|
Similarly, if you combine sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at just the right ratio, all you get is salt water.
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 17:15
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 14:23 |
|
|
kastein posted:Similarly, if you combine sodium hydroxide and hydrochloric acid at just the right ratio, all you get is salt water. I always liked that property of acids and bases. Combine two substances capable of giving you chemical burns and you get a harmless water/salt solution.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 17:40
|
|
|
Vitamins posted:This is tastes very salty and is used to flavour some weird kinds of liquorice in some countries. Delicious, I tell you. For a representative list of ingredients, look no further than Hockeypulver: Sugar, ammonium chloride and liquorice extract powder in a tin.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 17:42
|
|
|
Zonekeeper posted:I always liked that property of acids and bases. Combine two substances capable of giving you chemical burns and you get a harmless water/salt solution. Double replacement reactions are awesome that way. Then again there's potassium iodide plus lead nitrate, both transparent in aqueous solution: 2KI + Pb(NO3)2 -> PbI2 + 2KNO3 Lead iodide is toxic and insoluble, and bright yellow to boot. Potassium nitrate is somewhat toxic, too. So you get this:  Sufficiently elementary chemistry is indistinguishable from magic 
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 17:46
|
|
|
DemeaninDemon posted:One of the inorganic labs at my old school had a bucket of mercury just hanging out in a cabinet. Very cool looking that stuff. People used to be so hilariously gung-ho about mercury back in the day. It's hard to clean up - the little beads can roll into all sorts of nooks and crannies. I had lectures in what used to be the Cavendish labs, so people had been doing stupidly unsafe stuff in there for almost a century. One of my lecturers told us how he came into his office one day to be confronted by two men in haz-mat suits, who extracted I think a pint of mercury from under his floorboards.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 18:34
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:Delicious, I tell you. For a representative list of ingredients, look no further than Hockeypulver: Sugar, ammonium chloride and liquorice extract powder in a tin. That does sounds kind of intriguing to be honest, I'd like to try some someday. Going even further with horrible reagents, common table salt can be made from it's constituent elements pretty easily. Just add a chunk of horribly reactive sodium to a vial of horribly toxic chlorine with a drop of water to get it all going.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 18:37
|
|
|
My mom works for a chemical company and I was talking to her about this thread and she pointed me in the direction of this (scary) reaction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zz95_VvTxZM Apparently, this is what happens if you get a couple of drops of water inside your tanker truck of ammonia. Apparently the video itself may not be exactly that, but the same thing will occur.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 20:03
|
|
|
I wonder how that happens? Did she tell you anything about the conditions for that to happen? Wiiiild barely scientific speculation time: Rapid dissolving in water which rapidly decreases pressure? maaaybeee? Doesn't even need to disassociate all it needs to do would be to complex with the water and that would dramatically decrease volume.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 20:16
|
|
|
Rigged Death Trap posted:I wonder how that happens? She says that all the ammonia basically seeks to bond with/go to the same place as the small amount of water and so it quickly vacates where it is supposed to be, leaving a vacuum. I know literally nothing about science so I may be explaining/relaying that wrong but as far as I understood, that's how it seems to go.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 20:20
|
|
|
Liquid ammonia with a few drops of water would never, ever do that. MAYBE a tank full of ammonia vapor with a few drops of water added. I'm not sure how that would work out, it's been too long since I took chemistry. That video is the result of steam cleaning a tank car and then sealing it up before the temperatures equalized, as I recall. Which resulted in the hot steam condensing, drawing a hard enough vacuum to collapse the tank car as soon as it got strong enough to draw the weakest spot on the wall in. A cylinder is incredibly strong until the flattest/weakest spot on the wall starts failing, then it's all over.
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 20:54
|
|
|
kastein posted:Liquid ammonia with a few drops of water would never, ever do that. Yes, should have specified, she said: 1: it's non-liquid ammonia that I'm talking about. I think she said "anhydrous ammonia". Apparently it can also violently explode on you if you get air in it or something too, so maybe crushing a tanker car isn't even the worst of your problems. Also, if the tanks leak, you will die in a cloud of death. 2: as I wrote in my edit above, the video isn't ACTUALLY ammonia, but ammonia getting water in can apparently cause the exact same thing to happen. Should have been more clear. Sorry, like I said I don't really know that much about it, just find it interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEZDdPP_nRY < here is a demonstration on a very small scale of how it works with a bottle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KctSyILS6Ho < another. VV EDIT: She said that is what happened when it happened at her company: it was not flushed completely, they had steam still in there, put it back together and wham, it collapses. VV hallo spacedog has a new favorite as of 21:46 on Jan 20, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 21:24
|
|
|
Rigged Death Trap posted:I wonder how that happens?
