When an article says "some scientists think" then remember this: I, a scientist, once thought I could fit a whole orange in my mouth. I could, it turns out, get it in there, but I hadn't given sufficient thought to the reverse operation.
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I operate on the if it says "scientists" it's pure sensationalist crap, if it says what sort of scientist they've at least paid a tiny bit of attention to what's actually been said and it may be worth reading
It’s a way to perform chemical reactions requiring spell components that are extremely reactive to water and/or oxygen (sometimes but not always this reaction involves fire or explosions). (Continued)
Anyways, the schlenk line is a pair of glass tubes both connected to a set of stopcock valves. One is hooked up to a vacuum pump and the other to a source of inert gas with no moisture or oxygen (usually high purity nitrogen or argon), with the unused gas pressure escaping through a mercury bubbler.
The idea is that you can only have the valve open one or the other at a time. But if you start trying to get creative you can accidentally make a circuit and suck the mercury straight through the damn thing
Meanwhile, the vacuum pump side needs to be connected to a solvent trap, a tube immersed in liquid nitrogen to freeze out any fumes. That can explosively decompress too!
I saw this story when it was first posted to Twitter. You tell it well with the lurid and vivid details of experiencing the unfolding events. Horror/comedy. I think about it every time I see "some scientists think" and laugh. At least you got a good story out of it.
My husband, a scientist, has done all sorts of daft things in the past, including making enough hydrogen sulphide to necessitate the evacuation of an entire building of the university (In fairness, he was a student at the time, not a professor)
i was en route to a festival so i was refreshed enough not to feel a thing. by all accounts i looked like a piss catherine wheel rolling down the banking tho
Knowledge will not be defeated! (at A-level we had a science teacher who showed us how to do things like hammer a nail really quickly into a nos canister to use as a projectile, and once came into a class he wasn't even teaching with a carrier bag filled with gas to set it on fire and then start...
bouncing it around the walls until it started to set fire to posters at which point he stamped on it, causing a huge ball of flame to go up his leg - just outstanding chaos on every level).
Our chemistry teacher was in a decades-long funk because they'd banned his annual competition to see who could launch a bucket the highest using electrolytically produced hydrogen. School legend has it that he blew out the ground floor windows on one side of the building including the headmaster's.
No, it's just a toxic cleanup nightmare. (Metallic mercury isn't *that* bad, but it's a pain to clean up, and you really have to get all of it because it's a toxic hazard basically forever)
my father once told me when he was in intro chem, he upset a beaker of butyric acid onto his lab book, but couldn't smell it because he'd been working with it so much that day. When he carried the lab book back to his dorm his roommates made him hang it out the window (and keep the window closed)
Ngl it was a mix of horror but also smugness cos I had proved my doubters wrong (also fortunately turns out my jaw still had that little but of stretch left so no professional needed to be involved).
The most entertaining dinner I ever had was sitting on a deck with a person who worked in a lab with radioactive materials and a person who did something in a lab involving a lot of vacuum chambers while they swapped tales of Things That Went Very Wrong.
It's been decades so I couldn't possibly accurately recount it, but the best anecdote involved radioactive iodine and some dummy getting followed home by a team with a geiger counter.
I had a summer lab student whose nickname among the faculty was something like “Miss .023 microcuries” (I may have the exact numbers wrong), because that’s what she had dumped down the sink after a radio-labeling experiment. Good times with RadCon for everybody!
I know nothing about radioactive material except "no touchie" so I don't really know what that means, but I've heard enough "and then things went horribly wrong" stories to know just from the presentation that that's bad. 😆
My favorite hazardous chemical is antimony pentafluoride, in part because it's one of the precursors for fluoroantimonic acid (strongest acid known to man).
This is brilliant, extremely funny…and was also a classic pub trick when I were a lad. You pick a cocky twat and say “bet you £10 you can’t fit a whole orange in your mouth”’
The hilarity is well worth the cash!
He could also do what hard drive manufacturers do to determine the MTBF of their products, and try to fit several hundred oranges in his mouth all at once.
I’m just saying if you want to retain credibility as a scientist. Otherwise people will say “there goes the man who inferred statistical significance from an inadequate sample”. Also tbf “the orange-in-mouth man”.
Every time I see "scientists say", I just think of any time I can get just one of my friends to agree with me. Scientists say pizza is delicious, scientists say the lime ones are the best Starburst, scientists say cats are perfect beings.
I should also, on reflection, have practiced in private. I had an audience, which grew as my initial satisfaction at an hypothesis well proven, slipped rapidly through stages of qualm, disquiet, then alarm (mild through severe) and ended in full blown panic.
Given the consequences, layed out in great detail, I would actually conclude that testing of hypotheses shall not be practiced in private, not very least to protect those proven right from being overwhelmed with emotions
That's an allegory for all potential geoengineering schemes & CCS approaches for the days ahead. Nothing can be tested beforehand, and if someone in authority makes a decision, they will soon find out if they are biting off more than they can chew.
When one panics, one's muscles tense, which is of course, the opposite of what I needed here. I had been quite relaxed at the start, but now I couldn't get a finger between the orange and the very taut edges of my mouth.
Above and below, the orange, which was now under some pressure, deformed to make a nearly perfect seal against my teeth. I hadn't previously been aware of how much oxygen one needs to consume an orange, but I was made aware of it now by its sudden and ongoing lack.
I forgot for a moment that I had nostrils and tried to breathe in hard through my mouth. I have big lungs. When the doctor tested my lung capacity, I blew the end clean off the cardboard tube.
I've always been vaguely proud of that; mostly for want of more tangible achievements and because I am, when all is said and done, the kind of person otherwise predisposed to shove a whole orange in his mouth without cause.
Those enormous lungs - my pride and joy - expanding in this moment of crisis to their fullest extent, had created a hard vacuum behind the orange, which, at that point imploded.
I am a scientist and I believed I could halfway pull an entirely full 6 column agar plate rack partly out of the incubator with one hand and put ONE plate at the bottom of the last stack with the other.
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It will, eventually, melt.
She was like 16yrs old at the time.
https://bsky.app/profile/dereklowe.bsky.social
The hilarity is well worth the cash!
Tears of laughter.
https://politicalfilm.wordpress.com/2017/07/18/the-corruption-of-science/
You may have killed the neighbor next door with your lungs.
Entire rack of plates on the floor.
D:
"No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head."