Tell us some hilarious lab experiences!
>molecular biology lab
>paired with a pre-vet girl
>she was given a micropipette
>"How do I know how much water this will hold?"
>later she makes the classic mistake of not balancing the centrifuge
>destruction
>still got good grade because of me
>physiology lab
>chronaxie and rheobase of human radial nerve
>I give my friend nice 120 V pulses with 10 Hz frequency
>watch him twitch and suffer
>don't balance the centrifuge
One time I didn't notice my grinding wheel was cracked and it exploded. That was fun. Highly recommend, high speed aluminum oxide is a good time for the whole family.
>>/Reddit/
Thanks for your cooperation
>Work in engineering lab
>Lots of heavy equipment, chemicals, etc.
>One guy accidentally squirts superglue into his eyeball, has to go to emergency opthamologist
Another guy accidentally squirts NaOH into his eye, has to go to emergency ophthalmologist
>Another guy got his fingers crushed under a 50kg steel plate and had to get surgery
Plenty more that's happened """unofficially""" that no one talks about
>crushed under a 50 kg steel plate
Ouch
>Making suppositories in lab
>Prof calls them RectalRockets
I chuckled for like 20 minutes
>made a circuit composed of only batteries
>left it on for 20+ mins, and left the lab (with everyone inside it)
>one of the batteries exploded over my lab partner's notes
Why?
why to what?
we left the lab to do some shit interactive experiment outside.
the battery exploded because it overheated, considering the only thing the circuit could produce was heat and there were 6 of those big batteries connected end to end.
>When you're in a PCR lab and you don't know whether you've fucked up or not until week 12
Hahaha I love performance anxiety.
Are engineers seriously such big fuckups in labs?
>Research assistant for a color-vision study in 2nd year (co-op)
>Grad student goes "hey I have a thing can you test this subject"
>lolsure
>Need to turn on one of the tests
>there are a few different things plugged into a power bar
>power bar doesn't have a light to tell you if it's on
>hit the switch
>hmm, nothing happened
>switch it back
>nothing
>Oh, there's a switch on the back of the test lel
>Few hours later
>prof and grad student say that one of the computers crashed and they cant fix it
>cant use that computer (nor the test installed on it) for the remainder of the study
>mfw I realized that computer was on and plugged into that power bar
>mfw noface
As an undergrad researcher, I successfully killed/contaminated about 3 trays of bacterial colonies that had been growing for about 4 weeks by sneezing on them. Thank god I was doing it for money and not credit.
You're evil.
>failed first midterm
>have to rely on a really strong curve to bring my mark up
>replace other lab member's solutions with water whenever they're not looking
DEVILISH
I added some sugar to one student's urine sample at med school. Now he thinks he has diabetes.
can the """"""""" meme die already? its bad
>first year in med school
>biology lesson, learning to use microscope.
>teacher asked a girl for her saliva
>we saw sperm
The last lab I worked in you had to wear full safety gear regardless of what you were doing. Pretty much everything was conducted at a foggy yell.
...
Repeatedly burned meself with soldering iron.
lmao
I was working on a robot for a competition that was coming up in our high school's tech lab.
> Working on robot, sitting on field right next to it, and trying to fix an axel hub that is not sufficiently bolted down to the axel.
> Get an Allen key and screw the bolt back down, tension seems to be good enough, proceed with some stress tests.
> Grab a controller, and run at full power the DC motor that the aforementioned axel was connected to.
> mfw my hand was resting on top of the gear of aforementioned axel hub.
> mfw I ran a DC motor at full speed with a 1:6 gear ratio.
> mfw that my middle finger went straight into that gear ratio.
> mfw I pulled out at the very last second before my finger would've been crushed.
> mfw a loud "FUCK" rang throughout the school that moment.
> mfw the robot I began to hate with a passion tore my middle finger.
Every skill that uses a big rocket in games gets branded a suppository in my mind.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
>“It all started with an enquiry from a nurse,” Dr Karl Kruszelnicki told listeners to his science phone-in show on the Triple J radio station in Brisbane. “She wanted to know whether she was contaminating the operating theatre she worked in by quietly farting in the sterile environment during operations, and I realised that I didn't know. But I was determined to find out.”
Getting to a lab very early has its perks. Lab partner brought in some food grade mineral oil and filled his mouth with it and then stuck a tiny chunk of potassium metal in there, when he exhaled the moisture in his breath reacted with the potassium and gave him fiery dragon breath for split second.
