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Vitamins posted:Phosgene also smells like freshly cut grass. Chemists working with it get very panicky when spring rolls round and landscapers and farmers get to work. Unfortunately, by the time you can smell it you're overexposed, as mentioned above. It reacts with the moisture in your lungs to form HCL acid, while it also causes irreversible damage to your lungs.  I work in a private lab that uses it to validate the service life of activated Carbon used by the military in gas mask canisters.
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Jan 26, 2014 19:02
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Defecation posted:I work in a private lab that uses it to validate the service life of activated Carbon used by the military in gas mask canisters. For some reason I always thought they would test stuff like that with some kind of harmless tracer chemical that would get absorbed like a poison but, you know, not actually be one 
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Jan 26, 2014 22:34
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Parallel Paraplegic posted:For some reason I always thought they would test stuff like that with some kind of harmless tracer chemical that would get absorbed like a poison but, you know, not actually be one No better test than testing it with the real thing. And anyways it should be quite simple to test. Place gas and mask in sealed chamber with air vac and let exhaust percolate through water tank.
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Jan 26, 2014 22:56
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My mother worked as a microbiologist for many years and handled all manner of deadly diseases of and viruses. She said the only one that really made her uncomfortable was when she had to do a viral count on tissue samples from a man dying of rabies. She of course was fully aware of the vaccine and all of that but she said she was terrified due to the fact that no one in the lab had been vaccinated and how horrible it is to die from it. I know it's not chemicals but I figured it would fit. I remember there used to be a thread in the Academic and Education forum about crazy stories involving chemicals and radioactive materials, I was trying to search for it to re-read it for the longest time. But I love these stories and I am totally digging this thread. Wizard of Wang has a new favorite as of 13:25 on Jan 27, 2014 |
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Jan 27, 2014 13:22
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Viruses are about the closest to a chemical you can get while still being infectious. They're basically extremely complex, self replicating chemicals wrapped in a little ball of hate. So you aren't far off there. I still think someone (not me  ) should synthesize some tetramethyl plutonium. 
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Jan 27, 2014 17:43
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kastein posted:Viruses are about the closest to a chemical you can get while still being infectious. Wouldn't they be second closest, right behind prions?
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Jan 27, 2014 17:53
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I was about to eat from a dented can of clam chowder. Then I read the posts about botulism.  I don't know if you actually saved my life, but you may have.
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Jan 27, 2014 19:11
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The chances of that having botulism are miniscule, much like your chances of surviving if it does!
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Jan 27, 2014 20:04
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I thought the more reliable sign was avoiding cans that were visibly bowed outward at the top and bottom, since the toxin makes gases or something that puts pressure on the inside of the can? I may be misinformed/have made this up.
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Jan 27, 2014 20:46
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QuickbreathFinisher posted:I thought the more reliable sign was avoiding cans that were visibly bowed outward at the top and bottom, since the toxin makes gases or something that puts pressure on the inside of the can? I may be misinformed/have made this up. Always thought this too. Did some research and bulging cans should always be avoided as bacteria have made a home in there and started to produce gas. Dented cans are far safer, but still have some risk as the dent could have created a small opening for air/bacteria to get in.
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Jan 27, 2014 20:53
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Diabetes By Sundown posted:http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Butyl_hydroperoxide poo poo. I just bought a bottle of that. 80% in decane. And I'll be using it in conjunction with an acetic acid/chloroform solution.  If you need a good oxidizing agent, how about Piranha Solution - a mixture of sulfuric acid and hydrogen peroxide.
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Jan 27, 2014 21:06
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Vicodiva posted:My favorite FOOF: There's yer problem, anything thing that evolves a flammable gas needs to stowed away from sources of ignition and a reefer motor is a source of ignition. I think the IMDB says those type of materials are only allowed in a reefer container if the reefer is cooling the interior to 10C below the flashpoint of what ever gas is evolved. Also explosion proof reefers are allowed I think, but that doesn't look like one (but I can't really tell from the photos) Expandable polymeric beads will do this same thing, they evolve benzene. This is a pretty common stowage and segregation error actually. Looking at that military container they did other things wrong too. Those should be marked "WARNING, MAY CONTAIN EXPLOSIVE MIXTURES WITH AIR. KEEP IGNITION SOURCES AWAY WHEN OPENING" Any way my favorite: grain and sugar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQZGWjVwN58 Dust is bad. Another, coal. Coal loaded in vessels will evolve flammable vapors and/or spontaneously combust. Ambient temperature at loading of greater than 100F and mixtures of differing grades of coal greatly increase the odds of a hold fire. The different grades of coal hold different amounts of water. When grades get mixed in a vessel hold, the moisture will move from one grade into the other, which heats the coal and produces flammable vapors.
