i value my eyebrows and hearing, thank you very much

Some of you may be followers of Derek Lowe's popular "Things I Won't Work With" series where he highlights especially nasty chemicals (y'know, above and beyond the ones that are preventing our river from freezing).

I am pretty pleased to nominate the below compound as worthy of a post from Lowe (and also a 6" thick blast shield):



The molecule comes from a JACS ASAP that was published by a former undergrad student in our group who has since gone on to do some crazy explosives chemistry in grad school in Munich (you'll need subscriber access to be able to read the article).

For any non-chemists in the house, one rule of thumb for judging the explosivity (a term I just made up) of an organic molecule is the ratio of C to N atoms. The more N, the more likely it is to blow sky-high. TNT (2,4,6-trinitrotoluene), the industry standard for a good explosive, has a C:N ratio of 7:3, whereas the above compound has a staggeringly low 1:5![1]

You'd have to have cojones made out of titanium carbide to be able to work with this stuff on a regular basis. Judging by the experimental, they take some serious precautions (and this is coming from a person who works with hydrofluoric acid every day):

5-Nitrotetrazole-2N-oxide and its salts are all energetic compounds with sensitivity to various stimuli. While we encountered no issues in the handling of these materials, proper protective measures (face shield, ear protection, body armor, Kevlar gloves, and earthened equipment) should be used at all times.

Congratulations, Davin! Don't explode your face off, ok?

[1] There are several other commercial explosive materials out there that have a much lower C:N ratio such as RDX, and even crazier compounds are out there in the literature. But Davin's lab is actually conducting explosion tests (i.e., going out of their way to actually blowing things up!). Cr-a-a-z-y.

Safety song!

From the grad students who made that nano song, here's an awesome video on lab safety! If this doesn't get you wearing your safety glasses, I just don't know what will. Although I don't know why they had to pick on the purple furry guy for having lots of hair. Some of my male colleagues with extremely hairy backs had better watch out!



Seriously, if I could sing like that, my fellow labmates would be a lot more happy when I get to singing in the lab.

fire in the lab!

Ah! Giant fire in the lab across from us!



Okay, that photo isn't actually our fire. But our fire was pretty big, in my unbiased opinion. A benzene still caught fire (still unsure over the exact cause, but an old still plus maybe some water is a likely culprit). Our lab came in to the sights of flames licking at the ceiling.

We grabbed the fire extinguisher and put it out (apparently this isn't the greatest idea, as you can blow the fire onto other flammable sources such as other stills) and pulled the alarm.

Everything is okay now, other than a huge pile of extinguisher poop. Whew!

mission accomplished

I successfully did not blow up the chemistry lab today. Which is no small feat, let me tell you.

We use, on an everyday basis, two quartz tube furnaces that go up to 1100°C. We normally use them with Ar or dilute H2/Ar mixtures. I've used them so much that I kind of forget that 1100°C is nice and toasty warm. I've never tried to roast a marshmellow, but I bet you I could.

Anyway, I set up a run today with 20% H2/Ar as the carrier gas. High concentrations of H2 + 1100 degrees of scorching heat + large cylinders of compressed gas is *probably* completely safe and sound, if properly set up. The biggest risk is static electricity, which can accumulate on the surfaces of insulators like quartz or tygon tubing. We got around that by using Cu tubing for the most part, grounded to metal monkey bars, and cooling our outlet vent.

It did have the potential to go completely and horribly wrong if it did in fact malfunction. Which, I guess, describes about 85% of all the experimenting I do around here. But, it's an interesting thought- if you were the student responsible for causing the serious injury or death of someone through your research, would you want to stay in Chemistry? If not, what would you do?