Lab screw ups

>>8584517
I farted so hard that the professor and all students needed to leave for a couple of seconds (I was the lab technician)

>>8584556
Deadly bro

>>8584517
Sleep well little buggy :'(

my biggest screw up isn't all that dramatic. for O-chem lab we were extracting limonene from citrus peels (lab smelled FANTASTIC as a result) which meant keeping an acid solution containing the peels at reflux. I leaned in to read the thermometer (fume hood door was fairly high) just as a big bloop of vapor came up through the condenser, and I got a dilute puff of HCl in the face. my nasal passages felt a little raw for a few days but that was it, since I was wearing my safety goggles.

>>8584517
i once touched a diffraction grating with my finger. five years since that happened my fingerprint is still on there and no one knows that it was mine.

>>8584591
>to read the thermometer
Liar, you went to smell the vapour and forgot to waft (like a pro). Though, to be fair, the same thing happened to me when I was cooking meth, so...

Well since I'm a computer science major I've only had to do one class that's involved a lab and that was chemistry. My partner was a milf and she thought I was really cute and I had her do all the work and I pretended to try and let me tell you I was a god damn expert at pretending to contribute on that shit. Felt good getting an A in all my labs without effort. I miss that woman, really wanted to fuck her she was sexy she had a slim body and a nice petite ass with a freckle face. But she was a reserved person who had a boyfriend so I wasn't going to put myself in that situation. I sure do miss her. Oh but to answer your question I made zero mistakes since again she did all my work for me.

>>8584609
the thermometer was inside a condenser. the condenser was all fogged up.
believe me, the whole ROOM smelled like oranges. there was no need to lean in to sniff.

>>8584667
Sounds like olfactory heaven, anon.

>>8584517
Charred $450 worth of organic product and 3 mo of work. It still haunts me to this day. Although its not the worst I've heard.

A prof told me a story that when he was an undergrad, first day during the meeting he and the PI listened to a 2nd yr grad student say she was having trouble with a reaction for 6 months. Turns out she was trying to do something that was literally impossible. The PI said "once I get some fucking grant money it'll only be undergrads and postdocs because postdocs know what they're doing and undergrads know they don't know shit!"

This one time I accidentally unplugged this freezer.

Honestly I would rather not talk about it again..

>>8584635
cool blog

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>>8584831
I remember you. How was the fallout?

>>8584635

Wanna know how I can tell you're a virgin?

>>8584831
>unplugged the freezer
I would murder you

>>8584975
just for fun, how do you figure?

>>8584831
You deserve a punishment worse than death

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>>8584635
>I wasted 20 seconds of my life to read this

>>8585026
Anyone who takes the time out of their day to write a paragraph fetishising their lab partner, then goes out of their way to provide an explanation as to why they didn't pursue said lab partner (to a bunch of internet autismos on /sci/, no less) just has to be either a virgin, or a pathetic person with too much time on their hands.

>>8585064
You're a virgin because you post on this board.

I'm not even the guy you're replying to

>>8585064
I don't even think there was a lab partner. He's just a talented story-teller.

On-topic, I just learned about the demon core.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core

Not my story, but a lab mate was telling me a story about what happened at a biotech place he works at.

Long story short, someone fucked up the buffer stock and about $500k worth of protein had to be poured down the drain because of it.

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i was a TA in genetics lab and accidentally put the wrong primers and sequences out in lab for my 2 sessions for a PCR and electrophoresis

No one received results and no one isolated gene sequences from my screw up, I found my error after multiple students complained that their shit was bandless and some students stayed over to repeat their study and it still came bandless

>tfw accidently grabbed glucose solution droppers instead
>tfw I only took undergrad genetics and was a graduate biochem student

>>8584517
Not that big of a screw-up, but I was on the bus heading to the Chemistry practical exam, and I was talking to my mates, one friend tells me
>I'm so stressed, I double-checked if I took my labcoat this morning
>Haha, that's funny
>Wait

And that's how I almost got an F to this test.

I once caused a small flourine fire.

The sheer panic I felt....you ever seen concrete on fire? Would have been beautiful if the fumes weren't life-ending poison.

I got it out and manged to cover the whole thing up. Thank God I was working outside and none of that shit got on me. Never again will i fuck with anything that nasty.

>>8584591
Same exact thing happened to me in my O chem lab last summer. Loved the smell of the lab

I was quenching about 10 g of LiAlH4 in a litre of ether, by running dilute sulfuric acid down the side of the flask into the solution.

There was a bit of dried residue and for a few moments I got to see some glowing embers where the dry LiAlH4 was reacting with the water.

>>8585332

You were working with actual gaseous fluorine? Or some other fluorinating reagent?

>>8585064
>The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.

I heard a story that happened in my lab a few years ago.
Basically there is a research group which works on advanced fluorescence techniques, and had among other equipment a state-of-the-art STORM (stochastic optical reconstruction microscope) setup, which was really expensive, with lots of table optics elements and so on.
One day, someone from another group decided to wash glassware using aqua regalia. He put like 10 liters of the acidic mixture under a fume hood and let it boil to clean stuff. The thing is that the fume hood was not working, and was also connected to the microscope room where the STORM was. When people went in the room to use the microscope, everything was destroyed, including the optic table (!).
Basically a microscope setup worth 500k-1M was ruined, and they lost like two years of research since they had to assemble a new one.

My o-lab always reeked of acetone, i actually got nasues once or twice every lab and woulf take a break in the bathroom

>>8584635
Pro tip: she was aware you did nothing and would have felt bad if she mentioned how useless you were. In fact she probably ranted to her bf about how shitty her lab partner was and how she does all the work. I've been in that situation before (minus,the qt bf)

I used the wrong pipette and contaminated one of the stocks for the entire Orgo lab. I was the first one to get the solution, so everyone else after me ended up getting no reaction, and yet they never found out who contaminated the stock.

