PYF Dangerous Chemistry: Fluorine protecting Its Modesty...

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darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Carbon dioxide posted:

Only in concentrated form. By the time it gets into the sewage treatment plant, it will be diluted to homeopathic levels.

Additonally, HOOH slowly breaks down into water and O2 by itself.

I wouldn't worry about this. There's worse things you can pour down the drain.

How's it handle plastic pipes? I've got a stubborn clog that might require something stronger than lye, but if it melts the pipes that's obviously no good.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2015 14:37

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 04:32

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

KillHour posted:

This stuff is what I typically use for shower drains that get hair and gunk stuck in them:

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Instant-Power-67-6-oz-Hair-and-Grease-Drain-Opener-1970/100169339

Will try that then, or possibly lye pellets as others suggested. Have also tried snaking the drain, but that couldn't find anything. It's maddening; the first 10+ feet of pipe are clear as anything, but water still won't drain.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2015 22:25

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Geirskogul posted:

Hexanitro what?

Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, AKA CL-20. Probably the best quote from that article:

quote:

There's a recent report of a method to make a more stable form of it, by mixing it with TNT. Yes, this is an example of something that becomes less explosive as a one-to-one cocrystal with TNT. Although, as the authors point out, if you heat those crystals up the two components separate out, and you're left with crystals of pure CL-20 soaking in liquid TNT, a situation that will heighten your awareness of the fleeting nature of life.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2015 22:02

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Data Graham posted:

I always assume "You know that one guy in Robocop?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjEdLuqK1RQ

But yeah, what's the real answer? Expect it's something about loving up DNA and replication thereof? Or does it wreck some enzyme in the liver?

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 06:48

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Pitch posted:

When inhaled it reacts with your cell membranes and more or less liquefies your lung tissue. It's not particularly irritating or painful so you might not notice until you start coughing on the fluid in your lungs.

Yeah, after some further digging it methylates the lipids in cell walls, causing them to break down. So it'd be more like that one dude in the X-Men movie, who gets turned into a jellyfish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tx_CaXqp9U

# ¿ Apr 13, 2015 10:00

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Memento posted:

Yeah it's a neat little short story that is told as if it were a real story related to him at a rocketry conference. The end of the story suggests that it was some false-flag stuff fed to the Russians that ends up being what caused Chernobyl.

To be fair, though, that kind of thing did happen (allegedly). The only part I'd doubt is the red mercury/Chernobyl side of things, everything else is totally plausible.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2015 01:58

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Kinetica posted:

Superacids talk:

We were doing catalyst work with them. We weren't using the really horrid one, fluoroantimonic acid (H2FSbF6), but some of them were pretty nasty. One really fun thing you get to worry about is decomposition products. I'm fine dealing with liquid acids, but when these bastards decompose and many of them spit out gaseous acids because they hate you and all humanity, I tend to become a bit neurotic.

Not all of them are that spiteful though, ones like triflic acid are much milder. Not something you want to stick your hand in or be around when it decomposes, but it could be worse. I could have had to deal with methylated metals.

Basically, don't do things that are dumb, and for fucks sake if you have a question on working with it just ask.

Methylated metals like these methylated metals?

And of course, :justpost:

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 05:16

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Kwyndig posted:

Well I was more talking about using, you know parachutes and those bouncy balloons they use for missions to Mars. Throwing some cables around a block of tungsten and attaching enough parachutes to land it safely wouldn't be a big issue with all the carbon and silicate up there. Hell, if it turns out to be easy to make aerogel in micro G we can just coat the things in the stuff and we could even drop hard into the ocean instead.

Note, I do not personally recommend dropping house sized chunks of metal anywhere. I was thinking more car sized.

Yeah, but with smaller chunks you run into diseconomies of scale, because now you have to attach more parachutes to more lumps of rock, with larger combined surface area to coat with aerogel. The best answer will probably be to keep processing it into finished goods outside the gravity well, if only because that'd probably wind up being a necessary step between going back to the moon and reaching out to the asteroids.

# ¿ Jul 4, 2015 06:59

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Luneshot posted:

I remember seeing a chart once (probably in this thread) of some compounds (alcohols maybe?) and their odors. A good third of the ones on the chart just had a skull and crossbones, aka "the concentration required to smell it would be high enough to kill you".

There's this, which also labels some chemicals as "unique" in odor.

Woolie Wool posted:

Everyone wants to be coy. I want the horrible details!

