive stuff, since they're definitely allowed to have it four years ago. My year 10 physics teacher brought out some radioactive material for demonstrating the types of radioactivity

[@misswhovivian868]

@@archerymidnight3422 yeah, probably also depends a lot on where you are. In hindsight, it was probably not quite as illegal as it felt at the time

[@tyrannosaurusimperator]

I have pictures of the radiation samples from my physics classroom. Apparently the DoE would just hand out plastic coins full of major isotopes expected to be in fallout to schools in the 60s. No idea why.

[@SomnolentFudge]

My grand mother was a nurse for decades from the 40s through the late 80s and nurses like her often had to mix / measure chemicals used in the early days of chemotherapy (chemo has come a long way but it's still nasty, and in the early days it was really nasty stuff!) so she said it was splashed and spilled all the time and no one wore gloves. Quite a few people like her that worked with the stuff died from things like aplastic anemia, closely associated with exposure to chemo. Side note the origin of chemo is interesting, it came from the observation of people exposed to mustard agents in WW1 and 2 and that it stopped all of the rapidly reproducing cells in the body.

[@tsm688]

chemo is a drug therapy designed to **almost** kill you. It'll never not be nasty :D

[@garcia83viz]

My grandfather was a miner in central Mexico, I had never met him, but I'm close to my Dad... Years ago my father and I went down to clear his father's house after he passed... He had a gallon of pure liquid mercury in a thick glass flask, with a cork cover. He would drop soil samples into it, pure gold would sink to the bottom, everything else less dense would stay afloat on top.

[@starsilverinfinity]

I dont think I have the dedication to piss on hay to extract a compound, kudos lmao

[@2001Pieps]

You know, I'll finally take the time to write down my two stories. I'm currently nearly finished with my bachelors in essentially "bio-chemical engineering". This means we have both microbio and organic chemistry lab. However for some reason the university has decided that instead of starting with the relatively safe bio-lab (using yeast), the students should start with organic chemistry lab… in the first quarter of the first year! This hilariously results in people straight out of high school playing with the most dangerous chemicals they will encounter in their entire bachelors degree (considering that most bio-labs don’t use acyl chlorides and concentrated sulphuric acid). Perhaps the idea of natural selection inherently appeals to the university staff. I have *quite* the number of stories from this specific lab but these two stand out to me: One of the experiments is the synthesis of lidocaine, a numbing agent. A few years back two students had just finished the purification of the final product. However, one of the students had gotten some of the lidocaine on their hand. They noticed that the spot where it landed had gone numb. Their lab partner, obviously wanting to use the scientific method, decided to test the claim by pressing their nail *hard* into the spot. The student didn’t notice any pain, nor did they notice that the nail had actually pierced the skin until a few minutes later when they noticed their product had in fact turned a bright red colour due to the blood from the wound. Ever since the incident the procedure mentions explicitly to wear gloves and make sure no lidocaine contacts your skin, despite it not being particularly hazardous. The second story I heard first-hand. One of the other reactions was a Grignard reaction in ether. The ether had to reflux in a RBM with a condenser. My friend had set everything up but the reaction failed to start (it was marked by a colour -hange). So they turned off the hot plate and the condenser and went to get the assistant. No problem, this was a common issue, so the assistant told them to briefly heat the RBM with heat gun. So they did. Eagle-eyed viewers may have spotted the mistake. They had not turned on the condenser. As the ether got to a roiling boil and the colour-change just started to occur; there was not a FWOOOP, but a WHOOOSH as the seemingly normal air in the fume hood was quite suddenly and unexpectedly replaced with *fire*. Luckily my friend got of with just some mild first degree burns and a scorched lab coat.

[@landjungfisch]

The following is not really a lab accident but something that someone who's into chemistry (and it's accidents) should have known better about. In order for you to fully appreciate the story I'll have to backtrack with some background information. Starting as a kid of the age of 10 I and my dad (who's a firefighter) performed a flour dust explosion experiment in our garden every year. It's great family fun, easy to set up and it sensibilitizes the kids for the dangers of combustible dust clouds. We got a more and more sophisticated setup to try to increase combustion and the size of the fireball but at it's core it's just a burner as ignition source, a hose with flour in it pointed upwards and a air pump and a lot of fun. However, let's get to the point. Yesterday I was setting up the BBQ. I had already prepared the wood starter fire and was getting the coal when I noticed that there was just enough coal left in the bag for grilling so I decided to just pour it in. I turned the bag upside down above the grill and the following happened in a few milliseconds: I saw a black dust cloud coming out of the bag, my brain drew the parallels to the experiments with my dad and while I was still processing my mistake the fireball singed the hair on my arms. To add insult to injury I dropped the paper coal bag, which promptly caught on fire and startled by that I touched the red hot side panel of the BBQ. I luckily wore leather gloves so my hands weren't hurt but the gloves got ruined nonetheless. (Quick PSA: if you are wearing leather gloves and you touched something hot, shake them off your hands *immediately*. Thy can keep away the heat for a while but if they are heated past a certain point they will shrink, get stuck to your hands and burn them) So, lesson learned: think about what you are doing before something bad happens and be aware that danger lurks not just in the lab but also at home.

