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I was just recently directed to this thread, but wow that's a lot to read through. Anyways, my own story to tell isn't quite mine. Instead, a friend of mine (let's call him Matthew) likes to tell this on behalf of his parents. Both of Matthew's parents are schoolteachers of some sort, and as you'd expect have collected a lot of stories over the years. They're actually planning to write a book about such experiences when they retire, if they haven't done so already. (I first heard this perhaps five years ago, for context.) And in particular, Matthew's mother works teaching something that necessitates a storage room attached to her classroom. Perhaps biology, perhaps chemistry, perhaps something else, I forget. The previous user of the classroom and its attached storage room had some genial person who'd been willing to store things for others in that storage room. So long as the item in question could fit on a shelf and you hadn't pissed this person off, you could likely drop off said item without many questions. And when that previous user had left, most if not all of the relevant contents had remained in the room. So it was that Matthew's mother was rather surprised on her first day to find an oil-filled jar of white phosphorus in the storage room. Given that it was otherwise filled with oil, the jar wasn't at immediate risk of causing a massive hazard and potentially killing students or staff. But Matthew's mother was still understandably disturbed to find a war crime waiting to happen in her back room, or more generally on school grounds, and thus made some phone calls. Shortly thereafter some well-trained folks from the EPA came to dispose of the jar and its contents, letting everyone else get back to business. I'm sure that none of the staff forgot that particular incident.
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Aug 4, 2016 11:26
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Maxwells Demon posted:Is ClF3 a 0 on the toxicity scale because ClF3 is actually not significantly toxic or because it will oxidize into substances so quickly you don't need to worry about its toxicity?
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Feb 26, 2018 03:44
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I love the Weekly World News. 
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Apr 21, 2018 00:47
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Grumbletron 4000 posted:I do know of that certain kind that causes a horrible prolonged death like that poor lady chemist that had a drop go through her glove and died an agonizing death. 
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Jul 17, 2018 07:50
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Technically she did run a lab with unsafe working conditions, but that's less on her and far more on the extremely undeveloped nature of the field at the time. Nobody really knew at the time just what radiation could do, so everyone was doing poo poo that in hindsight would freak out any current scientist in the field. (Tesla stuck his head in an X-ray beam for a time before wisely reconsidering after the heat got to him.) In particular Marie Curie often kept a sample of some radioactive isotope on her person as a party amusement or an impromptu flashlight in addition to several other test tubes around her home and workspace; to this day many of her papers and even her cookbook are hazardous without gear. It was only after scandals like the Radium Girls in the 1920s that the danger of radiation was first realized, and by then Curie was in her twilight years. As for the reasons for character assassination, being a woman at the turn of the 20th century was unfortunately not the full story. She wasn't French, so in an era of nationalism the right-wing press loved to bash her for being Polish. And being a foreigner, she could then be painted as either godless or (even worse!) Jewish.  Yeah, poo poo like the Dreyfus Affair didn't show up in isolation.
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Oct 11, 2018 04:02
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BattleMaster posted:For centuries, a rite of passage for chemists was the preparation of tetralitiomethane. This tiny molecule - starting as carbon tetrachloride, force-fed mercury, then suffocated in a near vacuum - was prepared whole and burned that way, bonds and all, while the apparatus was draped with a linen napkin to preserve the precious aromas and, some believe, to hide from God. 
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Jul 5, 2019 01:58
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TorpedoFish posted:The first attempt at making a nuclear reactor that could be operated by the average soldier resulted in a destroyed reactor and deaths of all three "operators", including one pinned to the ceiling by a control rod.
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Jan 20, 2020 04:39
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zedprime posted:Besides biological factors like that, the fundamental chemistry part is a fluorine calcium bond is so ridiculously favored that HF gets over being a weak acid to gobble it up any chance it can manage. If it didn't favor one cation so tremendously you'd be a bit safer too.
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Mar 3, 2020 03:33
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It sounds like a way to smuggle in the Church of Drinking Bleach.
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Apr 4, 2020 04:18
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Isn't that one of the really venomous ones? Some species of blue-ringed octopus?
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Feb 20, 2021 22:12
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LifeSunDeath posted:water is dry as hell, also sharks are smooth as hell 
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Oct 25, 2021 17:40
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Platystemon posted:Yeah good luck beating established solutions, honed by genetic algorithms.
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Mar 15, 2022 22:49
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Zil posted:For the idiots in the back, namely me, is that study discussing how to take meth and turn it back into sudafedrine?
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Jul 20, 2022 04:34
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Phanatic posted:Highest specific impulse chemical system ever was a tripropellant mix of hydrogen, ClF3, and lithium. 
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Jan 7, 2023 01:53
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Apr 7, 2023 01:33
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The Claptain posted:Toluene, chromyl chloride and carbon tet Then he pulled out the carbon tet and I went "OHNONONO you incredibly foolhardy man don't touch that". 
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Jun 2, 2023 15:19
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I know this is a typo, but the idea of subatomic particles annihilating to produce seamen is really funny to me for some reason.
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Feb 2, 2024 04:36
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