|
Yeah, cadmium has been out of use as a coating on bolts in almost every market for quite some time. Like you said, military/aerospace still has a lot of exceptions, be extra careful around those. I always figured cadmium plating was the greenish one, but I must have been wrong. Cadmium's a nasty one like you said, not only will it gently caress up your lungs on the way in, it will gently caress up your liver trying to process it in your bloodstream and your kidneys trying to filter it out, and basically anything else it runs into. The kidney damage it causes is permanent, they won't recover. It's effectively incompatible with life. Like you said it's a nasty carcinogen and oh, it ruins your bones too by loving up calcium chemistry in your body or something. It's actually been featured on Things I Won't Work With in a compound, dimethyl cadmium IIRC. Which is basically one of the better ways of making sure that the cadmium compound burns, produces incredibly fine easily absorbed airborne powders, reacts with things, goes through lab gloves like dimethyl mercury, etc etc. Consider it a more potent, uglier version of cadmium that doesn't really respect your personal space much. edit: holy poo poo it's even worse than I remembered. http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2013/05/08/things_i_wont_work_with_dimethylcadmium.php kastein has a new favorite as of 10:07 on Jan 16, 2014 |
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 10:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
Also keep acetylene gas away from copper piping, as Copper Acetylide can form, which is a heat and shock sensitive high explosive.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 10:08
|
|
|
Can't even welding galvanised steel make you really ill due to the zinc layer evaporating and getting inhaled? I've got some massive respect for welders. While they don't really go FOOF, most of the transition metals are indeed horribly toxic and a pain in the arse to dispose of. Most of them also make some very pretty colours in solution so it's even more disappointing when you have to dispose of them. Like the aforementioned chromium and cadmium, nickel complexes and compounds are carcinogenic in very small amounts. However on the opposite side of the spectrum, some transition metal complexes are extremely useful as therapeutic drugs. Platinum complexes for example are used for treating cancers as part of a course of chemotherapy, and gold is used to treat arthritis. Even more interesting in the case of the gold treatment is that it will build up in your joints so potentially by the end of the treatment you'll have a few hundred dollars of gold in your knuckles. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 12:09
|
|
|
Vitamins posted:Can't even welding galvanised steel make you really ill due to the zinc layer evaporating and getting inhaled? I've got some massive respect for welders. Yep, you get the zinc shakes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 13:05
|
|
|
kastein posted:Yeah, cadmium has been out of use as a coating on bolts in almost every market for quite some time. Like you said, military/aerospace still has a lot of exceptions, be extra careful around those. there's really no hard and fast rule about which is which -- the iridescent color comes from the chromate treament and not the plating itself. And to add to the confusion, there are colored trivalent chromates as well. Oh, and hex chromates get used on some aluminum parts as a pretreatment as well. And as a seal after anodizing. And sometimes in the anodize process ( well, chromic acid ) itself. There's a bunch of alternatives to all this cropping up, but poo poo is still everywhere, especially for military/aerospace parts.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 13:16
|
|
|
Vitamins posted:However on the opposite side of the spectrum, some transition metal complexes are extremely useful as therapeutic drugs. Platinum complexes for example are used for treating cancers as part of a course of chemotherapy, and gold is used to treat arthritis. Even more interesting in the case of the gold treatment is that it will build up in your joints so potentially by the end of the treatment you'll have a few hundred dollars of gold in your knuckles.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 14:00
|
|
|
Vitamins posted:However on the opposite side of the spectrum, some transition metal complexes are extremely useful as therapeutic drugs. Platinum complexes for example are used for treating cancers as part of a course of chemotherapy As much as I respect the fact that it's better than the alternative, I'm still gonna have to say gently caress oxaliplatin. F -, would not inject again if I had a choice. As an idea, it's sorta cool though. Mainlining me some platinum, plebs.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 14:04
|
|
|
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tert-Butyl_hydroperoxide I found this while looking for a good oxidizer. Its the only thing I've ever seen with all 4s in the NFPA diamond. Yeah, I think I'll stick with APS...
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 16:48
|
|
|
One Eye Open posted:Yep, you get the zinc shakes. As far as I know zinc flu wont kill you, it just makes you feel like poo poo. Welding releases tons of nasty vapors though. And yeah, chromates are used a lot in all manner of plating and coating. I found out about this because we were going to use it after an alodyne process (iirc, I am the EE and just heard the MEs talk about it in a meeting, I may have gotten this a bit wrong) to do bond precoating/surface prep/corrosion protection on a bunch of aluminum parts. Upon reading the MSDS, they decided we would be using something else... anything else.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 16:54
|
|
|
kastein posted:And yeah, chromates are used a lot in all manner of plating and coating. I found out about this because we were going to use it after an alodyne process (iirc, I am the EE and just heard the MEs talk about it in a meeting, I may have gotten this a bit wrong) to do bond precoating/surface prep/corrosion protection on a bunch of aluminum parts. Upon reading the MSDS, they decided we would be using something else... anything else. Why no, I didn't want to live that long. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 17:14
|
|
|
kastein posted:
Manganese seems to be among the worst in normal welding, possibly causing brain damage(summaries of the Mayo study and the Washington University School of Medicine study).
