What's your worst lab incident, Veeky Forums?

I read somewhere that the effect varies from person to person, usually people get this uncontrollable fit of laughter

Tbh I never laughed when I took it either

story ive heard at parties
>dude working in rad room
>drop of radioactive material in water splashes on dud'es wrist
>dude instinctively licked watch

lol why

Happens in london all the time now. People get acid thrown on them. New craze.

Not me personally, but this is a fantastic lab event.

Wut. Tritium oxide or something?

Who the fuck licks their watch?

I had a benzophenone/ketyl THF still start fire. It's pretty much just a big molotov cocktail at that point.

Friend I knew was working with organic peroxides and forgot to quench them prior to rotovaping a few grams worth of product, his face has tons of tiny scars now and his hand is fucked up.

One guy was working with triphosgene and almost killed himself with phosgene exposure. Didn't seem to understand that it's a fucking chemical weapon and his hood didn't really work. Glad I'm done with grad. school...

>London is now inhabited by an oriental sorceror's guild
How to defend against acid splash attacks? Baking soda?

i inadvertently serum starved some tissue culture cells because i used the wrong bottle of media

I was trying to distill my mercury just because it was getting cloudy. So i made a still but come to find out it wasn't air tight, and that day it was raining so i just said fuckit.jpg and i did it indoors and then mercury gas.

>I was trying to distill my mercury just because it was getting cloudy. So i made a still but come to find out it wasn't air tight, and that day it was raining so i just said fuckit.jpg and i did it indoors and then mercury gas.

mfw only owning 3 pounds of mercury that's fucking dirty as shit

Concentrated sodium hydroxide solution

>organic peroxides
>rotovap

Ouch.

>triphosgene

All I needed to hear to think brainlet. A 15 year old kid on an amateur chem forum I used to browse killed himself a few years back when he made phosgene (don't recall if on accident). His youtube channel is still up though and has videos of him making shit like carbon monoxide.

>be me working late and alone to try and finish undergrad research project
>doing a moderately large scale oxidation using copper oxide/palladium chloride catalyst combo
>be impatient and add the catalyst a little too fast
>woomph
>my supervisor asks later: why is the ceiling of your fume hood green?
It could have been much worse.

kek

I don't know, just that it happened.

I do t know exactly but probably something with isotopes of C or N or P, it was a biochemistry lab.

Gonna askhere,

Wtf do i do with dirty mercury? How to dispose of it safely and properly

Final in Chem II lab. Two hours in and I break my vial and have to start over. Get halfway through before time is up, never determine what the solution is. I ended up with a C in the class I think because the professor took pity on me, it should have been automatic failure to fail the final.

I say don't. Save it, it's getting harder to come by. If you really want to dispose of it, prepare a fat wallet and look for hazardous waste disposal company near you. but there are all sorts of people I know who would kill for some to clean up and use for experiments.

What's his account?

>parents go away for weekend, have to stay at grandpa's
Are you 12?

>be me last year
Oh wow, haha. How did that happen? That's kind of embarassing. I don't know how you could move on from that.

>work in a really poor underfunded startup lab
>have to manufacture and jury rig lot of our equipment on site
>run out of epoxy one day
>lab mate says he has an extra tube at home
>brings it in the next day
>hard as a rock, all dried up
>try to use it anyway
>at one point, it stops squeezing out of the syringe
>decide to use an exacto knife to cut it open and scrape some out
>shit is so hard, the tip of the knife actually breaks off, causing the knife to run up and slice a massive gash into my thumb
>run around the lab dripping blood everywhere while my lab mates grab the first aid kit
Fun times. We were at like "200 days without an accident" before that incident, too.

Be in HS Chem class circa 1982. Teacher was an old school (mid 60's) dude, very old school - demanding and rigorous.

So one morning, after taking us through the steps, I heated a ceramic lab crucible to constant weight.

Lab Prof didn't instruct us on how long to wait for crucible to cool or to use tongs. He just assumed that we would know that it would be HOT HOT HOT for a good long while.

Yeah, I know, it would be hot, but I thought after a couple minutes, it would be cool.

So I picked it up with my hand and pout it onto the scale.

Hand didn't hurt for a few seconds.

And then...it did.

Immediately went to sink and teacher put salve on it.

All of the fingers swelled up like sausages and hurt like hell for a few days, but no permanent damage.

As lab mistakes go, that was an easy one, and it taught me to be extra vigilant and careful with
every experiment thereafter, so not a bad thing.

/that teacher was a hoot.

