The Higher States of Bromine

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/11/21/the-higher-states-of-bromine

by Karunamon • 7 years ago

262 173 7 years ago

blogs.sciencemag.org

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

I've wondered if I should be nervous about brominated vegetable oil in food. I mean, it's not new or unusual, but I feel like if it was just invented, we'd all be rather skeptical, no?

sansnomme2• 7 years ago

You know, philanthropists really need to invest in higher level free education for non-CS sciences. We have tons of free resources with tremendously beautiful animations on data structures and state-of-the-art machine learning, but the same can't be said for bio and chemistry. This is holding back the biotech industry. People can't make educated judgements about stuff like Mercury Thiomersal because that level of organic chemistry understanding isn't covered well by existing resources like Khan Academy. Hacker News and Silicon Valley loves disruption and "Move fast break things" Uber-style. How about democratising medical education? The cheapest, fastest way to improve healthcare in developing countries is to break the whole "apprenticeship" gatekeeping system that plague medicine and pharmacy. There is no FDA in Africa to bring down the hammer on you making videos on low-cost quality control for orphan drug analogues when people are dying due to corruption, incompetence, and poor medical practices. The level of biochemistry knowledge on HN is amazingly poor, every thread on CRISPR and gene drives reads like the infamous parable of the blind men and an elephant.

harimau777• 7 years ago

I would love that!

I'm researching materials for a project I'm working on so I've been reading a lot of chemistry articles on Wikipedia. I've noticed that there appears to be a set of known building blocks that chemists use to build solutions. Something like:

- "Molecule bits" (rings, chains, functional groups, esters, etc.) that have known properties

- Common processes for modifying/changing those bits (alkylation, calcination, ether cleavage, etc.)

- A set of standard chemicals (alcohols, acids, solvents, emulsifiers, etc.)

For example I often read things like:

"In order to give a polymer higher temperature tolerance, chemists often add a benzine ring by calcinating the molecule using acetone."[1]

While I'm sure that a professional chemist needs to be able to handle lots of edge cases, it seems to me that a lay person could get a lot of milage out of learning these standard building blocks. I'm going to have to look and see if I can find a good resource that explains them.

[1] Note: All of this sentence is completely made up, I just intend it as an example.

shagie• 7 years ago

Chasing links from the article's author... the category pharma 101: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/phar...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2014/09/22/a_... - A Free Online Med-Chem Course

The course appears to now be at https://www.coursera.org/learn/drug-discovery

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

Is thimerosal or biotech connected to the post you are responding to in some way?

pbhjpbhj• 7 years ago

People can't make educated judgements about stuff like Mercury Thiomersal because [...] //

Removing Thiomersal from vaccines didn't reduce ASD diagnoses. That seemed to be sufficient for me to form a judgement on it. But, AIUI it's not used in vaccines in the UK now anyway.

longemen30002• 7 years ago

Yeah, the bromine ion has half life in the body of some weeks, and can cause some neurologic problems,but the body eventually expels it away. I would be worried, but is, not in my primary list of food risk

pfdietz3• 7 years ago

Bromine is now on the list of essential elements. It's necessary for proper synthesis of weird S=N bonds in collagen IV.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4144415/

isoprophlex2• 7 years ago

Mind you, there is no ionic bromine in brominated vegetable oil. There are carbon-bromine bonds in there, so it's toxicity is also dependent upon what your body does to those.

Bromo alkanes are known alkylating agents. Some alkylating agents are carcinogenic. YMMV...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brominated_vegetable_oil

baldeagle• 7 years ago

Brominated veg oil is the thing that gives mountain dew the unique mouth feel, and sometimes light oil slick appearance once stale.

big_chungus4• 7 years ago

Would you please elaborate on the "unique mouth feel" of mountain dew, for someone who hasn't had it?