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 18:35
|
|
|
Not super dangerous but I would sit around and sniff toluene if it wouldn't kill my brain. I love that smell.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 19:08
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Clostridium Botulinum is a lovely little microbe. It Also, don't buy dented cans. Industry-standard pressure cooking of the cans will zap any botulin inside the can, but dents can introduce microscopic breaches that inoculate the contents with fresh spores - while not admitting sufficient air to make the environment aerobic. The spores find themselves in an all-but-anaerobic environment, with no competitors, and can set about pumping out toxin.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 19:40
|
|
|
In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. I literally thought I was going to die. I was certain that my parents would come home to find a very stupid, very dead teenager on the kitchen floor. It burned all the way down my nose and throat and choked me. I went outside and started gasping in fresh air. For the next few days my sinuses and tastebuds were all messed up. You learn a lot in high school, is what I'm saying.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 20:58
|
|
|
Eclipse12 posted:In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. Holy poo poo.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 21:03
|
|
|
Eclipse12 posted:In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. Pretty sure one of the first things I learned in high school chemistry was that you waft any potential vapors towards your nose, not dunk your face in them. Also, don't play with highly corrosive acids. That was probably the second thing.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 21:21
|
|
|
Eclipse12 posted:In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. Congratulations! You made HCl and SO2. Both of which are quite nasty to inhale.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 21:25
|
|
|
Eclipse12 posted:In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. Back when we were clearing out my grandpa's house after he died, we found an unmarked plastic jug with a clear liquid inside. Curiosity got the better of my dad, so he opened it and went in for a sniff. He says he didn't even get to inhale before it all but knocked him on his rear end. I still wonder what the hell was in that jug, because according my dad, it was worse than anything he'd ever smelled before, way beyond ammonia and those kinds of things.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 21:35
|
|
|
My high school chemistry teacher claims to have been knocked out by taking a whiff of a container of glacial acetic acid. I'm sure it would be rather unpleasant, in any case.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 22:05
|
|
|
ol qwerty bastard posted:My high school chemistry teacher claims to have been knocked out by taking a whiff of a container of glacial acetic acid. I'm sure it would be rather unpleasant, in any case. I don't know how he'd be knocked out by it, but it smells pretty awful. Imagine vinegar but 100x more intense. In Sixth Form one of my friends inhaled a bunch of conc. HCl vapours which gave him a pretty bad nosebleed which was hilarious. Seriously, don't stick your faces over chemicals. I learnt that lesson after stupidly dumping some POCl3 down a wet sink and choking on the fumes.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 22:18
|
|
|
Why would anybody just take a good long whiff of concentrated HCl? I worked with 12M HCl in chem lab at college and that stuff just looks evil. Everybody in my group agreed it would be quite unwise to take it out from under the fume hood, let alone smell it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 22:41
|
|
|
Not really vapor related, but I learned really quickly making gun cotton for college chemistry demos that you want to wear an apron for it, even if you do it in a fume hood. I spent two days doing it and came away with two shirts full of holes from the pure sulfuric and nitric acids I had to use going everywhere when I'd wring the excess acid from the cotton, plus several yellow stains on my skin from the nitric acid. I'm lucky it didn't actually burn me, but I liked those shirts.
RedneckwithGuns has a new favorite as of 01:29 on Jan 17, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 23:09
|
|
|
DemeaninDemon posted:Congratulations! You made HCl and SO2. Both of which are quite nasty to inhale. Could have been a lot worse, I was looking at that set of chemicals and gut feeling told me it was going to produce some nasty chlorine chemical, but I was guessing pure chlorine or the same stuff that is produced by bleach+ammonia. Got off easy on that one, you can recover from hydrochloric acid and SOx pretty easily if you don't die.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 23:14
|
|
|
Irradiation posted:Not super dangerous but I would sit around and sniff toluene if it wouldn't kill my brain. I love that smell. As long as you're not huffing its smaller brother, benzene. Toluene is nothing compared to straight out benzene. It's like Toluene but more effective at lower doses oh and highly carcinogenic. This is why Toluene is your aromatic solvent of choice. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 23:27
|
|
|
kastein posted:Could have been a lot worse, I was looking at that set of chemicals and gut feeling told me it was going to produce some nasty chlorine chemical, but I was guessing pure chlorine or the same stuff that is produced by bleach+ammonia. Got off easy on that one, you can recover from hydrochloric acid and SOx pretty easily if you don't die. The worst parts of the bleach+ammonia reaction come from chlorine reacting with the amine groups, so he was lucky he was using something without those. Hydrazine will seriously gently caress up your day. Everyone thinks ammonia is safe since it's so common but it's a reaction or two away from seriously ruining your day. Seriously, in the presence of chlorine and ammonia, you're gonna get that stuff, and it's both highly toxic and highly flammable. It's not picky about how it kills you, it just wants to kill you.
|
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 23:29
|
|
|
Reminds me of high school chemistry when a student in my class grabbed a fistful of sodium hydroxide pellets during a lab which required it. Literally, she grabbed a chunk of NaOH pellets with her naked hand and clinched it inside her fist. She only got some mild skin irritation, in no small part due to our teacher's quick reaction to it (never seen our chem teacher so furious). Most fearful i've been of any chemical in chem class (college level) has to be when we had to handle Bromium, and maybe Paraquat as the runner up. Corrosive as hell, lots of tiptoeing around it, but kind of beautiful. It's not often you encounter clear coloured gasses, here's a pic:  Bromine is really nasty, chemical warfare in a bottle. Look how the brown clear gas neatly fills the whole round flask. Oddly beautiful. Falukorv has a new favorite as of 23:43 on Jan 16, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 16, 2014 23:41
|
|
|
This thread is awesome! Other than some absolutely terrifying viruses and bacterial agents that I know of prions(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prions) scare me. What are prions? Well they're misfolded proteins produced by a cell. Proteins are produced in a string like fashion(translation) and fold into a tertiary structure during this processing(sometimes modified further after). Prions are proteins that have not folded correctly, therefore do not function as intended. If not recycled by the cell, or if the cell is unable to, they may fold other proteins into a similar fashion. It can act as a template of itself and propagate by 'influencing' other proteins. This may by pass the 'central dogma' of biology which is DNA -> RNA -> Protein with huge interpread regulatory network controlling it all. Instead you have 'bad' proteins making more bad proteins without the cell being able to regulate it otherwise. This is further problematic in that it may be transmissible by many means including consumption of infected tissue. Even if the infected tissue has been cooked the prions may have remained in tact and have the possibility of spreading to the unknowing consumer. Examples: Kuru, Mad Cow disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. I suggest reading up about Kuru. Prions are kinda cool though. There are some complicated arguments about what qualifies something to be 'living.' In the grey zone there interesting subjects like viruses, transposons, prions, and some others I'm probably out of the loop on. If nothing else those topics lead us to redefine some of our qualities on the matter. Eclipse12 posted:In high school I snuck some sulfuric acid out of our chemistry lab. When I got home I wondered if mixing it with bleach would neutralize the pH of the liquids and make something that was basically water (I didn't really do any research here). So that's what I did. I poured some bleach into the acid, waited a few moments, and then took a curious sniff right from the top. Strong acids give an interesting sensation to your respiratory tract. At work we use a tissue fixative called Bouin's which is a combination of picric acid, acetic acid and formaldehyde before processing tissue for histology. A container of it we had laying around was knocked over by my boss spilling the bright yellow Bouin's all over the floor. Gotta clean it up, so we both go down to it only to back away after less than a minute of cleaning because both of us had stinging sensations and watering eyes. That was a fairly tame concentration of those acids and even it was distasteful. If that's a sampling of stronger acids I don't want to know. There was another experience I had using some HCl out of a fume hood(because there wasn't one) to adjust the pH of a buffer. It turned into a game of 'hold you breath, point the bottle away, collect HCl, close, then finally breathe.' Yeah, not doing that again. Ever. Just think, in the past it was commonplace to Mouth pipette( http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/bodyhorrors/2013/03/20/mouth_pipetting/#.UthhZPRDt6c ). They had bulbs to do the job, but nothing was as accurate as using your body! Thankfully that practice has mostly passed on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 00:08
|
|
|
Eggbeater Jesus posted:Why would anybody just take a good long whiff of concentrated HCl? I worked with 12M HCl in chem lab at college and that stuff just looks evil. Everybody in my group agreed it would be quite unwise to take it out from under the fume hood, let alone smell it. Beats me. We had to dilute down 12M HCl in one of our chem labs. Later, we were to warm up some diluted HCl on a heating plate under a hood. Some herfderf decided to just use the 12M HCl in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. Cue a lab evacuation after we all started getting sick and noticing the green gas clouds. The worst part is, he got upset with /us/ and went "OH, you should've told me."
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 01:09
|
|
|
I made the mistake of sniffing an unlabelled bottle while working in a high school lab. Yep, ammonia. GWBBQ posted:your skin still may irreversibly turn purple.  (The theme from The Smurfs is now playing in your head).
