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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: 3, Interesting) by Immerman on Wednesday November 12 2014, @03:37PM
Wow, I hadn't realized organo-mercury compounds were so much more dangerous than elemental mercury. Good to know. A mere pinprick worth would seem unlikely to increase the levels of actual mercury more than a single serving of fish (particularly a top predator like tuna or shark).
And I'm not certain if the same mechanism would work for humans, but female dolphins actually have a way of ridding themselves of dangerously high mercury concentrations: They get pregnant. Between in-utero transfer and the concentration of mercury in their fat-rich milk they transfer virtually their entire mercury load to their first calf, who rarely survives the process. Subsequent calves get a low enough dosage that they can survive to repeat the process.
You know, now that I think about it, such bio-accumulation would suggest that all modern cetaceans, particularly males, are probably "mad as a hatter". Makes you wonder what they'd be like in full command of their faculties.