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babyeatingpsychopath posted:I assume these aren't monochromic gammas due to compton scattering and other effects, so can you get some that have enough energy to activate other materials? In normal fission/fusion weapons, a lot of the prompt radioactivity that's hanging around near the target is from neutron activation. I know that prompt gamma-ray emission when bombarded with neutrons is a thing, does that process work in reverse? I don’t know if electron-positron can generate gammas with enough energy to split atoms. I mean just based on particle masses you’re looking at about only about 1 GeV of gamma, and if you give the particles a lot of kinetic energy you don’t just get gammas, you start getting mesons and Ws and Zs depending on how fast they’re going.
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Oct 10, 2021 00:31
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Oct 13, 2021 01:17
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Tunicate posted:current belief is 'yes', but there still hasn't been experimental verification of how gravity interacts with antimatter. In theory it could be a hell of a lot more buoyant Camrath posted:Told the stories before here, but I had him as my chemistry teacher throughout senior school and was his assistant at his lectures for several years.
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Oct 13, 2021 07:47
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GWBBQ posted:I know it was someone here, were you the one with the story about getting stuck in traffic with an alarming amount of ammonium triiodide sitting on your lap? It was indeed Camrath Camrath posted:I have a story about this stuff..
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Oct 14, 2021 02:01
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Can’t remember if I told this one here or not, but we also pretty much blew up every chemistry lab in the school on the last day of term that year. They were getting refitted and refurbed, so it’s not /quite/ as bad as it sounds, but. The top story of the science block was the chemistry department, and all the labs/classrooms had interconnecting doors and benches running to the walls. So, we mixed up a frankly ludicrous amount of flash powder (magnesium powder and potassium or possibly sodium chlorate- this was 20+ years ago so my memory is less than perfect)and laid a trail along the benches to form a massive circle throughout the entire floor. Then we got out the tanks of hydrogen and oxygen and filled something like 20 balloons with a stochiometric mix, then weighed down the strings with asbestos mats over the lines of flash powder. Finally we fused it with a mixture of potassium permanganate and glycerol atop a small mound of barium peroxide. Andrew touched it off in his usual manner- by spitting on the permanganate to act as a catalyst. We then legged it down three flights of stairs to the quad outside. I think it was rather more powerful than he had intended (or perhaps not?)- the entire top floor of the building lit up with searing white actinic light from every window, while the balloons all exploded near simultaneously with a peal like rolling thunder. And of course, thick white smoke came pouring out of every window. Frankly I’m amazed we didn’t get the police coming to investigate a terrorist incident. We did however have our much-loathed headmaster appear in the quad looking like he’d just poo poo himself, and take Andrew away ‘for a quick word’. He’s still teaching there now, or at least as of 2020.
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Oct 14, 2021 12:28
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I enjoy Szydlo's demonstrations very much. More stories please.
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Oct 14, 2021 14:25
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I was in Advanced Chemistry back in High School, and at the end of my senior year, we were all chilling after the end of AP exams and finals. Couple of weeks left in the school year before graduation, you know the mentality. So normal chem is doing something in the chem lab and we were over at the "other" fume hood, which was annoyingly stuck in a corner and had bad access and a dodgy exhaust fan and no outlets. I don't remember exactly what we were trying to do, but we did end up evolving some amount of hydrogen sulfide gas doing so. We knew it was going to happen, hence the fume hood. Fire alarm goes off, PA announcement to clear the science wing, etc. We're all confused when we find out the other half of the wing was "completely flooded with toxic fart-smelling choking gas." Turns out that fume hood wasn't hooked into the roof exhaust vents like every other hood, it exhausted into the building supply air. This is why the "exhaust fan" was dodgy; sometimes there wasn't enough negative pressure between our side of the building and the other side to always suck fumes out of the hood. Memory states we weren't making huge fuming clouds of yellow gas or anything, the HS was just a byproduct of the reaction, but I guess it was in enough concentration that some people with sensitivities had pretty strong reactions.
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Oct 14, 2021 19:11
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well, real glad you discovered that in a way that didn't kill anyone
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Oct 14, 2021 19:30
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flatluigi posted:well, real glad you discovered that in a way that didn't kill anyone Yeah. There was a big fallout because that hood also didn't get its gas or electric shut off when the fire alarm tripped. How something like that is installed in a new-built school (the school building opened my freshman year) was a very pointed question. It's like that hood was added on years later by someone random, except it wasn't, and nobody knew how or why it was there or different.
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Oct 14, 2021 19:50
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babyeatingpsychopath posted:Yeah. There was a big fallout because that hood also didn't get its gas or electric shut off when the fire alarm tripped. How something like that is installed in a new-built school (the school building opened my freshman year) was a very pointed question. It's like that hood was added on years later by someone random, except it wasn't, and nobody knew how or why it was there or different. Blueprints show X fume hoods. Construction contract requires X+1 fume hoods. Contractor takes care of the rest.