>>8584831
Oh come on it can't be that bad, aren't freezers insulated anyway? Did you like ruin a lot of rare samples or something? Surely they would have freezers like this with a dedicated un-unpluggable electrical supply, so i doubt a freshmans could fuck it up

>>8584831
Oh man! tell us again!

>>8584517
Nothing too major.

Dumped 8000 psi of air into a 2000 psi max pressure gauge because I grabbed the wrong dial. Tooted like a train whistle and fucked all the mechanisms up. $500 to replace.

Also I put a tray of rock plugs into the 100C oven instead of the 60C humidity oven, which dehydrated them and collapsed the clays, fucking the porosity.

Mining lab, btw.

I leaned on the emergency power switch and delayed an experiment by an hour. Not a big deal honestly.

>how shall I quench these ~5-10 mL of unreacted chlorosufuric acid in DCM in an apparatus equipped with two outlet bubblers to scrub the acidic fumes
>add quite a bit of water
>stopper is ejected from flask like a cannonball and ricochets off the fume hood wall

Chlorosulfuric acid

Never again

>>8585423
I could buy the fume hood not working, but to have it vent into another room in the lab? Bullshit.

>>8585775

All the hoods would be connected to the same extract system, so if the whole system was down then vapours from one hood would diffuse into the ducts and down everywhere else, presumably.

Depends what the timescale was.

Physicists and chemicals seem to be a bad combination, I've heard of one lab where they needed to clean a lot of silicon wafers for surface functionalisation, so somebody decided to make up a nice big bottle of pirahna solution and then tightly stopper it and keep it for storage...

>>8584556
One time one my professors farted when he was going to lean forward to help us out.

>>8585775
>>8585823
It was an old building, and the fume hoods were connected in some way, idk.
Anyway, the story is not bullshit and it severely held back the progress of the lab at an important moment.
Feel free to call bullshit, idgaf, just telling what I heard from the head of the group

>>8584597
This is evil

I was in a lab with a guy who was one or two steps away from creating dimethylmercury. Without a fume hood or gloves.

Professor nearly had an aneurysm when he realized how close we came to all dying in the shittiest way possible. Never saw that guy again, I think the Professor managed to get him expelled.

>>8585047
>tfw he reads at 438 words per minute.
Brainlet detected

>>8585969
Don't take it personally, we just get a lot of people making up shit in these threads. Usually more fake shit than real.

Good point about connected ducts though.

>>8585477
You sure you don't mean diethyl ether? Never heard of people getting dizzy from acetone.

In secondary school when we were creating hydrogen gas with hydrochloric acid and some metal, one hurr durr gurl took burning match and put it directly in front of pipe where gas was coming from. Erlenmeyer exploded and acid flew all over the class room. Fortunately we had safety glasses

Someone put plastic in the glass waste bin

So every single student in that Chem quad got 10pts taken off their grade

Wasn't our section though. I had to put something in the bin at the end of class and there wasn't any plastic in it then

>>8585269
Ouch.....

>>8586040
>>8585423
>>8585269
Fuck me, we Gordon Ramsay's Lab Nightmares now?

>>8584831
Now I need to know.

>>8584591
I did the same shit but with eugenol lmao smell was dope tho

>>8584517
This is a story my dad always tells me about when he was in grad school.

Two grad students were fighting about whether a brick of sodium would float or sink in water. The one remembered his high school chemistry demonstration showing that a small chunk of sodium clearly floated. The other remarked, "These are merely surface effects, like how spiders can use their hairs to float on water" and that they were "unable to scale properly" to a scale of a brick. The brick of sodium would sink, as the molecular weight of sodium is greater than water.
Like good scientists they decided to test this hypothesis. They carefully measured out a kilogram of sodium from the store room, brought it to the school lake, and threw it in.

Well, they found out that sodium does in fact float. The surface of the sodium rapidly oxidized, releasing heat, hydrogen gas, which instantly ignited, creating an almost-hovercraft ballooned up by burning hydrogen. The brick raced across the lake and into a group of neighboring pine trees, which of course ignited. The grad students called the fire department, but never let them know the source of the fire.

Took a chem gen ed at the end of high school.
Our project was making fireworks because we were in a private school.
My buddy put too many chemicals in his mixture which apparently brought the ignition temperature down below the temperature of the corning oven.
It lit everyone's fireworks and almost burned the school down. Fire department came and yelled at our instructor. Had a good giggle.

I once needed to mix Nitric acid with ethanol, I didn't knew that I need to dilute first. That shit started to turn green. Just ran out and watched that eruption for some seconds, and then I cleared all. The End.

>>8586892
>grad students not knowing that sodium reacts violently with water

Where they art majors?

Stanford Prison Experiment. I was a guard.

>>8586974
can you validate your claim? either way no one really gives a shit, psych isn't science

>>8584517
i remember being in the lab and some small pox got polluted by some of the air ventilations of the lab. Killed the woman downstairs. I ended up killing myself.