Burned his lips a little but he was stoked about doing it. I wasn't even mad honestly, it was cool.
>quietly farting
I got you mang
In cell culture lab they asked me to cleanse the laminar flow cabinet. I spilled ethanol and set the inside on fire. It did the job.
>Another guy got his fingers crushed under a 50kg steel plate, has to go to emergency opthamologist
ftfy
>Working on "star in a jar" experiment for advanced physics lab
>have 1 partner
>hes the nit picky carful type and im the spaz trippin out that i finally get to make a damn star in a jar
>use a filament to generate steam bubble to be caught in standing waves blah blah
>adjusting filament before putting it in the vat
>he fucking turns it on and it fucking brands me
>your fucking luck
>super glue in eyeball
fuck people like you
how about you perform better or get the fuck out instead of sabotaging other people
I sense in you a darkness that will consume worlds.
In our uni only chemistry department is forced to wear safety stuff. Physics, engineering, biology, biochem... nah, they'll be fine...
>get caught
>get banned from entering any university for 10 years
>Neuroscience lab, dissecting sheep brains
>First week of lab, just a simple mid saggital cut
>Knives we use are rounded and don't look very sharp
>TA is talking about various structures, showing where to cut exactly and asks if we think the knife looks sharp
>Some guy says "no", proceeds to run it across his palm
>Turns out they are very sharp, his palm is now cut open and blood is everywhere
>TA is as dumbfounded by what he just saw as the rest of us
I now TA that course and we don't have materials out at the start, students need to grab them themselves and aren't allowed to do so until after the first quick safety orientation. It's a third year course so you'd think people would be smart enough not to run a knife across their palm
>It's a third year course so you'd think people would be smart enough
you'd be wrong, very wrong.
It's sad how retarded people can get university level degrees too.
>One guy accidentally squirts superglue into his eyeball
How the fuck does one accidentally squirt fucking superglue into his eyeball, fucking engineers I swear
>TA is talking about various structures, showing where to cut exactly and asks if we think the knife looks sharp
>Some guy says "no", proceeds to run it across his palm
Absolute mad man
>PCR lab
>waiting 12 weeks for results
what the fuck are you on about?
>engineering student
>be in chemistry lab
>partner drops a test tube
>TA gives us shit
>5 minutes later
>I drop a test tube
>TA gives us a mark deduction for "poor lab conduct"
>asks us for our names
>mishears my partners name, deducts marks from a different guy instead
Why didn't you pretend to be someone else?
What kind of experiments were you supposed to do?
>whoops i thought it was mine
Wow, so hard.
one of my friend accidentally injected cancer cells into his finger a few years ago. Luckily they were already in a denaturating medium and nothing happend after
holy shit we're all doomed
Just because that is what you are shown the most does not mean it happens as regularly as it seems.
These accidents are likely very rare and happened over many years.
where does this comic come from?
what's its name?
I don't know, saw it in a thread in /b/ 2 days ago
>First year honors bio lab
>Lab partner is an aspiring
>TA is having us to cell culture.
>After 2 hours of doing several different cultures I let him put them away
>He drops all of them on floor
>Proceeds to open them "to make sure they are OK"
>Come back next lab
>Mold on our samples
>TA deducts nothing because he doesn't give a shit.
Aspie*
Another
>In chem lab
>We are synthesizing some obscure, useless chemical x
>TA "make sure after step 4 to make sure you stir the solution slowly"
>Step 4 finished I'm anxious to get out of this aweful lab (2.5 hours in)
>Stir as slow as possible, solution essentially explodes in my face
>TA "you must have stirred to quickly, go ahead and start over"
>Tell him I'm good he can grade my solution when I'm done
>Make roughly 2% of x in entire solution
>Only subtracts 5%
>Feelsgoodman
>get lazy working, sit on a stool
>diluting 18M H2SO4
>go home and after laundry
>see pants has wholes in it
>resemble drops and realize i had spilled shit on myself earlier in the day
Last one
>Physics lab
>Measuring friction on surfaces with highly inaccurate sensors
>All these honors kids trying desperately to get decent results
>I just google friction values in the objects and write a function to create my values in excel.
>My lab is done in under 15 minutes
>Next lab I'm told everyone had to stay an extra hour
What kind of ghetto school do you go to where the centrifuges don't shut down upon detecting a major imbalance?