[@That_Chemist]

Yeah I love it when the brain draws parallels

[@PossiblyABird]

The eye surgery stuff really isn't that bad, I've have both of my corneas transplanted in the past year, and every few months I get stiches removed in the same way the guy in the vid had the metal shard removed. It freaks you out the first time but it doesn't hurt it just feels weird and every time after that gets easier and easier, Also there's a reason people say "don't rub your eyes" if I didn't rub my eyes then I would still have both my corneas lmao.

[@PossiblyABird]

Also yeah always wear ppe, I don't even need glasses but I wear them anyways whenever I go outside just because my eyes are weakened now so if I get poked in the eye too hard then there's a decent chance it will pop open.

[@00muinamir]

Eyeball stuff is such a huge NOPE for me. I don't even like it when the optometrist has to blow air on your eyeball. I'm never getting Lasik, I'd much rather wear glasses forever.

[@PossiblyABird]

I was like that too, like it took 20 minutes for the doctor to put eyedrops in my eyes for the first time, but after a few visits where they got stuff close to my eyes I kinda got used to it. It's pretty easy though if you have to pick between blindness and being slightly uncomfortable.

[@custos3249]

Speaking of having a chemical dumb, here's a 2fer. Years ago, I worked for a company that rhymes with Mock Chemical as an order picker. For how much they emphasized the importance of shipping the MSDS with all materials and even had us do group stretches at the start of every shift, they were remarkably safety lax in all the wrong ways yet overzealous in all the wrong ways too. I eventually had my "contract terminated," because I was technically a contract worker through a temp agency (temp agencies are like crack, kids. Not even once!), so this was somehow legal. I had a freak neck spasm at work so serious, I literally couldn't turn my head to the right, and x-rays showed the muscles had pulled my cervical vertebrae (neck bones) almost perfectly straight - they're very much not supposed to be like that. I missed all of 1 day of work, but since I was a temp who reported an injury, I was gone. Then to add insult to literal injury, I'd applied to become a real boy a week or so before getting the boot. When HR called a few weeks post firing asking to set up an interview and said they were impressed with my numbers (they once presented Dobby with a $10 gift card for his "winning" top picker he didn't realize was a contest), it was easy to chose my words. As for my actual chemical dumb, we needed to wear gloves for how many corrosive and caustic chemicals we handled, like the danger Fresca we shipped in the same light green 2 liter bottles (sulfuric acid and more). Obviously we had to remove the gloves before going to lunch, but tossing them on my cart never seemed like something I'd need to think about. One day after coming back from lunch, putting my PPE back on, and eventually working up a sweat in a non-AC'ed shipping warehouse, I used the back of my gloved hand to wipe my forehead. Carrying on with my day, it didn't immediately hit me why my forehead started to become itchy. Not intensely and well within normal "my forehead itches" range though, which is why I kept wiping/rubbing it. Didn't dawn on me until home where I saw the redness in the mirror and the itching went away a while after washing. The next day, I still hadn't worked out where it came from until working up a sweat again. New gloves later, mystery solved, and I made sure to always put my reusable gloves palm side down and not stacked from then on.

[@arthurcruikshank1415]

This reminded me of a story my dad use to tell me it was bout his good friend who worked in a R&D Chem lab with energetic chemicals for munitions he would go eat lunch behind the lab one day my dad had noticed there was a small fenced in plot the grass was vibrantly green an around everywhere else the grass was dull. My dad asked his chemist buddy qn he laughed qn sed it's all the nitrates ammonia that they been feeding it as a guy Camelot of the lab an poured a beaker out ( this has been happening for years) an with a closer look there were crystals an flakes growing.. as the chemist laughed he lit a cigarette an flicked it on the patch of grass as it energetically defligrated then went on to detonate cutting a 3ft trench.... At a high-school I went to there was a old lab closet that stayed locked for years when it was opened they found picnic acid in a bottle an escaped to grow crystals on other lids of chemicals like perchlorate an mercury potassium sodium an even bottles of metal powders.... About the antimony pill 💊yes it use to be common in households to have one or two that had been kept in family for years.. when someone felt sick or needed purging they swallow the antimony slug an fish it out of chamber pot next day clean it off ready for next use.. I've heard this story an description of the Antimony metal pill when I was researching old world medicines an remedies.. it was also believed to help against poisoning 🙃

