Science horror stories

[kerbiloid]

... And a storey above there lived another neighbor, one more chemist. A day before he had stolen in the lab a tub of liquid bromine.
So, when those two cops were peacefully walking down the street to have a cup of coffee with doughnuts (as always, this was their main occupation):
- Two guys with the stolen potassium saw the cops and thought the cops want them;
- Neighbor a storey below with the stolen petrol saw the cops and thought the cops want him;
- Neighbor a storey above with the stolen bromine saw the cops and thought the cops want him;

And all of them flushed their evidences down the toilet at once...

So, you can see how a concourse of circumstances looking unbelievable, impossible, really happened because of the same trigger launching the whole event sequence.

Edited November 11, 2016 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

... And a storey above there lived another neighbor, one more chemist. A day before he had stolen in the lab a tub of liquid bromine.
So, when those two cops were peacefully walking down the street to have a cup of coffee with doughnuts (as always, this was their main occupation):
- Two guys with the stolen potassium saw the cops and thought the cops want them;
- Neighbor a storey below with the stolen petrol saw the cops and thought the cops want him;
- Neighbor a storey above with the stolen bromine saw the cops and thought the cops want him;

And all of them flushed their evidences down the toilet at once...

So, you can see how a concourse of circumstances looking unbelievable, impossible, really happened because of the same trigger launching the whole event sequence.

lulz, this made me think of this:

A pair of criminals have raided a weapons laboratory and stolen a lump of plutonium.

They see a pair of policemen walking towards thier apartment and think they are going to get caught.

"Quick, how do we get rid of this plutonium? Its too big for the toilet!"

"Lets try and make it smaller, its solid metal so we'll have to use these explosives!"

"I've got all this lithium deuteride as well, chuck that in the box too!"

"We are SO smart!"

[todofwar]

As a chemist there are two materials no one will ever convince me to work with, FOOF  (and that's a chemical formula) which has been mentioned, though they left out its ability to cause ammonia to burn at -80 C. And dimethyl mercury. One time a researcher spilled two drops of dimethyl mercury on her hand, wearing two layers of gloves. Dead 6 months later, apparently nothing the doctors could do.

[todofwar]

Another more cautionary tale. One time a graduate student was pulling up 50 ml of t-butyl lithium. The back of the syringe flew out, spilling the tbuli all over them. They immediately caught fire, and a bottle of hexane right next to them also then exploded. Unfortunately the student didn't make it. Always be careful with pyrophorric chemicals and never have flammable solvents nearby.

[p1t1o]

1 hour ago, todofwar said:

Another more cautionary tale. One time a graduate student was pulling up 50 ml of t-butyl lithium. The back of the syringe flew out, spilling the tbuli all over them. They immediately caught fire, and a bottle of hexane right next to them also then exploded. Unfortunately the student didn't make it. Always be careful with pyrophorric chemicals and never have flammable solvents nearby.

A chemistry professor of mine once told us that "back in the day" they would demonstrate the nature of t-buli in lectures by squirting a syringe of it over the front row, whereupon it would auto-ignite in air and be entirely consumed before it reached them. One hopes.

Of course, "back in the day" they used to mouth-pipette benzene.

[kerbiloid]

Quote

As her tutors had said, there were two signs of a good alchemist: the Athletic and the Intellectual. A good alchemist of the first sort was someone who could leap over the bench and be on the far side of a safely thick wall in three seconds, and a good alchemist of the second sort was someone who knew exactly when to do this.

 

Terry Pratchett, "Feet of Clay"

Edited November 14, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Green Baron]

Apparently a fart caught fire during surgery.

I do not claim any scientific correctness for this, just to make that clear ;-)

 

[p1t1o]

57 minutes ago, Green Baron said:

Apparently a fart caught fire during surgery.

I do not claim any scientific correctness for this, just to make that clear ;-)

 

There is also apparently a non-negligible risk of fire when using a defibrillator:

http://www.mdsr.ecri.org/summary/detail.aspx?doc_id=8128

 

[monstah]

1 hour ago, Green Baron said:

Apparently a fart caught fire during surgery.

I do not claim any scientific correctness for this, just to make that clear ;-)

Yes, "fart" is indeed the correct scientific word for it.

[kerbiloid]

Spoiler

They told about a female researcher, who was working in an environmental startup company producing clean food.

Once her assistant carried their analyzer away - to the repair shop, and they had no opportunity to check their protein bakery for a week or so.
Thus, she asked her daughter, an intending student, to deliver the pallet with food samples to their parent lab.