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Jan 27, 2014 21:08
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kastein posted:I still think someone (not me
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Jan 28, 2014 05:44
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It's something that should exist, if anyone was brain damaged enough to make it. Something like dimethyl mercury or dimethyl cadmium but even more horribly toxic and also radioactive to boot. Oh, and probably more unstable.
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Jan 28, 2014 07:18
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Speaking of phosgene, I worked in a lab that was working on block co-polypeptides related to the method developed here. I was working on formulation and analysis so I never had to do the synthesis myself, but it loving terrified me. It involved first creating an organometallic catalyst using a pyrophoric (ignites spontaneously in air) with sodium metal (reacts violently with water). Phosgene was also an essential component in the peptide linking process. It's so great at crosslinking peptides and proteins, it'll crosslink the poo poo out of your lungs! Peptide synthesis can be a dangerous field. Before that I worked in a lab doing polymer nanostructure fabrication, and frequently used Piranha etch to remove polymer from my molds. It's scary how fast it'll eat things, I once saw someone spill a drop on a paper towel, which was just wrecked, looked like it had been completely burned. Anyway, the thing about piranha is that the solution heats rapidly as you add hydrogen peroxide to sulfuric acid. It should be done slowly so you don't boil the stuff hand have it splatter everywhere. Anyway, in the cleanroom where I worked, there was a big lab that did MEMS fabrication on a bunch of silicon wafers at a time, and I saw them once trying to clean them all at once with Piranha. They poured out literally an entire bottle of sulfuric acid into a giant beaker on a hotplate, turned the hotplate on(!) and then dumped in the entire bottle of hydrogen peroxide literally all at once. I didn't stick around to see what happened, but I assume no one died. Still a monumentally stupid thing to do.
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Jan 28, 2014 09:02
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The Max Berger book linked above describes a synthesis where the procedure was "place troughs around work desk, pour precursors into open-topped flask, run from the room and wait for the geyser of product to bounce off the ceiling and down into troughs". Sounds like they were going for something similar.
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Jan 28, 2014 09:14
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QuickbreathFinisher posted:I thought the more reliable sign was avoiding cans that were visibly bowed outward at the top and bottom, since the toxin makes gases or something that puts pressure on the inside of the can? I may be misinformed/have made this up. So in other words, I shouldn't open my can of baked beans from the 60s or my can of bacon from the 50s?
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Jan 28, 2014 14:02
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QuickbreathFinisher posted:I thought the more reliable sign was avoiding cans that were visibly bowed outward at the top and bottom, since the toxin makes gases or something that puts pressure on the inside of the can? I may be misinformed/have made this up. If it's bulging you shouldn't eat it (and won't want to). But the fact that it isn't bulging doesn't mean it's safe, botulinum has no visible effect on food.
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Jan 28, 2014 14:30
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BrandorKP posted:Another, coal. Coal loaded in vessels will evolve flammable vapors and/or spontaneously combust. Ambient temperature at loading of greater than 100F and mixtures of differing grades of coal greatly increase the odds of a hold fire. The different grades of coal hold different amounts of water. When grades get mixed in a vessel hold, the moisture will move from one grade into the other, which heats the coal and produces flammable vapors. Yep, spontaneous ignition of coal decomposition products is what actually sank the Maine. Heat from these reactions warmed up a magazine bulkhead which caused the powder within to detonate. A bunch of ships were lost to powder decomposition leading to spontaneous ignition during the early 20th century. Nitrocellulose is fun stuff!
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Jan 28, 2014 14:55
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yep, spontaneous ignition of coal decomposition products is what actually sank the Maine. Heat from these reactions warmed up a magazine bulkhead which caused the powder within to detonate. Sometimes the coal starts burning while still in the ground, and you get a coal seam fire that spews hellish gasses up through holes and swallows people whole into burning sinkholes. There's one that has been burning constantly for six thousand years.
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Jan 28, 2014 15:55
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Yep, spontaneous ignition of coal decomposition products is what actually sank the Maine. Heat from these reactions warmed up a magazine bulkhead which caused the powder within to detonate. These days it mostly happens on vessels loading coal from Indonesia. I've boarded several vessels that have had previous coal fires. There is very little the crew can do about it once the fire starts too. If they aren't doing their gas testing and aren't following the rules on when they should or should not ventilate they're hosed once a fire starts. Can't really open the holds (more air would be bad once the fire starts). Can't really use enough water to put it out (don't want to capsize the ship with free surface effect). They end up just discharging the still burning coal at the pier. Speaking of boring things that can kill one. Metal ores prone to liquefaction are apparently the most dangerous bulk cargo this year. Bar Ran Dun has a new favorite as of 16:12 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 16:10
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Metallic ores don't even have to melt to be hazardous to cargo ships. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the collier U.S.S. Cyclops was that her officers were unfamiliar with the differences between the loading properties of a load of coal and the load of manganese ore she carried on her final voyage (the ore, being denser material, would have taken up less space in the holds than an equal load of coal, leading to Cyclops being accidentally overloaded). Combine that with the nasty storm she sailed into off Hatteras, as well as possible degradation of the hull thanks to sulphrous byproducts in the coal she usually carried, and you've got all the ingredients for a sudden total disappearance.