[@cascadianrangers728]

my sister found a gamma emitter of some sort in an old chemistry supply room at a school she occasionally substituted at; There was a radiation warning symbol on the door, but it was so aincent and worn that nobody paid any attention to it, but there were. very fresh ones on this massive cupboard so heavy they had never been able to move it when remodeling...I lent her my ol civil defense gamma detector, expecting she wouldn't find anything, just for a lark, but to my surprise she called me up asking what a reading meant...I said any reading at all means you're being exposed to ionizing gamma radiation, and need to leave Immediately! Upon closer inspection, sis found that the crazy heavy cabinet and door were lined with an alarming thickness of lead; Last I know the DOE had come in, inspected everthing, and freaked out enough that they dismantled that whole area and sealed most of the debris in oil drums.

[@subverted]

Not sure if you heard about this but just this week an entire tanker car full of styrene cooked off in a private rail siding next to the 215 freeway in Southern California. Saw on the news that the outside temperature of the tanker car was over 300F! That situation resulted in a huge evacuation, exclusion zone, and that fairly major freeway being shut down for over 24hrs.

[@blueredbrick]

I love the quality of ground glass high temperature suitable mercury thermometers. Just treat them with lots of respect and all is fine. This is in a lab that is only shared with a few other collegues and I could find everthing with my eyes closed. Yeah, no open flames please in an organic lab please.

[@saltyboi-kn1vf]

There's still a couple dichromate stains on the ceiling at my old school's labs as well from the same experiment... We now exclusively distill into conical flasks without a bung so that there isn't a closed loop

[@HungVu-ny1ig]

A student decided to eat a chemical-injected fish. This is what happened to his stomach...

[@tammyhollandaise]

When Dad had just started his teaching career, his first highschool lab class taught him a valuable lesson in education. The students were going to perform an introductory experiment that involved boiling water. He instructed them to use a Bunsen burner and glassware, then set them loose. Almost immediately, there was a jet of flames from one of the lab stations; one student had lit their gas spigot at full blast and didn't know what to do. Fortunately, another student behind the fireball was able to reach over and close the valve. Dad sat the class back down and thoroughly instructed them on the use and components of a Bunsen burner. This is how he subsequently started every year for 30+ years.

[@TheHuntermj]

When I was a kid I used to put a tiny amount of acetone in plastic bottles and light them so they fire off like rockets, one day it was really windy so I held a hand over the end and held the lighter really close to the nozzle... Whoosh, a jet of flame shot out and burnt a quarter sized hole in my skin between my thumb and pointer finger. Fun times.

[@kaboom4679]

I did this , at about the age of 7 , with a pint bottle and isopropanol . I had just a small amount and would shake it up to increase the vapor . I got first and second degree burns on my hand from that misadventure . I would also take Christmas ornaments ( very thin glass ones ) , fill them with butane from a lighter , then light them producing an impressive little rocket . Occasionally i could get one to fly a few feet and shatter on impact . So i thought why not scale this up ? Not my best day , but I learned a few lessons . The burnt hand teaches best . And while that which does not kill you makes you stronger , it will probably hurt like hell . I developed an interest in less painful methods and techniques .

[@HE-pu3nt]

I was a very precocious child. I loved to collect lead and make molds to cast it into. We started chemistry lessons at age 12. Unfortunately the teacher was going through a really horrible divorce, she would disappear for half an hour to have a good cry in her car, leaving us to our own devices. I'm not proud of this, but the idea of getting all those lovely chemicals was just too much. HCl, H2SO4, HNO3, phosphorus, gallium, sodium, potassium, mercury, oleum, CCl4, erythritol, + about 20 other stuff and some really nice glassware. Bradford University, UK had a chemistry department. The library had a huge chemistry section. Armed with knowledge gained from the library and my chemical stash I would get into all sorts of trouble, but that's for another day. I was in the garden shed, door closed, melting some lead, 500g. My crazy young mind decided that putting the mercury, 200g into the molten lead would be a good idea. That was 41 years ago, and I'm still here.😵‍💫

[@science_and_anonymous]

Dry ice and acetone are FAR better for use in cold traps. It is actually for the reason of the LOX story that LN2 is not used for cold traps unless absolutely necessary at my university, and when dry ice cannot be used.