The girl was enough smart and was doing her practical training in the lab as an assistant, so she just took the pallet and went to their collaborators.
She chose the shortest way, through their permaculture plantation.

Perhaps, a security guard stopped her and asked: "This is a restriced area. Where are you going to?"
She described her problem and asked him to let her pass to their parent lab.

"Can you describe exactly its location? Will somebody meet you here?" - continued asking the guard.

The student girl told him all this, but he was still asking. "Have you a pass card?".

"I don't need any card, you see? Or chips, or other material stuff." - The girl began getting angry. - "We are a modern company and use biometry to identify our staff. Nobody from the street can pass the voice and retina scanners."
"Ok, ok, I was just asking" - he said and let her go.

"What a shocking ignorance", she thought. "How this guy even could get his job as a security?"

At last, the girl arrived to the lab, she put her hand onto a door, equipped with a palm scanner, saying "Knock-knock".
Then she passed her voice matching procedure, perceiving that the sensor work somewhat strange.
But the door was still closed.

"Hey, how can I get in?" asked her.
"Pull the cable near the door, it's under maintenance" they answered from inside.

The girl came in and saw the lab specialist sitting in a chair.

She was not very familiar with this lab personnel, though her grannie was working there.
So, she took her smartphone and ran the corporative identification application, pointing the camera to the person.

The smartphone electronic assistant reported:
"Palm pattern - no match found. Retina - no match. Ears shape - no match. Teeth shape - no match. Voice pattern - no match.
Chemical identification test OK. Best match in contact list - 'My_Granny', similarity 27%".

"Why..." - began the girl, but the person attacked her and cannibalized. This was that security guard met by her in the permaplantation.
The girl realized that it was she who told the abuser how to get to the lab, and he had consumed her grannie, that's why the chemical id test passed OK.

Happily, there were IT specialists returning from a cheap diner.
"Look, that augmented biowolf has eaten somebody. Again."
"But how did he come in?"
"Did you forget? We switched off the door scanners when departing to lunch. Otherwise we then couldn't get in ourselves."
"Funny. That stupid AI twisted up the wolf and the grann ie ."
"Not AI stupid. You stupid. You had teached its neural network with your furry manga."
After they finished laughing, they restored the girl and her grannie from a backup, disabled the wolf and they all lived long and happily.

And as they were fond of Linux, they named this story Red Hood.

 

Edited November 17, 2016 by kerbiloid

[p1t1o]

http://theconcourse.deadspin.com/ways-to-die-that-are-more-awful-than-dissolving-in-a-sc-1789089809

[BrennanMonster]

With regards to the toilet exploding from flushing an alkali metal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CEC64Bqeajs

They used sodium, which is less reactive than potassium. 

[Codraroll]

This one is a little less epic and more mundane than previous stories, but it happened at my university some 15 years ago, so I have good faith in its accuracy. Our professor told us as a word of warning:

One day, one of the researchers in the chemistry labs brought her early-teen son to work (as far as I can remember, it was during the "work week", where 9th-graders "apprentice" at some local workplace to get a taste of working life), where he helped with some experiments. Some of the experiments required liquid nitrogen, which was stored in a big tank in the Chemistry building. The mother gave him a set of keys to the room with the tank, and sent him across the building with insulated bottles to fill for her experiments. Liquid nitrogen's primary property is that it's really, really cold, which fascinated the boy. He decided to fill some in an empty Coke bottle and take it home, to pour on stuff and see what happened. We've all wanted to try that, right?

However, liquid nitrogen isn't cold because it's liquid nitrogen. It's liquid nitrogen because it's cold. A coke bottle with a decilitre or two of liquid nitrogen will, given the temperature of an average backpack, and the time it takes to bring it home without one's mother noticing, turn into a coke bottle with half a decilitre of liquid nitrogen, and a few dozen litres of gaseous nitrogen. Since the bottle itself only held half a litre, the gaseous nitrogen built up enormous pressure.

Back at home, the boy took the bottle to his room, held it the way you hold bottles when you open them, and unscrewed the cap. A few milliseconds later, the cap was embedded in his left eye. It had flown with such force that it destroyed his eye completely, and as far as I can remember he lost his vision on the other eye too. It was apparently a life-threatening injury, but he was taken to hospital and managed to recover. His blindness was permanent, though.

Back at the university, procedures changed immediately. Since the accident, there has only been one set of keys to the nitrogen room, and only one responsible person allowed to have them. And no person without an extensive safety course is allowed to even enter a lab, unless dangerous equipment has been stoved and locked away. Bringing kids to work is completely out of the question.