A proper chemist can probably tell you more, but my understanding from the last time this came up is that it breaks down cell walls by methylating the lipids, so it's going to look kinda like that one senator from the first X-Men movie, except not all of you will turn to jelly at the same time.
ETA: Actually, last time this came up, it was also you asking for horrible details. So come on, chemists, do tell us more.

darthbob88 has a new favorite as of 18:22 on Jan 13, 2016

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 18:19

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Suitaru posted:

A methyl group is a carbon with three hydrogens on it, with the fourth available bond on the carbon sticking to whatever's been methylated. Methyl groups are sizable compared to their mass and nonpolar. If cell walls get methylated, the lipids don't fit together very well and the membrane starts leaking; if DNA gets methylated when it shouldn't be (DNA methylation is a common reaction in many forms of life, but only at specific spots on the genome), the various proteins that read it and do things to it bump into the methyl group and can't go any further; anything that relies on being polar to participate in enzymatic reactions will stop working if the ligand or enzyme gets methylated. It's kind of hard to nail down exactly what goes wrong with methylation because A. it's like dumping ball bearings covered in glue into a car engine, something's gonna get weird but who the hell knows what, and B. usually the methyl group itself is not nearly as dangerous as what it's attached to, because methyl groups being nonpolar/not very dense/relatively small mean they happily float through lipid membranes and anything else nonpolar. As people have mentioned, this is basically a VIP ticket for whatever's attached to go hang out and party inside the nearest available cell. For example, you might have seen pictures of people sitting on liquid mercury and being fine, but dimethylmercury is one of the most powerful neurotoxins known to science. The famous case of Karen Wetterhahn is the classic example - she spilled a couple drops of dimethylmercury onto her latex-gloved hand, cleaned it off after maybe a minute, and spent the remaining year of her life in a vegetative state. The methyl groups helped the mercury diffuse through the glove, through her skin, and into her body in the space of twenty seconds tops, and from that point on she was doomed.

All righty. Thanks for the horrifying explanation.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 21:37

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

I've heard about another scientist who snuck his money out of the Reich by turning it into platinum wire which he bent into coat hangers, smuggled out, and later resold. Supposedly Hevesy also made early use of radioisotope tracers to find out whether his landlady was making the hash she served in the morning from scraps of last night's dinner.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2016 07:31

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Icon Of Sin posted:

Better than being rocky, I suppose.

Yeah, but still not all it's cracked up to be.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 17:54

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

An Angry Bug posted:

Whatever happened to David Hahn, anyway?

He made Eagle Scout, joined the Navy where he tried to make Reactor Tech, and was arrested in '07 for apparently trying to create another reactor. Single-minded type of dude.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2016 21:43

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

A White Guy posted:

So, aside from the lichens that hang out in the Chernobyl reactor, does anyone know off hand about some extreme examples of things that survive and thrive in environments that are highly radioactive/metallically poisonous? I'm utterly fascinated by fungus and just how unbelievably resilient and adaptable it is. Today, one of my friends who's a Chem major told me about how their professor had a microscope up in front of their class, focused on fungal yeasts that were living in mine tailing from a badly done gold mine from the early 1800s. The water is unnaturally blue from the amount of copper in it, and yet this fungus is just hanging out, happily nomming on sulfides.

Deinococcus radiodurans. Discovered in '56 when it proved that hard radiation isn't enough to sterilize a can of meat. Hardy little sunzabitches. Also, probably not the mine you're thinking of, but I must mention the Berkeley Pit. A lake so toxic a flock of geese died after landing on it, but there's still bacteria and fungi, happily digesting the metals and spitting out what might be the next cancer drug.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2016 05:59

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Kinetica posted:

It depends on what the molecule is, and if there's room to bond to it.

However, there are many people who are working very hard at trying to cram them on to everything and find that limit (sometimes when things go wrong you have to find their respective body parts first).

Most famously the Klapotke lab in Munich, which holds the record AFAIK with 14 nitrogens and 2 carbons.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 22:17

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

axeil posted:

Pardon my ignorance, but what exactly is that mixture going to do? Explode horribly and maim the person?

Not so much maim as poison.

# ¿ May 11, 2016 14:21

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Rigged Death Trap posted:

Nerve agents are decidedly one of the more unstable toxic super death chemicals.
A few decades of time and pressure (and possibly maybe heat from hydrothermal vents) is more than enough to break down most things.

Even if those toxins are intact, the solution to pollution is dilution. Thousands of tons of nerve gas dumped into and mixed with billions of tons of water is pretty drat safe, all things considered.