[@LocalMicroMenance]

The Staph a story made my jaw drop. Currently I'm in college to get an associate's in biology before going and getting a bachelor's in Microbiology, and I have already had a fair amount of micro experience from my Junior and Senior years of highschool. So hearing the words "mouth pipette" and "microbio" in the same sentence is horrorifying.

[@elnombre91]

Dichromate oxidations of alcohols are pretty common lab practicals for A-level chem students in the UK, or at least they were. I did a bunch of them. Definitely saw a few people spill dichromate solution on their hands. In one of my A-level chem practicals, my lab partner spilled butyric acid on my ungloved hand - it smelled like puke for a couple of days. As someone who has dispensed liquid aHF a few times, you don't need anything particularly fancy to dispense it - just some steel tube/braided hose and some metal screw-thread fittings. Why the hell would anyone use glass? That is absolutely insane. If your lab uses HF and glass, please go tell your safety person. The only exception is NEt3-3HF, it's still dangerous but is safe to use with glass (likely because it mostly exists as the ammonium salt).

[@steweygrrr]

Liquid O2 is no joke. As an example during World War II the Imperial Japanese Navy used liquid oxygen as propellant for the motors of their torpedoes. This meant that all of their ships that carried torpedoes, which at that point consisted of about only 12 front line ships out of around 180 that _didn't,_ also had to carry liquid O2 tanks to make sure that the torpedoes were always fully fuelled and ready for use. That fact alone directly caused or contributed to the loss of more destroyers, cruisers and submarines purely due to naval combination involving not just explosions but copious amounts of fast moving, *hot* metal splinters that had a habit of setting fires and had very little trouble puncturing both torpedoes and liquid oxygen storage tanks/compressors. A couple of ships just outright exploded from a hit that they would otherwise have survived.

[@AaronJLong]

I dropped out of high school after 9th grade, so missed out on high school chemistry. Got my GED without further study later, and went to college for Engineering. My major required me to choose a science elective (not directly tied to my degree) and I went with chemistry. There was the regular version, which was meant to be more digestible for those not going into the sciences, and the more technical version for science majors. I took the latter, despite my professor recommending I switch to the simplified version after I chatted with her and mentioned my (lack of) educational background. Loved college because I had choices, and I was there to challenge myself and learn. Loved that class and while I planned on going into electrical engineering, I was heavily tempted to take the path of chemical engineering instead. But enough reminiscing. No high school chemistry means I never got to engage in many antics such as heating pennies from different years to make bronze or brass pennies, and after reading about it online as a teenager I wanted to try. I rummaged around, found a couple of pennies from the date range that likely had tin, during the transition from copper to the modern zinc with a thin copper coat, and the zinc filled ones that came after and are the most common. I told my stepfather what I wanted to do, and he offered to help with his blowtorch. We went to the garage, I held a penny with some tongs or something and he blasted it with his large blowtorch. I was looking for it to change color, but instead the zinc melted inside the penny and fell out, splattering on the floor and I was left holding a penny husk.

[@gilgoldmuenze2570]

When is saw the title, I was thinking you talk about the chem problem we have at the German/Poland boarder river RIGHT NOW! Since some days news report of numberless dead fish in the river. They measure high salt and higher oxigen level then normal... till now, no one knows what happened...

[@sealpiercing8476]

Many people, even scientists who should know better, are way overconfident about the accuracy of their temperature measurements. Shot to shot Reproducibility is simpler, but sub-degree accuracy is complicated.

[@chemistryofquestionablequa6252]

Gotta calibrate your thermometers. They're rarely perfect

[@olbluelips]

How uniform are temperatures throughout different materials? Like if the temperature of something is 25 degrees, does it contain distinct pockets of slightly greater or lesser temperature, or does it look totally random?

[@sealpiercing8476]

@@olbluelips Heat flows from high temperatures to low temperatures. When you need to know the temperature of something that's usually because it's different from ambient, so you have heat flows and the temperature is to some extent not uniform. When you want to know a temperature very accurately, not only do you have to calibrate your thermometer but also you care about small temperature differences in both the experiment and the calibration. That's what makes it a more detail-intensive task.