>Intro to chemistry
>Yea, I started at the fucking bottom of the barrel
>In lab, checkin out what the hell pH is
>Got a bunch of acids and a bunch of basis, gotta figure out which one is which
>Go get some HCl
>go get a 100mL like the bottom of the barrel children's lab book tells me to
>fat, dyke black women is fucking dancing in the lab
>No one says shit because the TA is checked out doing his own shit
>she bumps into me
>it spills everywhere, a ton of it is in her "hair" or whatever shit is weaved in
>I get another and go to my table, this time Like I'm carrying a live grenade
>about a minute later, my hand is itchy as fuck, wash it off, no big deal
>a few minutes later, dyke is screaming her head burns
>Her hair is giving off stinky steam
>TA freaks out, evacuates class
>See her getting undressed by the lab body shower
>Hear TA yelling
>Never see dyke again
>New TA next lab

what a bunch of goofball assholes, you need finesse

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In a high school chemistry class I once opened the super concentrated lab stock solution of ammonia and took a big sniff because i had read in my textbook it had a strong odour.

Fucking almost knocked me out. I lay down on the floor and had tears streaming out my eyes for hours, lungs were on fire.

Good times

>>8587008
We had a few huge nitrous tanks. It was for making whipped cream and how the teacher explained that "the grocery store is actually a chemical store." Man.... it was glorious how much Nitrous we consumed and got away with it scott free. We also had to lay on the floor, with tears in our eyes trying our best not to laugh!

>>8586992
Kek

>>8584517
Fucking roaches tho?

my dad's an ME and he told me an amusing story from work.
the company he works for makes a lot of audio equipment. for whatever reason (don't remember what exactly the test was) there are some things they do with prototypes that require a nitrogen atmosphere. so they have a sealed chamber to run tests in.
one time, management brass comes down to see what those pesky engineers are up to, and is super excited to see the test in action. when they're ready to open up the chamber afterwards and remove the prototype, they tell him to stand back from the door. he doesn't listen...and promptly faints as the pure N2 washes over him.

>geochemistry lab
>guy pours liquid nitrogen on his sleeve
>doesn't notice (yeah, don't ask me how, he's kinda..... special)
>almost loses his hand

>>8584517
>organic chemistry lab
>have to use heat basket for some reaction
>plug in heat basket, not realize it's turned on immediately
>supposed to heat solution slowly
>leave heat basket on while finishing making solution
>the time has come
>put the flask in the heat basket
>everything evaporates in brown smoke
I'm pretty sure I inhaled some of that shit :(

>>8587872
Fuck

>>8586892
>>8586972
What would happen if you threw it onto an ice cold lake? Would the temperature be low enough to keep it from auto-igniting?

Also, shouldn't it have exploded like the one in this video?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTFBXJ3Zd_4

>>8587872
he must have been really dense not to notice it
first portions of liquid nitrogen instanteniously evaporate and deal no damage

Not me personally but there is that one youtuber hobbyist chemist who died after producing mustard gas (or was it phosgene?) even after being warned not to do it. Can't remember the channel's name. RIP though.

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>>8584635
>she did all my work for me.
muh sides
you are my hero

Someone left a spoon in a bowl and put in the microwave in the breakroom of the lab. Had to evacuate 3 floors because alarms went off. Chemists, amirite?

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>>8584831
>>8584831
>This one time I accidentally unplugged this freezer.

I mislabeled the Hydrogen tank "Helium" freshman year.
A couple people didn't fly so good after that one.

>>8588823
>A couple people didn't fly so good after that one.
What was the tank for?

>>8585064
You're close to why we can be sure he's a virgin, but you're over analyzing things.He literally gave it away in the first sentence
>Well since I'm a computer science major....

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>>8588823
You should be put up against a wall and shot.

>>8588946

>last to finish my experiment
>my lab partner left without really cleaning so it's just me and the TA
>at least she's kind of qt
>finally finish cleaning
>bend over to pick up my book bag and go
>shit my pants right in front of her
>there's no way she didn't notice
>there was a very loud, wet, watery sound to it
>I just stare at her for a moment, and she's wide eyed
>then I just bust out running out of there
>worst part is that some chunks and liquid managed to come out my pants leg when I ran away

I dropped that lab and took it again next semester, not a big deal I guess.

>supercritical fluid lab
>wrenching a $5000 high-pressure gas flow controller in place
>fffffffuuggg, I bent it
>attempt to fix
>it's now fucked completely
>nobody saw this, proceed to assemble the rest of the reactor
>experiment begins
>reactor is full with carbohydrates
>oxygen flows in uncontrollably
>fucking explosion
>lab assistant nearly killed by shrapnel
>$20k total damages
>everyone thinks it was an accident

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>>8589640
Jesus Christ

>>8586992
no dancing in lab, kline

dropped a pipette in a chromatography column beyond my reach
really didnt change anything though and just continued it normally with it chilling in there

>>8584517
funniest screw up was at a cancer research lab where I was interning. This Indian investigator drooled into a cryostorage

>>8589640
WEW, now that's what I call psycho.

Thanks, reading all of these made me feel much better about my own fuckup.

>>8586986
i dont know why i laughed at this

Lab is empty, me and teacher
Cleaning up before going home
Spill like 300ml of high morality hcl in a hole behind the counter near the window

Forget about it and clean then rest up
Come back next semester and they're remodeling a few floors due to lab damages

one time in high school we were boiling water in a beaker over a bunsen burner for some reason and the teacher called for our attention and he was standing at our table so the class was also looking at me and my friend accidentally knocked the stand that the beaker was on and i jump onto the bench at my side as the beaker of boiling water fell past my torso and everyone saw, no burns

>>8590071
>high morality hcl

>>8590071

ebint :---DDd

>>8587008

Meanwhile we played ammonia hangman with 5 molar ammonia

>>8590087
>ammonia hangman
0w0 what's this?

>>8587008

oh fugg

I tried that with concentrated vinegar, it was like a physical sensation. I can only imagine how hard ammonia must have kicked.

>>8584831
How come you are still alive? The wrath of a PhD student close to time limit is considered a force of nature ready to unleash a personal apocalypse on any potential problem between him and graduation.