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Jan 28, 2014 16:22
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BrandorKP posted:These days it mostly happens on vessels loading coal from Indonesia. I've boarded several vessels that have had previous coal fires. There is very little the crew can do about it once the fire starts too. If they aren't doing their gas testing and aren't following the rules on when they should or should not ventilate they're hosed once a fire starts. Can't really open the holds (more air would be bad once the fire starts). Can't really use enough water to put it out (don't want to capsize the ship with free surface effect). I was going to ask that if the vessel was designed knowing it would haul around something that could catch on fire like that they could seal the hold to starve the fire of oxygen, but I thought about it and now I'm guessing doing that would leave you with a backdraft waiting to blow the ship up as soon as any oxygen reached the hold again.
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Jan 28, 2014 16:58
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Metallic ores don't even have to melt to be hazardous to cargo ships. It's all moisture content. Below a certain percentage they just sit there in a pile. Above a particular percentage (depending on the particular ore) they sometimes just decide to flow. Grain can flow in a similar way and is really quite dangerous too, but there is a grain code and there are rules for loading grain to prevent vessels from capsizing. And vessels still just disappear all the time especially bulk carriers. Again seemingly boring things like "loaded the vessel too fast" can cause hull stress that cause the vessel split apart and sink out at sea. Sometime ships just split in half, well just because: http://imgur.com/ACSSMqq It happens less than it used to, but it still happens and often nobody really knows why. President Ark posted:I was going to ask that if the vessel was designed knowing it would haul around something that could catch on fire like that they could seal the hold to starve the fire of oxygen, but I thought about it and now I'm guessing doing that would leave you with a backdraft waiting to blow the ship up as soon as any oxygen reached the hold again. Most bulk carriers are omni-purpose. They usually have either natural or forced ventilation in the cargo holds. There are procedures to follow regarding ventilation with coal. More info than one could want: http://www.ukpandi.com/fileadmin/uploads/uk-pi/LP%20Documents/Carefully_to_Carry/Coal%20Cargoes.pdf and http://bulkcarrierguide.com/coal-hazards.html Basically one ventilates the holds to keep the methane that is produced below the LEL (lower explosive limit). One doesn't ventilate when the coal is self heating (keep the oxygen out) to prevent a fire. But sometimes both those things happen ( mixed blend, with the blended coals having differing moisture contents, loaded at high ambient temperature.) Gas testing lets you know what is going on.
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Jan 28, 2014 20:38
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:Nitrocellulose is fun stuff! The first non-ivory billiard balls were made from specially formed and treated nitrocellulose, and they were still explosive to a certain extent. The company recieved a letter from a Colorado saloon owner who said that the balls were great but when someone would shoot too hard everyone would end up reaching for their gun.
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Jan 28, 2014 21:01
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BrandorKP posted:It's all moisture content. Below a certain percentage they just sit there in a pile. Above a particular percentage (depending on the particular ore) they sometimes just decide to flow. Grain can flow in a similar way and is really quite dangerous too, but there is a grain code and there are rules for loading grain to prevent vessels from capsizing. I've been unable to find anything much in English about it, but in 1975 and 1979, two Norwegian almost new ore+oil carriers (Berge Istra and Berge Vanga) disappeared, almost without a trace. The first one left two surviving Spanish sailors that were picked up after a week or so on a tiny rescue raft - and who explained that the ship had exploded and sunk almost immediately. The second one didn't leave a trace. As for what happened, there's been speculations for ages; a retired captain that had sailed on one of them and a surviving sister ship only recently (2006) explained what he'd concluded and kept secret for a few decades. These were double-hulled ships with large center tanks that could be used for ore or raw oil, and wing tanks that were only used for oil. They loaded ore in Brazil, sailed to Japan with that, then ran empty to the Persian gulf, where they filled up with oil that they took to the Netherlands - and from there they ran empty to Brazil. When empty, the wing tanks still held some leftover oil, and obviously rather a lot of evaporated gas. To keep the explosion risk down, they were pumped full of CO2, produced in a dedicated burner. Between the burner and a tank full of possibly explosive gas was a water lock that could apparently slosh dry in high seas. Light the neutral gas producing burner, and *boom* goes the ship. (It did apparently not help that the second in command who did the gas measurements had no idea how to interpret the results, or he might have seen that the gas on the supposedly inert side of the piping was also explosive.) The leftover sister ship was reduced to only shipping ore after the second one blew - the captain in question convinced the company that they couldn't safely continue, and to fund a school for training crew in gas handling and such; the tradeoff was that he didn't talk to the media about it. Ref http://www.dagbladet.no/2011/01/21/magasinet/berge_istra/berge_vanga/skipsfart/bergesen/15151445/ (Norwegian). Computer viking has a new favorite as of 22:43 on Jan 28, 2014 |
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Jan 28, 2014 22:33
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That reminds me of another story involving hazardous cargo. What happens when you convert a hurriedly-built wartime oil tanker with a likely structural weakness to carry molten sulfur? The ship catches fire and blows up, duh.