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 21:44
|
|
|
hallo spacedog posted:She says that all the ammonia basically seeks to bond with/go to the same place as the small amount of water and so it quickly vacates where it is supposed to be, leaving a vacuum. I know literally nothing about science so I may be explaining/relaying that wrong but as far as I understood, that's how it seems to go. hahah yes! Score one for me on trivial science poo poo!
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 21:48
|
|
|
hallo spacedog posted:She says that all the ammonia basically seeks to bond with/go to the same place as the small amount of water and so it quickly vacates where it is supposed to be, leaving a vacuum. I know literally nothing about science so I may be explaining/relaying that wrong but as far as I understood, that's how it seems to go. That's a demonstration of improper venting during pumpdown, though, which is a much easier but less interesting way of drawing a vacuum on a container. e: I have not once managed to post something novel in this thread. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 20, 2014 22:16
|
|
|
This thread is great, it's a superfund site in written form. Years ago I was a cadet on a chemical tanker (SS Chemical Pioneer) for about 6 weeks. We had 50 tanks, each with its own dedicated deepwell pump and piping to the manifold. Mostly we carried MTBE which is now all gone as far as I can tell. We also carried Acetic Acid, Caustic Soda, Acetone, and Ethanol 200 and 190. No one liked suiting up in rain gear and full face respirators for working with the acid, and everyone was always lurking around the ethanol tanks when they were being gauged by the terminal. I remember that MTBE smelled like dog poo poo, and that if your gonna get sprayed in chemicals, Acetone is a pretty safe one to choose compared to most of our cargo. The rumor was the ship was asked to carry phenol once, and they threatened to all quit. I am not a chemist I should add, so there is probably some sea story BS in what I heard and saw on that ship.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2014 01:55
|
|
|
Acetone is in fact fairly benign as a chemical, especially compared to how goddamn well it works as a solvent for, well, almost any oil/alcohol based anything. It's the major constituent of most chlorine free brakleen type products. I actually prefer it to the toluene/xylene/ethylbenzene/methyl-ethyl-badshit based automotive solvents in both effectiveness and not-getting-cancer-of-the-everything-ness. I wouldn't be at all surprised... phenol isn't a very pleasant smell. At least it wasn't selenophenol, which has been featured on Things I Won't Work With.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2014 02:02
|
|
|
Floating lead on mercury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1Hv0Oz_r1k&t=103s
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2014 05:45
|
|
|
Mercury Ballistic posted:This thread is great, it's a superfund site in written form. That sounds like a massively interesting job you had. Yeah acetone is pretty benign generally speaking. If you got doused in the stuff you might pass out from the fumes, and your skin would dry and you'd get very cold very quickly as it evaporated off, but apart from it's flammability it's not too bad. Plus like Kastein said, it makes an extremely good solvent. Aromatics make some pretty horribly carcinogenic solvents, but the one's I had the most are the halogenated ones. They're generally a pain in the rear end to work with, really annoying to dispose of safely, are usually very toxic/carginogenic/teratogenic, and if they catch fire for whatever reason their products of combustion are as, if not more than, toxic as the solvent itself. I don't get the hate for phenol though. Apparently I'm one of the few people that really like the smell of the stuff, and the soft pink crystals are kind of pretty.  But it's not particularly dangerous as far as I'm concerned, having used it in reactions in school. I'd be more scared of the caustic soda to be honest.
|
|
#
?
Jan 21, 2014 11:47
|
|
|
Vitamins posted:I don't get the hate for phenol though.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 04:04
|
|
|
Speaking of our good friend chlorinated brake cleaner, one of the main ingredients is a lovely little chemical called Tetrachloroethylene, also known as dry cleaning fluid. It's a powerful organic solvent, hence its use in both- it gets oil and various other automotive fluids off of metal, and whatever lovely biological filth off of your clothes without degrading the fibers like water does. It also dissolves your skin oils, which leaves your fingers with kind of a tight, almost plastic texture (ask me how I know!), so it can gently caress with your health that way. As Kastein mentioned, it's also a well-known carcinogen. Oh, and it can form nerve gas when you expose it to high temperatures. Wikipedia posted:At temperatures over 315 °C (599 °F), such as in welding, tetrachloroethylene can be oxidized into phosgene, an extremely poisonous gas. Tetrachloroethylene should not be used near welding operations, flames, or hot surfaces. Here's a link to an article written by a fabricator who found out the hard way: http://www.brewracingframes.com/id75.htm Don't worry though, if it burns at lower temperatures there's no risk of that happening; it merely forms nice, friendly gaseous HCl instead!