>>8585332
You had that "good pair of running shoes" ready?

>>8585775
Not him but I had the misfortune of experiencing a similar kind of problem. What was extracted from the fume hood was deposited in a lab nearby. Two were sent to hospital, one remained there for a while and the rest sent to medical checkup.

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obligatory pic related

My biggest lab screw up was wasting a summer in a fusion lab.

It wasn't a complete waste, I transitioned to math that summer and I'm a lot happier.

>>8590106
I remember a fellow student opened a bottle of highly concentrated acetic acid.

I got an enormous craving for pickles.

>>8584517
Once I was putting an ethernet card into a lab computer to test that it worked. It DID work, but the driver fucked up a program on the computer, and after nearly two days of triyng to fix it, the computer had to be replaced. Then I did it again on another computer.

>>8585487
>Oh come on it can't be that bad
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/freezer-malfunction-thaws-150-brains-at-harvard-research-hospital/
>A freezer malfunction at a Harvard-affiliated hospital has severely damaged one-third of the world's largest collection of autism brain samples, potentially setting back research by years, scientists said Monday.

>>8590071
>tfw I've only used immoral HCl my entire life
How did you into ascencion?

>>8590074
Actually I think this whole post writing is your biggest screw up.

>O-chem lab
>leaning about boiling points
>use high morality water
>forget to dilute the water
>put it over the bunsen burner
>not under the fume hood
>instantly boils at over 200 Kelvin
>fumes everywhere
>TA runs over and flips his shit
>lab partner passes out and later dies
Luckily I was wearing my safety goggles so I got an A+

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>>8590191

>>8585332
It seems you are well on your way to becoming a fluorine chemist anon. Now all you need are a few missing fingers, an eye patch, and a calcium gluconate baptism

>>8584517
>genetics lab
>everyone is retard
>inoculating samples
>open vat of 70% etoh
>lab group next to me drops flamin etoh into the vat

They were Amazed when it was on fire
>they freeze in terror
>they fucking try to blow it out using their breath
>fire errwhere
>they try to another it
With a plastic petri dish
>now the fire has been going for five minutes, TA is no where to be found
>I am waiting for someone to catch on fire
They try to carry it to the sink

But it's hot...

>drop glass container
>fire everywhere
TA swoops in with fire extinguisher while I died of laughter

>>8590191
kek

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>working in lab
>lazy so sit on a stool
>working with Sulfuric Acid filling the 18M droppers
>go home and do wash clothes
>find holes on my pant leg
>chemical spilled on my pants and I didn't even notice well past laundry day

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Freshmen year
>get into the lab for a session on protein extraction
>setting up, checking what we got in our trays
>see chloroform
>cover the label with my hand and turn to lab partner
>does this smell funny to you?
>he almost passed out and had to sit down the whole practical
>ended up doing all the work myself, rightfully so

>Walk into first chem lab ever
>Break pipette
>Pay to replace it
>Drop chem
>Become an alcohol
>Drop out of college
>Jump off bridge
True story

Not a lab story and not mine, but a freshman in my uni thought that nobody would notice if he took an expensive-ass anatomic model home to study

Head of anatomy dept went ballistic and decided that nobody would pass anatomy until the model appeared.

That year there was an historic low in the anatomy pass rates at exactly 0%.

>>8590191
Water boils at 100 degrees you fucking retard

i threw dry ice in boiling water once and almost killed myself

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>Mammalogy lab
>Learning how to prepare specimens for collections
>Get my mouse
>Carefully skin him
>Get to the eyes, do one perfectly and horribly fuck up the other
>Crap
>Turn the skin inside out to stuff him and then back around, one arm gets caught inside and I don't notice as I'm sewing him up
>Professor comes over and uses my poor excuse for a mouse on how to insert the rod into the tail to keep it stiff
>"Now when you do this you have to be really careful or else you'll break the tail..."
>Prof then proceeds to break my tail
>At the end I have a lumpy stuffed mouse with one gigantic eye, three appendages, and a broken fucked up tail
>Lovingly call him Eyegor

Picture semi-related. Not my handiwork, but still hilarious.

>>8584975
Cuz anon is a CS major?

>>8590166
>implying this wasn't an inside job by psychiatrists trying to set back neurological diagnoses of autism

An honours student at my uni lost one of his fingers when a 5L distillation flask he was distilling hexanes on exploded.

He tried to sue the faculty and then went on to study a PhD

>>8591144
How would this kill you lol

>>8585311
omfg im dying

>>8586143
he means ether. acetone simply doesnt smell that potent

>>8586245
That seems irrational.

>>8587030
I need to get my hands on a tank of the medical grade stuff sometime for recreational purposes, that shit is nice, probably my favorite intoxicant i've ever tried, such a pleasant, mellow feeling, safe too if you pop some b12 supplements after a session. and let the gas warm up for a bit in a balloon.

>>8591402
what the fuck. why are undergrads distilling hexanes on a 5L scale? grad students dont do that here and the stills are extremely dangerous to begin with.

>>8590143
can you imagine the poor fucker's face after this happened?

The sad thing is, they make all-plastic carts, or ones that use aluminum instead of steel. i bt the eddy currents on an aluminum one are unreal next to a magnet that massive

>>8591000
you asshole! That's great.

>>8586892
>Two grad students were fighting about whether a brick of sodium would float or sink in water.