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, Codraroll said:

Back at home, the boy took the bottle to his room, held it the way you hold bottles when you open them, and unscrewed the cap. A few milliseconds later, the cap was embedded in his left eye. It had flown with such force that it destroyed his eye completely, and as far as I can remember he lost his vision on the other eye too. It was apparently a life-threatening injury, but he was taken to hospital and managed to recover. His blindness was permanent, though.

Back at the university, procedures changed immediately. Since the accident, there has only been one set of keys to the nitrogen room, and only one responsible person allowed to have them. And no person without an extensive safety course is allowed to even enter a lab, unless dangerous equipment has been stoved and locked away. Bringing kids to work is completely out of the question.

Never ever enclose any cryogenic material, this also applies to dry ice. Just the same way you don't heat an closed container with liquid to high temperatures.

Not part of the 5 minutes briefing I got before started using it on university it was mostly about spilling it. 
Interesting having cotton cotton or other absorbing clothes on you is worse than bare skin as is you spill it on skin the droplets will hover like water on an hot pan then fall of but they will be absorbed by cotton and then it will be very cold. 
 

[p1t1o]

2 hours ago, Codraroll said:

<snip>

Good story. LN2 safety is quite relaxed in most places I have seen it, though unaccompanied children being sent to collect reagents still would have set off massive red flags all over the place.

I once wanted to acquire some so that I could show my GF some cool science stuff and was looking around for where to get it, I ended up talking to a company that sends tankers round to refil the stores of places like labs and hospitals and the like. They said they didnt sell it in "personal use" amounts but they said that I could arrange to meet the delivery tanker at one of his stops and they would fill up whatever container I had for a "nominal" fee, and that was the extent of it.

[TheSaint]

Apocryphal story from the prototype where I did my nuclear training in the Navy, take it with a grain of salt. Maybe several.

After a shutdown of the plant that involved welding new components into the primary system, radiography of the new welds was required. This is essentially an x-ray of the welded areas to determine if there are any flaws in the welds before pressure is applied to them. To do this, they set up a set of photographic plates on one side of the weld, and then set up a radiographic source on the other side. The source is carried around in a shielded container, affectionately called, "the pig", which has a length of tube attached to it. The tube is arranged near the weld, then the radiographers take shelter behind a portable shield. A remote-controlled mechanism in the pig is actuated which moves the source into the tube, exposing the film. After the prescribed exposure, the mechanism is activated again and the source moves back into the pig.

Well, the story goes, that somehow, unnoticed to the radiography technicians, due to some flaw in the tube, the source fell out of the tube. It was a very small sphere, somewhere between the size of a marble or a pea, easy to miss if you're not looking for it. So they packed up their gear and took off. More workers came in to continue with their work, and one of them happened to notice this little white plastic sphere in the area. And he thought, "Gee, the radiographers must have dropped this. I wonder if they need it?" So he picked it up and put it in his pocket. And carried it around in his pocket for the rest of his shift. And at the end of his shift he went to the Radiography Office. And all of the radiography techs had gone home for the day, but the secretary was still there. And he asked her if she knew what it was, and she said, "I don't, but I'll hang on to it and ask the guys in the morning." And she put it in her desk drawer. And the next morning, as everyone is filing in to work, she asks, "Hey, Bob, some guy dropped this off after you all left yesterday. Do you need it?" The radiography tech takes one look at it and says, "Put that down, and get out. Now." And they evacuate the entire office. Lots of people wound up with excessive doses. Bunch of radiography techs lost their jobs. Secretary wound up with burns on her fingers. The worker who walked around with it in his pocket wound up in the hospital with massive tissue necrosis, ended up losing his leg.

[TheSaint]

8 hours ago, p1t1o said:

Good story. LN2 safety is quite relaxed in most places I have seen it, though unaccompanied children being sent to collect reagents still would have set off massive red flags all over the place.

I once wanted to acquire some so that I could show my GF some cool science stuff and was looking around for where to get it, I ended up talking to a company that sends tankers round to refil the stores of places like labs and hospitals and the like. They said they didnt sell it in "personal use" amounts but they said that I could arrange to meet the delivery tanker at one of his stops and they would fill up whatever container I had for a "nominal" fee, and that was the extent of it.

We used to use LN2 for freeze seals in the Navy. If there was a component that needed to be isolated for work, but that had no isolation valves, you could freeze the water on either side of it to isolate it from the rest of the (obviously depressurized) plant to prevent having to drain everything to work on it. So you would build up these little cofferdams around the pipes on either side of the component and fill them with liquid nitrogen, and then station a freeze seal watch whose sole job was to watch the temperatures of the freeze seals and add more liquid nitrogen as necessary to keep them within the prescribed temperature range.