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 07:59
|
|
|
Yeah, if you are a welder, chloro/fluoro/bromo anything is a bad thing to have around. Stick with acetone or brakleen that lists acetone and heptane as its only ingredients. The worst it can do is catch fire if you are retarded instead of producing WWII era nerve gas right in your face.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 11:56
|
|
|
Say Nothing posted:It's corrosive and can cause numbness so you don't realize you are getting burned. It may cause liver and kidney damage, and also has central nervous system effects. Oh yeah I realise that, but from my experience people that may handle it give it some kind of mythical deadly properties that are much worse than it actually is. Ask one chemist to do a synthesis that uses HCN or RFNA and they'll usually be pretty happy to do it, but ask the same person to use phenol and they might tell you to get lost. I guess it's just chemists being weird or something. Now dry cleaning fluid has been mentioned that gives me a good excuse to talk about supercritical CO2. Everyone knows that at standard temperature and pressure CO2 is a colourless, odourless gas. And a lot of people are familiar with dry ice, it's solid form at low temperature. So called because it will sublime straight to a gas rather than through a liquid phase at STP. However if you put CO2 at a slightly elevated temperature, and increased pressure, you'll get a supercritical fluid. These are interesting as they share the properties of both a gas and a liquid. They will fill a sealed container like a gas but with the density of a liquid. This fluid makes an excellent solvent for organic compounds. It's most common use is as an agent that can decaffeinate coffee beans, and can be used as a dry cleaning agent. There are also plans to use it as a cooling agent for power generation. Compared to the equivalent organic solvents like tetrachloroethylene mentioned before, it's non-toxic and will evaporate cleanly into the atmosphere which saves on cleaning up horrible halogenated solvents.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 12:14
|
|
|
It’s a natural compound, but oxalyldiaminopropionic acid (ODAP) is truly insidious. Your body treats it like glutamic acid (of MSG fame, and for the record MSG is harmless), but unfortunately it doesn’t act like it. ODAP is found in plants of the genus lathyrus (wild peas), notably including lathyrus sativus, which is grown as a food crop in Asia and East Africa. That appears incongruous, but it turns out that lathyrus sativus can be part of a balanced diet. Like deuterated water, mentioned earlier, as long as you don’t cross a certain threshold, you’re fine. Lathyrus sativus is a particularly hardy crop, but that just means it’s likely to survive when your normal food crops don’t, which is exactly when it is dangerous. Not only will you have to consume more ODAP if lathyrus sativus is all you have to eat, but on top of that, ODAP shows increased toxicity in malnourished persons regardless of total dose. Subsist on lathyrus sativus or its relatives for too long and you’ll contract lathyrism. In a cruel coincidence, sufferers find themselves wasting away, much as if they had eaten nothing at all.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 15:24
|
|
|
VX nerve gas. Even a tiny drop of it can kill people.
|
|
#
?
Jan 22, 2014 20:24
|
|
|
This is probably slightly off topic since it doesn't involve "dangerous" or explosive chemicals, but it's an impressive story involving chemical reactions. Yesterday, a large amount of quick set concrete got spilled in a switch station in the London Underground. If allowed to set, the equipment was as good as gone. While hardening, the concrete expands and heats up, so any equipment caught inside would either be crushed or heated enough to ruin it forever. Anything that did manage to survive would be destroyed by the jackhammers needed to remove the hardened concrete. Lost cause, right? Nope. It turns out you can delay the reaction that causes the concrete to set with a common substance: Granulated sugar. It interferes with the reaction and slows it down. Add enough, and you can keep it from hardening indefinitely. All they had to do was dump sugar into the mess and shovel it out at their leisure. I loving love science. Before and after:  (Source: The Obsolete Technology thread, which links to the Telegraph article explaining how they cleaned it up.)
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2014 17:07
|
|
|
Zonekeeper posted:Nope. It turns out you can delay the reaction that causes the concrete to set with a common substance: Granulated sugar. It interferes with the reaction and slows it down. Oh, so there's actual science behind this episode of  Happy Tree Friends:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFMehrbFJsk
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2014 17:27
|
|
|
I was looking up bismuth salts last night, and while they all seem to be as toxic as one might expect from a heavy metal halide, most are pretty unassuming otherwise. Except for bismuth pentafluoride, which is noted to be an "extremely powerful fluoridating agent", with all the fun that implies. It reacts vigorously with water, forming compounds like ozone and oxygen difluoride. OF2 seems pretty nasty too; it's a potent oxidiser and will itself react with water to form everyone's favourite horror chemical, hydrofluoric acid.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2014 17:30
|
|
|
Excuse Me Sir, Would You Like to Buy a Kilo of Isopropyl Bromide? (PDF) by Max Gergel. This has been linked a couple times on Derek Lowe's blog and is a fascinating read. It is probable that not all the stories are true and quite likely that some details here and there have been embellished. One of my favorite stories in there is the synthesis of ethyl trifluoroacetate for the US Army starting on page 90.quote:After many years running a small chemical company and handling similar requests I know not to quote until one has developed some experience making the compound. "Do not trust the literature" is a maxim which all learn who survive. I should not have quoted Captain Hearon, I should have made a batch of ethyl trifluoroacetate using the Henne procedure and verified that the instructions were adequate and the yields could be duplicated. I was young and "hungry" and I felt that $100 per pound should take care of costs and allow a profit.
|
|
#
?