//one day, before we came into the class, he made a chemical contact explosive and put it on each lab table where we would put our books, so when you put your book down, there was a loud BANG!!! and it your book/notebook/spiral pad would literally pop off the table by a few millimetres.

///another time, at the start of class, he called us to a table where there was a pile of chemicals. He turned off the lights, set a flame to the chemicals, and they proceeded to steadily burn, changing colors several time. Then he turned on the lights, pointed to the pile of ash on the lab table and said, " That is carbon. Now go back to your desks and open your textbooks to page 78..."

////Another time he told us about all the fun things that you can do with active metals, making sure to stress how critically important it was to follow proper precautions.

Every year my high school chem teacher would do a decent sized thermite demonstration in the lab and every year the fire department would show up as the whole wing of the school filled with smoke. I loved that guy (no homo).

Dropped some HCl on table salt and it started fuming some green smoke
I'm assuming it was chlorine gas
but fortunately I was doing it in the balcony

When my teacher was doing the chemical burning demo, his face was literally lit up with glee - like a mad scientist.
As I said, he was tough, but he was always directing us to discern and appreciate that chemistry was really, really fun.
I'd wager that a lot of the stuff he did wouldn't be allowed these days, which is a shame.

Ha this thread again, got my usual story ready.
Some brainlet was working with HCI and told me it fully reacted and I could theoretically drink it. So I did to prove her wrong, fortunately spit it out at the right time cuz it was enough to kill me.

Same with mine. I'm old enough that I remember being able to buy chemistry sets with shit that could easily kill you. I also remember buying saltpetre at the drug store and trying to make my own gunpowder. It never worked all that well, but I definitely burned a few holes in my parents' wood deck trying.

drapes were originally sage-green

>I remember being able to buy chemistry sets with shit that could easily kill you.

Ah, that takes me back.
Brother and I had a chemistry set we got for Christmas from the Sears catalogue, and parents thought it was great....
And then one day, as he and I were busy on the dining room table, Mom just happened to linger and start reading the labels of some of the chemicals we were working with, especially the warnings.
She totally freaked. She was a nurse and she pointed out to us that a microscopic amount of a particular chemical could kill us, another would instantly melt our skin, etc.
"We know", we replied deadpan.

Chem teacher did the hydrogen oxygen flame slow burn mix thing that whistles and booms in a small container. Decided to try same thing in a water cooler jug. Inside. The boom made desks jump on the floor above.

The ceiling tiles above his desk were scorched badly from his flaming bubble demonstration

Good idea, instead of getting chemical burns you'll get regual burns..
I would suggest using something that'll soak up the acid.

Got a couple fun ones from undergrad:

- Close to working up an organic reaction (took me about a week to get this far) using some kind of Hg catalyst, finally pour the filtered mixture (still containing Hg) along a glass rod into an erleynmeyer, wipe my brow, set the erlenmeyer under my fumehood and go out for a break before the final step

HOLD ON LAB SAFETY

Quickly close the glass safety shield... onto the glass rod, smashes through the bottom of the flask, Hg and all of my product everywhere

I took a long break after that one.

Actually have my lab book right here for the people interested; was a pinacol rearrangement of 2,3-diphenyl-2,3-butanediol

Uh, PPE?

I wish they still sold that shit

youtube.com/user/Myfanwy94

At this point i've accepted that accidents happen in the field, it's a risk-reward kind of science.

17.

accidentally fucked up my mouth with water that had a ton of lye dissolved in it after my brother poured out my dr pepper and replaced it while we were making hydrogen via lye+aluminium

Almost disposed of a litre of 70% nitric acid into the acetonitrile waste container because of a lab techs inattention

Another one I heard from a TA; apparantly they were from when the more dangerous experiments were done, some kind of distillation set-up where ozone could be formed (I think).
Apparantly his friend's setup exploded and shattered the safety glass. The guy was in harm but just staring infront of him in shock, so he went over and tapped him on the shoulder to see if he was ok.
The guy started screaming, ran for the safety shower and stood under it for 10 minutes to calm down.

wasn't harmed obviously*

Another time a friend in the lab of mine called the professor over to the rotavap. Everytime he turned the vacuum on the solid would turn pink, white if the vacuum was on. This baffled the professor (who had been teaching that lab for a long, long time) so they went over his procedure step-by-step.

"Did you check your pH?"
"Yes sir, ofcourse"
"What did you do with the litmus paper, I want to see it"
"I threw it into the flask ofcourse professor"

Massive facepalm, told him to stop wasting his time

What the actual fuck?

that's a hell of a story, grandpa. I did something similar with a resistor once; burned the fingerprint off of my index finger and thumb.

took me a long time to forgive him