Lab screw ups

Charred $450 worth of organic product and 3 mo of work. It still haunts me to this day. Although its not the worst I've heard.

A prof told me a story that when he was an undergrad, first day during the meeting he and the PI listened to a 2nd yr grad student say she was having trouble with a reaction for 6 months. Turns out she was trying to do something that was literally impossible. The PI said "once I get some fucking grant money it'll only be undergrads and postdocs because postdocs know what they're doing and undergrads know they don't know shit!"

This one time I accidentally unplugged this freezer.

Honestly I would rather not talk about it again..

cool blog

I remember you. How was the fallout?

Wanna know how I can tell you're a virgin?

>unplugged the freezer
I would murder you

just for fun, how do you figure?

You deserve a punishment worse than death

>I wasted 20 seconds of my life to read this

Anyone who takes the time out of their day to write a paragraph fetishising their lab partner, then goes out of their way to provide an explanation as to why they didn't pursue said lab partner (to a bunch of internet autismos on Veeky Forums, no less) just has to be either a virgin, or a pathetic person with too much time on their hands.

You're a virgin because you post on this board.

I'm not even the guy you're replying to

I don't even think there was a lab partner. He's just a talented story-teller.

On-topic, I just learned about the demon core.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Not my story, but a lab mate was telling me a story about what happened at a biotech place he works at.

Long story short, someone fucked up the buffer stock and about $500k worth of protein had to be poured down the drain because of it.

i was a TA in genetics lab and accidentally put the wrong primers and sequences out in lab for my 2 sessions for a PCR and electrophoresis

No one received results and no one isolated gene sequences from my screw up, I found my error after multiple students complained that their shit was bandless and some students stayed over to repeat their study and it still came bandless

>tfw accidently grabbed glucose solution droppers instead
>tfw I only took undergrad genetics and was a graduate biochem student

Not that big of a screw-up, but I was on the bus heading to the Chemistry practical exam, and I was talking to my mates, one friend tells me
>I'm so stressed, I double-checked if I took my labcoat this morning
>Haha, that's funny
>Wait

And that's how I almost got an F to this test.

I once caused a small flourine fire.

The sheer panic I felt....you ever seen concrete on fire? Would have been beautiful if the fumes weren't life-ending poison.

I got it out and manged to cover the whole thing up. Thank God I was working outside and none of that shit got on me. Never again will i fuck with anything that nasty.

Same exact thing happened to me in my O chem lab last summer. Loved the smell of the lab

I was quenching about 10 g of LiAlH4 in a litre of ether, by running dilute sulfuric acid down the side of the flask into the solution.

There was a bit of dried residue and for a few moments I got to see some glowing embers where the dry LiAlH4 was reacting with the water.

You were working with actual gaseous fluorine? Or some other fluorinating reagent?

>The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

I heard a story that happened in my lab a few years ago.
Basically there is a research group which works on advanced fluorescence techniques, and had among other equipment a state-of-the-art STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction microscope) setup, which was really expensive, with lots of table optics elements and so on.
One day, someone from another group decided to wash glassware using aqua regalia. He put like 10 liters of the acidic mixture under a fume hood and let it boil to clean stuff. The thing is that the fume hood was not working, and was also connected to the microscope room where the STORM was. When people went in the room to use the microscope, everything was destroyed, including the optic table (!).
Basically a microscope setup worth 500k-1M was ruined, and they lost like two years of research since they had to assemble a new one.

My o-lab always reeked of acetone, i actually got nasues once or twice every lab and woulf take a break in the bathroom

Pro tip: she was aware you did nothing and would have felt bad if she mentioned how useless you were. In fact she probably ranted to her bf about how shitty her lab partner was and how she does all the work. I've been in that situation before (minus,the qt bf)

I used the wrong pipette and contaminated one of the stocks for the entire Orgo lab. I was the first one to get the solution, so everyone else after me ended up getting no reaction, and yet they never found out who contaminated the stock.

Oh come on it can't be that bad, aren't freezers insulated anyway? Did you like ruin a lot of rare samples or something? Surely they would have freezers like this with a dedicated un-unpluggable electrical supply, so i doubt a freshmans could fuck it up

Oh man! tell us again!

Nothing too major.

Dumped 8000 psi of air into a 2000 psi max pressure gauge because I grabbed the wrong dial. Tooted like a train whistle and fucked all the mechanisms up. $500 to replace.

Also I put a tray of rock plugs into the 100C oven instead of the 60C humidity oven, which dehydrated them and collapsed the clays, fucking the porosity.

Mining lab, btw.

I leaned on the emergency power switch and delayed an experiment by an hour. Not a big deal honestly.

>how shall I quench these ~5-10 mL of unreacted chlorosufuric acid in DCM in an apparatus equipped with two outlet bubblers to scrub the acidic fumes
>add quite a bit of water
>stopper is ejected from flask like a cannonball and ricochets off the fume hood wall

Chlorosulfuric acid

Never again

I could buy the fume hood not working, but to have it vent into another room in the lab? Bullshit.