Jan 24, 2014 19:24
|
|
|
 This is dicyanoacetylene (C4N2). It burns in oxygen at a temperature of 5260 K (4990 °C, 9010 °F). For reference, the melting point of tantalum hafinium carbide (the material with the highest known melting point) is 4215 °C.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 01:01
|
|
|
atomicthumbs posted:
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 01:30
|
|
|
Fucknag posted:Speaking of our good friend chlorinated brake cleaner, one of the main ingredients is a lovely little chemical called Tetrachloroethylene, also known as dry cleaning fluid. It's a powerful organic solvent, hence its use in both- it gets oil and various other automotive fluids off of metal, and whatever lovely biological filth off of your clothes without degrading the fibers like water does. Phosgene's not a nerve gas, it's a poison gas that attacks the lungs. Nerve gas is whole 'nother barrel of dead monkeys. quote:Phosgene is an insidious poison as the odor may not be noticed and symptoms may be slow to appear.[18] The odor detection threshold for phosgene is 0.4 ppm, four times the threshold limit value. Its high toxicity arises from the action of the phosgene on the proteins in the pulmonary alveoli, the site of gas exchange: their damage disrupts the blood-air barrier, causing suffocation. It reacts with the amines of the proteins, causing crosslinking by formation of urea-like linkages, in accord with the reactions discussed above. Phosgene detection badges are worn by those at risk of exposure.[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosgene#History Those WWI poison gasses and nerve gasses really are nasty enough to deserve their own effort post.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 14:46
|
|
|
Retarded Pimp posted:Phosgene's not a nerve gas, it's a poison gas that attacks the lungs. Nerve gas is whole 'nother barrel of dead monkeys. Particularly organophosphates like sarin and the far worse VX, as well as some industrial pesticides, which cause the wonderfully-named SLUDGE response: quote:Salivation: stimulation of the salivary glands Basically, you drool, cry, vomit, piss, and poo poo yourself to death. In the EMT thread, they described the standard EMS response protocol for an organophosphate spill as "get the gently caress out and wait for hazmat" because unless you have the proper protective gear and enough atropine to treat everyone exposed, you're just going to make it worse. Also, all an anti-cholinergic like atropine will do is keep you from dying if properly administered. It might still gently caress you up. Don't play with pesticides, kids.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 14:54
|
|
|
Phosgene also smells like freshly cut grass. Chemists working with it get very panicky when spring rolls round and landscapers and farmers get to work. At least it smells nice when you're hocking your lungs up. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 15:05
|
|
|
Some really cool posters warning against gas weapons:   All from the wiki pages about the respective gases.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 15:26
|
|
|
Bertrand Hustle posted:Particularly organophosphates like sarin and the far worse VX, as well as some industrial pesticides, which cause the wonderfully-named SLUDGE response: Pff, I can manage most of that with just ethanol.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 15:53
|
|
|
ubergnu posted:Pff, I can manage most of that with just ethanol. Yeah, but the dose needs to be significantly higher. Organophosphates are much more cost-effective.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 16:07
|
|
|
Plus you don't have to worry about the morning after fall out.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 16:59
|
|
|
I hear you get so high you talk to God! 
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 17:02
|
|
|
Speaking of chemical smells, you can’t smell hydrogen cyanide directly, but an old trick is to smoke a cigar while preparing it. It changes the flavour of the smoke. Naturally, that’s not recommend nowadays.
|
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 17:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 14:23 |
|
|
I work with 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin(Dioxin or TCDD) in a biology lab trying to characterize a cell protein's, Aryl Hydrocarbon Receptor(AhR), role in childhood immune responses. Its a polycyclicaromatic hydrocarbon that has been a byproduct of industrial chemical processes. It is a strong activator of AhR which exerts trascriptional control over genes that have a AhR related promoter. We dont fully understand the AhR pathway and what genes it has strong control over that might be tied to, but we're currently trying to work it out. Importantly it has been implicated in some terrible symptoms as well as a carcinogen. It has been implicated as one of the major causes of symptoms after use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam region. It was also used in the attempted assassination against Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko, which lead to his skin to have chloracne symptoms due to the amount he was poisoned with. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Yushchenko#Dioxin_poisoning_allegations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seveso_disaster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange It's an interesting subject in my opinion, but it wasn't until I had taken the job that I found I was working with this chemical. Luckily I don't work with too much of it to be terribly scary, but the risk is always there. onemanlan has a new favorite as of 18:17 on Jan 26, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jan 26, 2014 18:14
|
|