Derek Lowe keeps a blog, that alone wouldn't be news worthy but his blog is the home of Things I Won't Work With, a fascinating look at chemicals so noxious, so volatile that even the names will make amateur chemists flinch.
Such things as:
Everyone knows hydrogen peroxide, HOOH. And if you know it, you also know that it's well-behaved in dilute solution, and progressively less so as it gets concentrated. The 30% solution will go to work immediately bleaching you out if you are so careless as to spill some on you, and the 70% solution, which I haven't seen in years, provides an occasion to break out the chain-mail gloves.
When we last checked in with the Klapötke lab at Munich, it was to highlight their accomplishments in the field of nitrotetrazole oxides. Never forget, the biggest accomplishment in such work is not blowing out the lab windows.
and FOOF
And a hard core it is! This stuff was first prepared in Germany in 1932 by Ruff and Menzel, who must have been likely lads indeed, because it's not like people didn't respect fluorine back then. No, elemental fluorine has commanded respect since well before anyone managed to isolate it, a process that took a good fifty years to work out in the 1800s. (The list of people who were blown up or poisoned while trying to do so is impressive). And that's at room temperature.
Has anyone here had to work with any of these?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2014, @06:53AM
TFS makes no sense - headings have no relation to the text.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Bot on Wednesday November 12 2014, @11:05AM
And still no systemd mentioned in the comments, either.... oh wait.
Account abandoned.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2014, @12:01PM
Yeah, thanks for the reminder: all the stupid hipsters hate systemd. I'll just be over here using Arch Linux with systemd, because fuck you, that's why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 12 2014, @01:16PM
No, the stupid hipsters love systemd cuz, you know, apps.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Jesus_666 on Wednesday November 12 2014, @01:53PM
To give some context: The peroxide peroxides article uses HOOH's reactivity to point out how reactive HOOOH etc. become. The mercury azides article is, well, about what the Klapötke group likes to do, namely synthesizing ridiculously unstable molecules. The FOOF ones goes on about how nasty FOOF is.
I think there are a few other articles that could've been mentioned. Like the one about hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane, aka CL-20. Anyone who knows what "nitro-" says about a compound will perk up at that name. To finish with my own out-of-context soundbite: