/sci/ - Science & Math

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Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:24:54 2014 No.6420553 [DELETED]

Biggest fuck-ups in the lab? I'm not talking about loading a row of sample in top of another on the qPCR or some small shit like that, I'm talking about apocalyptical fuck-ups.

In our lab, this days I have taken part in the biggest fuck up in my life to day.

>one pHD student from Iran, has to come to our lab.
>she has some iPS lines i trully need
>sending biological samples from Iran is near impossible
>we decide that she should take the samples with her in the plan
>thisishighlyillegalbutfuckit.jpg
>just load a lot of dry ice in the luggage and put the frozen cells in ther
>THEY LOST HER LUGGAGE
>In some airport in the world, now there is one luggage FROM IRAN that is emiting smoke (dry ice sublimating)

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:31:53 2014 No.6420563 >party van incoming Also, that sucks. What was the importance of the cells?

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:34:53 2014 No.6420567 >>6420563 They are iPS (induced Pluripotent Stem cells) from a particullar tissue. The process to make them is around one month, and it doesn't always work as intended (is quite tricky). So it freed me of all that work.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:35:53 2014 No.6420571 >>6420553 You do know that she is probably going to end deported, right?

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:38:23 2014 No.6420573 >>6420571 Yes, that is what we are afraid of. But, anyway, I'm sure ther will be other anons that tell us their stories

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:40:23 2014 No.6420574 >>6420567 That's very compelling, and you definitely have a quality student there. I certainly hope she doesn't face legal ramification. At any rate, best of luck in your research, I find it helpful to internally chant "hard work builds character"

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:41:24 2014 No.6420577 So it's true that Iran is highly advanced in stem cell research?

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:46:24 2014 No.6420581

>>6420574
Thank you! Been doing lately around 12hours/day because of some contaminations on my cell lines. If hard work builds character, I think I don't want my character to be bigger, man.

Anyway, another small story:

>One year ago, friday, very tired
>Infecting some cells at 8 in the evening, feeling pretty miserable
>Put the plate in the centrifuge (at 20ºC), spin for 30'
>Begin picking up
>Go home
>Realize on sunday that the cells are still in the centrifuge
>They should be dead, all my previous experience and the literature tells me they should be dead
>They are alive.

And that's why sometimes I love working with cancerous cell lines.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:47:53 2014 No.6420585

>>6420577

Yes, they have the Royan Institute, which is specialized in pluripotency and stem cells. Sometimes they use some strange methods (probably because they have to prepare a lot of media and reagents that we can buy here) but the publish quite well.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:48:54 2014 No.6420586 >>6420581 I started to lel, then a completely different feeling because cancer is scary mang.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 20:59:54 2014 No.6420602

>>6420586
Yes, well, you get desesitized with time, believe me. Oh, another one (I'm beggining to realize that my life in the lab is a dark comedy).

>Operating mice
>Mouse begins to wake up in the middle of the operation.
>Ohshitoshitoshit
>Take some isofluorane (this is used as anesthetic of all kinds of mamifers, even humans until some years ago) and my handkerchief
>Good night sweet prince
>I now feel like a rapist
>End operation
>Begin to walk outside the operating room, feeling dizzy
>I fall against the wall, hit my head, my mind clears, I go fast outside the room
>The mouse woke up because there was a broken tube in the anesthesia machine
>I had been breathing isofluorane the whole time

And that's the story of how I nearly became "the guy who we found drugged in the operating room"

Funny thing, Isoflourane gives you the mother of all hangovers.

>>	Hyde Mon Mar 17 21:09:54 2014 No.6420612 Not in chem lab but related to chemicals. Some idiots had to clean the hallway and noticed that ammonia and bleach work very well, so why not use them at the same time. Half the marching band had chemical burns on their lungs from the chlorine gas.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:19:24 2014 No.6420622 One of the clean workers of our lab once made herself a pizza using the microwave for heating agar for electrophoresis. Yes, the same electrophoresis that are using etidium bromide. Why yes, the same etidium bromide that is a very dangerous carcinogen.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:25:23 2014 No.6420629 >>6420553 made me chuckle lol

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:25:54 2014 No.6420631 >>6420612 This happened in Spain some summers ago in one swimming pool. The clever girl appeared in the news and it became a meme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICQrvG6jfOA

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:27:53 2014 No.6420633 >>6420581 so op got cancer? >>6420602 lol

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:28:53 2014 No.6420635 >>6420631 This one is better https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X-X0jY6dwE

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:30:53 2014 No.6420639 >>6420633 No, OP works with dangerous cancer cell lines, but there is no reason why we should have gotten cancer.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:35:53 2014 No.6420648
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Worst thing I saw was what some students in a lab I was teaching did.
> learning about thermodynamics
> have some water baths at various temperatures for them to put their samples in
> not enough baths in this lab, so we negotiate with a bio lab to use some of theirs
> understanding that their samples have to stay in the baths
> stress this in the pre-lab about a hundred times
> seriously, the importance of this was more than half the talk
> DON'T TOUCH THEM OR I WILL SHANK YOU
> students decide anyway that the baths in the other lab are the wrong temperature
> temperature changes everywhere
> no one figures it out until the next day
> 2 years' worth of research for 5 grad students utterly destroyed
"But we didn't touch their samples!"

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:41:23 2014 No.6420654

>purifying fusion protein with gst tag
>this protein expresses very consistently and well
>run 100ml sample through column via fplc
>elute right after injecting
>didnt wash column
>lost 30 mg of protein that day
not too much of a fuck up considering that one of my lab mates broke a sample loop (pricing north of $1200)

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 21:49:24 2014 No.6420661

>Filling up buckets for the fertilizer solutions.
>Leave for seminar.
>Realize on the bus I forgot to turn off the faucet.
>Haul sack back to lab.
>Fucking Waterworld.
>Leaked though the floor down on to the lab below.
>Dripped onto electrical outlets.

>No one knows who it was.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:01:56 2014 No.6420678 >Doing research with rats in perfluorocarbons >Working late >Leave five rats in a sealed tank of liquid over the weekend Not that bad but I felt like shit about it.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:04:53 2014 No.6420681 File: 70 KB, 500x670, milk.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420553 >Running a chem lab as a TA. >Today we're playing with iodine. >Some kid previously looked up how to make nitrogen triiodide. >He now has one leg.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:08:53 2014 No.6420689 >>6420553 Fuck iPS cells. >Better go change the media on my cells! >Lemme just take a quick look under the microscope first >They look neuronal Fuck 'em.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:13:24 2014 No.6420697 >>6420553 v&

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:19:54 2014 No.6420704 >>6420681 That escalated quickly. Although it's very unlikely nitrogen triiodide would do that.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:20:55 2014 No.6420706 File: 11 KB, 312x312, 1394740054046.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420681 ouch

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:21:23 2014 No.6420707 >>6420704 That shit is op dog.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:29:55 2014 No.6420722
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Not sure what exactly caused it, but somebody fucked up badly enough for this to happen at my school's college of Optics and Lasers:
>somehow trigger volatile gas alarm
>madness ensues
>police speed to the scene and establish a yellow tape perimeter around the building
>everything in the vicinity shut down
>emergency response team waiting outside
>news vans and two copters hovering above
>guys in hazmat suits (pic related, from the incident) storm the building

I had to go to an exam before the ordeal was over, but I'd imagine the guy responsible has taken a lot of shit for it.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:30:23 2014 No.6420724 >>6420648 Holy shit that's terrible, what was the fallout from that?

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:34:53 2014 No.6420728

I have yet to royally fuck anything up, and I have been a grad student for 5 years. Also, no end in sight for my project.

I got lots of stories of people in or near my lab fucking things up, though.

>Be in a lab that shares equipment with other labs sometimes.
>Nearly all our equipment is older than I am.
>Dumb bitch from the lab next door comes over and decides to use our old and busted (and only) floor centrifuge without asking.
>Bitch is dumb because she works in a "factory" lab for minimum pay to do menial tasks with little to no formal training.
>Needs to use our centrifuge to spin samples at 20,000 rpms
>Centrifuge can only handle 14,000 before it starts smoking.
>Cranks the speed dial up to 22,000, turns it on
>Walks away immediately after switching it on because fuck proper equipment usage.
>Revving intensifies
>Suddenly, smoke, smoke everywhere and something's a' rumblin'.
>Centrifuge = very broken
>Boss of "factory" lab forced to pay repairs
>Dumb bitch gets 3 shiny new assholes
>Fired at the end of the day.

And now, after repairs, our centrifuge runs better than ever.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:39:23 2014 No.6420730

Last week someone in the university maintenance department forgot to turn the power back on for a third of our building after an electrical maintenance outage that was supposed to only last two hours.

The power was out for about twelve hours. There's a high throughput sequencing core on the ground floor, and about twelve labs in that section of the building. A lot of people lost a lot of very expensive reagents and samples.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:43:23 2014 No.6420736 File: 22 KB, 200x194, 1394760769610.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420728 That went better than I expected

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:44:24 2014 No.6420742 >>6420736 Yeah, that repairman must have been some sort of genius. It runs so smooth and quiet now.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:54:53 2014 No.6420756

>girl in my lab working with carcinogenic moon dust simulant under fume hood
>fuck safety precautions
>fuck gloves
>fuck masks
>fuck goggles
>sticks head under fume hood because safety precautions haven't been fucked hard enough yet
>fuck turning the fan on
>accidentally drops a sample
>cloud of moon dust engulfs her

and much cancer was had on that day. That shit sticks to you and doesn't come off. It's basically a bunch of really fine silicates with interesting electrostatic properties, so it's a bitch if you don't contain it properly.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 22:56:54 2014 No.6420759
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>>6420728
Another one, with non-deliberate kinky undertones:

>Teaching undergrads how to use a GC.
>Setup is simple as fuck. Decide to walk them through it step-by-step just to be on the safe side
>Whoreclown's turn to load the GC
>She's been known to fuck up everything she touches.
>ohboyherewego.jpg
>I give a slow and simple demonstration on how to load the CG with a 10uL syringe.
>Take the solid, glass part of the syringe and carefully guide it to injection port. Do not touch the plunger while doing this.
>Carefully insert needle into injection port, making sure not to force it in or risk breaking the injector.
>Once the syringe has been seated, depress the plunger in one smooth motion.
>See? Wasn't that easy? Now your turn!
>BLAHAHAHAA OKAY XD
>Takes the syringe and with index finger on plunger, J-J-JAMS IT IN the injection port.
>Sprays sample everywhere.
>WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? STOP!
>Just set the syringe down and sit over there!
>okay.jpg

I only got one bad review teaching that class. Guess who it was from?

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:05:54 2014 No.6420769 >>6420759 Jesus christ man. I am a fairly patient person myself but I don't think I could deal with such incompetency.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:10:23 2014 No.6420778
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Oh I remember one from when I was a wee lad.

>Just started in the lab not 2 months ago
>Need to express protein to test for my project
>Have plasmid already, just need to transform some bacteria
>Transform DH5a cells
>Try inducing expression, check for expression on SDS page gel
>pic related
>PI from next lab over asks how I expected to get expression without a phage or pseudophage (DE3)
>All of my wat
>I find out I had no clue what I was doing

I'm still kind of embarrassed about that one. Years later, I'm one of the better guys when it comes to protein expression tech.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:11:24 2014 No.6420782

>In undergrad organic chem lab
>Doing simple acid-base extraction
>Someone doesn't seem to understand that gas is generated inside the separatory funnel when the particular solute we are using moves from one solvent layer to the other
>They don't vent the gas
>they're spinning the funnel around, too much gas, the top pops off and fucking FLIES across the room
>smashes into one of the chemical waste containers, which is really a big emptied-out and re-used 5 Liter bottle of something
>Glass spiderweb cracks
>Person who did it starts yelling "oh sorree sorree" and runs to pick up the fucking container
>Bottle is weakened from impact so it falls/kinda breaks out of his hand and shatters on the inside of the fume hood
>Nobody knows what was really in there, so they evac'd the building

I'm amazed that little glass cork flew hard enough to weaken that thick fucking bottle

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:15:54 2014 No.6420795 >be doing regular lab shit >lab manager breaks a flask or something >tries to clean it up with paper towels >paper towels catch fire from nearby heating plate >suddenly fire everywhere >lab manager flipping out Humorous day.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:20:53 2014 No.6420809 >HS Chem class >Had two biggest fucktards ever to exist as partners >Lit shit on fire all day everyday > Very small gas leak started at our lab station over the weekend. >Entire desktop in flames >mfw douche-bags tried to blame it on me.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:25:55 2014 No.6420817
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Not so much a fuck-up as it is extreme rage over something:

>Here, we give special bacteria cells! Make electrocompetent!
>Try to make electrocompetent. Seriously, it's not hard.
>Test cells with electroporator and positive control plasmid
>Do everything perfectly, know capacitance of cell, work out exactly how to shock the cells in that special way, then recover them without killing them
>No colonies
>Repeat above steps after tweaking
>No colonies
>Repeat above steps after tweaking
>No colonies
>This goes on for the better part of a month
>Ask if there's something wrong with the electroporator.
>Lab is full of chinese students. I ask them how many cfu's they usually get from their electrocompetent cells using this device
>They smile at me, wearing a confused look
>I ask them if they have ever checked the efficiency of transformation
>They smile at me, wearing a confused look
>Ask for help from other labs
>Oh, but it's so easy, Anon! If anything, my cells are TOO competent!
>mfw

Seriously, fuck electroporation. Fuck it in the ass. If the instrument you use is bad, it won't matter how good you are, it won't work.

Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:30:53 2014 No.6420823

There have been two big fuckups in my lab since I joined.

>get a new extremely powerful pulsed laser
>a dude in my lab puts his face planar with the beam while the laser is on

>someone leaves a water line on in the wetlab accidentally without tying it tightly to the outlet
>the hose pops off overnight and it floods our entire floor with water

If I think of more I'll post more.

Anyone wanna know anything else about being a chemistry PhD student?

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:34:53 2014 No.6420829 >>6420728 I have two centrifuges which go up to 18k RCF and they definitely scare me because the carbon fiber rotors are probably 5+ years old. I don't want to be around them when they go.

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:51:29 2014 No.6420858 >>6420823 has it personally worth it to you? im on the fence of going phd or not

>>	Anonymous Mon Mar 17 23:52:59 2014 No.6420860 >>6420858 *been worth it to you

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:22:29 2014 No.6420912 >>6420823 Is it possible to get anywhere in Academia without being a genius?

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:33:29 2014 No.6420925 >>6420912 No. Not unless you get lucky.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:39:59 2014 No.6420934 >Undergrad research >In room using GC/MS >Look around while I wait for samples to finish >See rage-comics taped to the rotary evaporators >They're reminders to turn them off when done

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:41:59 2014 No.6420938 >>6420707 Still not that bad, especially as a contact explosive. What are you doing giving him large enough quantities to make that shit?

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:45:30 2014 No.6420943

Not me, but this happened in the lab next door.

>Research student making a peroxide
>Mixing in some solid reagent
>Needs to be done slowly, or the reaction goes into fucking overdrive
>They fuck up, tip whatever they had the reagent in too far over and just dump it in
>They barely have enough time to get their hands out of the fume hood before it explodes
>Destroys several thousand dollars worth of glassware and gets chemicals everywhere

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:47:59 2014 No.6420945 Broke a handle off a -80 once. Stole an identical one from a different department (theirs was not in use). I've fixed more things in this lab than I've broken.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:49:28 2014 No.6420947 >>6420581 I audibly snorted after reading this. Good show anon.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:50:56 2014 No.6420950 >>6420782 Were there any fluorinated compounds in there? Shit loves to fuck with glass.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:52:26 2014 No.6420952 >>6420648 If that shit happened to me I would have actually shanked those fuckers.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:53:26 2014 No.6420953

>>6420912
Grad students are some of the biggest morons I've ever had the pleasure to work with. They peak in stupidity around the 3rd/4th year, then after a year of depression they start thinking clearly into their post doc. Some don't make it to post doc. There are no geniuses in phd programs, because if you're a genius you'd have the foresight to not pursue a phd.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:54:26 2014 No.6420956 >>6420953 Why is it a bad idea to pursue a PhD?

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:56:26 2014 No.6420959 >>6420956 Hide out in a STEM grad student's office, or talk to a 5th/6th year student. Ask them what sort of job they got lined up. What that smile go upside down.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:56:56 2014 No.6420960 This one time, I submitted a major computing task but in part of my code one of the expressions had a missing term and I wasted heaps of expensive comput

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 00:58:56 2014 No.6420963

Was doing that shitty experiment in first year physics with the charged balls. I don't remember what it's called because I'm an engineer.

Anyway we were working with 50kV and the probe had a 10M resistor to stop people from dying. While doing the experiment none of us were aware that the ground plane wasn't actually connected to a pipe outside, so it began quickly building up a charge. By about half-time almost everything at the workbench was charged to 50kV and people were getting shocked touching the chairs, tables, books, pencils and even the case of the bench supply.

Good times. Once we worked out what was going on I refused to touch anything around me. Lost a few marks because of it, but I heard some guy got Ventricular Fibrillation so yeah fuck that.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:06:56 2014 No.6420972 >>6420959 Is there really no jobs for STEM fields? I'm about to apply to first year community college for interest in physics..

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:07:56 2014 No.6420973 >>6420972 I probably sound like a twat, but I'm drunk so for the holiday

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:09:26 2014 No.6420977

>>6420972
Most recent student to graduate in my lab has been staring at Monster.com for the past couple of months. Picture the worst possible situation, it's worse than that. By a lot. It's even tougher in physics, from what I heard. I work in molecular genetics.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:10:26 2014 No.6420980 >>6420977 How the fuck am I supposed to work in STEM master race if there are no jobs?

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:11:26 2014 No.6420984 >>6420980 applied STEM master race

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:15:26 2014 No.6420993 >>6420980 Get off 4chan for one, undergrad circle jerk in here, you won't get a real idea of what STEM is like here. Try interning in some lab. Get a feel for it. The real deal, not as it is glorified on here, is not for everyone.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:15:56 2014 No.6420994

I work at a government microbiology lab. We run tests on water samples to check for coliforms, etc. This wasn't a fuck up on my part, but it was a pretty spectacular accident.

>Get some compliance water samples that need to be filtered and set onto agar plates. Pretty typical shit.
>Filtration units draw down the water using a vaccum and the water is collected into a large glass bottle that holds several liters. Bacterial colonies collect on the filter while water is drawn through it.
>Set up my filtration station. Begin processing samples like I have been for years now.
>Shooting the shit with co-workers as I'm working. Friend/co-worker is standing right next to large glass bottle that collects water from the samples. I'm seated maybe a foot away from it.
>BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
>Holy shit what the fuck was that?! Is it raining indoors? Why is there water everywhe-
>Look over to my side. Glass bottle is fucking GONE.
>Notice tiny shards of glass in my hair, sticking out of the ceiling, littering the floor.
>Imprint of the glass bottle is carved out on the stone lab work surface.
>All of my what.
>Still cleaning up tiny bits of glass for days afterwards.

Amazingly neither of us was even so much as scratched by any of it, despite the glass bottle being merely a foot or two away.
As it turns out the glass bottle that we had been using for this method was never originally rated for vaccum pressure and the lab worker who initially bought it years ago never even checked.

The incident was the talk of the building for the week.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:16:56 2014 No.6420997

>evaporating platinum onto samples
>platinum sits at the bottom of the container, laser zaps it to evaporate it, samples at the top of the container await platinum vapour
>one of the samples falls off its holder thing
>directly into the path of the laser
>sample is evaporated onto other samples, ruining the whole lot

That was expensive....

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:20:56 2014 No.6421002

>>6420993
This will probably turn into me dribbling on like some sort of baby, but I'm merely 19 and wanting to do go into STEM for astronomy/astrophys, and I kind of don't know where to begin besides the math itself. As stated earlier I'm planning on starting community college next month to get pre reqs out of the way and get going, but if there are so few available jobs it seems to me to be not worth the money/time if I end up working at Home Depot anyway.. Do you feel me?

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:23:56 2014 No.6421008

>>6421002
Welcome to the state of STEM jobs in America.
It's been this way for a few years now. It's pretty shaky for molecular biology at the moment. I can only imagine how awful it would be for astronomy/astrophysics which has little to no application outside academia.

And yet we still have clowns like Bill Gates going to congress extolling the virtues of allowing more people to come and work on visas; because we have such a terrible STEM "shortage".

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:31:21 2014 No.6421017

>>6421002
Haha, community college. Man. My friend worked at CERN as an undergrad. Got into a top nuclear phys phd program stateside. Can't find funding. Had to drop her PHD.

You want to work in academic astrophysics? And what find a tenure professorship? Jesus christ, there are like a handful of such positions open and hundred if not thousands of old experienced research professors working off meager grants making like 50k a year ready to fill them.

With biology you at least have a large industry to look at for jobs. Astrophysics has little commercial application. Unless maybe GPS companies and satellite companies take astro. students. For that I imagine you don't want a phd.

But like most of the little dweebs on here, I imagine you're talking about a phd in theoretical astrophysics. And I'm actually laughing at the idea. I know one theoretical physicist. And I'm being serious, he's the 50yo homeless guy that camps out in the university library, and tutors undergrads for money. His fucking glasses are cracked. You can't make this shit up.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:33:20 2014 No.6421023

>>6420994
Also another accident that happened in my lab, a bit more recently. Again, not my fault, but it was a major hassle.

>Lab workers have to run daily QC checks on all our instruments. This entails checking fridge/freezer temps in AM and PM hours.
>I usually work in cell culture lab. Small freezer stocked full of reagents needed to prep media.
>I'm out for the day. Another lab tech checks the freezer temp before she leaves for the day.
>She doesn't notice that she didn't close the freezer door completely and it's left cracked open over night.
>Get back to lab next day. Huge fucking puddle on the floor. Dozens of frozen stocks and reagents ruined.

And I had a fairly large order of cell culture flasks I needed to prep that week too. I had to remake a shit ton of antibiotic solutions, they had to re-order so much shit. It was a huge hassle.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:34:20 2014 No.6421025 >>6421017 Not him, but what about something like biophysics. Is that not applied enough?

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:36:20 2014 No.6421030

>>6421025
Just about anything in bio is going to be substantially more "applied". The job market still isn't great, but there's at least a private sector, whereas for shit like Physics and a lot of fields in Math it's purely academic so you're pretty much screwed.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:43:21 2014 No.6421054

>>6421025
Biophysics is no different from any other bio degree. I mostly see them in neuro dept. I don't really know much about them.

>>6421030
Math guys have it the best. You don't really need a phd, a masters would be enough. Any bank, hedge fund, whatever. Math degree is what you expect a business degree to be. I've also heard of some physics students sneaking off to work for hedgefunds using their math skills. I hear it's dull work, you crunch numbers all day, every day. But the pay is spectacular.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:45:21 2014 No.6421057 >>6421054 That's true enough I suppose. Still, how many people go into a math degree wanting to work for hedgefunds? That's generally what people go into finance degrees for.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:48:51 2014 No.6421061 File: 2.85 MB, 2376x2592, i did not save this.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6421008 ...and the collective lot of /sci/ laughs at us engineers. EE and ME undergrad here, and i'm already getting good offers.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:52:21 2014 No.6421070 >>6421061 >i did not save this.jpg Engineers continue to deny their true nature.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 01:55:51 2014 No.6421076

>>6421017
No I don't give much of a shit for theoretical physics, I just wanted to run an observatory or some shit like that, help map and get to know whats out there more. Even that is seeming to be a fruitless road to take if I can't actually practice what I've learned. I'm starting to search for other more realistic alternatives..

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:00:51 2014 No.6421080

>>6421076
I can't say how likely it would be to actually land a job running an observatory, but I can guess that the odds would be incredibly slim. You'd be better off pursuing that sort of thing as a hobby honestly. There are some pretty nice telescopes available for amateurs on the market these days.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:01:21 2014 No.6421084

>>6421076
Attaboy. I recommend an applied math degree, with a lean towards statistics/big data. Minor in something you enjoy, a humanities, maybe a language. Languages are fucking great. Intern as much as possible in various fields, hands on learning is equal to a year of courses. Learn to program in Python, Perl, R.

It's what I would have done looking back now.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:02:51 2014 No.6421089 >>6421084 I don't give a rooty tooty poot about coding though

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:08:51 2014 No.6421099 >>6421089 go into engineering then. We outmath mathfags.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:08:51 2014 No.6421100 File: 21 KB, 400x388, 1319513637197.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6421080 If this is true, then it is truly disheartening to see something you feel strongly for be painted as a road to no where because of money..

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:09:22 2014 No.6421102

>>6421089
Better start. A physicist spends the better part of a day programming. How do you think they collect/analyze data from their colliders and scopes? Microsoft didn't program the firmware, certainly. As a geneticist I am getting tension headaches from staring at R on my laptop all day. The amount of data experiments produce turned every biologist into a bioinformatician to some degree.

Working in a company cubicle you will be working with spreadsheets all day. Best to learn how to automate everything now, in R or SAS or whatever. Marketing companies look at big data, advertising, production, service industry, management, everything.

You can't get around it, without programming knowledge these days you are behind the competition.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:11:21 2014 No.6421104 >>6421099 >We outmath mathfags. Pff, I WISH.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 02:48:53 2014 No.6421158 >>6420994 You are living in a cartoon.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 03:17:42 2014 No.6421185

>>6420980
Engineering undergrad + 2-4 rounds of co-oping or interning if you want to get in it quick
Don't go past master's level unless if you're in the EU, get a company sponsored PhD (Engd, D.-Ing, etc)

Or do what I did
BS physcs, MS optics
started working at big-ass company (Northrop Grumman) as an R&D engineer
within a year they started talking about putting me in a PhD program at a big school. Probably will get fast-tracked to that soon and they'll keep paying me like $30,000 a year on top of my tuition.

and to stay on topic
>working in microscopy lab for master's, have my own optical table for my microscope
>postdoc who built/runs really badass light sheet microscope has the other table
>whiny Bio PhD girl comes in to scan some pollen grains on the light sheet
>I'm buried behind 4 monitors and a bunch of optomechanics control modules so I dont see her and she doesn't see me
>puts her fucking purse on my table in the path of my beam
>open the shutter from my comp to run a scan
>blast a Coach bag with 8 watts of supercontinuum light (320-1900 nm)
>funny smell
>kill laser
>girl tries to pull rank and bitch at me for not announcing that I was about to use the laser
>postdoc tells her to gtfo
>have good laugh

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 03:48:12 2014 No.6421215

>>6421185
Another that I didn't witness but happened in the same room
>light sheet microscope runs on watercooled Argon ion laser
>same postdoc is replacing some of the hoses
>leaves room for a few hours, locks door and puts up sign saying don't go in or do anything
>same bio major decides to steal lab key from postdoc's desk and ignore sign
>isn't booked for the microscope b/c she fucked up and wants to do last minute imaging
>tries to start everything up herself
>watercooling wasn't hooked up
>water everywhere
>bio girl tries to dip out just as postdoc is coming in
>apparently tried to btich at the postdoc b/c he's 6'3", she's 4'11", and he "put the sign too high on the door"

If you're a physicist in biophotonics you hate your life b/c you have to work with bio majors. As soon as they hear that you're building a microscope they start snooping around to see if they can get images of their shit. And where I was all the bio majors were arrogant as hell b/c they were convinced that they were going to cure cancer and acted like physicists were a bunch of nerds who built things for them. But physicists put up with it b/c it's an easy way to piggyback onto publications
>trying to explain that my microscope isn't ready for imaging yet
>explain that I'm making PSF measurements to optimize everything
>bio major doesn't get what a PSF is

fuck

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 04:11:12 2014 No.6421246

It was some chemistry class lab.
>be doing titrations
>me and lab partner are joined by this cute girl that missed her other class
>be doing more titrations with some shitty acid
>new girl goes retarded and knocks off the burette from its stand
>half-catches in the air and starts doing some kung fu spinning thing as she tried to catch it and acid flies all over
>she starts freaking out
>lab partners are covered in acid
>help teacher take them to the restroom and help my lap partner take off her shirt
>new girl still freaking out
>female teacher that was walking to her office comes in to help
>new girl is talking about how she's going to sue and some other shit
>they get to home so they can shower and shit
>I go back to the lab and finish titrations by myself and leave early
I think it was like 2M HCl but I don't remember for sure. Other than that nothing really happened except idiots that would get rashes for resting their arms/head against the dirty countertops

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 04:16:42 2014 No.6421258 that kid who asploaded the ultracentrifuge same kid was hospitalized due to not knowing how to work with solvents the stupidest people I've ever encountered work in academia.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 05:40:06 2014 No.6421353

>Growing bacteria samples during intro to bio

>One guy with tonsilitis decides to cough into his growth medium

>Fucking deliberately grow bacteria known to be infectious to humans

>Tell nobody

>Opens petri dish after about a week in the incubator

>Half of class infected

I hated that guy so much.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 05:59:36 2014 No.6421362

>>I don't give a rooty tooty poot about coding though
>go into engineering then. We outmath mathfags.

Uh...

What branch of engineering are you in where coding doesn't happen?

Civil, mech, process: Matlab

Process, Electrical: PLC

Electronics, Data: PLC, FPGA, C/C++

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 06:49:05 2014 No.6421420 >>6421246 >I think it was like 2M HCL Confirmed for High School

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 07:30:36 2014 No.6421452 File: 50 KB, 264x255, woah.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] I used to intentionally turn as many of the gas taps in my HS chem lab on and then leave Serves chem teacher for leaving the gas on

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 07:35:05 2014 No.6421458 >Chemistry department; many years ago >Some guy leaves hot plate on over the weekend >Come back on Monday; entire lab burnt down

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 07:41:05 2014 No.6421463 >>6420553 wow no one gives a fuck about your American brainwash terrorism problems all the Iranians I've met here in germany have been nice as fuck, why would there be a country full of evil people, you're (your country) insane

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 07:42:35 2014 No.6421464 [DELETED]

File: 4 KB, 243x207, index.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

In chemistry. Teacher is Jewish. Writes 'Happy Hanukkah' ( I hate religion) in chalk on the board before lecture starts. After class I change it to 'Happy Holocaust.' 5 minutes later there is what I thought a terrorist attack. Police, campus security securing perimeters .. searching people. Next class an inquisition is launched near death threats from the professor ect.

A qt3.14 who knows I did it turns over and gives me a
>'you've been a bad boy look.'

She say's,
"anon did you do that?"

I wink. Later we had sex.

But still honestly that was the biggest fuckup of my life even though i wasn't caught. I might have been expelled or maybe thrown in prison or killed? I dunno it was serious shit.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 08:04:35 2014 No.6421484 >>6421023 Where are you from?

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 08:10:05 2014 No.6421494 >>6421464 where the fuck are you from?

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 08:15:19 2014 No.6421500

>>6420724
> what was the fallout from that?
Some sad graduate students, scaled-back labs for the rest of the week (couldn't use the bio lab baths any more obviously), and that's about it.

The same group of students also used a metal stirring rod in a redox experiment. Rapid oxidation = spray of boiling fluid all over the room. Fortunately no one was hurt.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 12:02:38 2014 No.6421741 >>6421246 >2M HCl wow it's fucking nothing

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 12:44:39 2014 No.6421793 >>6421420 >>6421741 I use 2M to season my food.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 12:55:08 2014 No.6421804 if you want money, get into GOVERNMENT instead of science government is the most profitable and most sustainable business model in history.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 12:57:55 2014 No.6421811 >>6421099 hahahahaha

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:01:23 2014 No.6421816 >>6420689 You're just shit with iPS cells I guess. hunt:Try growing them on vitronectin

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:12:54 2014 No.6421833 >>6421158 I have often suspected this myself.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:13:54 2014 No.6421835 >>6421484 US

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:15:55 2014 No.6421841 >>6421100 Theres a lot of reasons why it's so fucked right now. Maybe one day when all the baby boomers die off we'll finally be able to get some good jobs again.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:34:13 2014 No.6421865 >>6421500 >Fortunately Some pain might be good for them. They keep fucking up and getting away with it. A little bit of pain might be good here

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:48:43 2014 No.6421894 >>6421215 >If you're a physicist in biophotonics you hate your life b/c you have to work with bio majors Is it really that bad? I was planning on going into biophotonics.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 13:59:48 2014 No.6421921

>>6420678
"Bad" doesn't always mean that it cost a lot of money to fix. Not trying to make you feel bad, but I just want to let you know that that's a pretty big fuck-up since, you know, you were basically torturing animals.

Not that it doesn't happen, it happens pretty often over here. Once someone came into one of our labs and there were literally rats running around on the floor because the previous people had "forgotten they'd left them in the scanner". Anesthesia runs out, rats wake up, now you have several rats freely able to gnaw on exposed cables from million-dollar equipment.

There are also some people who cannot bear euthanizing their own animals. What do they do? Oh, just put them in the big ol' euthanasia box the technicians use in the morning! Of course, they only get euthanized in the late afternoon, at which point the box is literally brimming with live mice layered on top of each other. Oh, and rats (which, since they are natural predators of mice, said mice are absolutely terrified of). Although I think they put a stop to that fairly recently, thank God.

>>6420622
Also happens more often than you'd think (I know of at least one lab where several people actually do it). PhD students can be gigantic idiots.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 14:55:27 2014 No.6421991 >>6421835 Ah ok. Just wondering. If you were local to me I would of asked for a job.

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 15:27:27 2014 No.6422058
File: 638 KB, 256x192, 1389981692269.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>Be alone in lab, late at night.
>bored, grab 10M HCl
>prepare anus to dilute concentrated acid in small volume flask
>Is it never base to acid or acid to base?
>too late, I pour
>strong vigorous reaction startles me, instinctively I dodge sideways and jerk hand holding Hcl vial upwards
>10M HCl flies over right shoulder
>Bubbling acid eating floor, table, equipments.
>Sphincter on lockdown
>Find baking soda for some reason believe this must be aqueous
>waste time finding beaker and filling with water as smell of acid eating materials fills room
>Toss entire 500mL beaker of highly dilute baking soda on floor, bubbles vigorously
>Repeat several times
>Use 1/2 roll of paper to clean everything up.
>No serious damage but indelible bleached spot on floor which no one notices.
>Reflect seriously on personal stupidity and general suitability of life
>pry open sphincter with pool cue 48 hours later

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 15:39:57 2014 No.6422068 >>6422058 >>bored, grab 10M HCl I don't see how this could ever end in good times

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 15:52:28 2014 No.6422074

heard this story; i dont remeber the details:
>phd student
>has to do something that requires refilling ethanol from time to time (i think it was a destillation)
>refills directly from 25(?)L bottle
>ethanol catches fire while refilling
>fires runs into bottle
>student flips out
>drops bottle
>burning ethanol everywhere
>hail satan.jpg
>40k $ damage

Anonymous Tue Mar 18 16:06:28 2014 No.6422089

Im a physics student but some chem grad student at my uni threw sulphuric acid into another students face and then hit him with a hammer. He had to go to on life support in a burns unit and stuff iirc. I guess that isn't really a fuck up because it doesnt sound much like an accident. Was just kinda weird because i had done chemistry subjects in that building

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 16:06:58 2014 No.6422090 File: 34 KB, 352x420, 1355940018389.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420553

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 16:07:58 2014 No.6422092 File: 4 KB, 132x146, 1394900746762.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420681 This thread is gold How much did he make anyway ? Its kinda hard to lose a leg with a few hungered grams as far i imagine.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 16:12:59 2014 No.6422100 >>6421008 That "shortage" phenomenon isn't restricted to US only, but over here in Europe we have other fags calling.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 16:41:28 2014 No.6422148 File: 59 KB, 737x480, lel.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6421246 >>6421420 >>6421793 >>6421741 lmao2M!!! 2M!!!!

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 20:31:36 2014 No.6422555 >>6421463 Where have I exactly implied that: 1.-I think that our student was anything but TOO NICE for agreeing to transport the cells 2.-I think she is evil 3.-This history takes place in the USA.

>>	Anonymous Tue Mar 18 23:59:30 2014 No.6423016 >>6420782 not marking waste containers in a chem lab... even mc donalds does a better job than that

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 00:09:31 2014 No.6423048 >>6420950 It's possible. It was the halogen waste bucket, but that could mean lots of kinds of things. We were given regular warnings not to put any HF into glass containers, but someone probably did it anyway, it's second year undergrad.

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 00:15:01 2014 No.6423063

>>6421054
biophysics at my uni is physics with a little bit of bio what you need for a specific problem so basicly you can do the same things biologists do but you know a lot more mathematical methods and can do the job biologists were supposed to do and bring math into bio like some guys a few centurys back did with chemistry

also in europe with stem degrees it's not much of a problem to get into consulting and financial shit (sure it's nice to have a lot of money but i'd rather be the 50 year old theoretical physicist teaching undergrads...)

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 00:25:03 2014 No.6423084
File: 33 KB, 369x369, ..png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>basic how to use the microscope day in undergrad bio course
>pre med girl across from me thinks she's hot shit and starts dicking with it and ignores the demo
>10 minutes later, watch her crank the course knob too much and slam the thing into the lens
>panics and tries to hide what she did but ultimate gets found out
>ends up having to pay a decent amount of money to fix the lens
>Flash forward a few weeks
>Ends up doing the same exact thing and cracking another lens
>mfw

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 00:42:49 2014 No.6423126

>>6421025
Not him, but what about something like biophysics. Is that not applied enough?

Biophysics is a very wide field, loosely defined as the application of tools and principles of physics to biological problems. There is overlap with molecular/cellular biology, neuroscience, virology, biochemistry, structural biology, systems biology, etc.

Any advanced education or training in biophysics will be highly specialized. The applications -- in academia or in industry -- will vary considerably.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 00:45:49 2014 No.6423128 >>6422089 Wait, I thought hammers were great for neutralizing acid?

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 01:09:50 2014 No.6423163 >>6421458 >new building >individual fume hoods >pre-med majors leaving hot plates on in organic labs >fume hood catches on fire at one point >over worked stock room tech has to go and make sure that hot plates are turned off now

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 01:57:20 2014 No.6423246 >>6422089 unsw reppin

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 03:57:31 2014 No.6423385 >>6422068 This isn't normal, but on Chemistry it is.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 04:00:32 2014 No.6423388 My dad studied biophysics 25 years ago, and he told me how during his undergrad years alone about three fellow students died in lab accidents (ether explosions I think). Such is life in third world university.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 04:23:01 2014 No.6423411 >>6420722 happened at my university once. Some guy working on a petawatt class laser in a basement accidentally flooded the whole building with deadly fluorine gas. He now has the nickname of fluorine boy.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 06:31:30 2014 No.6423542 File: 229 KB, 180x104, 1215026755318.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420678 Jesus Christ, the sheer horror of that

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 09:20:51 2014 No.6423716

I don't know how my chemistry teacher is still alive.

Told us a story about teaching in a school in England.

>Decided to show them how thermite works
>Doesn't use a plastic shield
>Lights it
>Fucking iron spraying everywhere
>No one loses an eye

Also if he's doing a demo and needs to use a bunsen, he lights one and then preceeds to lean over the damn thing when lit, not once, but several times. I've even seen his jumper start to catch on it but then go out before the whole thing goes up in flames.

We were doing some reflux a few weeks back and teacher demo-d it because we couldn't be arsed and we've done it a million times.

>reflux in fume cupboard
>he fucks about with the quickfit to do distillation
>water tube comes out of sink hole
>starts filling up the cupboard
>water getting nearer to electric isomantle
>nobody says a word because we don't honest give a fuck
>he doesn't do a thing
>fucking water everywhere

The next week the ceiling collapsed on the floor below us from water damage between the two floors. Whole entire room full of computers trashed directly underneath our classroom.
Could probably take a wild guess and say our teacher fucked up again.

The other week I near took him out when he was cycling when he just proceeded to cross the road on his bike without looking.

I'm failing chemistry.

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 09:35:51 2014 No.6423730

These aren't really accidents or anything major just some things my lab partner did back in community college.
>be doing that experiment where you put metals in acids
>lab partner knocks the beaker of acid onto his hands
>"Ah this stings slightly"
>Proceeds to then suck his fingers
The acid was weak as hell but still it was retarded
>Same experiment
>Dip strip of magnesium into acid for a second
>Realize using wrong metal and take it out
>5 mins later notice him chewing on something
>Hes chewing on a strip of magnesium that was briefly dipped in acid
Nothing to serious but every experiment was almost impossible to enjoy because of that

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 09:40:51 2014 No.6423737 >>6423716 The classical chemistry teacher

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 11:29:21 2014 No.6423886 >>6420622 Wait what? Etidium Bromide is in agar or something. I´ve done this alot in the microwave we use to heat agar.

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 11:31:52 2014 No.6423891

A few horror stories I heard in the safety lecture for my undergrad chem lab

>Some guy is working alone at the lab some evening
>Something with heating up gas I guess
>Does it in a chemical bottle
>Shuts it too hard
>Bottle explodes
>Metal shard flies directly into his throat (He was holding it near his face)
>He is alone at the lab, and the campus is mostly empty at those hours, so he just died alone and his body was found the next day
And that's why you need completely shut glass containers!

>Some young girl (14 I guess) in some program for gifted kids
>Comes to do some basic acid-base experiment in the lab
>Uses rubber gloves
>Accidentally puts them against her face after it touched the acid
>After ten minutes, someone tells her that she has a hole in her cheek
And that's why you never use gloves!

and this one isn't a specific story, but just happened often
>Someone working in the fume ventilator
>Forgets to actually turn it on
>Opens it after finishing reaction
>Gets face full of toxic gas

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 12:18:52 2014 No.6423970 Heard of this one retard. >Uses X-rays without protection >Dies, because didn't understand that you need a protection.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 15:07:59 2014 No.6424228 >>6421991 You wouldn't want to work here. Trust me.

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 15:15:29 2014 No.6424234

>>6423886
>http://www.fishersci.com/ecomm/servlet/msdsproxy?productName=BP130210&productDescription=ETHIDIUM+BROMIDE+10ML&catNo=BP1302-10+%3Cimg+src%3D%22%2Fglyphs%2Fgsa_glyph.gif%22+width%3D%2230%22+height%3D%2213%22+alt%3D%22Available+on+GSA%2FVA+Contract+for+Federal+Government+customers+only.%22+title%3D%22Available+on+GSA%2FVA+Contract+for+Federal+Government+customers.%22++border%3D%220%22%3E%26%23160%3B&vendorId=VN00033897&storeId=10652

Agar is basically just seaweed gel, afaik it shouldn't have any ethidium bromide in it unless it's a special type of agar media.

Also MSDS are your friends.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 15:36:47 2014 No.6424263 >>6423891 Jesus.That first one is fucking brutal.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 15:53:17 2014 No.6424275 I remember hearing about this a few years ago. Pretty damn big fuck up by any measure. http://www.nbcnews.com/id/42569811/ns/us_news-life/t/yale-student-dies-chemistry-lab-accident/#.Uyn1ZM4f7vI

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 15:53:46 2014 No.6424274

>Really late at night
>Building a spot welder
> Ripping off a electrical piece off some scrap
> Last one of the screws too rusted on and now rounded out
> Start tapping it off with a hammer
> The hammer causes another piece on the scrap to shatter
> It was a mercury switch
> Mercury everywhere
> uhhhhh...
> email my prof and just leave it on the floor

Now there are safety signs everywhere

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 16:25:48 2014 No.6424348 >>6424275 The real question is, what was a theoretical physicist doing in a workshop?

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 16:35:48 2014 No.6424371

>Went to pick up Leco sulfur determinator at lab. See vacuum container with coal samples inside.
>Decide they are part of the pickup along with calibration samples and accelerants.
>Put in truck.
>Get call, "Anon, did you see...."
Some dudes experiment, been there for 1 year.
>One fucking year!
>Lucky fucking bastard, I didn't open container.
Return to lab that night.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 16:44:48 2014 No.6424389 Why would there be no jobs for STEM PhDs? Companies don't have R&D?

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 16:57:48 2014 No.6424421

Not really a fuck-up per se but it would have been. I got VERY CLOSE to dropping an NMR sample tube into the machine without the air pressure being on. It would have fallen into the $400,000 instrument and gotten shit everywhere. I probably would of been ostracized from the whole school since they literally just got it. Good thing my professor yelled to hold on a second

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 16:58:48 2014 No.6424425

>lab co-worker next to me performing a liquid/liquid extraction with DCM and "diluted" sulfuric acid
>his interpretation of "diluted" is 50% v/v
>shakes separatory funnel
>vigorous reaction ensues
>small geyser of acid blasts him in the chest (fortunately wearing lab coat) and I get spattered with acid as well

I had a minor one recently but nothing terrible came of it:

>quenching excess chlorosulfonic acid in DCM by adding water
>a biphasic system forms, with the acid and organic crap floating beneath water
>add more water, as quenching seems to have subsided
>magnetic stir bar jumps, vigorous reaction ensues as the phases mix
>stopper ejected from flask like a cannonball, ricochets off fume hood wall

Fuck chlorosulfonic acid, it's like the demon child of sulfuric and hydrochloric.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:00:48 2014 No.6424431 >>6424389 Not much Physicists or Mathematicians can do for R&D.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:10:48 2014 No.6424449 >>6424348 Being secretly jealous of the experimentalists and their cool toys.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:13:48 2014 No.6424453 >>6420553 >Collaborating with axis states Saged, reported, hidden, contacted moot, emailed obama

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:15:48 2014 No.6424459 >>6420581 >Creating a centrifugation-resistant cancer cell line WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:18:48 2014 No.6424463 >>6420622 >>6423886 >>6424234 EtBr isn't a carcinogen, that's persistant urban myth.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:19:48 2014 No.6424465 >>6424453 >with axis states Shows how stupid you are.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:20:48 2014 No.6424467 >>6420553 Once a superconducting coil quenched in our lab. It had the entirety of 100 mA of current in it. Didn't even trip the safety valve.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:21:48 2014 No.6424471 >>6424465 >He doesn't know about the axis of evil. >Laughing GWBush.jpg

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:21:48 2014 No.6424472 File: 14 KB, 252x240, 1376915231028.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420661

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:23:48 2014 No.6424479 >>6424463 You'll have to excuse me for not taking your word for it where potentially dangerous chemicals are concerned.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:24:48 2014 No.6424484 >>6424463 >the compound that is designed to intercalate with DNA doesn't fuck with your DNA Okay

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:25:48 2014 No.6424486 >>6420728 >Getting mad at your colleague because your own equipment is shittily maintained and you never bothered to put up a notice informing people of this

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:26:48 2014 No.6424489 >>6424486 She should have bothered to ask in the first place.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:33:48 2014 No.6424506 >>6420778 wat what is this phage bullshit why can't you just heatshock it in?

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:33:48 2014 No.6424507 >>6421246 >not stripping naked and using the emergency lab shower

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:35:48 2014 No.6424513 >>6424507 >Any excuse to strip naked to show off your twisted, rotund form like some slutty exhibitionist. Typical chemist mindset.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:45:48 2014 No.6424542 >>6421215 Shut up and get back to cleaning my microscope, bitch

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:46:48 2014 No.6424545 >>6424459 Creating SPACE CANCER

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:54:48 2014 No.6424555

>>6424463
>not treating everything in a chemistry lab as though it can, will, and indeed, desires to give you cancer

Maybe its because I was trained in a marine natural products elucidation laboratory where everything is an unknown with mostly unpredictable properties, but still.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:56:48 2014 No.6424557 >>6424421 This happens more often than you'd think

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:57:48 2014 No.6424560 >>6424555 >chemistry lab >ever needing to do biological assays >laughing girls.jpg nice joke anon

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 17:59:48 2014 No.6424563 >>6424484 It's been tested extensively in mice, one metabolic breakdown product is slightly carcinogenic, and to get that effect they had to directly inject orders of magnitude higher concentrations than you would ever get from skin contact

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 18:14:48 2014 No.6424602 >>6424506 DH5a cells are shit for expression, they're used for their high copy numbers to maximise the chances of getting colonies, like for a miniprep

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 18:27:48 2014 No.6424626

>>6424484

I won't agree with the other guy and try to say that EtBr isn't a mutagen, but I do think it's hazards are grossly overstated. Just because a chemical is capable of intercalating into free-floating DNA doesn't necessarily mean it's going to cause problems in eukaryotic tissues.

If I recall correctly, most of the toxicity studies on EtBr were done in vitro or in bacterial or embryonic systems. Evidence of EtBr causing cancer or birth defects in full eukaryotic organisms is pretty scant. Hell, the stuff was regularly used for years to treat cattle for trypanosomes, with no noticeable health issues.

I mean, EtBr certainly isn't all puppies and rainbows, but maybe it's been unfairly demonized.

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 18:28:48 2014 No.6424631 >>6424602 my whole life is a lie

>>	Anonymous Wed Mar 19 19:01:48 2014 No.6424711 File: 35 KB, 540x720, BB-S5B-Walt-590.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6423385

Anonymous Wed Mar 19 23:35:48 2014 No.6425181

>>6420858

I'm half way through my second year and I've been having a good time.

I'll be submitting my first publication soon assuming my experiments go well in the next few weeks.

All I can do is hope I get a good paying job after this.

>>6420912

Do you mean graduate student or prof?

I know graduate students who are complete morons and still got their PhD's.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 00:06:48 2014 No.6425225

So I've been applying as an undergrad research assistant for an inorganic lab and I have a pretty good chance of getting in. What should I expect? I'm a bit worried I'm going to make myself out to be a complete retard because the more I learn the more retarded I feel. Send help.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 00:18:48 2014 No.6425238

>>6425225

You'll be a complete noob for sure, but graduate students expect that of undergrads.

Just don't break anything, keep your work area clean, read papers other grad students tell you to read, and be friendly.

I'm the poster above you, and the more *I* learn the more retarded I feel.

I only assume it will be this way until I die.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 00:20:48 2014 No.6425241

>>6421246
>2M HCl

that's adorable.

>inorganic chemistry lab
>GA heading the lab is qt phd student
>using 15M HCl
>have to pour 20mL it into graduated cylinder, 50mL size I believe
>she doesn't use a pipette or anything
>pours straight from this several liter jug in one go
>miniscus of HCl ends up exactly at 20mL
>start to kneel and say I am not worthy

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 00:23:48 2014 No.6425249

>>6425241

>15 M HCl
>not 99.999% sulfuric acid mixed with an inorganic oxidizing agent

We use that shit in my lab to clean glassware, and it is so strong that it strips layers of stone off of our "chemical resistant" countertops.

It also turns papertowel into black ash.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 00:32:48 2014 No.6425266

>>6425249
>strips layers of stone off of our "chemical resistant" countertops

Reminds me of how shit our lab room is for inorganic. There are no actual floor tiles, just dirty cement with what looks like dried tar over the decades. Instead of having access to vacuums in every fume hood they put in air, exactly the opposite of what we need for filtration.

There is one, ONE scale in the whole room that actually works. The GA is a saint to put up with all this shit.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 02:33:48 2014 No.6425438 This topic learned me a few things as a undergrat. 1.) fuck ups happen. 2.) it can always be worse. 3.) what not to do. 4.) somehow some labs sounds shittier the. Our schools lab, where we have 2 chemisrty classrooms.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 05:06:48 2014 No.6425566

>>6425249
>"chemical resistant"

Yeah, that seems about right.

In b4 hydroflouric acid (I will never work with semiconductors again)

Honestly, it seems to me that every time somebody claims to have invented X-resistant anything, they go and invent a better X.

It literally goes like this:

1: "Our competitors are weaksauce, let's make our product durable against EVERATHANG"

2: "Wait, shit, we need to be able to shape and form our product, let's invent an even harsher product it's not durable against"

3: Repeat from step 1

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 05:13:48 2014 No.6425572 >>6421500 they were your students. how the fuck did you not take it in the ass for that, you should have.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:19:48 2014 No.6425690 File: 808 KB, 207x207, 1376029214860.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6424459 >implying most cells aren't naturally able to survive a few thousand RPM cumon step it up

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:30:48 2014 No.6425699 >>6420730 fuck that shit, my life would be over if all our freezers and stocks thawed out, jesus

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:32:48 2014 No.6425701 >>6423048 You were working with HF in undergrad?

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:33:48 2014 No.6425703

>>6420648
fuck I hate this bullshit. cunts cant fucking listen or comprehend instructions

first year zoological diversity subject where we dissect various animals

>starfish week
>"dont use scalpel, I cant stress this enough. its too sharp and the skin is too leathery"
>10 minute talk about not using it and scissors are fine
>two minutes after talk ended two kids already sliced their fingers severely with the scalpels

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:35:48 2014 No.6425704
File: 326 KB, 3388x3638, 1394125547688.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>6420809
>AP chem
>partners were the two biggest fucktards ever to exist but also my friends
>built massive teepee out of napkins and alcohol-soaked wooden stirring sticks
>light it on fire in the sink
>brief explosion that left a rectangular black mark on the ceiling
>mfw they managed to explain it away without getting in any sort of trouble
that class was a blast

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:44:48 2014 No.6425713 >>6421353 What a fucking dick

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 07:48:48 2014 No.6425718 File: 11 KB, 256x256, 1371947003975.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6422074 >25 liter bottle that student was fucking ripped

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 09:00:48 2014 No.6425786 >>6423891 I seriously doubt 2 happened (also 1). I realise the importance of lab safety and all, but those are most likely just made-up scare-stories. Especially 2, that is seriously unlikely.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 13:35:48 2014 No.6426106

haven''t worked in the lab that long, but i have a couple
>buddy of mine working on some fish bacteria
>needs butyric acid for a growth medium
>opens the bottle
>the entire lab stinks like feet for the rest of the day

another one
>gotta autoclave a growth medium
>had to remake this accursed medium for three times because things kept going wrong with it, this one was PERFECT. nothing could possibly go wrong
>automatic autoclaves are full and running, so have to use one of the old fashioned autoclaves which is basically a pressure cooker but bigger
>set it up
>continue on with labwork elsewhere
>people are watching another autoclave, so i ask them to keep an eye on ours.
>go to another area to work on some other preparations, very simple microscopic work
>after about an hour (which is shorter than the runtime of the autoclave) start smelling something burning
>figure it's nothing
>take a look at the autoclave, it would be ready soon, time to take it out
>mfw pressure was completely gone
>inside of the autoclave was completely black and crispy
>the growth medium, which was at first 200ml's, only was 100ml's and concentrated as fuck, but everything caked to the side of the infusion bottle
>mfw the next group is showing up in an hour, so no more time to make a new medium
>discard the medium, clean out the autoclave and go home chilling with bros.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 14:38:48 2014 No.6426177 I love every one of you guys. Just keep going, don't give in, work hard, stay strong. Keep at it. Have a great day!

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 16:18:48 2014 No.6426348 >>6420553 I fucked up conversions few hundred times, np no one saw it so it's ok.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 16:55:48 2014 No.6426415 >>6424489 >Why do people assume a piece of equipment works like it's supposed to?

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 17:32:48 2014 No.6426474 >>6426415 >open valve for air >water comes out tuition money well spent.

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 17:37:48 2014 No.6426479

>>6426415
No. Fuck you. It's like you've never even worked in a lab before.
You go into another lab that you've never been to before, you fucking ask them about their equipment and if it's okay to use it. You just waltz in and use something without permission you fucking deserve all the shit coming to you. That's what you get for assuming shit like that.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 17:41:48 2014 No.6426485 >>6426479 eh, not that guy but it should be a bit of both. Yeah people should ask but there should also be a laminated piece of paper taped next to the instrument informing people that it's screwy and not to exceed so and so.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:03:48 2014 No.6426513 >>6420553 Still a student, but during experimentation with acids and cells in class, a lab partner (You know, THAT guy who always sits around doing jack shit) decides to drink from a beaker It was full of sulphuric acid Hilarity ensured

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:25:48 2014 No.6426561 >turns on gas >I'm a jew! >puts his mouth on the outlet and takes a deep breath Nothing bad happened, but wow...

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:41:48 2014 No.6426586 >>6426513 did he died?

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:43:48 2014 No.6426587

Not so much a fuckup, but still amusing nonetheless.

>Friends with classics undergrad
>He pesters me to see the virology lab (he's a huge Resident Evil fan)
>Tell him it's boring as shit
>Finally agree to let him peer through the internal windows, at night
>Tell professor
>A plan is hatched
>Makeup is acquired
>Contacts are acquired
>The stage is set
>Night falls
>Labs are in B1
>More labs in B2
>Get in the lift
>Sneakily send a text
>Lift starts descending
>Passes B1
>Pretend to freak out
>Muttering "they couldn't have escaped, they can't have escaped"
>Lift doors open
>Tell him we have to take the stairs
>Lead him down the corridor
>Scuffling noises from adjoining labs
>Suddenly, a chair is kicked over from the way we came
>Even I jump
>Professor and senior researchers in top notch zombie makeup bum rush my friend
>Improvise and grab a nearby phone, start screaming "we need a goddamn lockdown" into it
>Friend suitably scared
>Professor rips off his makeup
>"And that's why you don't sneak in here after dark"

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:45:48 2014 No.6426592 >>6426586 Nah, we just mixed a light base in a load of water, then made him spend the entire day drinking water He did have a sour throat for a few weeks though Shit was hilarious

Anonymous Thu Mar 20 18:50:48 2014 No.6426598

>Radioactive material stored under water (don't ask)
>Testing water for leaching
>Filter down sample
>Place filter paper under drying lamp
>Everything's going well
>Suddenly, smoke starts to curl out from under the lamp
>Fire up fume hood
>Fire up secondary air sampler
>Replace filter in primary (for comparative testing)
>Evacuate

Some fuckwit had switched the glass fiber filter paper with nitrocellulose, the damn things looked identical. The contamination was so well adhered to the fume hood that we had to replace the whole damn thing. Somewhere, in the desert, there's a fume hood that's been cut into bits and shoved into barrels.

>>	Anonymous Thu Mar 20 20:03:48 2014 No.6426751 >>6426587 >and that's why you don't sneak in here after dark Arrested Devlopment fan detected

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 09:08:48 2014 No.6427710 File: 12 KB, 350x300, 1377795853310.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6426592 >Shit was hilarious Really?

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 09:51:48 2014 No.6427757

>>6425572
> confirmed for being someone's retard student
I bet you're the kind of person who's going to sue the city for putting hard pavement on the road when your kid falls off his bike and skins his knee.

I was teaching a lab of 40 people who are supposed to be responsible adults, in two separate rooms. I can only be in one place at a time. They ignored not only the written and verbal admonishments against what they were doing, but also the yellow tags on the baths saying what temperature they were supposed to be at, and the general principle of "don't fuck with it if you don't know what it is." It's not rocket science.

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:06:48 2014 No.6427772 >>6426513 >Drinking something that you're unsure of what it actually is >In a laboratory Isn't the first thing they teach you in every grade school/high school science class not to eat, drink, or smell things? You'd think it would have resonated.

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:07:48 2014 No.6427774

>me: T/A for a Math class
>class: in Chem building
>arrive at school one day, Chem building yellow-taped, surrounded by police
>WTF is going on?
"Waiting for bomb squad, please stand back"
>some dumbfuck left an open beaker of picric acid in chem lab overnight
>conduct class on the lawn in front of Math buiding on nice Spring day FTW

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:09:48 2014 No.6427778

Huge fuck up, but not in a lab.

>be me running pizzeria
>Get huge order for 30 pizzas Saturday night to be delivered Wednesday at noon
>Day of order, get to work 3 hours early for prep
>Everything is perfect, pizzas come out of oven at 11:30, cut and boxed by 11:40 and brought to location by 11:55
>receptionist asks who I am
>"Bitch, look at these pizza boxes"
>Still looks at me, puzzled
>Gets up and goes to back room for a minute
>She asks if this is the order for Wednesday
>Instant humility as I realize it's Tuesday
>My family gets cold pizza for 2 weeks

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:11:48 2014 No.6427781 >>6427774 >picric acid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWK6Eoassjg Is this it?

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:22:48 2014 No.6427794 >>6427781 Not that event (in which it looked like the container was closed) and not that college.

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:33:48 2014 No.6427815

>college in agricultural fruit-crops community
>notice a lot of fruit-flies one day
>ask friend in bio lab whether they had a release
>he confesses they dropped a chilled box of fruit-flies off the delivery truck
>a week later: fucking fruit-flies everywhere
>local headline news
<span class="math">\mathbf{INVASION OF FRUIT FLIES}[/spoiler]
>bio lab people keep quiet

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:58:48 2014 No.6427834

>>6427815
Reminds me of a story my biology teacher told us.

>working on a uni project to do with maggots
>near the end of project
>finishes up for summer for a few weeks
>forgets about millions of maggots left in room
>comes back to a black, inches deep, sea of dead flies

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 10:58:48 2014 No.6427835

Just finished my last day of chemistry lab work this semester. People did hilariously dumb shit, e.g.

>Putting Zinc shots in the heavy-metal-solutions container
Released Arsine and Hydrogen Sulfide multiple times so that our lab needed to be closed three times in three weeks.

>Not having an eye on the Sodium Carbonate extract while heating
It boiled over and left the whole workplace a huge mess

>Not washing your hands when they get into contact with concentrated acids/bases
One guy accidentally dipped his hand into conc. Nitric Acid while stirring his filtrate, put a golve over it and kept working with his other hand. He has eight fingernails now.

>Blowing up the Marsh Test because they didn't want to wait long enough for the Arsine to exit.
Instead, they got themselves an Oxyhydrogen test which blew up all their samples.

Some chemistry freshmen are hilariously stupid.

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 11:04:48 2014 No.6427840 >>6427781 Picric acid is actually a pretty common find in old universities with piles of old poorly documented chemicals. And because it tends to lose oil with time, you essentially end up with a live artillery shell.

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 11:48:48 2014 No.6427926

>Yesterday
>Team is calibrating the system for some PLD
>After 2 hours waiting for the vacuum to stabilize we have a mechanical failure with one of our motors
>Ohforfucksake
>After some 30min we found the problem to be a fucking bent nut
>2 more hours of vacuum
>As we were waiting for the ablation to finish we realize that the fucking laser was still in the calibration mode setting
>The last 40 min were for nothing
>The team members, each from a different country, begins an warm introduction to the was of blasphemy from their respective countries
>We decide to cover the failure with a new batch, since they were meant to go to XPS anyway
>Out of the fucking nowhere the bench that held the laser fell down
>Laser burns a beautiful curve in the wall and sets the lab coat closet on fire
>Satan himself appears in front of us laughing madly. Well, that or the gas did us some damage
> As we were setting the fire off, the professor arives in the lab
> I've never seen a chinese go full aryan before, he was as pallid as the moon and his eyes were as open as their cartoon's.

It was a nice day.

>>	Anonymous Fri Mar 21 23:31:22 2014 No.6429364 File: 14 KB, 261x255, 1393376430061.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6427926 >> I've never seen a chinese go full aryan before, he was as pallid as the moon and his eyes were as open as their cartoon's. Holy shit. You owe me new lungs.

Anonymous Fri Mar 21 23:54:53 2014 No.6429411
File: 7 KB, 198x261, chicago-turret-980-ws909agvcp.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

I don't pretend to have a lot of lab experience, but I'll contribute what I got:

>High School chemistry lab
> do experiment 1
> everyone finishes about the same time
> clean our test tubes
> time for experiment 2
> normally we'd let our test tubes dry overnight and use new ones for experiment 2, but all our other tubes got borrowed by another class
> we need dry tubes now
> teacher tells us to use the lab's air nozzles to dry our test tubes
> I'm a second semester junior at this point and have taken classes where I've been doing a lab almost once a week for the last 3 semesters and not once have I ever seen these air nozzles used.
> everyone starts using air nozzles about the same time.
> I turn mine on pretty fast.
> gurgling noise from my nozzle
> wut.jpg
> before I realize what's happening about 400 ml of what I guess was condensation mixed with rust and god knows what spews out of the nozzle like a fire hydrant. This liquid had the color and consistency of gritty coffee but it smelled less like something chemical and more like something rotting.
>I get sprayed with mystery stink goo, partner gets sprayed, the girls behind us get spayed, lab equipment gets sprayed, walls get sprayed, everybody's papers get sprayed.
>everyone stares, none of the other nozzles spray anything
>my partner and I clean up and help the unfortunate team behind us do the same
>bell rings, last class of the day so everybody goes home, do experiment 2 the next day.

I found out later that this happened at least once before to someone who was one of the first guys to use the air nozzle after they'd been inactive for a while.

Is this something that happens?

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:19:22 2014 No.6429458
File: 20 KB, 381x400, 1376176188968.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>6420553
Okay, I think I have something from not too long ago.

>doing undergrad lab work
>working in group of three, including myself
>we've done particular sections of gel electrophoresis labs before, but the professor and/or his lab aids have always done the other parts of it
>eg if we prepare the DNA samples, our gels were pre-prepared by them, or vice versa
>this is the first time we're ever going to do the entire lab by ourselves
>thisisitnigga.jpg
>carefully work in the lab for hours doing every part of it near-perfectly
>finish gel
>finish DNA samples
>finish electrophoresis
>last step is to get a picture to analyze data
>the buffer solution we were working with is essentially contaminated with an unpredictable amount of a known mutagen/carcinogen/etc.
>I go to begin clearing off some of our work space (move beakers, flasks, etc. away from work station), ask Doofus McGee to put gel in UV light chamber and ready the machine to finish the lab
>ohboyherewego.jpg
>Doofus decides to fuck around for a bit, talk with three nearby friends who are in the lab because God only knows why
>he's still just holding the gel tray
>gel is slippery from buffer solution
>it fucking slips out of the tray and shatters on the floor
>gel is ruined
>dreamsshattered.jpg
>we were in there for several painstaking hours, and were even in the lab around half an hour longer than expected
>Doofus McGee and the Retard Three decide to clean up their mess. Arguably a redeeming quality
>except
>none of the Retard Three are wearing any lab equipment, picking up gel pieces with their bare hands and wiping the contaminant on their clothes to dry them off
>deargodwhy.jpg
>Doofus, although wearing gloves, etc., starts fucking around with the UV machine for no reason at all
>has just smeared contaminant all over the machine door, handle, and I want to say literally all of its buttons
>lab is contaminated
>at least four people are contaminated now

God. damn. everything. I'm trying not to rage. MFW.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:20:22 2014 No.6429460 File: 17 KB, 219x199, 1377026275888.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6420602 >Good night sweet prince Love it.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:23:22 2014 No.6429468 >>6429411 First time I've ever heard of something like that happening, but it's pretty disgusting nonetheless.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:29:52 2014 No.6429478 >>6420654 >lost 30 mg of protein that day Not sure if this is more depressing on /sci/ or on /fit/...

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:43:02 2014 No.6429508 >>6423891 Glass bottle, dies of metal shard. That man deserved a Nobel for transmutation.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:53:32 2014 No.6429519 >>6425701 No, but they told us anyway. Better to be informed than uninformed.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:54:02 2014 No.6429527 >>6429508 Don't be silly, you can't win a Nobel if you're dead!

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:54:32 2014 No.6429524 >>6425701 By when I said "someone probably did anyway" I meant some grad student TA, who are often not really much smarter than undergrads

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 00:57:32 2014 No.6429531

>>6429411
Yeah, that happens. It's why at the University I work at it is an unwritten rule to never dry glassware with in air from the built in lines. What instruments we have that need air have fancy units to remove water and oils. You can tell which TAs don't know shit because they let their students do that. I used to try to educate the TAs about it when I saw that they never seemed to give a fuck.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 01:59:32 2014 No.6429649 >>6420678 I don't really know much about these chemicals or how the rats would react to this. Could someone explain to me what this would do? Would the rats just not die?

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:13:18 2014 No.6429692

I cringe so hard when I think of the mistakes I made in lab. Also I didn't talk to anyone I worked with out of social anxiety, thankfully 10 months of unemployment has given me time to start changing that.

Forgot a sample in the NMR. Probably cost the lab a couple bucks to replace.

I spilled acetone on the floor filling the reagent bottle. Go to clean it up afterwards and accidentally rub a bunch of resin off the floor tiles.

Forgot to check the stoppers on the vacuum line. Accidentally sucked up a graduate students reaction into the line costing him at least a couple days of work. Felt terrible about that one. And then I tried cleaning the vacuum line but it was impossible so I tried letting it soak but then another grad student just did it.

Caused tons of chemical waste because I suck at running columns. Also I was never sure about what product I had so I put crap in a jar and labeled it thinking it might be useful later. It's probably still just sitting there taking up space.

All that in less than a year plus getting nowhere close to results made me decide I probably wasn't cut out for a PhD

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:30:48 2014 No.6429736 File: 89 KB, 577x580, 1376721489848.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6421070

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:36:18 2014 No.6429749 >>6421420 >>6421741 You really can't use HCl in high school nowadays anyway. Must be intro chemistry in college.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:36:48 2014 No.6429750

>bench project in uni electronics lab
>using $40,000 instrument on rollcart
>tenured prof comes in with cup-o-soup
>interest in what I'm doing, places soup atop instrument so to look over shoulder
>bumps rollcart, soup spills into instrument
>smoke appears, display goes blank
>pull power-cord out of mains
"Oh I'm so sorry"
>spend a week disassembling, cleaning, reassembling, and day-trip to manufacturer for recalibration
>frantic panic to finish project before end-of-term

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:39:18 2014 No.6429756 >>6429749 I used HCl in high school, and that was only 3 years ago.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:46:48 2014 No.6429774 >>6429756 Hm. Never mind then. I thought that high schools were more strict on chemicals, due to concerned parents, etc..

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:51:48 2014 No.6429786

>>6421076
>I just wanted to run an observatory
As a grad Mathfag I worked (as data analyst) for a well-respected sci-guy who ran a radio observatory that later shut down for lack of funding, forcing him into early semi-retirement because no fulltime job available.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 02:55:48 2014 No.6429799 >>6422092 Maybe the container shattered and critically damaged his leg

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 10:39:46 2014 No.6430277 >>6420963 >I heard some guy got Ventricular Fibrillation You would've seen it if it happened in the same room, it's fatal without medical care(debfibrillation) because your heart can't pump effectively.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:00:15 2014 No.6430295 >>6429478 Or /d/....

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:13:45 2014 No.6430309 >>6426592 Medical practice is to not try to neutralize anything due to exothermic reactions risking to fuck shit up. Don't induce voimiting either because esophageal damage is worsened.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:27:48 2014 No.6430318

>>6427772
>Isn't the first thing they teach you in every grade school/high school science class not to eat, drink, or smell things? You'd think it would have resonated.
Good luck getting that through the thick head of lab naive people.

>medical biochem
>people eating sandwhiches constantly
>people having their water bottles on the lab bench
>people incapable of using a pipette: they always push it beyond the first resistance, and they submerge the tip in the sample and let go, removing the sample and putting it into whatever reagent bottle they decide to use next.
>all our labs is dumb-ass mix-for-colour or percipitation labs with exact instructions.
>half of the groups never get the right results.
>half of those that get proper results can't explain it.
>most exercises are about things that haven't been used in real practice for 20 years or never.
>these people are supposed to help you and save your lives in the future.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:36:48 2014 No.6430323

>>6424484
yeah, sure, if it gets into the nucleus

first it has to get through the dead skin, the cell membrane, and the nuclear membrane, none of which is has been demonstrated to do effectively.

wash your hands, make sure you don't do something dumbfuck like eat it, and you'll be fine.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:36:48 2014 No.6430325 >>6430318 Does that place have no standards? In my labs you get kicked out if you chew gum.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:38:48 2014 No.6430327 >>6425241 >>she doesn't use a pipette or anything >>pours straight from this several liter jug in one go is this unusual? i never bust out a pipette for the high molar acid jugs

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:40:48 2014 No.6430329

>>6430325
>Does that place have no standards?
People are told to not do it but it doesn't stick. One of the teachers got pissed and started shouting though so his groups did so less.

Hell, some people even decided it was a good idea to eat in the autopsy room, while we watched an autopsy.
Though they got pale faced and put their food away after a minute.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:47:48 2014 No.6430331

>>6429458
If it makes you feel any better, most labs designate an entire room for running gels and treat the entire room and everything in it like it's EtBr contaminated (because it almost certainly is). That geldoc was probably very contaminated to begin with.

Also EtBr is light sensitive.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 11:49:18 2014 No.6430334 >>6429692 >Accidentally sucked up a graduate students reaction into the line costing him at least a couple days of work. probably taught that student a valuable lesson in only prepping one sample, though

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 12:12:19 2014 No.6430352 Some guy was killed at the PES lab at my uni, don't know why exactly

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 12:13:19 2014 No.6430353

I did some stupid stuff in my early times of setting up microscopes for oil immersions. Nothing serious happened but when we were looking at bacteria like e.coli, gold staph etc., on the 100x lens, normally you put the drop of oil on top of the slide. I put it under, between the slide and the diaphragm where the light was shining through. A couple days later I realised, felt like an ass.

I might remember more stories later and post them.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 12:47:19 2014 No.6430373

>>6427774
>>6427781
>>6427794
>>6427840
I had a similar story. Happened to a friend of mine.

>At his university, apparently one of the storage labs stored about 7 vials of picric acid.
>A few of them were starting to crystallise.
>crystallised picric acid is explosive
>whole building, several thousands of people evacuated
>taped off
>bomb squad called
>news and media reporters
>everything was fine a few hours later

Everyone at that uni was sent an email that the picric acid was actually crystallised but they treated it as it was, for precautionary reasons.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 12:48:19 2014 No.6430375 >>6430373 I meant it wasn't crystallised

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 12:55:49 2014 No.6430381 >>6421061 To which shitty university do you go to? EE, ME and medicine are the three hardest degrees here with graduation rate of less than 20%. Double major is just s bad joke.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 13:42:49 2014 No.6430460 >>6424431 Really? Who does do RnD then?

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:03:07 2014 No.6430523 >>6426485 This. There should be a tag, but they're still retarded.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:06:07 2014 No.6430532 >>6427757 I'd still feel guilty about the bio students, if I were you. It must have been fun to explain that your students are too retarded to follow instructions and messed up some year long experiments.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:37:37 2014 No.6430630

Not an accident but some fucktard :

>Doing crystallization for purification purpose
>we need to wait for the powder to get colder before going to next step
>fucktard in front of me : shit is hot gonna blow on it to get it colder
> lab ruined for him
>was fucking hilarious

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:39:07 2014 No.6430639 >>6430460 Engineers

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:42:37 2014 No.6430647 >>6430352 Gravity monster

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:57:37 2014 No.6430694 >>6420782 Fuck those liquid-liquid extractions, especially with ether.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 14:59:07 2014 No.6430706 >>6420823 What happended with the laser dude? Did he lose an eye?

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 15:15:33 2014 No.6430752 >>6422074 And that is why you use fire proof bottles for bulk chemcials

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 18:15:16 2014 No.6431119 >>6420678 Did they survive? Or did they slowly suffocate?

>>	carl Sat Mar 22 19:41:47 2014 No.6431211 >>6429649 Bump for this

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:06:16 2014 No.6431235 >>6430329 I ate lunch while watching an autopsy. No big deal. Smell kind of ruined what was otherwise a good sandwich, though.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:09:46 2014 No.6431240 >>6430630 Wait, so he had a hot solution and was going to blow on it to cool it down? What an idiot. Couldn't he just redo the purification, though?

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:14:16 2014 No.6431244

>>6430532
Oh, of course I felt terrible as fuck. I too had lost my experiment earlier in the year (in a less spectacular manner... somehow all 10 disks in the HPC RAID were destroyed to the point where no genuine data could be recovered, and then that garbage data had been written to the tape backups).

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:17:46 2014 No.6431245 >>6424389 >>Companies don't have R&D? pretty much this. In the 80s everyone decided that R&D wasn't worth it and got rid of it. There are some noble exceptions to this though.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:22:48 2014 No.6431248
File: 61 KB, 372x411, kitten-vs-gojira.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

You wouldn't think you could have a big fuckup in a computer lab, but....
> 2 a.m., major assignment due next day
> we're all in first year, so every assignment is a tremendous struggle
> 20 people in that lab, tappity tappity tappity
> lots of people didn't even start until a couple hours ago
> douchebag who's banging the one cute girl in the program comes in, leans on the wall next to the door, starts chatting to some poor guy who doesn't even know him and just wants to work
> insinuating he just nailed this girl for all to hear
> suddenly, peeyooooooo~ all computers turn off
> dude straightens up, puts his hands in the air
> "Oh God, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."
> takes off running
> wtf?
> turns out there's a big red button labelled "emergency power off" right where he was leaning
That was the night I learned why our prof recommended emacs as a better editor than gedit... autosave = lifesave.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:25:47 2014 No.6431255 Biggest fuck up I've ever accomplished was picking up red hot marble with my bare hands. That was an unwise move.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:29:46 2014 No.6431266 >>6431248 did he get what was coming to him? I need some closure

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:30:46 2014 No.6431268 >>6431248 >That was the night I learned why our prof recommended emacs as a better editor than gedit... autosave = lifesave. Not even on /g/ I'd read this.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:35:16 2014 No.6431274 >>6431248 >gedit pretty much everything is better than gedit hell i'd rather use notepad than gedit

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:37:46 2014 No.6431277

>>6431248
Wouldn't university computers reformat their drives anyway? How would auto save have helped.

And why weren't people working on their laptops.

And why does a computer lab have an emergency power off switch, that's more something you'd see in a science lab.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:55:46 2014 No.6431299 >>6431248 Why would a computer lab have a emergency shut off like that?

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 20:59:17 2014 No.6431313 >>6431299 For emergencies of course!

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:00:17 2014 No.6431314

I don't know if this counts as apocalyptic or not, but I was working on a project that required programatically generating STL files which were too complicated to CAD and then 3d printing said .STL files to run tests on them.

Sounds like nothing can go wrong, right? Wrong!

I get my parts loaded up in a very full build, IE loaded up with a bunch of things to print that mine, on a SLS machine(powder 3d printer) and the tech mentions they look a little bit funny. It's the end of the day and the tech wants to go home so I say just print it.

T+ 36 hours I get called down to breakout my part, I chisel away the semi-hardened powder where the part should be and WTF. There's this weird triangly thing that looks like the thing I was trying to make had a love child with a Sierpinski triangle. Other than that it's really hard to describe the Euclidean horror I made.

Turns out the program I wrote had a bug. I nearly destroyed the 3d printer and everybody else's parts.

Also fun fact, you can completely destroy an SLS 3d printer by printing really thin stuff, it curls mid-print and fucks the roller.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:03:16 2014 No.6431324 >>6431299 Emergency sentient artificial intelligence containment

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:15:18 2014 No.6431346
File: 1.60 MB, 281x272, crow-cookie.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>6431266
He never showed up in the lab again, but beyond that, I have no idea. I hooked up with that girl after exams, so he was with her for at most a few weeks. Maybe that incident was the catalyst? Or maybe he just had a small penis. It is a mystery I have no desire to investigate further.

>>6431277
Why in the world would turning off power to a computer cause the drive to be reformatted? That is the worst idea ever. And laptops were not always ubiquitous. It wouldn't surprise me if there were people in that course who didn't have even desktop computers at home, and certainly not everyone in residence had one.

>>6431248
>>6431299
> Why would a computer lab have a emergency shut off like that?
> For emergencies of course!
This answer is as good as any. The room is now an office for career counselling or something like that, but the button remains. They have, however, installed a hard plastic box over it, which you must flip up before pressing the button.

OP IS A !FAG..jIhak Sat Mar 22 21:19:19 2014 No.6431354

>>6431324

Per Clarke, it will just command the power grid to deliver a surge and fuse the switch closed.

>>6431346

> Why in the world would turning off power to a computer cause the drive to be reformatted?

Public lab computers are often set to wipe and reload a fresh image on each boot, both to simplify configuration changes and to prevent viruses from persisting across reboots.

> That is the worst idea ever.

Not if users are saving to network storage.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:25:18 2014 No.6431371

>>6431354
That seems heavy-handed, useless, and a colossal waste of time. We just had write-protected system files, a reasonably resilient OS, and a good security team.

Anyway, if you're saving to network storage... then autosave will still save your ass.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:28:48 2014 No.6431375

>doing immunohistochemistry
>primary antibodies are expensive as fuck
>test antibodies on some slides i didnt care about the day they arrived
>worked beautifully
>came time to do the actual experiment
>incubate slides in primary antibodies
>incubate in HRP conjugated secondary antibodies
>apply chromogen
>no staining
>wtf
>waste an entire month troubleshooting
>turns out i misread the storage instructions
>stored all the antibodies in -20 C instead of 4-8 C
>mfw I killed $3500 worth of primary antibodies
>mfw my PI still doesn't know
>mfw I'm doomed when she gets back from vacation

hold me /sci/

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:31:18 2014 No.6431385

>>6431371
Dude, that's the standard and one of the best and simplest solutions to avoid students doing shit with the PCs. trust me I work on IT. You do an image and install a whole lab in a afternoon

>We just had write-protected system files, a reasonably resilient OS, and a good security team.
Yeah right. On a school/university? You have any idea the kind of people that runs IT and the budget they get.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:33:48 2014 No.6431389

I once saw a girl inject herself with Karl Fischer reagent (hydranal 2 I believe) being held in a KF syringe. She had to go to the hospital.
I also saw an idiot who was in one of my labs work with Ethidium Bromide (perhaps the most carcinogenic substance known to man) without gloves on a daily basis.
Finally, in a pharma lab I currently work in, someone was working with sufentanil outside of a hood (it's environmental toxicity is in the 10s of ppm).
Neither of the former individuals work in a lab. The latter still works at our current lab, but I'm not sure for how much longer.

>>	Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:36:18 2014 No.6431397 >>6431375 hide the original test ones you did and tell her it was a bad batch also what? i always freeze antibodies and they work fine. as long as you dont put them through a shitload of freeze thaws they should be fine

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:40:06 2014 No.6431407

>>6431397
The instructions on these antibodies explicitly stated to not store below 4C. I've ruled out every other possibility for them not working after spending I don't know how many hours on the phone with the support people at ABCAM where they came from. Also she already saw the test slides and knows that the antibodies worked before. I'm basically fucked.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 21:54:06 2014 No.6431450

>>6431385
What do you do when the power flickers? Wait an hour for every machine to get itself reimaged? Or call in an IT guy and spend a whole day with the lab out of service? Reformatting is used because it's dead simple, not because it's a good solution.

> You have any idea the kind of people that runs IT and the budget they get.
Yes. At my school, they were all former students or current grad students who'd been taught by one of the world's top OS designers, who'd been doing security since the Cold War... so... it was pretty good.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 22:04:07 2014 No.6431460

>>6431450
No, you don't get it. Lemme change the terminology. You set the PC to record an specific state and every change you do after that is erased on reboot. You don't reimage anything, only when the PC breaks, of course. If you want to know more about search for DeepFreeze.

You can have a top notch team but you should never expect that the lab built for students will get any attention. Deploying the easiest and simplest solution is the rule.

Anonymous Sat Mar 22 22:12:39 2014 No.6431473

Not exactly a lab thing, but I worked at some home for retarded people and they had a pool I had to take of.

>have to change the chlorine and sulfuric acid bottles twice a week usually
>get a call in the middle of this process
>forget to put the tube that sucks in the acid
>next day I check the cellar as always
>for some reason the chlorine bottle leaked (or however it happened, I still have no clue) and the whole floor was covered with chlorine water. The smell was agonising (note the room is hardly vented)
>the pH of the pool water is at 14
>go to my boss and tell him what happened
>"Well, close the pool and mop it up"
>I close the pool and mopped it up, took me like 2 hours. It was really hard to breathe, as my lungs started to burn.
>Whole floor is orange and red and even green and flaking off (it was bare concrete).
>My boss comes down
>"Oh, you're finished. Why is the floor orange? We have some grey color left, paint the floor"
>I paint the floor grey
>Looked like nothing ever happened.

Carl !!dFf2PUolAtC Sat Mar 22 23:22:58 2014 No.6431605
File: 42 KB, 481x358, saganwelp.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>6420553
>Work with a Q-machine doing plasma experiments
>Basically a big vacuum chamber and a plasma source wrapped inside a giant solenoid.
>Usually operates around ~1 T.
>One day last Summer
>Rough morning, kind of out of it
>Not really paying attention to things
>Going through the motions
>Turning everything on and setting up the machine
>Hot plate is up and running
>Oven is going
>Probe circuit is running
>Crank up the magnetic field
>All ready to go
>Turn around to see my professor standing right next to the coils chatting with our technician
>Right next to the coils

I managed to wipe every card in his wallet. Credit cards, building and lab access cards, everything. Took him like two weeks to get them all replaced.

He laughed it off for the most part, but he still loves to give me shit about it every chance he gets.

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 02:32:22 2014 No.6431849 File: 64 KB, 640x480, 1279663669759.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] I've fucked up so many SDS PAGE gels because I have shaky hands >partner says "Man, I hope you don't plan on becoming a surgeon"

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 02:37:22 2014 No.6431851 >>6431473 That's an OSHA thing right there.

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 02:57:22 2014 No.6431864 >>6420681 Anyone else see the face in the middle milk bottle?

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 03:07:52 2014 No.6431868 >>6431864 just you i think

Anonymous Sun Mar 23 03:18:53 2014 No.6431880

>>6429458
oh god this reminds me of when i dropped a glass beaker and it shattered all over the place and my groupmates just stood around not helping me and the professor got upset about it despite the breaker not being worth much :-------((((((((((

at least it wasn't anything as bad as that though

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 03:22:22 2014 No.6431882 >>6427835 >One guy accidentally dipped his hand into conc. Nitric Acid while stirring his filtrate, put a golve over it and kept working with his other hand. He has eight fingernails now. how... why the fuck would you put a glove over it

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 07:06:34 2014 No.6432038 >>6431605 Yeah, because it's your fault you were doing your job, right?

Anonymous Sun Mar 23 08:19:35 2014 No.6432084

>>6431605
He really shouldn't have been standing next to your coils. They're usually plastered with stickers saying "DO NOT STAND HERE IF YOU HAVE THIS KIND OF STUFF IN YOUR POCKETS".

I work with an MRI machine, and every time I get new students they ask if the magnet is "on" right now, despite the gigantic stickers saying "THIS MAGNET IS ALWAYS ON".

Anonymous Sun Mar 23 08:45:05 2014 No.6432109

>Doing A-level chemistry
>Have to choose own experiment for coursework
>Decide to acetylate salicylic acid since I'd already done it at home, comparing the yield and purity when using either sulphuric or phosphoric acid as a catalyst
>Enter stoner friend
>Begins the very cunning technique of copying what I did last lesson in the next
>I'm aware of this
>Don't give a shit
>Chemistry teacher starts noticing he's running into exactly the problems I am but one lesson behind
>Heating under reflux
>Stoner does this next lesson
>Neglects to use a condenser
>Neglects to use a fume hood
>Pear shaped flask boiling merrily away
>Spewing acetic anhydride fumes
>Most students are on the other side of the classroom, along with the teacher
>Stoner has eyes and respiratory system of steel, hardened by heavy pipe use
>Teacher politely enquires as to what the fuck is in the flask
>Stoner gestures at a few bottles
>Teacher cuts the gas
>Orders everyone to make their work safe and GTFO

When we returned to clean up, the teacher had a burst blood vessel in his eye. The stoner voluntarily dropped chemistry.

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 09:25:34 2014 No.6432144 >>6431407 >The instructions on these antibodies explicitly stated to not store below 4C. huh, weird and yeah you're fucked man :(

Anonymous Sun Mar 23 09:31:04 2014 No.6432147

>>6431274
>Notepad better than gedit

I am no Editor Warrior* but this makes no sense to me - does Notepad do ANYTHING that gedit doesn't?

(Personally, I advice people to use any extensible editor and then use that editor for everything with a single exception*)

*Use Visual Studio if writing for .net

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 09:35:34 2014 No.6432149 >>6432147 it doesn't have any new features over gedit but the features it does have, it doesn't implement in a way that makes me want to throw the computer out a window

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 09:40:04 2014 No.6432156 >>6432149 That's what I mean - what doe gedit that is so bad?

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 09:44:34 2014 No.6432163 >>6432156 it's really subtle usability problems, not outright "you put in this feature wrong". it's been some time since i used it so i can't be more specific than that, but every time i used it all i can remember is it being maddening

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 10:23:37 2014 No.6432220 >>6431240 We extracted an organic product from a metallic solution and when the job was done , we had a nice little white powder. We needed to wait for that powder to get colder but I don't remember why

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 12:01:12 2014 No.6432362 >>6432163 Ah. Actually, I seem to remember something similar, I just never used Linux enough for it to start really bothering me.

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 15:20:51 2014 No.6432786 File: 2.43 MB, 488x519, 1391827244894.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6431473 >the pH of the pool water is at 14 >the pH of the pool water is at 14 >the pH of the pool water is at 14

>>	Anonymous Sun Mar 23 15:23:52 2014 No.6432792 File: 62 KB, 480x360, 1393384590773.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>6432109 >>Stoner has eyes and respiratory system of steel, hardened by heavy pipe use But.. how? How?!

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