[@mnxs]

@@olbluelips yes, that can actually be a problem. As temperature is something that propagates through a material, if something happens to raise the temperature more in a local pocket, and the material/mixture is not an especially good heat conductor (or there is just _a lot_ of heat development), this can easily become a problem. Said pockets can be within the reaction mixture, but it could also be considered the entirety of the mixture and reactor vessel, as that is most often sorrounded by a poor heat conductor - air. Many, many industrial accidents have happened this way - the Chernobyl nuclear disaster is a very infamous one where this phenomenon played a role. In chemical industry, this problem is particularly worrisome in highly exothermic reactions. It's called a runaway reaction, and it's the reason why chemists are often very concerned with mixing/stirring, and why you usually see, for example, reactions in the production of energetics (like explosives) conducted in reactors suspended over a literal pool of water and neutralising agent (like sodium bicarbonate) to have place to literally dump the entire contents immediately if things start to go out of hand.

[@Karza_357]

I don't have any interesting stories to add. During my time in the lab everything went smoothly. Nobody broke anything or spilled anything or had any "great ideas". It is very interesting to listen to these stories.

[@That_Chemist]

that is a good thing - good on you for being safe!

[@aqdrobert]

My coworker from Bosnia figured out when she was a child, Bosnian coins fit exactly into 240 volt wall sockets. She was knocked across the room. Decided never to try that again.

Speaking of highschool boys, I had an attic lab. Long story short, I poured 30mL of 10M HCl onto a dirty funnel that had bicarbonate on it. With no gloves, no coat, no glasses, I was lucky to not have been hit. It was on my arm and on my shirt, and it was on the ceiling and the walls. Safe to say that I felt the immediate need to go put on some glasses.

[@melody3741]

I just realized i have the raw meat reaction with nearly everything. Touching anything mildly dirty requires me to wash my hands before doing anything.

[@jarlaxle3588]

That last story surprised me. I was playing with Potassium Nitrate at 12 years old....and apparently a grown up can't even get it in europe. I'm not a chemist, just someone who likes certain aspects of chemistry. As a child I was super into blowing stuff up and making things like Thermite....as an adult I'm more interested in pharmacology and how chemicals interact with the body as I have done a lot of psychoactive substances and deeply support full legalization of all drugs. Love your videos cuz I'm the type of guy who only follows safety procedures that I agree with or that make sense to me, because the more skill you have the more safety stuff you can skip. Accidents can happen to anyone though if Lady Luck doesn't favor you that day and it is always interesting to hear those stories. Thankfully my combination of skill and luck has never failed me.

[@o5-7firefox]

New fear unlocked: mouth-pipetting MRSA

[@robertroy8803]

Love the shout-out to ChubbyEmu!

[@interstellarsurfer]

I'm really glad that we don't do this anymore... Now we pay shell companies to do it for us. 😂

[@stephenjacks8196]

Potassium Dichromate solution was sold in US drugstores as a mouthwash until the 1990s.

[@That_Chemist]

Hold up

[@captaincat1743]

About getting stuff in your eye as in the last story. I had a shard of glass stuck in my eye years ago also 2-3 mm in size. I didn't know it was glass, it felt like grit that would not move even when I blinked to the point I could shed a couple of tears. I went into an opticians to ask if they could look for me and see what it was. They looked, numbed my eye and were able to remove the shard which was still protruding. I think he used a wooden spatula thing to wriggle it out, it came out very easily, in a couple of seconds. So just some advice - opticians can often help with eye problems that you would not expect. And some are more skilled than I had previously thought.

[@ryanfreedman6348]

My prof was also a backcountry skier who got a bit of bark lodged in his eye in a similar way on the slopes. The way he describes being unable to blink, sleep, or tear up without excruciating pain both before and after the procedure seems like hell on earth.

[@jasonmurawski5877]

My chemistry teacher told us all a story from the school she used to teach at before mine. It was a lab with very old equipment, including a massive (like, 3 feet long) mercury barometer. Apparently, she was moving it one time and dropped it, and it shattered. The entire lab hallway had to be shut down for a week while a hazmat team cleaned up the liter or so of spilled metallic mercury.

[@Nukesnipe]

Holy shit that eye story had me completely tensed up

[@Gabiscis]

that mercury story cant hold a candle to cody'slab legendary mercury wrangling

[@Mediamarked]

My middle school likely still has a 2kg jar of mercury, with no use for it, stored on the top shelf of a storage cabinet. Along with various other dusty&crusty chemicals. The only thing my teacher learned us was "blow gas in soapy water and watch the fiery bubbles when you light it", while I made a water rocket for the teacher, that's still in use there.. Chem teacher also was our math teacher btw, she was nice... Not sure if she was understanding the safety issues though. This was in ~'04, a close friends kid goes to that school now, and relays the nostalgia back to me... It was a special ed kinda school, for long term sick/ learning disabled students. Why they had hazardous chemicals, who knows. Had no viable use for it, that's for sure. But there were so many things wrong there... Made pyrotechnic compounds in the chem classroom during lunch breaks, got kicked out finally for that. Good times.