I literally stopped there in full on kek

>scorching hot day
>decide to prank my lab buddy
>get like 6 pounds of gallium
>sit it outside, melts to a beautiful liquid
>tell him I have a bunch of mercury i just got, then "accidentally" spill it on him

Nearly got socked in the mouth by a sputtering half-silver nerd, well worth it though

>>8590091

Everytime you get a wrong letter you take a deep sniff of ammonia

>>8586992
>>New TA next lab

>some fucking retard clowns around in the lab ignoring the safety rules and gets hurt
>TA gets shit on

what the fuck

>>8591481
holy fug

I once killed a whole 15cm plate of mammalian cells (2 weeks of work) because I washed it with PBS too aggressively. It was 2 seconds. My post-doc looked devastated. I just kept saying "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

>>8585311
kek

>>8584517
>Uni didn't care about security
>retard wearing contacts carrying HCl to the adjacent lab
>HCl in his eye, the contact hold the HCl in his eye
Now he is halfblind and the Uni aboid wearing contacts in labs and you must wear lab glasses

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I accidentally used LB medium with antibiotics in them, than without. Mistakes were made. Needles to say, nothing was growing after that. (I had to grow some E. coli for plasmid extraction etc.) It was bad, because it affected the schedule.
Also once when I was extracting plasmid, I forgot ONE STEP (rinsing plasmid colum for 2 minutes in centrifuge, at the very end). And when I wanted to see concentrations of plasmids, they were shit. I was so pissed to myself and stayed at lab until 9 PM, so I could do everything all again. End of the day, plasmid extraction succeeded, with "ok" concentration. Not really that big screw ups, but something i guess.

>>8591143
you cannot be this retarded

>>8584831
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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>pre engineering class
>one of our projects is to make a catapult out of popsicle sticks and rubberbands
>seems fun
>work with group
>after a lot of fuckups, we get one working
>problem is, the damn thing is unstable as fuck
>you're graded on how far you launch it
>do test launches
>still holding together
>convince groupmembers to launch it from the max
>some say no
>others say yes
>eventually, we agree to do it
>our turn up to launch it
>pull back ALL the way
>launch
>ball goes vertical
>catapult EXPLODES
>mfw

>>8592310
xD

>>8590269
trying to smother it was actually the right idea and what you're supposed to do if you have a beaker of flaming ethanol

but usually people recommend using another beaker a size larger that you just place over the flaming beaker, not a piece of easily melted plastic

>when the fuckup kid drops a test tube and the whole class goes silent

>>8591015
>Become an alcohol
Fermented sugar or well hydrated alkene?

>biochem lab
>group members are doing spin filtration
>they keep loading with the same amount of liquid for some reason
>wonder why they're not getting a higher concentration
>this goes on for like 4 hours

>>8591123
A variant of that supposedly happened in a "no mean city" where student took body parts home for study. After use ... they dumped some in the river which was found by the police.

There was a bit of fallout from that one.

>>8591462
I heard of a variation on that.

>Lab get a huge superconducting magnet, proceeds to remove ALL magnetic materials.
>Double checks. Everything.
>Turn on magnet.
>A trolley starts edging towards the magnet, first slowly
>Fast thinking researcher immediately grasps the situation and dives like rugby players to tackle it.
>Situation under control
>Everyone breathes out a massive sigh of relief.

>Until their colleague from the lab on the floor below the magnet appears to report that suddenly all their lamps slammed up into the ceiling in wild deviance over gravity.

>>8591632
He was clearly a lazy fuck who didnt give a shit

>>8587872
>not noticing liquid nitrogen boiling off arm
what a bloody retard

>>8591363
>Implying it wasn't anon fucking up

>>8593532
>Implying there were implications to be made beyond the original context

>>8590269
fucking retards lmao

I've had pretty uneventful labs besides this one
>Bio 1 lab, freshman year
>Bunch of morons in the class
>Cultivating E coli for examination
>Some dumbass decided to take a huge whiff of his specimen and pick at it too
>Fucker got sick and dropped the class

>>8593591
Could've been a fatal error

I study dog behaviour and today I hit a dog in the face with a snowball that was meant for her butt. She turned really fast as the snowball was airbourne and it hit her in the snout. She was excited, but it was still an accident in the wild lab.

>>8593847
PETA has been notified

>>8586992
This reminds me of my first day in my Chem lab when the TA complimented some dude for being "extra handsome today" or something. The TA was a middle eastern guy. The next week when we had lab, we had a new TA.

Start with 8th grade high school, generic science class but it was a chemistry lab and we were making bleach with sodium hypochlorite and somebody got something mixed up and suddenly we had to evacuate the entire school because somebody made chlorine gas

In 3rd year Mech Eng. electrotechnics lab somebody tried to "fix" a very large and expensive power supply, unfortunately I wasn't looking but when all was said and done the power supply was completely destroyed and somebody had to take a trip to the hospital because of electric shock.

I took a graphic design class for my free elective in fourth year to get an easy high distinction and watched as a gaggle of art students took apart an old cathode TV and almost killed themselves on the capacitor before I showed them it was still holding a super fucking large charge, the lab tech almost had an aneurysm on the spot when I told him what they were doing

>>8593591
Most lab strains of E. coli are non-pathogenic, so either he was very unlucky or it was a coincidence.

>>8593847
taking pictures of dogs at the park for instagram doesn't count as "studying dog behavior"

>>8593854

Please no. They'd probably kill the dog because it's "suffering."

>>8594354

Those pictures are for my personal collection which is in my closet.

>>8590148

> wasting a summer
> in a fusion lab.

Seems cool as fuck to me anon, you better explain yourself.

>lab tech fiddling with centrifuge electronics, thing was old and not very reliable
>inadvertently disables some of its functionality
>as a result when it's next turned on, it spins up to the point of literally exploding

Thing was probably pulling a few thousand more rps than it was supposed to,i heard it from the next room over revving up and vibrating and had a complete "OH NO DID HE JUST" moment, followed by loud bang like a gunshot

>steel shrapnel embedded in the concrete wall like 4 inches deep
>lab tech huddled in the corner, unhurt aside from permanent hearing damage

Leave centrifuges to the pros, they're literally bombs if you fuck up and push them over the material limits. Poor fucker was never quite the same after that.