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Well, the oil slick is the brominated oil not doing its job…

perl4ever3• 7 years ago

Is it really not in anything else? Seems like I have seen it in the ingredients for other things.

twic2• 7 years ago

Well, it's banned in the European Union, so you could always move over the Atlantic and not have to worry about it. On the other hand, as a UK resident, i look forward to finally getting to try it next year!

johnhess• 7 years ago

"Things I wont work with" is a great concept that tech should borrow from chemistry. Some things, while they carry possible returns on investment, are simply not worth the risk.

I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech. I can imagine particular technologies (e.g. predictive policing) or types of data (e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet).

jeanlucas• 7 years ago

I try to apply this to my own work, nowadays I work with financial software in South America, and I have the power to suggest what to use and what to avoid. I decided, and yet to know if it's a good idea or not, to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.

rsynnott• 7 years ago

to instead of worrying about leaking data, not collect some types of data at all.

Interestingly, this has probably been the main beneficial effect of the GDPR so far. Personal data has shifted from being a pure asset to a combo of asset and liability, causing some companies to just avoid collecting anything but the essentials.

Jestar3423• 7 years ago

I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet

There is just no way that doesn't already happen all over the place already.

The "things I won't work with" blog lists things that will actually kill you in horrible, mind bendingly painful ways.

In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"

paranoidrobot2• 7 years ago

In Tech it's more like "things I won't work with because it might fail" or "is too difficult" or "might be a bit too unscrupulous"

For some of things, sure.

But there are other things that do cause death, pain and suffering.

If you wrote code that's used in military weapons, that's a more direct relationship.

If you write code that's used to power gambling sites/devices, it's perhaps somewhat abstract - but there are a large number of people who are harmed because of how addictive these things are.

If you write code that's used for managing high-interest loans (like the point-of-sales type of 'buy-now-pay-later' of loans) - then you're enabling the exploitation of people who by-and-large cannot afford the things they're being told they can have, and will spend a large portion of their life paying these loans off.

MengerSponge• 7 years ago

Just because it's done all over the place already is no excuse for you to do it better.

girvo3• 7 years ago

I can tell you that they indeed are going over the internet, being put into a cloud based notes system for medical data at least where my girlfriend works as an optometrist (they have psychologists, GPs, surgeons, etc and they all use the same system)

vidanay• 7 years ago

I have never had the opportunity, but I personally would never work with life critical software.

malux85• 7 years ago

No helping oppressive governments spy on dissidents.

No high frequency trading.

No financial targeting the vulnerable (subjective, use your own ethics and good judgement)

No dragnets

No devices to disrupt tor or P2P networks

No troll farming or mass media manipulation

No fake dating profiles

No metric stuffing

That’s it off the top of my head. I know that sometimes secondary effects can happen (e.g. an oppressive government may use a database, and I might work on that database) but that’s not me directly helping them.

Something like this, feel free to add others everyone!

Zaskoda• 7 years ago

Now if someone will make some sort of union I can join so I can strike and support others who share the same fundamental ethics. :)

narrator• 7 years ago

No fully automated slaughterbots. There has to be a man in the loop that at least clicks a mouse every time the robot kills an enemy combatant. No one should ever say: "Oh yeah, we had a bug in the auto-kill algo and our killer robot shot a whole bunch of innocent civilians. Whoops! That's nobody's fault. Nobody's responsible. The algo did it all by itself!"

chirau• 7 years ago

Out of curiosity... why won't you work with HFT?

schlipity• 7 years ago

Why would your first rule be so limited? Why help anyone spy on anyone else?

ATsch3• 7 years ago

While I think these are incredibly important and extremely neglected in the industry, these ethical concerns are really something different from the spirit of the "Things I won't work with" series, which is mainly about safety and sanity.

mattygee• 7 years ago

No software-only interlocks on anything that requires a safety interlock

8bitsrule• 7 years ago

No voting-machine software. Paper ballots guarded at all times by well-armed disabled vets. Ballot-scanners produce a paper checksum slip for each voter that they can later compare online to verify ballot has been counted correctly.

jellicle• 7 years ago

The "good" thing about dangerous chemistry is that it is dangerous, first and foremost, to the chemist. Inspiring some caution in the majority of chemists.

The bad thing about dangerous tech is that it is usually someone else who gets hurt, and the technologist is affected last or not at all. Predictive policing? It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick...

It should probably be required by law that Zuckerberg keep nude photos of himself on his Facebook account, to encourage security.

salty_biscuits• 7 years ago

"It's not going to be rich white guys who catch the pointy end of that stick..."

Detection of white collar crime? Surely detection of fraud in financial transactions isn't rocket surgery...

JshWright2• 7 years ago

(e.g. I refuse to put digitized therapist's notes on the internet)

So... No EHRs?

eropple• 7 years ago

EHRs don't imply internet access.

matthewfcarlson• 7 years ago

More of an embedded/firmware engineer who happens to also be a web developer, I had a rule that I wouldn't make anything that directly killed people. I had many friends go work at various defense companies designing missile control systems. That said, their stories about the challenges and what sort of places they went were fascinating. I'm glad someone did it. I'm just glad it wasn't me.

girvo3• 7 years ago

I was in the process of being hired to work on tech like that last year. The technical challenges and constraints were so exciting, but I couldn’t get past my moral and ethical problems with writing software that kills people, so I ended up turning down the offer

CamouflagedKiwi• 7 years ago

My first thought was "more than 2 consecutive *'s" which has something of a resonance with the higher oxidation states the author mentions being wary of.

Florin_Andrei• 7 years ago

I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech

Computer tech is nowhere near as spectacular as chemistry, in an immediate, palpable sense. Almost nothing is. Maybe some narrow areas of physics or real-world engineering. But chemistry is pretty much unique that way.

Chemistry is a great hobby to pick up when you're a teen. Well, assuming you survive the whole thing.

bryanrasmussen• 7 years ago

I knew someone that claimed he would not work with gambling applications on moral principle, I didn't much respect the stuff he had built as it seemed all brochure ware about 6 years behind the times but at any rate he had the one standard.

patrickmay• 7 years ago

I wonder what "Things I wont work with" would be for tech.

Online voting. Anything more sophisticated than automated scanning of a paper ballot cannot be trusted, even in theory. Always, always be able to do an audit from the original ballots.

mulmen• 7 years ago

I would expand that to include electronic voting in general. Even air gaps are not satisfactory.

OliverJones• 7 years ago

I started out a biochemist before I discovered computers. This article is rofl funny. "invigorate itself all over the ceiling..." yeah, got the t-shirt. That's why they took away my bunsen burner and gave me a mouse.

Seriously.... fellow programmers, designers, entrepreneurs. What are the things you won't work with?

For my part:

Web code written in any language without a well-integrated string data type. strcpy() is a target painted on my back if I did that.

Anybody who claims they've got amazing new data- or media= compression technology and wants funding for it.

Transferring peoples' data from a protected realm (like a HIPAA-covered pharmacy system) to an unprotected realm (like direct marketing).

sansnomme2• 7 years ago

To be fair, neural networks are very effective for (lossy) VR compression/representation. See: papers by Facebook Research.

ben_w• 7 years ago

Anybody who claims they've got amazing new data- or media= compression technology and wants funding for it.

Anyone whose business plan names an existing famous company — “Uber for aircraft”, “Facebook for political activists”, that sort of thing.

Niksko• 7 years ago

Why? These sorts of descriptions are incredibly useful for getting people to understand your value proposition. Just because you mention this doesn't mean you're going to adopt Uber or Facebook's moral code.

ajuc• 7 years ago

The only thing worse than no good string data type is 5 different string data types in one application.

std::string, OString, QString, char*, QByteArray

OString was our wrapper around database library strings.

And there were automatic cast between SOME of these. I especially liked the helpful automatic cast to bool from OString (true if it wasn't empty if you're wondering). It meant that doing OString("password") == OString("wrong password") returned true because it converted both to bool.

adrianN• 7 years ago

Five different string datatypes are actually a good idea in many scenarios, but you have to be very careful with automatic conversions.

gHosts• 7 years ago

...and you will at all times want to be suited up like you’re going to going to spay a velociraptor.