# ¿ Jul 7, 2016 06:56

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Zopotantor posted:

Red-hot cannon balls were a thing during the age of sail. (If you can believe C.S.Forester.)

Dunno about red-hot, but heated shot actually was used, going back to the 1500s. Apparently in the 1860s they reached the apex with molten iron-filled shells :black101:

# ¿ Nov 15, 2016 21:38

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

My Lovely Horse posted:

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-bristol-38991983

The terrorism link is awfully sensationalist, but apart from that I wonder how that happens and what the routine is. Do you check for high explosives at every step in certain procedures, just in case?

I expect for certain procedures there isn't so much a "run a sample through a spectrometer, just to make sure you haven't accidentally made boom juice" as "this step will probably involve the creation of an organic peroxide as an intermediary, so try not to sneeze".

# ¿ Feb 16, 2017 18:31

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

AA is for Quitters posted:

You can though! Triacetone Triperoxide is what was used in the London bombings.

Actually, TATP is acetone and peroxide, not acetic acid. You still can't do anything too interesting with acetic acid.

# ¿ Jun 8, 2017 21:21

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

DirtRoadJunglist posted:

Whatever's in the water is generally fatal to most living things, never mind that it's so acidic that it ate the last boat ramp a while back and they haven't been able to put anything on the water since. Made collecting the goose caracasses a loving chore. If I remember right, they had to swap boats out after a few hours anyway, otherwise the hulls would get eaten through. Oh, but there are nematodes that thrive in that toxic slop! Last I heard, they're being researched for potential cancer fighting agents. Life finds a way...

Yeah, and apparently they're also being investigated as a way to extract the metal from the water.

# ¿ Jun 19, 2017 22:46

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Dirt Road Junglist posted:

Couldn't find any info on its toxicity, but it does seem to be the sort of thing that catches fire if you blink in its general direction?

Yep. It's one of the things Derek Lowe would rather not work with for just that reason.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2017 16:58

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Moist von Lipwig posted:

Ah yes, the old "add fluorine to make it less corrosive trick". Now tell me about adding tnt to hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane to make it more stable

To be fair, apparently the HF doesn't make nitric acid itself less corrosive, it just creates a protective fluoride layer on the storage tanks to prevent them from being further corroded.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 16:12

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Platystemon posted:

Sadly, the N1 failure is no longer considered the largest non‐nuclear explosion in history.

Still, it made a good showing.

Hell, it wasn't even the largest at the time. It was exceeded by, among other things, the Heligoland "British Bang" experiment.

quote:

. On 18 April 1947, the Royal Navy detonated 6,700 tonnes of explosives ("Big Bang" or "British Bang"), creating one of the biggest single non-nuclear detonations in history.[25] Though the attack was aimed at the fortifications, the island's total destruction would have been accepted.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2017 23:23

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Magnus Praeda posted:

Which webcomic is that?

Freefall. Pretty good and fairly solid on the science, but glacial pace. It's been on the internet about as long as I have, and has only covered a few weeks to a couple months of actual plot.

E: Rereading that section, the sentence isn't merciful because of affluenza, it's because he's being judged by a jury of his peers, including robots who are very big on the idea of rehabilitation through honest work. I will also note that the robots are the people he was trying to genocide.

darthbob88 has a new favorite as of 18:55 on Oct 13, 2017

# ¿ Oct 13, 2017 18:50

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

iospace posted:

So how long do you think it'll take him to synthesize N₆₀?

Probably 5 or 6 destroyed spectrometers.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2017 19:30

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Strom Cuzewon posted:

I would totally read a Blindsight-esque book about how the brain is just an endoparasite hogging the bodies resources, and isn't actually a requirement for life to function.

Obviously you can't prove that, because the brain won't let you

It's a symbiont, actually.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 22:55

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Johnny Aztec posted:

Not quite chemistry but I am fond of " injuries incompatible with life"

IE: Decapitation, such torso trauma that literal poo poo is coming out of their mouth and other fun things

Related, copremesis. Not all that innocuous a word, but a really nasty condition.

# ¿ Jan 3, 2018 18:59

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Trig Discipline posted:

If you listen to the commentary tracks on Futurama DVDs they talk a lot about how a bunch of the writing staff are actually math and science Ph.D.s

Including Ken Keeler, who came up with a new theorem just for one episode.