Slightly related, a failure analysis case I worked once involved an industrial centrifuge for bulk wine manufacturing. This thing was taller than a person. The bolts holding it to the ground were suffering from fatigue. Once one failed, the other degraded bolts all followed suit and the centrifuge was loose. Shoot itself through two walls before it moved far enough to unplug itself.
>Going through lab supplies taking stock
>Open cabinet, see bottle way in the back in a dark corner
>It's rusty and looks old as hell
>Can make out "ether" on label
>oh fuck
>School evacuates the building, calls the police to bring in a bomb robot to remove the bottle
Didn't explode at the end of the day but it was a whole fucking mess
>Doing experiments in mice
>For those who don't know, there's standard protocol for humanely killing mice
>First you gas them with CO2, then you snap their necks, then you put them in a paper bag in a freezer and wait for waste disposal to get rid of them
>Some grad students are too squeamish or too lazy to do the neck snapping, and just gas the mice and put them in the freezer
>Occasionally some of these mice wake up in the freezer, and lose their god damn minds inside a dark box filled with their dead kin
>Mice for every grad student are kept in the same room
>Building is having plumbing issues
>Genuine concern the mice room will be flooded
>Grad students advised to put "high value mice" on the top shelves, should the worst happen
When you spend 3-5 years trying to get the right mutations in your mice, that kind of shit is terrifying
Well, at least the mice won't suffer from too dry air in the room.
>TA'ing neuroscience labs
Doing this for years has killed me inside.
You would think that trying to identify high concentration acid by shoving it under my nose and smelling deepy is a lesson I would need to learn only once.
Several years worth of lab courses has proven that wrong.
>Didn't vacuum distill my meth properly.
>Ended up with yellow sticky crystals.
>Had to try again.
:'(
>guys in a lab upstairs get a 200L drum of glycerin
>can't get the hand pump to work
>decides next best solution is to gently tip the drum over a bucket
>drum falls over
Interesting. Could you elaborate? Does ether just become really unstable after a while?
it's a peroxide former, and tards are overly scared of peroxide formers.
we had some years (maybe decades) old cyclohexene. the thing fucking became as viscous as motor oil when it's supposed to be like water. we just called the unwanted chemical disposal and gave it to them without pissing ourselves.
hell, before i even knew that it's not supposed to be that viscous i took some samples out, put them in vials, and heated up the vials up with a heatgun so i would have an easier time getting them into a syringe to run through a GC.
also, it converted to the point that the samples had almost no cyclohexene left. i didn't have the column connected to a mass spec so i'm not sure what it actually formed, but i knew that it was time to order some new cyclohexene.
>Be chem undergraduat
>First class involving lab work
>some guy starts screaming: "Get the water, get the fucking water!"
>His slowpoke labmate asks him 5 times why before he finally gets water and splashes the guy
>Turns out he dropped HCl on his pants and shoes
>Has to go to the hospital with burn symptoms
>order case of 500ml bottles of citric acid solution
>get shipped a fucking 300 gallon tank on a pallet.
>it sits on our dock for 3 weeks
>finally get told to bring it in and transfer into old bottles
>tank is square, plastic surrounded by a metal cage
>has a cap on top and nothing else
>stupid ideas passed around, somebody thinks a fucking keg tap might work, I say just fucking ladel it into a beaker and pour it from there into bottles
>finally decide to pop a fucking hole in the top, epoxy a spigot onto it, and tilt the fucker onto the side
>I want nothing to do with this
>nozzle in place, pallet jack used to lift one side, then pure retard strength to tilt it over by hand
>this fucking thing weighs a literal ton
>i repeat that this is a bad idea
>it goes over, impact registers on seismometers
>aaand the top splits open all the way from our hackjob spigot to the plastic weld around the cap
At least we got our bottles filled from the 50 litres or so that stayed in the tank...
this is what i hate about lab work. it's pretty obvious that you didn't need the solution immediately since you let it sit around for 3 weeks. in that time you could have either returned it and got what you were supposed to, or ordered a tap to properly extract it from the container.
instead, i'm guessing everyone was either too lazy and/or considered this not their problem until it was too late to return/order the tap, so you half assed it and wasted resources. i'm pretty sure that if you even bothered to ask other labs someone would have the tap.
this has pretty much been my experience working in a university lab. no one gives a shit about anything, and doesn't keep track of anything, until it's their time to use it. we have vacuum pumps that didn't have their oil changed for so long that it turned black. the guy before me used the experimental apparatus when he new it had leaks because he was too lazy to fix it and told me i should fix it when it came my time to use it.