All the hoods would be connected to the same extract system, so if the whole system was down then vapours from one hood would diffuse into the ducts and down everywhere else, presumably.

Depends what the timescale was.

Physicists and chemicals seem to be a bad combination, I've heard of one lab where they needed to clean a lot of silicon wafers for surface functionalisation, so somebody decided to make up a nice big bottle of pirahna solution and then tightly stopper it and keep it for storage...

One time one my professors farted when he was going to lean forward to help us out.

It was an old building, and the fume hoods were connected in some way, idk.
Anyway, the story is not bullshit and it severely held back the progress of the lab at an important moment.
Feel free to call bullshit, idgaf, just telling what I heard from the head of the group

This is evil

I was in a lab with a guy who was one or two steps away from creating dimethylmercury. Without a fume hood or gloves.

Professor nearly had an aneurysm when he realized how close we came to all dying in the shittiest way possible. Never saw that guy again, I think the Professor managed to get him expelled.

>tfw he reads at 438 words per minute.
Brainlet detected

Don't take it personally, we just get a lot of people making up shit in these threads. Usually more fake shit than real.

Good point about connected ducts though.

You sure you don't mean diethyl ether? Never heard of people getting dizzy from acetone.

In secondary school when we were creating hydrogen gas with hydrochloric acid and some metal, one hurr durr gurl took burning match and put it directly in front of pipe where gas was coming from. Erlenmeyer exploded and acid flew all over the class room. Fortunately we had safety glasses

Someone put plastic in the glass waste bin

So every single student in that Chem quad got 10pts taken off their grade

Wasn't our section though. I had to put something in the bin at the end of class and there wasn't any plastic in it then

Ouch.....

Fuck me, we Gordon Ramsay's Lab Nightmares now?

Now I need to know.

I did the same shit but with eugenol lmao smell was dope tho

This is a story my dad always tells me about when he was in grad school.

Two grad students were fighting about whether a brick of sodium would float or sink in water. The one remembered his high school chemistry demonstration showing that a small chunk of sodium clearly floated. The other remarked, "These are merely surface effects, like how spiders can use their hairs to float on water" and that they were "unable to scale properly" to a scale of a brick. The brick of sodium would sink, as the molecular weight of sodium is greater than water.
Like good scientists they decided to test this hypothesis. They carefully measured out a kilogram of sodium from the store room, brought it to the school lake, and threw it in.

Well, they found out that sodium does in fact float. The surface of the sodium rapidly oxidized, releasing heat, hydrogen gas, which instantly ignited, creating an almost-hovercraft ballooned up by burning hydrogen. The brick raced across the lake and into a group of neighboring pine trees, which of course ignited. The grad students called the fire department, but never let them know the source of the fire.

Took a chem gen ed at the end of high school.
Our project was making fireworks because we were in a private school.
My buddy put too many chemicals in his mixture which apparently brought the ignition temperature down below the temperature of the corning oven.
It lit everyone's fireworks and almost burned the school down. Fire department came and yelled at our instructor. Had a good giggle.

I once needed to mix Nitric acid with ethanol, I didn't knew that I need to dilute first. That shit started to turn green. Just ran out and watched that eruption for some seconds, and then I cleared all. The End.

>grad students not knowing that sodium reacts violently with water

Where they art majors?

Stanford Prison Experiment. I was a guard.

can you validate your claim? either way no one really gives a shit, psych isn't science

i remember being in the lab and some small pox got polluted by some of the air ventilations of the lab. Killed the woman downstairs. I ended up killing myself.

>Intro to chemistry
>Yea, I started at the fucking bottom of the barrel
>In lab, checkin out what the hell pH is
>Got a bunch of acids and a bunch of basis, gotta figure out which one is which
>Go get some HCl
>go get a 100mL like the bottom of the barrel children's lab book tells me to
>fat, dyke black women is fucking dancing in the lab
>No one says shit because the TA is checked out doing his own shit
>she bumps into me
>it spills everywhere, a ton of it is in her "hair" or whatever shit is weaved in
>I get another and go to my table, this time Like I'm carrying a live grenade
>about a minute later, my hand is itchy as fuck, wash it off, no big deal
>a few minutes later, dyke is screaming her head burns
>Her hair is giving off stinky steam
>TA freaks out, evacuates class
>See her getting undressed by the lab body shower
>Hear TA yelling
>Never see dyke again
>New TA next lab

what a bunch of goofball assholes, you need finesse

In a high school chemistry class I once opened the super concentrated lab stock solution of ammonia and took a big sniff because i had read in my textbook it had a strong odour.

Fucking almost knocked me out. I lay down on the floor and had tears streaming out my eyes for hours, lungs were on fire.