>>8584517
Carbon tetrachloride poured basically onto somebody's hands while they were washing them.

>>8593591
>someone in a college somewhere took a whiff of e.coli
He should have been expelled and had his high school diploma revoked for that one, holy shit.

>>8584517
>Be in 10th grade chem lab
>Turning a penny "gold" by making a brass alloy
>After heating the coin over the bunsen burner we are supposed to drop it into a beaker to cool it
>Retarded girl drops it directly in her hand after heating it and gives herself a serious burn
>Teacher calls girl retard in front of the entire class

Accidentally left the gas tank we used to calibrate our indirect calorimeter on. It was several months due for replacement and that was the last day of data collection for that manuscript.

PI said he's done worse and laughed it off. I'm also the only person in the lab who knows how to use it.

not really lab, but still

>helping prof with demos, setting up stuff
>first year mechanics
>classic pendulum "if i just let go and don't throw it, it won't hit me when it comes back" thing
>prof about to let the weight go
>sneeze loudly
>prof gets spooked, hi arms twitch forward a little before loosing the weight
>he obviously knows what's going to happen, but for whatever reason doesn't move
>poor cunt gets 5 kg of iron moving at a fair speed right in his face, in front of 200 freshmen

>>8591432
They're two separate events.

>>8592387
Well-reduced aldehyde.

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burnt out a resistor or two

I remember dissecting frogs in high school. Managed to get free from the pins after the primary incision. Got treated to the image of a frog hopping along with its innards trailing behind it.

>>8590035
what'd you do?

>>8584517
High school biotech lab, one of the kids nearly killed himself by sticking a lab scoop into a electrical outlet

I forget to remove the little strip of tape off the bottom of my gel before running it every fucking time I do a Western.

I accidentally condensed oxygen in a schlenk line trap.

Thankfully nothing happend.

>>8584517
I have some from robotics lab.

We took about 2 years to build a quadcopter from scratch only to throw it to the wayside and buy one pre-built (which was soon after driven into a wall and destroyed).

One of our methods our group called "dynamic tethering", which really consisted of a lab member holding the copter while feeling the force from the motors to tune the PID controller.
You can tell which members were part of the quadcopter group, because they had slashes all down their arms from the blades.
We have a nice set of safety goggles with a slash across them, which a member was wearing (safety first)

>>8595946
Another robot, called Fenrir, is usually called in the papers I found as a pendulum bot. It consists of two large (3 feet iirc) wheels with a counterweight offset from the center (250 lbs?)
I mention the name, because its named after the norse god (norse beast) called Fenrir, that killed Odin (a robot we competed against).

Instead, Fenrir preferred the blood of children and computers.
Fenrir had a glitch where on some boots (1 out of 100 or so) the motors would both go full out and chaos would ensue. Once this meant that it drove to a group of children down the hallway, thankfully it crashed into a wall instead. Two other times, this meant it ate a computer. one the labs, another time a personal one.
So how this would happen is that when uploading code to the arduino, we would of course be plugged in via standard usb a-usb b cable. The robot would go full out, pull itself off the stand, and start rotating, slowly pulling the computer to the robot's maw (I think we saved one compputer from this fate).

We later found, that it was a problem with the specific arduino, and replacing it removed the problem

>>8588823
Bullshit, hydrogen tanks use LH screw connectors, helium uses RH screws.

>>8586892
>Grad students
>Not knowing that Alkali Metals react violently with water
>Costanza.jpeg

>>8595979
I embellished a little on their actual argument.
I meant that the bed of hydrogen wouldn't be enough to keep the sodium afloat

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>>8586892
>mental image of a brick of sodium gliding across a lake leaving a wake of fire
>mfw

>>8591481
Gallium is like $300 for 25 g. That's like 45,000 dollars in gallium. Why did your lab have so much?

>>8584517
Nothing too fancy:
>Friday Chem lab
>Normies have extremely important partying to do so they rush the experiments, go through the motions, copy each other's answers, fly out the door early
>Lab mostly empty, all equipment used and left out
>Still taking my time with experiments to do them carefully and deliberately, watching reactions out of personal interest and to absorb information
>Prof likes my dedication, talks to me about subject matter while I'm cleaning up
>Shooting the shit holding a beaker of HCl
>Rush-job students have spilled contents all over beaker
>Hand suddenly slips closed
>Crash
>Look at hand, nothing but label
>Glass and acid all over floor
>Prof suggests we have experienced an important property of acid
>Slippery?
>You got it. Now go home anon, it's late, I'll mop this up.
He was a cool prof.

>>8591363
As an aspiring physiological psych student, fuck psychiatrists. Fuck them forever.

>>8595991
I found out some time ago that gallium is extensively used in semiconductors. I have a friend that works in waste management who could get me shitloads of old computer parts, we're talking heaps 6 feet high of them, so i spent a long summer processing out the gallium and other metals from them. Got a pretty decent chunk of gold out of the whole thing too.

The prank wasn't the primary purpose of the gallium, of course, but i figured why not do it? I just scraped it off of him and recovered the stuff that fell in the grass. i wanted the gallium to find out how it affected different alloys of aluminum and just for the sheer joy of having over a gallon of what i think is the prettiest of all metals in my possession.

funny that i could have made money off of it, but that wasn't my goal at all.