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Oct 14, 2021 21:48
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I work in a research building with a mix of labs and offices. For whatever reason some of the fume hoods vent to the same exhaust stacks as the office air, which is fine as long as the vent fans are running. When the power goes out, any heavier-than-air fumes are likely to fall down the stack and come out of the AC ducts - and my department is at the bottom of the stacks on our side of the building. Thus the Ventilation Power Failure alarm system, with yellow and red blinking lights ("evacuate this side / entire building") and funky bwoOOIIP bwoOOIIP noises. It's very "90's action movie" - and separate from the fire alarm system. And, yes, the alarm system was designed in before the building was furnished. As I understand it they noticed the vent issue and decided it was too late or expensive to fix, but at least they could put in alarms.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:13
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Not fixing the issue and just retrofitting a very unhelpful alarm system is also very 90's action movie, definitely from the same mind that brought you "in the event that it is necessary to evacuate all the lights should turn off and start flashing red strobes everywhere to make it as confusing as possible."
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Oct 14, 2021 22:17
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OwlFancier posted:Not fixing the issue and just retrofitting a very unhelpful alarm system is also very 90's action movie, definitely from the same mind that brought you "in the event that it is necessary to evacuate all the lights should turn off and start flashing red strobes everywhere to make it as confusing as possible." On a not entirely unrelated note, the elevators in the building are the very cheapest they could find, and while I think they're safe enough, they keep going out of service. I've been told that it's because the elevators were one of the last decisions to be made, and the building was well and truly at the end of the budget when they got that far. So, yeah, properly fixing it would obviously have been much better, but I think I see why it didn't happen. I'll take an "you should probably get out within the next two minutes" alarm over nothing, I guess. At least the affected benches are mostly used for routine biology lab things, the actual fumes involved are mostly ... not benign, but the worst cases are more "tolulene" and less "methyl tellurium" (or whatever helljuices the chemistry departments play with).
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Oct 14, 2021 22:35
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I have seen the documentary film "resident evil" so I don't know that I would feel entirely safe about pumping biology fumes through the building.
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Oct 14, 2021 22:43
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Camrath posted:asbestos mats over the lines of flash powder. babyeatingpsychopath posted:Yeah. There was a big fallout because that hood also didn't get its gas or electric shut off when the fire alarm tripped. How something like that is installed in a new-built school (the school building opened my freshman year) was a very pointed question. It's like that hood was added on years later by someone random, except it wasn't, and nobody knew how or why it was there or different. I am completely unsurprised by the fume hood thing.
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Oct 14, 2021 23:07
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GWBBQ posted:I'm not saying that anything else in that story sounds like a particularly good idea, but this seems like an exceedingly bad idea. Ah yes, the "ehfuggit let's just lower the building" problemsolving philosophy
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Oct 15, 2021 00:14
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GWBBQ posted:I'm not saying that anything else in that story sounds like a particularly good idea, but this seems like an exceedingly bad. I was maybe less clear than I should be- I have no idea if they were actually asbestos, probably not- they were the standard heatproof mats we used when heating stuff. We called them asbestos mats out of habit/tradition. And the flash powder was on top of it, with the balloon over the powder and the string trapped beneath.
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Oct 15, 2021 00:21
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The ones we had at school probably weren't actually asbestos but they'd be about the only things in town that weren't given how many asbestos warnings I have to read when I go to work in places today.
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Oct 15, 2021 03:09
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How wide are the air conditioning vents? No particular reason.
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Oct 15, 2021 08:49
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cowboy
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FFT posted:How wide are the air conditioning vents? No particular reason.
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Oct 15, 2021 12:33
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sus
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Oct 15, 2021 14:58
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FFT posted:How wide are the air conditioning vents? No particular reason. About the size of a well-trained small child with IR goggles, why do you ask?
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Oct 15, 2021 22:29
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Computer viking posted:I work in a research building with a mix of labs and offices. For whatever reason some of the fume hoods vent to the same exhaust stacks as the office air, which is fine as long as the vent fans are running. When the power goes out, any heavier-than-air fumes are likely to fall down the stack and come out of the AC ducts - and my department is at the bottom of the stacks on our side of the building. Thus the Ventilation Power Failure alarm system, with yellow and red blinking lights ("evacuate this side / entire building") and funky bwoOOIIP bwoOOIIP noises. It's very "90's action movie" - and separate from the fire alarm system. That still sounds expensive. Couldn't they have, like, stationed some people throughout the building to raise the alarm when something bad happened?
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Oct 16, 2021 00:38
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Zopotantor posted:That still sounds expensive. Couldn't they have, like, stationed some people throughout the building to raise the alarm when something bad happened? How to gently caress Up an Airport goes into all the details of just how bad things went
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Oct 18, 2021 01:37
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The New Meth I don't quite get why the new meth formula is having a different effect on people. Are they chemically not the same?