Good times

We had a few huge nitrous tanks. It was for making whipped cream and how the teacher explained that "the grocery store is actually a chemical store." Man.... it was glorious how much Nitrous we consumed and got away with it scott free. We also had to lay on the floor, with tears in our eyes trying our best not to laugh!

Kek

Fucking roaches tho?

my dad's an ME and he told me an amusing story from work.
the company he works for makes a lot of audio equipment. for whatever reason (don't remember what exactly the test was) there are some things they do with prototypes that require a nitrogen atmosphere. so they have a sealed chamber to run tests in.
one time, management brass comes down to see what those pesky engineers are up to, and is super excited to see the test in action. when they're ready to open up the chamber afterwards and remove the prototype, they tell him to stand back from the door. he doesn't listen...and promptly faints as the pure N2 washes over him.

>geochemistry lab
>guy pours liquid nitrogen on his sleeve
>doesn't notice (yeah, don't ask me how, he's kinda..... special)
>almost loses his hand

>organic chemistry lab
>have to use heat basket for some reaction
>plug in heat basket, not realize it's turned on immediately
>supposed to heat solution slowly
>leave heat basket on while finishing making solution
>the time has come
>put the flask in the heat basket
>everything evaporates in brown smoke
I'm pretty sure I inhaled some of that shit :(

Fuck

What would happen if you threw it onto an ice cold lake? Would the temperature be low enough to keep it from auto-igniting?

Also, shouldn't it have exploded like the one in this video?
youtube.com/watch?v=NTFBXJ3Zd_4

he must have been really dense not to notice it
first portions of liquid nitrogen instanteniously evaporate and deal no damage

Not me personally but there is that one youtuber hobbyist chemist who died after producing mustard gas (or was it phosgene?) even after being warned not to do it. Can't remember the channel's name. RIP though.

>she did all my work for me.
muh sides
you are my hero

Someone left a spoon in a bowl and put in the microwave in the breakroom of the lab. Had to evacuate 3 floors because alarms went off. Chemists, amirite?

>This one time I accidentally unplugged this freezer.

I mislabeled the Hydrogen tank "Helium" freshman year.
A couple people didn't fly so good after that one.

>A couple people didn't fly so good after that one.
What was the tank for?

You're close to why we can be sure he's a virgin, but you're over analyzing things.He literally gave it away in the first sentence
>Well since I'm a computer science major....

You should be put up against a wall and shot.

...

>last to finish my experiment
>my lab partner left without really cleaning so it's just me and the TA
>at least she's kind of qt
>finally finish cleaning
>bend over to pick up my book bag and go
>shit my pants right in front of her
>there's no way she didn't notice
>there was a very loud, wet, watery sound to it
>I just stare at her for a moment, and she's wide eyed
>then I just bust out running out of there
>worst part is that some chunks and liquid managed to come out my pants leg when I ran away

I dropped that lab and took it again next semester, not a big deal I guess.

>supercritical fluid lab
>wrenching a $5000 high-pressure gas flow controller in place
>fffffffuuggg, I bent it
>attempt to fix
>it's now fucked completely
>nobody saw this, proceed to assemble the rest of the reactor
>experiment begins
>reactor is full with carbohydrates
>oxygen flows in uncontrollably
>fucking explosion
>lab assistant nearly killed by shrapnel
>$20k total damages
>everyone thinks it was an accident

Jesus Christ

no dancing in lab, kline

dropped a pipette in a chromatography column beyond my reach
really didnt change anything though and just continued it normally with it chilling in there

funniest screw up was at a cancer research lab where I was interning. This Indian investigator drooled into a cryostorage

WEW, now that's what I call psycho.

Thanks, reading all of these made me feel much better about my own fuckup.

i dont know why i laughed at this

Lab is empty, me and teacher
Cleaning up before going home
Spill like 300ml of high morality hcl in a hole behind the counter near the window

Forget about it and clean then rest up
Come back next semester and they're remodeling a few floors due to lab damages

one time in high school we were boiling water in a beaker over a bunsen burner for some reason and the teacher called for our attention and he was standing at our table so the class was also looking at me and my friend accidentally knocked the stand that the beaker was on and i jump onto the bench at my side as the beaker of boiling water fell past my torso and everyone saw, no burns

>high morality hcl

ebint :---DDd

Meanwhile we played ammonia hangman with 5 molar ammonia

>ammonia hangman
0w0 what's this?

oh fugg

I tried that with concentrated vinegar, it was like a physical sensation. I can only imagine how hard ammonia must have kicked.

How come you are still alive? The wrath of a PhD student close to time limit is considered a force of nature ready to unleash a personal apocalypse on any potential problem between him and graduation.

You had that "good pair of running shoes" ready?

Not him but I had the misfortune of experiencing a similar kind of problem. What was extracted from the fume hood was deposited in a lab nearby. Two were sent to hospital, one remained there for a while and the rest sent to medical checkup.