>>8594288
Bleach is sodium hypochlorite

>>8595936
That always scared the hell out of me when I first started working in an inorganic lab. Still paranoid, never done it before though.

we bought 3k of capillary columns and contaminated them the same week we got them forcing us to reorder them.

>>8596046
>so i spent a long summer processing out the gallium and other metals from them
Got a guide?
Make a guide?

I collect parts...because I don't like throwing them away

>>8587872
every time we have to use liquid nitrogen in our lab we all scour the lab for any rubber we can find to submerge in the liquid nitrogen and shatter.

>>8596088
Sometimes if I'm impatient I grab samples out of the ln2 with gloved hands instead of fishing for them with tongs. If I'm not quick enough I can feel the glove crisp up around my fingers.

>>8592798
>>Until their colleague from the lab on the floor below the magnet appears to report that suddenly all their lamps slammed up into the ceiling in wild deviance over gravity.

LIBERATE TUTE ME EX INFERIS

I don't know if it counts but:
>digging a roman villa
>we actually manage to find a well conserved bust
>after the documentation is done a guy has to put it somewhere outside the work area
>hear a "ooops"
>turn around from my 2x2 square of dirt just to see the guy sacrificing his foot to save a stone bust from the fall damage
I really felt bad for laughing, bless his heart.

>>8585582
>psi
Found your problem anon

I used the bunsen burner to light my bowls in class every time before I did a project.

>>8584635
dude kys what a boring shit

>one of your first classes in a chem lab
>all the bottles are identical, with tiny labels
>reach for a bottle amongst solutions of sugars
>some white residue around the cork
>have an idea
>skim it off and put all of it on your tongue
>sulphuric acid

Last time i posted this of sci everyone told me im lying, so ill say it clearly in green.
>This is not my story
>I did not witness this
>my biochemistry professor told us in class it happened to her
>she may be full of shit

story
>biochemistry prof wasting time in class
>every interaction ive had with her indicates she is a retard, but other people always tell me how smart she is
>years ago when she was in undergrad
>doing some lab
>writing in her book she knocks over a beaker
>assumes its just water since she cant remember what she put in it
>continue writing while arm in lying in the misery liquid
>arm starts to itch
>arm starts ti slightly burn
>she realizes the liquid us her sulfuric acid
>she removes her lab coat
>whole arms skin gets removed with lab coat
>is rushed to hospital with arm with no skin

I couldnt see any scars (dont know if there would be), but shes so fat and ugly now al her skin looks like shit so the scars may be camouflaged

>>8595116
>Leave centrifuges to the pros
That reminds me of when I was nearly killed by a turbo pump.

These are like jet engines with rotor and stator and lots and lots of blades rotating at GREAT speed, except that the blades are powered by an electromotor.

When these go they shred themselves and throw turbine blades clean through the casing and into whoever is sitting close. i was nearly bisected when the turbopump suddenly ingested a lot more gas than it should.

It is amazing how the mind reacts. Realisation of impending doom took miliseconds, as did the realisation of what to do, followed by throwing the right switches while thinking at the same time how slowly time suddenly passed.

>>8595967
Do not underestimate the high level stupidity some possess. In one case the people noticed that the threadings indeedily did not match. So what to do? Of course they had an adapter made.

It did not end well.

>>8589640
>Oh shit I fucked up
>Lets keep on trucking!
Lmao people die bc of shit like this

>>8595702
He probably disconnected that freezer.

>>8595116
That sounds like something I'd do...

>>8585064
You're pathetic by your own standards for pointing it out, Instead of going outside and living life. In reality, you have 0 room to make judgements against your fellow autismos

Nothing major

Forgot about taq polymerase in ice bucket, went in next day to it floating in warm water. It's thermostable do it wasn't a big issue

Also forgot to add agar once to lb media

>>8588003
Mustard gas is not even that deadly, in WWI it was used to injure enemies and make them a burden to their side not to exterminate them. How much of it did he manage to get in his lungs?

>>8589640
I would literally pay big bucks to work with supercritic fluids. It's my fetish. Too bad I'll never get a lab with them

>>8590071
That HCl sure must have been noble. I wonder what corrupted him to the point of damaging public property so horribly.

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>program high voltage source in Labview so that it shuts off when reaching a certain threshold
>note: I have very little experience with Labview
>do several of my experiments, seems to work fine
>start to pull off the cables from my experiment
>accidentally touch one of the prongs
>get huge shock, luckily someone was standing behind me and immediately pulled me away
>turns out my program was faulty and did not actually turn off the output, despite claiming to have done so in the interface

I'm not sure how dangerous the situation actually was (source was in constant current mode, low current, high voltage), but it certainly hurt and I'm just gonna turn off all power sources now before I fiddle with cables.

Not a lab fuck up but as junior doc I was assisting in a simple laparotomy.

>dropped a silent but deadly fart,
> it was so awful everyone thought the lead surgeon must have knicked the bowel
>Didn't own up to the god awful stench
> spent the next 30 mins running the bowel looking for the leak.

>bitch walking with 10M NaOH in flask
>drops flask
>NaOH shoots like a jet and smacks into the roof of her open mouth
>destroyed all of her teeth, gums, tongue and lips
>school revamps all lab safety requirements

>>8597137
How the shut did it manage to get in her mouth

>>8596851
we've had turbo pumps fail in a mass spec and as a standalone pump, and the throwing of blades through the casing didn't happen in either one. the standalone one rotates at 10000rpm and it's supposed to operate only in high vacuum. i, as well as other lab members, fuck up every so often and dump a few psi of gas on it. each time you just hear it spool down really loudly and hope it spools up again after you restart it.