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 01:25
|
|
|
Speaking of Fluorine compounds, a friend of mine posted this on Facebook, seems like something you really don't want to gently caress with: Sodium Fluoride.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 01:44
|
|
|
snorch posted:Speaking of Fluorine compounds, a friend of mine posted this on Facebook, seems like something you really don't want to gently caress with: Sodium Fluoride. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3548514 http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3100175
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 01:50
|
|
|
I'm gonna give a simple shout-out to Piranha solution: 4 parts concentrated sulfuric acid, 1 part 20% hydrogen peroxide, served hot. It does a great job if you want to clean pretty much any organic compound off a surface, but that also included your flesh right off your bones. In my old lab I used to make the stuff daily and one drop fell on my leather lab shoes and almost ate a hole clear through them (wear closed toe shoes and aprons kiddies). Oh yeah, also if you do something real dumb like pour ethanol in the piranha you get a big fire pretty quickly. Bip Roberts has a new favorite as of 01:58 on Jan 17, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 01:55
|
|
|
Say Nothing posted:I made the mistake of sniffing an unlabelled bottle while working in a high school lab. My high school chemistry teacher held out a stoppered bottle and challenged me to identify its content by smell. It was butyric acid. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 02:23
|
|
|
Dusseldorf posted:I'm gonna give a simple shout-out to Piranha solution: 4 parts concentrated sulfuric acid, 1 part 20% hydrogen peroxide, served hot. It does a great job if you want to clean pretty much any organic compound off a surface, but that also included your flesh right off your bones. In my old lab I used to make the stuff daily and one drop fell on my leather lab shoes and almost ate a hole clear through them (wear closed toe shoes and aprons kiddies). That's similar to what they used on Mythbusters to try and recreate the body dissolving scene from Breaking Bad. They dumped a pig carcass in the H2SO4 and then added H2O2 and the pig basically vaporized into a black pool of carbon. Didn't really scratch the tub, though. As far as welding health concerns, one of the long-term issues is permanent neurological damage. I saw a patient who was a welder and his MRI of the brain was speckled with tiny white dots, which is from the manganese accumulation in brain tissue. Over time it can kill the neurons in the brain and lead to Parkinson-like disease.  That big white spot isn't supposed to be there.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 02:27
|
|
|
onemanlan posted:Strong acids give an interesting sensation to your respiratory tract. At work we use a tissue fixative called Bouin's which is a combination of picric acid, acetic acid and formaldehyde before processing tissue for histology. A container of it we had laying around was knocked over by my boss spilling the bright yellow Bouin's all over the floor. Gotta clean it up, so we both go down to it only to back away after less than a minute of cleaning because both of us had stinging sensations and watering eyes. That was a fairly tame concentration of those acids and even it was distasteful. If that's a sampling of stronger acids I don't want to know. In high school we worked with some H2SO4, I think it was 5M on the day we got concentrated stuff. We had a major spill that went unattended because that group didn't know how to clean it up. The fumes from the acid chewing away at a wooden countertop left me with a cough for about six months.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 02:30
|
|
|
Dusseldorf posted:I'm gonna give a simple shout-out to Piranha solution: 4 parts concentrated sulfuric acid, 1 part 20% hydrogen peroxide, served hot. It does a great job if you want to clean pretty much any organic compound off a surface, but that also included your flesh right off your bones. In my old lab I used to make the stuff daily and one drop fell on my leather lab shoes and almost ate a hole clear through them (wear closed toe shoes and aprons kiddies). I was doing prep work for metal analysis of ore samples for a summer job. We used a nasty cocktail of concentrated HCl, HNO3, HClO4, and HF acids to digest the ore samples.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 02:37
|
|
|
I managed to add water to a beaker of full-fat 18M concentrated sulphuric acid once because I'm an idiot. FOOOOOOSH splash fizz fizz fizz gently caress poo poo gently caress.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 03:21
|
|
|
I'm Crap posted:I managed to add water to a beaker of full-fat 18M concentrated sulphuric acid once because I'm an idiot. FOOOOOOSH splash fizz fizz fizz gently caress poo poo gently caress. Do you still have a face? This sounds like the kind of thing that results in someone losing their face.
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 03:59
|
|
|
Really loving this thread so far, even if I think reading the links in it have put me on some lists. In payment, have some gifs I found in YOSPOS of metals reacting badly to mercury (the first one, at any rate. Not sure what's happening in the second).  
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 05:59
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 5, 2024 00:54 |
|
|
Terrible Robot posted:Really loving this thread so far, even if I think reading the links in it have put me on some lists. Dont make mercury compounds angry! You wouldn't like me when I'm reacting with transition metals!
|
|
#
?
Jan 17, 2014 06:06
|
|