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Oct 21, 2021 03:07
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quote:Later, Mexican investigators would report that of the 16 workers arrested at the Querétaro lab, 14 died over the next six months from liver failure—presumably caused by exposure to chemicals at the lab.
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Oct 21, 2021 03:24
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Nebakenezzer posted:The New Meth To quote the article, quote:Why is P2P meth producing such pronounced symptoms of mental illness in so many people? No one I spoke with knew for sure. One theory is that much of the meth contains residue of toxic chemicals used in its production, or other contaminants. Even traces of certain chemicals, in a relatively pure drug, might be devastating. The sheer number of users is up, too, and the abundance and low price of P2P meth may enable more continual use among them. That, combined with the drug’s potency today, might accelerate the mental deterioration that ephedrine-based meth can also produce, though usually over a period of months or years, not weeks. Meth and opioids (or other drugs) might also interact in particularly toxic ways. I don’t know of any study comparing the behavior of users—or rats for that matter—on meth made with ephedrine versus meth made with P2P. This now seems a crucial national question. No organic synthesis goes 100% to the desired product. There's always side products, sometimes a lot of them. Meth labs are not noted for their cleanliness - they're not producing pharm-grade products, nor are they cleaning them up very well. So the meth itself is the same, the difference is the other crap that comes along with it. Users have no control over the purity of what they're getting. The P2P process produces a different mix of chemicals than the ephedrine process does in the end product, and some of them have nasty effects on the brain.
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Oct 21, 2021 03:26
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Wasn't that the method in Breaking Bad that Walt was so good at? Wonder how much the show influenced whoever is making this.
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Oct 21, 2021 03:31
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Nebakenezzer posted:The New Meth Different production process so different side reactions/contaminants and there appears to be little investigation of the effects. E:f, b
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Oct 21, 2021 03:33
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Walt's method in Breaking Bad was not real because they did not want to explain how to make methamphetamine on their TV show. Want to point out that the author of that Atlantic article also wrote a book on the opiate epidemic and it is very good: https://www.amazon.com/Dreamland-True-Americas-Opiate-Epidemic/dp/1511336404
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Oct 21, 2021 03:37
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Phanatic posted:Walt's method in Breaking Bad was not real because they did not want to explain how to make methamphetamine on their TV show. Oh I know, I mean he made mercury fulminate in his kitchen that took out a wall. The chemistry was fast and loose. Just a funny thought though that someone saw how Walt ended up and thought, "yeah I want to do that"
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Oct 21, 2021 03:40
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IMO, one factor is that meth made through the P2P process is significantly cheaper than meth made through the old route. I don't know if you've dealt with a lot of meth addicts, but they are not the kind of people who go "Since meth prices have dropped dramatically, I'm putting more money into savings!". They just do three times as much meth.
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Oct 21, 2021 03:59
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Peer-to-peer meth? Is there some new app out there trying to disrupt the meth industry using the gig economy?
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Oct 21, 2021 05:21
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Meth? In this economy? No thanks.
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Oct 21, 2021 06:17
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Fair warning to the thread: do not edge in on my blockchain meth
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Oct 21, 2021 15:08
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Interesting article. I found it pretty disappointing that they had a DEA analytical chemist talk about seeing racemic vs D-methamphetamine for the P2P vs. ephedrine syntheses, but he wasn't roped into the speculation on possible neurotoxic contaminants. If anyone's doing LCMS or NMR to figure out what those impurities are, it's that dude.
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Oct 21, 2021 15:59
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EvenWorseOpinions posted:Fair warning to the thread: do not edge in on my blockchain meth Stay out of my NFT phenaz market and we good.
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Oct 21, 2021 16:07
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Mustached Demon posted:Stay out of my NFT phenaz market and we good. Its like the ocatina in zelda except it teleports all your money away
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Oct 21, 2021 16:35
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I'm trying to remember details about a radiation lab I read about awhile back. Here's what I can remember: - It basically had a buried radioactive source, a track+cart system, and a bunker. Operators in the bunker would move the cart with its sample up to the specified distance from the source, then raise the source out of the ground for a set amount of time (according to the experiment parameters), then lower it and retrieve the sample - They discovered that exposing wood to radiation would harden it, and I think they used some of this treated wood as the flooring in one of their buildings - I'm pretty sure the site is now shut down Does this sound familiar to anyone here? It's not an atomic garden: they were testing all kinds of random stuff, not just crops. EDIT: with some help from the military history discord: this was a Lockheed-run site, and the fancy wood was called Lockwood. TooMuchAbstraction has a new favorite as of 04:36 on Oct 22, 2021 |
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Oct 22, 2021 04:34
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The lab was the Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory. The hardened wood was called “Lockwood” after the military contractor. It’s used in the flooring of the IAE headquarters.
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Oct 22, 2021 04:37
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