[@Dylan-ee6qg]

"they weren't harsh on me, so I eventually did it again"

[@DatsuJSB]

Less than a litre combined of pyridine. Me: "you're definitely not a peptide or nucleotide chemist"

[@janmelantu7490]

“Concentrated liquid oxygen is a really potent oxidizer” uh yeah sure hope it is

[@That_Chemist]

Lol

[@IlusysSystems]

Well if you are fine with non-chemistry stories, I have one electricity related: I was fairly young, not sure how exactly, maybe 12-13, but also probably could have known better. Some kid few years ago told me, that if I hold neutral wire, I won't get shocked while working on live circuits. I've got plenty of shocks up to that point(EU, so 240V), enough to be cautious, but aparently not enough to not be stupid. I think I had even experience with working with fairly high voltages, using TV flyback transformers and building tesla coils, so up to several KV... Being a kid with little tools but interest in electronics, I often needed to remove insulation from wires. So most efficient method was to use your teeth to pinch through insulation and pull cable to remove it. Older people warned me that I would damage my teeth this way, and yeah some wires were quite durable, heh. Not sure what I was working on, but I had to remove insulation from mains cable, like PC power supply one to power my stuff. Obviously I wasn't stupid enough to leave it plugged in, but being over cautious when even potentially working on mains voltages I remembered this trick of holding neutral wire. So It was stripped first, then I held it in my left hand and I proceed to bite into live phase wire. I was instantly knocked out, and when I gained conciousness again, I was already screaming. took me about 10s to realize what happened. This was absolutely terryfing as I knew I fucked up. So I went look in the mirror to check the damage, but luckily there was just small burn mark on my lip. Moral of the story: Never ever assume, that there is no power in cable, always roll it up so you can see the plug at all times when working on mains circuits or use interlocks when possilbe. Also measure before touching... Another moral of the story: No electrocution is not painless. I assume this is what it feels like to be shot in the head. It may be quick, but it's immense pain.

[@theRPGmaster]

It's also worth adding that touching the neutral wire absolutely WILL NOT protect you from a shock, I assume it makes it even worse

[@erdnalickeroftoads2143]

The first guy cleaned the unproper genetics right off ✊🏾🗿

[@WaluigiisthekingASmith]

4:55 liquid oxygen is an oxidizer??? I would've never guessed.

[@That_Chemist]

lol

[@bug8992]

7:29 this has nothing to do with chemistry but this just reminded me my grandma touches raw chicken then opens the fridge. Without washing her hands and grab stuff from there. Sometimes I wonder how she hasn’t given anyone food poisoning yet.

[@nerdygem8620]

When I worked in clean rooms, I wasn't able to touch ANYTHING other than the required equipment, and had to spray my hands with 70% IPA before and after. So I couldn't scratch an itch, and I could NOT sneeze or cough. I basically had to become a robot for 4 hours. It also made me incredibly sceptical of people who said they "couldn't breathe" with a mask on during the pandemic - I have asthma and I wore a mask the whole time I was in the clean room.

[@Heavilymoderated]

In the spirit of the crawfish heart, I knew a guy who filed the crowns of his two front teeth flat in high school shop class for $2.40.

[@Tekdruid]

15:22 There was a major scandal in Finland in the 1980s where a company Called Oy Euro Industri was charged with delivering PCB and other industrial wastes to East Germany for disposal. What they did instead was ferry the barrels of waste out to the sea and dump them overboard. The people involved ended up with jail terms of up to 2 years. 17:57 Remind me of that day in my teenage years when my friends and I were goofing around with a little campfire and I had the bright idea to plop this random rubber bear toy I found somewhere into the flames. The smell was unbelievably vile, and all of us went home looking like we were dressed in blackface. My mom gave me a pretty stern talking to over that one. 21:15 Oh boy, another teenage years story! My friend and I had rode our bikes to the local garbage dump - as you do when you're a bored teenager in a small country town - and I was taking my destructive impulses out on some old fridge remains when a sliver of plastic flew off the wreck and straight into my left eye. Fortunately, all it did was nick the cornea, but I still had to go to the hospital and spend two weeks looking like a pirate while allowing the eye to heal under a protective patch. Had I been less lucky I might have lost the entire eye.

[@That_Chemist]

Yikes!