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Jan 29, 2014 02:06
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DemeaninDemon posted:One of the inorganic labs at my old school had a bucket of mercury just hanging out in a cabinet. Very cool looking that stuff. I was cleaning a dentist office's basement storage, and found a big rear end glass bottle of mercury... balancing on the edge of a counter. It was pretty loving cool (I didn't dare open that bottle though.)
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Jan 29, 2014 02:18
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Ugly In The Morning posted:The first non-ivory billiard balls were made from specially formed and treated nitrocellulose, and they were still explosive to a certain extent. The company recieved a letter from a Colorado saloon owner who said that the balls were great but when someone would shoot too hard everyone would end up reaching for their gun.
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Jan 29, 2014 03:06
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GWBBQ posted:This is a myth and if it could happen, ping pong would be an extreme sport. Ping-pong balls and guitar picks are in fact made from compounded nitrocellulose and camphor, mitigating the risk of explosion. They're still both violently flammable, however.
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Jan 29, 2014 03:17
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ArcMage posted:Ping-pong balls and guitar picks are in fact made from compounded nitrocellulose and camphor, mitigating the risk of explosion. They're still both violently flammable, however. As demonstrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vw7psWrzHH8
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Jan 29, 2014 08:59
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Apart from a bigass fire is there any risk doing that? I want to try it.
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Jan 29, 2014 09:07
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A Saucy Bratwurst posted:Apart from a bigass fire is there any risk doing that? I want to try it. I'd imagine a lot of fumes you don't want to be dealing with. Question I have, could you shred up a pingpong ball into dust and use it as a quick fire starter? I've been watching far too much survivorman.
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Jan 29, 2014 09:13
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Spooky Bear Ghost posted:I'd imagine a lot of fumes you don't want to be dealing with. From what tit seems leaving as a pingpong ball seems wiser; the shreds would burn up too fast. My tip of day: Squash em. Squash em flat.
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Jan 29, 2014 15:14
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I've been working with HF for long enough to be pretty comfortable around it, but I don't think I'll ever be this comfortable: Fulminant acute colitis following a self-administered hydrofluoric acid enema quote:A 33-yr-old white male presented with bloody diarrhea, leukocytosis, and left lower quadrant direct and rebound tenderness after a self-administered concentrated hydrofluoric acid enema while intoxicated from intranasal cocaine administration[...]
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Feb 4, 2014 13:12
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Diabetes By Sundown posted:I've been working with HF for long enough to be pretty comfortable around it, but I don't think I'll ever be this comfortable: Christ, some people are just too stupid to live.
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Feb 4, 2014 16:53
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quote:This case demonstrates that a hydrofluoric acid enema can cause fulminant acute colitis and chronic colonic strictures. As information goes, that doesn't seem that much more useful than "This case demonstrates that shooting yourself in the foot can cause acute shock and blood loss" ... though I fear someone in the future will do a keyword search, read this, and have to ask a patient some very specific questions. edit: Shame, they only have articles from 1999 and newer online. I'd like to see if there's any explanation as to why. However, there's a whole bunch of similar cases with other chemicals - a bunch of hydrogen oxide enemas (a couple of korean ones, and a newly diagnosed rectal cancer patient who thought the wait to see an oncologist was a bit long), a coffee one (korean; apparently traditional medicine), a detergent one in a kid (reproduced in lab mice and rats to verify!), a few with soap/alt.med. cleansers, and one with formalin (why?). Computer viking has a new favorite as of 17:16 on Feb 4, 2014 |
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Feb 4, 2014 17:04
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It just occurred to me that I open containers of these nasty trifluoride and tetraflouride gases secured by truckers all the time. It might be time to change careers.
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Feb 4, 2014 17:28
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BrandorKP posted:It just occurred to me that I open containers of these nasty trifluoride and tetraflouride gases secured by truckers all the time. It might be time to change careers. you... open containers? or you take closed containers out of other containers?
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Feb 4, 2014 21:14
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Diabetes By Sundown posted:I've been working with HF for long enough to be pretty comfortable around it, but I don't think I'll ever be this comfortable: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct....60444564,d.cWc
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Feb 4, 2014 21:28
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