1. Bored sailor with nothing to do but watch temperature gauges,
2. Dewar full of liquid nitrogen,
3. Lack of immediate adult supervision,

Yeah, you can see where this is going. Did you know that when you dip a ballpoint pen in liquid nitrogen and then drop it on a deck plate from about four feet in the air it shatters? Did you know that the ink almost immediately melts again, into little droplets all over the deck that are really hard to clean up without making a total mess, especially when you can't leave your watchstation to get anything to clean it up with and your shipmates are totally unsympathetic because they're all laughing too hard and joking about how busted you're going to be when the Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) comes around and sees this? And then when the EOOW does (unexpectedly) come around it suddenly turns into an all-hands evolution to get it all cleaned up as soon as possible because, all joking aside, we were all in it together. And then when the EOOW stops to review your logs, he makes some off-handed remark about doing dumb things with liquid nitrogen, which then turns into a half-hour BS session about all the crazy stuff he did with liquid nitrogen and other chemicals in college, winding up with, "But don't do anything like that here, we don't need any trouble."

[magnemoe]

47 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

We used to use LN2 for freeze seals in the Navy. If there was a component that needed to be isolated for work, but that had no isolation valves, you could freeze the water on either side of it to isolate it from the rest of the (obviously depressurized) plant to prevent having to drain everything to work on it. So you would build up these little cofferdams around the pipes on either side of the component and fill them with liquid nitrogen, and then station a freeze seal watch whose sole job was to watch the temperatures of the freeze seals and add more liquid nitrogen as necessary to keep them within the prescribed temperature range.

1. Bored sailor with nothing to do but watch temperature gauges,
2. Dewar full of liquid nitrogen,
3. Lack of immediate adult supervision,

Yeah, you can see where this is going. Did you know that when you dip a ballpoint pen in liquid nitrogen and then drop it on a deck plate from about four feet in the air it shatters? Did you know that the ink almost immediately melts again, into little droplets all over the deck that are really hard to clean up without making a total mess, especially when you can't leave your watchstation to get anything to clean it up with and your shipmates are totally unsympathetic because they're all laughing too hard and joking about how busted you're going to be when the Engineering Officer of the Watch (EOOW) comes around and sees this? And then when the EOOW does (unexpectedly) come around it suddenly turns into an all-hands evolution to get it all cleaned up as soon as possible because, all joking aside, we were all in it together. And then when the EOOW stops to review your logs, he makes some off-handed remark about doing dumb things with liquid nitrogen, which then turns into a half-hour BS session about all the crazy stuff he did with liquid nitrogen and other chemicals in college, winding up with, "But don't do anything like that here, we don't need any trouble."

LOL, at mine lab it was used as cold pump in vacuum chambers. 
The pump had an regulator who used compressed air to inject nitrogen as needed. However it also has an spray pistol like an compressed air pistol but with liquid nitrogen, test against wall. Cone of cold spell, cool., yes it was obviously an dangerous thing you don't fool around with much like an gun. 
However I had an warm bottle of coke, that should be easy to solve so I set it up and used cone of cold, around two seconds gave me an coke slush. I got even more respect. 
Still it was fun to freeze latex gloves and crack them. 

[TheSaint]

7 minutes ago, magnemoe said:

LOL, at mine lab it was used as cold pump in vacuum chambers. 
The pump had an regulator who used compressed air to inject nitrogen as needed. However it also has an spray pistol like an compressed air pistol but with liquid nitrogen, test against wall. Cone of cold spell, cool., yes it was obviously an dangerous thing you don't fool around with much like an gun. 
However I had an warm bottle of coke, that should be easy to solve so I set it up and used cone of cold, around two seconds gave me an coke slush. I got even more respect. 
Still it was fun to freeze latex gloves and crack them. 

Yeah, we did rubber gloves, paper towels, screwdrivers, all sorts of stuff. I heard that one of the guys did his nylon watch-cap-style hat. I wasn't around, but I heard it was really cool. And a terrific mess.

[p1t1o]

I just like the way that you can spill the heck out of it and it cleans itself up

[SR]

My chemistry teacher told me a story once.

There was a school that was shutting down which had some leftover chemicals.

So one lesson a chemistry teacher chucked some Alkali metals into the school pond.

Everything went well.

A couple of weeks later a biology teacher said "I don't know what's happened to the newts in the school pond. Its a real problem because the sixth form were doing their A level study on them."