[@Pootycat8359]

In the good old days, for a while, they used CCl4 for general anasthesia. Then they switched to chloroform. Apparently, too many patients had been expiring on the operating table. Finally, they adopted ether, which is safe, unless, of course, the doc is smoking a cigar over the ether-filled lungs of his victi....I mean, patient.

[@nabra97]

I mean... It's an awful idea to dispose of chemical waste like this anyway. But I feel even more uncomfortable thinking about dean bringing some extremely toxic chemical waste to the ferry and then dumping them into the ocean without PPE and with lots of people around who didn't even know about the danger.

[@rat-vomit]

I'm a grad student in life sciences, I don't really understand chemistry much but the dilution is the solution to pollution story made me remember the time where I was working with a drug that was hazardous to aquatic life. I asked if we had a waste container I could pour the waste in, and she told me to just pour it down the drain and run the tap for a while since I was working with a very low concentration. I was confused because that's still gonna be in the water and still harm whatever's in it, right? I had a chemistry lecturer back in undergrad who lost her shit at people pouring things down the drain, so it really stuck with me. My advisor is a very temperamental person and I was afraid of her at that point of my career, so I did as she said but left the water running over the weekend. I wish I would've grown a spine earlier and told her off, but this was months back when I first joined the lab.

[@tsm688]

It really depends on what. Hypochlorites - break down fast and leave relatively harmless products. The world flushes it down the drain literally constantly. Mercury - toxic to everything, forever, and never breaks down.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

TBF nature is good at recycling a lot of things, but not everything. The dilution thing can work, in specific circumstances.

[@thewhitefalcon8539]

also there are too many people now, so if all of us dilute something, it's not actually diluted. See CO2

[@serenkeating7672]

The story about the person who got a metal sliver stuck in their eye reminds me of my own somewhat similar story, thankfully much less severe. I was 16 and the day after St. Stephen's Day (/Boxing Day) my family went to the Titanic museum, and it turns out it's there because it's within walking distance of the drydock in which the Titanic was built. Once we had finished in the museum, we went over to the drydock... And into the century-old pumphouse, which contains the huge equipment that operated the drydock. As you can imagine, it's rather rusty. The next day, my eye started stinging slightly, intermittently. Over the course of the day the pain got worse, and more frequent. Since as far as we knew my eye had just been stinging, it wasn't until I was in real distress, rather than thoroughly peeved, that we got worried. Unfortunately, that was at about 5PM on the 28th of December. My mother had the idea of going to the pharmacy, and seeing if they had any advice. They did - to try the optician, who might have equipment to enable them to take a good close look at my eye. Unfortunately, the only one that was open was only so because the receptionist was giving a few people their new glasses. Their advice was to go to the emergency out-of-hours GP, who took a good long look at my afflicted eye and said "That's a rust ring, it's gonna need to be scraped off. I'll try to do it here first." That absolutely failed, I was quite scared and, given that it was about 10PM at that point, I was the type of tired that pushes you into something a bit manic thus more than a little wired, and couldn't stay still enough, try as I might. So I was sent into a hospital in the city centre that had an opthalmology and an eye emergency department. I was seen pretty quickly, especially considering my country's very overloaded health system, but by this point it was about 11:30 PM so I was in even more pain and even more tired-wired. There was no more success had. I was, however, given eyedrops that numbed the pain somewhat. They sent me home, to come back the next morning for an appointment with an opthalmologist. That was what actually worked, in the end. I was given some rather stronger eyedrops that I suspect were atropine, braced on my own order into the frame from those laser eye surgery ads by my mother, and the opthalmologist came at the rust ring on my pupil with a needle to scrape it off. The reason I suspect the eyedrops were atropine is that on top of somewhat paralysing the eyes, it dilates the pupil for 1-2 weeks. On top of the pain of a corneal abrasion, I had to protect my absurdly light-sensitive right eye for a fortnight. I ended up wearing one of the bandaid-like eyepatches they give children to head off a lazy eye. Wasn't the worst thing, though - it had pirates on it!

[@foxyfoxington2651]

Don't pour bad stuff down the drain, everybody knows the atmosphere is nature's bin!

[@bonebrokebuddy5248]

12:25 I was listening to this video absently at work and was surprised at first because this sounded exactly like a story my dad had told me until i looked at the screen and realized that my older sister was the one who posted that story and it was, in fact, about my dad lmao

[@SilverAceOfSpades]

No fracking way. That's awesome.