Why didn't he go to the Damn shower.
Why the fuck are you waiting 12 weeks for results?
Jesus christ people like you should be lynched. Why were the plates open in the first place and why would you think sneezing right ontop of them was anything but a dumb idea.
Buddy cleaning out a USG survey lab full of shit from the 50's testing unlabeled samples found a little tube of methylmercury.
she only found out what it was after she was done handling it, including taking a sample. She was mad.
Every single level of it was "not my problem".
Nobody knew whose problem it was supposed to be.
Honestly, it was fucking citric acid. Citric FUCKING acid. The container probably cost more than the solution. Send it back and buy more, from a different supplier if need be.
I mean, it's not a dramatic story but god damn was it stupid all the way through.
>Take art elective
>Pass by sculpture lab next door
>See girl holding a Dremel like a 2 year old holds a spoon
>She's carving something into a piece of 2x4
>Holding the wood with her other hand maybe 3" away
>Watch as the Dremel keeps jerking towards her hand
>Women
That shit's no joke. It goes right through gloves.
Some turbo autist on gurochan commissioned a shitload of nearly-identical Wheel of Time decapitation/farting comics with no nudity.
t. reverse image search
Fucking kill yourself my man
Sounds like your department is full of geniuses.
Haven't had any major fuckups at Uni yet, but I have a story from Advanced Physics while I was in high school.
>be me
>also be retard
>working with hot plates for arbitrary reason
>finish lab early, go back to desk to write a couple things down
>come back to put away supplies
>place ENTIRE FUCKIN HAND on hot plate, since I assumed it cooled off though it was 80-90℃ only 10 minutes ago
>get burnt, claim I mashed my hand leaning on the table when I ask teacher to go to the nurse's office
>had to wear icepack for 3 hours
I've been known to lack foresight sometimes.
He took a look at it and pressed it.
That's how i imagine it
>what is comfirmation bias
That's not that bad, I was fucking with my car stereo and held a couple Of wires together
> wondered where that green light was coming from
> what's this burning smell?
Melted fingers together
>green light
GATSBY IS GREEDY GREEN SYMBOLIZES GREED CAUSE THEY SOUND SIMILAR OR SOMETHING
>Of
Ok you get a B- for this paper even though you understand everything about the novel and several things I don't
What are you talking about?
>What are you talking about?
F for questioning the teacher
sounds pretty damn sticcy
should have gotten some tubing and siphoned it into more manageable containers.
it's fucking my guy
>O-chem lab
>leaning about boiling points
>use high morality water
>forget to dilute the water
>put it over the bunsen burner
>not under the fume hood
>instantly boils at over 200 Kelvin
>fumes everywhere
>TA runs over and flips his shit
>lab partner passes out and later dies
Luckily I was wearing my safety goggles so I got an A+
obligatory pic related
>high morality water
top kek
>microbio research
>doing a project with 2 other guys, we are each in charge of a separate gene on an operon
>1 of them has his shit contaminated so much it was untracable, halfway through had to stop
>other guy kept fucking up his lacZ fusion, took him extra 3 or 4 weeks
>As the only one unscathed, had to check reagents to see if they are contaminated
>eventually trace it to the taq polymerase when I PCRed, somehow me and that one guy miraculously avoided contamination
>find out the newbie researchers also used that vial of taq poly
Doesn't it cost like 200k to get one back up and running? Ignoring the damage.
depends, you don't have to do a full quench if it's not an emergency and provided that the metal object isn't too large
What the fuck is high morality water?
>the joke
>your head
>in micro lab
>working with e coli doing streak plates for the first day
>yeah its baby stuff but Id rather not have that shit spill on me
>guy asks me for help with technique
>I walk over, make a little diagram on paper for him on how to drag the loop through so it works right
>pics up e coli vial
>inoculates loop
>holds vial sideways while streaking plate
>e coli spilling all over his arm, pants and table
>smells like absolute shit
>"hey hey hey stop stop lift the vial up the right way!"
>"what?"
>still spilling bacteria all over himself
>"lift it up, youre spilling it! lift it up!"
>"what"
>finally looks down at drenched pants and shirt
>its spilling down his arm and into his glove
>"oh shit oh shit"
>thanks me for letting him know
>drops out of lab the next day
Hahahaha what the fuck
How did he not feel it?
>should have
Shpuld have never accepted delivery honestly.