>>8584517
>working with polymer that costs $500/g
>need to use 0.2g of the polymer to make a solution with 0.06g of a salt
>misread the molar ratio as 0.8 instead of 0.08, using 10 times the amount of salt
>use acetone to wipe all the labels off the vial and place it among a ton of other cluttered vials
Not an enormous fuck up, but I was new to my lab and making such a silly mistake made me feel really dumb.

>>8586040
I lost an ampoule of dimethylmercury.
We got an order for a bunch of different mercury compounds, supposedly for some kind of pollution research or some shit. I have no fucking clue what happened to it. It's not possible that it got stolen. Covertly turning the lab inside out looking for it was some mission impossible bullshit, as was trying to play it cool and come up with a reason why I needed to stay late to work on some other bullshit while I made a new one.

Never told any one.

In my nightmares I put on a pair of shoes, or climb into my car, or lean against a wall, and I feel a little *pop*.

>>8592203
What university is this careless?

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>>8592798
I guess their lamps didn't understand the gravity of the situation

>>8589610
Is it a meme to fart/shart in chemistry labs now?

>>8589640
>m....mom.....i need another 20k. My autism happened again.

>>8591632
of course? it's the TAs responsibility to watch over people and throw them out in case it's needed
>protip: if u ignore the safety rules - it IS needed

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>>8591168
what kind of fucked up mouse is that - wtf man

>>8584635
At least this story had a qt milf and not just a farting technician

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>>8599093
>mouse

>>8591446
How often do you work with acetone? I used to work with it on a daily basis. I was one of the only people that could stand being around it for extended periods because of how often I was exposed to it. Its stanky stuff and it burns.

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>>8584517
Dropped my bunsen burner in front of someone else's gas outlet during an ISA
Teacher had to slam the emergency gas stop button before the whole school blew up

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Theres only one reason for someone to use a tor browser for porn.

>>8598414
nice reddit post, faggot.

I worked in a government laboratory and a colleague of mine put a fuck ton of glassware inside of a machine to sterilize it.

well she put the fucker up way too high and melted all the glassware and fucked up the machine..

I've never seen someone cry in a workplace like that. poor girl... our boss is a sweetheart so he comforted her and she got to keep her job

also.... the melted glass looked pretty bad ass... a bunch of us including the girl who melted it kept pieces of it on our desk as souvenirs.

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>>8599450

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>>8599093
Its related in the vein of being bad taxidermy. It's from the Natural History Museum in Ulaanbatar, Mongolia. Their entire collection is like that.

>>8597670
>lost an ampoule of dimethylmercury

holy fuck anon

>>8597670
Now that's a fucking nightmare right there

>>8584517

I have heard stories of people accidentally making mustard gas in organic chemistry classes.

>>8600251
It is quite common to accidentally make TNT in organic chemistry labs too. It is simply amazing how many survive their studies.

>>8595963
>using arduino
There's the source of all your problems

>>8584556
I farted so nasty at work years ago that a coworker who was pregnant threw up. It was very amusing to me.

>>8584517
I saw someone spill a culture of drug-resistant Leishmania Donovani onto another person, and at first saying it was just medium. However we all saw that it was a culture and proceedded with the emergency procedure.

Not surprising, he was fired and lost his visum meaning he was forced on a plane back to Ghana.

kek, NEVER RELAX AROUND ... unskilled people

>>8599469
>government workers

>>8595991
you wot mate? 1kg is like 300 bucks

>>8584517
i heard of a guy pouring acid o´ver the back of another dude. he got expelled from university and the other guy was in hospital.

>>8597070

kek

>>8601711
biologists in action.

>>8585311
Surprised there wasn't one keener who blasted the sequences and caught it.

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>>8597670
>I lost an ampoule of dimethylmercury
jesus christ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn

Making polyacrylamide gels, smashed a 100ml bottle of TEMED. Vapor hits you like a slap in the face in that concentration. Had to evacuate the lab and get blowers in to make it habitable again.

>>8584635
you're the reason why people hate labs, fuck you, piece of shit.

>>8596851
Nice work, Teg.

>>8601796
fug

>>8591143
This one has high morality and wasn't diluted

>>8600967
Want meto tell you how i know your iq is below 380?

In high school physics lab we were playing around with circuits and I connected 6 large batteries in series with each other.

We then left the classroom to do some shit for 20 minutes and came back and one of the batteries had burst all over my partner's notes.

I was the golden boy in the class or however you call it, and I just told the teacher I must have left accidentally a cable that coincidentally touched the other end of the battery

>>8584517
I forgot to add the fucking primers when I was attempting to undertake site-directed mutagenesis. My prof and lab-bros thought it was pretty funny, particularly as I was the guy who usually got DNA concentration an entire order of magnitude higher than they did.

>be me
>last masters intensive course (genetics)
>TA tells everyone in the beginning to turn everything at the of day .... so
>me last one in lab
>me turns of some heater
>heater contained experiment of other student
>6 weeks of work fucked
>me tells no one. everyone thinks its some kind of electrical problem
>best day ever.

>be me
>undergrad research lab
>leave NMR tube over night in NMR lab
>pick up tube next day and goes leave tube in my lab
>lab closed, supervisor nowhere to be found, needs to be in class in the next 5 minutes
>shitwhatdoido
>see's prof. Friend of my supervisor
>she says she'll hand the tube to her
> is thrilled
>cut to 5 weeks later
>supervisor asks where tf is tube
>wot m8
>turns out prof. Friend lost tube
>fuckin' thought I was gonna be kicked out of research group
>supervisor is a sweetheart and I just got away with a warning

>>8604170
In a similar scenario, someone in my physics 2 class hooked up 6 6V batteries up to a DC motor with a propeller on it

Loosely

Nearly killed someone and a piece of propeller was lodged in the whiteboard