[@castornuclear]

Chemical waste in the ocean? Remembers me about the german-polish border at the Oder river. A polish company dumped chemical waste in the river. Now fishes are dying all along the river. Mercury traces were found. Scientists fear, the waste will contaminate the Baltic Sea👌

[@whoever6458]

When I was in human anatomy lab during some of the first labs, we were looking at the cadaver we had and examining his abdominal anatomy. One of the guys noticed these two long, thin tendon-like things passing through the area and asked the professor what they were. The professor told him to reach in and pull on them. Turns out that they were the spermatic cord so that pulling on one caused the testicle to which it was connected to pop back into the cadaver's abdomen. Literally all the male students immediately went running and gagging out of the lab while the rest of us had a good laugh about it. Not sure if any of them actually heaved but it sure was funny for those of us who weren't emotionally affected by the result of pulling on the spermatic cord.

[@gustafforsberg7005]

At my work (at a industry) everything goes down the drain except for 1-napthylamine (that we definitely dose not have the proper PPE for). We are poring mercury (salts), cadmium salts, oleum, lead salts and hydrazine (there is a special waste management system for the chemicals). This is a problem, when I work at the university "what are you doing?, just disposing of this mercury solution, down the drain?" it was at this moment I realized my fuck up. (it was about 10g of mercuric chloride in the solution)

[@ianfrisinger3778]

ur ratio of views per video and subs is crazy man. I’m happy u get the support u deserve

[@That_Chemist]

Thanks!

[@matthewellisor5835]

I can only think of a gross of other ways that I'd prefer to obtain nitrate salts.

[@IceyKnight]

I developed the glove switch very quickly working in a clean room with ultrapure polycrystalline silicates and monocrystalline silicates even now if I put gloves on I'm still hesitant to touch ANYTHING

[@Shniedelwoodz]

Chempolation > Tier lists. Fite me!

[@chaos.faerie]

1:20 as an electrical student, I want you to know that this has the EXACT same energy to me as I imagine the comment did to you 😂😂

[@CraftMine1000]

I'd argue thermocouples are more accurate since you can get a digital reading straight off it instead of relying on photons and parallax

[@That_Chemist]

true

[@GodlikeIridium]

8:28 No. You never run a distillation at atmospheric pressure in a closed system. Since the principle of distillation is boiling stuff, it would always blow up. Closed distillation apparatuses are only used for vacuum distillations. The top of a distillation apparatus always needs to be closed (Usually a thermometer or if you don't care about the temperature a stopper), otherwise you'll lose all of your product. On the other side, after the condenser, there you'll either have an opening for AP distillation or a vacuum connection for vacuum distillation. They just let the reaction go crazy fast and didn't secure the joints. And that reminds of an almost accident in the lab... A studied chemist used a rotavap to distill off diethyl ether. And she didn't turn the vacuum pump on to pull at least a slight vacuum... Rotavaps are a closed distillation apparatus meant for vacum distillation, always with 60 °C water bath, 40 °C boiling point and 20 °C cooling water... It's a distillation... So gas expands, distills over and condenses on the other side. Due to the closed system, this always popped off the stopper... Instead of thinking (studied chemist, bachelor's degree!) and noticing the obvious, she decided to grease the stopper (someone please explain me that reaction)... I came into the lab, instantly smelled the insane amount of ether vapour, saw it flowing off that rotavap (yes, you see such dense ether vapor in air, it was pure ether gas in air, due to the difference in refractive index it looked like a beautiful gaseous fountain), went in "Oh fu**" mode, saw the missing stopper, asked who used it, saw the vacuum pump not being turned on, explained her while switching the pump on and telling her to put that stopper back immediately.... Situation saved... I have absolutely no idea how nobody else smelled that and how she didn't get that something was very wrong. I was there for maybe 15 seconds until I sorted it out. I tried to continue working, bzt simply couldn't, I was way too sh*tfaced from those 15 seconds, so I went home. With public transport, obviously, but I use that usually. Use PPE, don't hire people who are too stupid and/or ignorant. And we need to fix our education system... Diplomas really got absolutely useless these days... I know PhDs with less knowledge that a random person I give a 2 min crash course in chemistry....

[@markshort9098]

I've had metal in my eye that healed over and the eye specialist used a hypodermic needle as a scalpel to open my eye to remove the metal which wasn't much fun, what made it worse though was the rust staining on my eye that the doctor scraped off with a hypodermic and i spent the next 3 days hiding in the dark, in pain.. I've had to have multiple bit's of metal removed over the years but I just get the metal removed within 24 hours instead of 3 days like the first one and i tell them don't worry about the rust stain, they disappear by themselves after about a year

[@ConcretorumAzoth]

Liquid oxygen is fun and all but liquid ozone esp high allotropes are nuts