Computer viking posted:

On the flipside, it is a positive nightmare to put out if you do manage to light it on fire.

Say Nothing posted:

Well, if you want unstable chemicals, i've work in one lab where there's been a dried-up bottle of Picric Acid at the back of the cupboard which no one wanted to touch.
I was slightly concerned about an ancient, half empty bottle of ether in my last laboratory, as ether can form explosive peroxides in the presence of air. Apart from that, I haven't really worked with much dangerous stuff, as I mostly deal with inorganic chemistry.

kastein posted:

burning the 32lbs of thermite I had on hand.

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.

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.

ubergnu posted:

Pff, I can manage most of that with just ethanol.

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.

7thBatallion posted:

What's 100,000 CPM in rads?

Saint Celestine posted:

This might be an appropriate question for this thread-

Whats a chemistry experiment one could perform for a class of kids with a big WOW factor, and isn't going to be dangerous?

Light Gun Man posted:

Where do they even take that stuff to dispose of it? Does it get processed back into something useful and sent off to labs or does the EPA just have a black hole somewhere they throw all this poo poo in?

Memento posted:

And that that particular brand of poison is being used on kids that have muscular spasm issues to make them work properly again
Cheers guys, I just sent these around the office, much mild chortling was had.

Perestroika posted:

That reminds me, in my old school there used to be a kind of urban legend going around that a rather inept chemistry teacher almost burned her face off trying to do a thermite experiment with a wrong ingredient that basically caused the whole thing to fountain up straight into the air. From researching it a bit it seems like the most likely culprit could be accidentally using something more energetic like magnesium oxide rather than iron oxide in the same quantity, but I don't know if that would produce such a reaction. Does anybody happen to know whether something like that is possible or if it's just made up?

RedneckwithGuns posted:

I don't know about explicit chemicals, but I remember a few months ago seeing how exfoliating face scrubs are bad now because they use plastic micro beads that like to play hell with modern water recycling stuff as well as typically finding their way to the ocean to join various garbage patches.

Luneshot posted:

released heat of about 1000 watts per gram

quote:

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php

Hydrogen sulfide, for example, reacts with four molecules of FOOF to give sulfur hexafluoride, 2 molecules of HF and four oxygens. . .and 433 kcal, which is the kind of every-man-for-himself exotherm that you want to avoid at all cost.

Carbon dioxide posted:

I have one too. This picture makes it look a hundred times as bright as it really is.

Groda posted:

deadly_pudding posted:

I wish I could remember what the exact compound was-
This kind of viscous yellow sludge that was a compound of lead and some other thing. We were working with it in Honors Chemistry in high school, and our teacher put the fear of God into us by telling us that if it touched our skin we would get cancer.

In retrospect, given the setting, I think he was exaggerating.

SymmetryrtemmyS posted:

Still is, I thought.

Alereon posted:

Tungsten is 85% as dense and you can actually get samples pretty cheaply and easily.

Munin posted:

Btw, slight aside but I've been trying to remember the title of a book about industrial chemistry of similar vintage to "Ignition!" written by a guy who ran a fine chemicals company in the US and the strange orders he fulfilled over the years. Several of them were of the "Things I will not work with" variety.

Does that ring a bell with anyone?

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

So essentially, if the very idea of something exists, someone has considered using it as rocket fuel.

Wylie posted:

Now I want to know what color Faygo is when it's on fire.

Platystemon posted:

Cadmium is amazing as an industrial plating.

It’s a shame it’s toxic.

SneakyFrog posted:

..... oh boy.

Vallejo paints you say?

well. Guess i gots me some cadmium.

Tunicate posted:

Ah you see, the falcon is such a piece of poo poo with turned-off safety features so good a tweaked-out supership that it can get closer to the gravity well than other ships can.

mostlygray posted:

You are correct. It's also called plastic weld if you go to a model shop. Its' icy cold touch when you accidentally inject it into a finger is pleasant reminder of my college days. If you don't hit a vein, it won't kill you, so that isn't too bad.

Kwyndig posted:

It's not entirely butyl acetate, they just use it as a solution to dilute the real solvent in it and of course it smells like fruit, many fruits produce butyl acetate.