# ¿ Jan 30, 2018 22:36

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

CellBlock posted:

That excerpt is from an XKCD What-If that was something like "What's the most dangerous thing I can do with a pressure cooker?"

Yep, and it gets worse after producing FOOF.

quote:

If your house is heated by natural gas, and it happens to contain hydrogen sulfide, you could pipe some of it into your container of O2F2. In addition to a massive explosion, this will also produce a cloud of hydrogen fluoride gas. Hydrogen fluoride can dissolve human tissue on contact, starting with your lungs and corneas.

As Lowe points out, the chemistry of this kind of reaction (O2F2 and sulfides) is largely unexplored.

Which gives us an answer to our question. What�s the worst thing that can happen in a pressure cooker?

Science.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2018 19:13

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Asproigerosis posted:

if anyone wants some free radioactive material signs with trefoil, I can hook you up. We've closed 4 sites and the radiopharmacy loves sending them over and over as stocking stuffers.

shalafi4 posted:

I can haz sign(s)?

shoot me a PM or username @ gmail.com

Same. How big are we talking? Palm-sized stickers, or something I need to nail up?

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 17:41

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

wolrah posted:

This seems like it could potentially get pretty FOOF-y: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-03977-w

Attempting to use AI to plan reactions for making new substances.

That reminds me of a proposal I saw a while back; the idea was that with new developments in molecular sieves and chromatography and all that, we can isolate a molecule of anything from a mixture of reaction products, while the best method for creating new compounds is just "Throw some things in a beaker and wait for it to stop fizzing". So, why not take this to its full extent, and just throw everything in a vat to react together so we can isolate out interesting stuff later? The best part is that the whole vessel would proceed to equilibrium, so as we find and isolate anti-cancer drug #294, the vessel would produce more of it, while whatever muck we throw back in would be produced less. Will post it once I get home and can look it up.

# ¿ Mar 30, 2018 22:00

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

13Pandora13 posted:

I'm looking for a chemical for a stupid art project. Not literally the chemical, but the name of one. I'm looking for something with an interesting molecular structure that is both explosive and highly mutagenic. The chemical model is going to get painted onto a lab coat. Any recommendations?

You can do worse than trinitrotoluene for moderately interesting structure and explosive. Or possibly take the understated route and put up 1,3,7-Trimethylxanthine.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 00:31

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

GWBBQ posted:

I'm late, but Tery Butyl Peroxide earns the elusive 444 fire diamond.

You mean tert-butyllithium, surely. Peroxide earns a mere 234 OX diamond.

darthbob88 has a new favorite as of 20:20 on Aug 11, 2018

# ¿ Apr 22, 2018 23:13

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Icon Of Sin posted:

Too much going on in this gif, you've angered the fragile nitrogen bonds down the hallw-

Yeah, more likely the Klapotke veterans have gone Buddhist, forsaking attachment to Earthly things. Like their fingers, spectrometers, and walls.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2018 18:45

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Ola posted:

No, they think "smoke = owning libs".

"Prius repellant", some call it.

# ¿ May 27, 2018 13:37

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Elmnt80 posted:

Wasn't there a dude impaled to a roof by a fuel rod who they determined lived for a bit after it?

Dunno about how long he lived afterwards, but I'm pretty sure you're referring to the SL-1 incident.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 18:20

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Phy posted:

What is BLA and why did the acronym get picked to make a noise you make when you're not feeling well (slash are a Dracula)?

My guess would be Blood Loss Anemia, also appropriate to Draculas.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2018 18:52

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

HelloSailorSign posted:

People mention phosgene gas - sometimes animals will ingest zinc phosphide since it's used as a rat bait, and some dogs are dumb enough to ingest a whole ton of it. Usually the first thing that happens when someone brings their sick animal in saying, "they got into something!" is to make them throw up, which given zinc phosphide turns into phosphine gas when the stomach gets to work on it... well, that can be bad.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6116a3.htm

Expect you're aware, but phosphine is different from phosgene, though neither is terribly healthy for you or your dog.

# ¿ Jul 27, 2018 22:58

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 04:32

darthbob88: Oct 13, 2011; YOSPOS

Nebakenezzer posted:

Sorry, what happened?

I'm guessing this. "I run home to help with a grass fire that started up in the neighboring canyon."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhk7UkqPAvQ

# ¿ Oct 6, 2018 01:36

The Something Awful Forums > Main > Post Your Favorite: Carefully Curated > PYF Dangerous Chemistry: Fluorine protecting Its Modesty...

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