Brand new sentence...

PS: If you must do battle with the likes of strcpy(), avoid strncpy() and strlcpy() and head straight for strscpy()

msla• 7 years ago

Web code written in any language without a well-integrated string data type. strcpy() is a target painted on my back if I did that.

Writing a URI parser in C which extracts hostname, port, and path is about the upper limit of what I want to do there.

I've done it, it works, I learned about strstr(3) in the process, and I don't want to do it again.

http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strstr.3.html

Anybody who claims they've got amazing new data- or media= compression technology and wants funding for it.

Encryption is probably worse for snakeoil, but I like reading about crypto snake oil. Schneier has a good series on it called The Doghouse. Example entry:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/09/the_doghouse_...

Phil Zimmermann (PGP) has an essay on recognizing it:

https://philzimmermann.com/EN/essays/SnakeOil.html

djb even has a competition:

https://snakeoil.cr.yp.to/

rstuart4133• 7 years ago

The code I'm most likely to waste an inordinate time on is any kind of non-determinism in the hands of an inexperienced programmer. Threads are the worst (possibly because languages like Java make them so easily available), but interrupts and multiple parallel even javascript promises returning in an unexpected order 1 time in 1000 can all create heisenbugs that take forever to find.

partyboat1586• 7 years ago

Inexperienced devs should pair program async and threaded code before they can do it on their own. They drive with the experienced dev over their shoulder to point out the footguns. Or at least have an interactive code review. Unfortunately lots of teams are under too much pressure to deliver so pair programming doesn't get done as much as it should. It's how I learnt to write safe threaded code and I can still hear the voice of the senior dev in the back of my mind when I write it now.

samatman3• 7 years ago

This entire series is a treasure.

I'll share my favorite, just for the phrase "Satan's kimchi" alone:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...

ce4• 7 years ago

The articles from that series have been discussed a couple times here already, it used to be hosted somewhere else. Nice to still see them (the first search's original links are dead though, available under the new domain):

https://hn.algolia.com/?&query=pipeline.corante.com%2Farchiv...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.sciencemag....

HeWhoLurksLate• 7 years ago

I can't even figure out what to say about that.

That was worth the read. Thanks!

rpeden• 7 years ago

"Sand won't save you this time" is another great read from the series:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2008/02/26/sa...

Nextgrid• 7 years ago

Another gem I highly recommend reading is his post on selenophenol: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2012/05/15/th...

The biggest stinker I have run across. . .Imagine 6 skunks wrapped in rubber innertubes and the whole thing is set ablaze. That might approach the metaphysical stench of this material.

api2• 7 years ago

A long time ago I found this series and LOL'ed and then had to email him a link I found to an experiment in using fluorine instead of oxygen in a rocket as an oxidizer. It resulted in the highest specific impulse ever recorded for a chemical fuel and would be awesome were it not for the exhaust being pure hydrofluoric acid.

prox• 7 years ago

You mean “launch the rocket,everyone dies” awesome?

pfdietz3• 7 years ago

I believe the highest Isp with fluorine is Li/H2/F2 tripropellant, in which the exhaust is mostly hydrogen and lithium fluoride.

api2• 7 years ago

Well I guess if you need a flame thrower in hell...

carapace• 7 years ago

Dr. Peter Plichta figured out how to make silane fuel, basically replacing carbon with silicon.

Before the 1970s, silanes were considered unsuitable for use as fuels, because they instantaneously self-combust at room temperature. Not satisfied to leave it at that however, Plichta went to work and succeeded in producing longer-chained silanes that appeared as clear, oily liquids and were stable at room temperature.

~ https://www.offgridquest.com/energy/turning-sand-into-fuel-s...

It burns nitrogen and the reaction is so energetic the flames are lighting.

https://www.plichta.de/plichta/

http://www.rexresearch.com/plichtasilane/plichta.html

userbinator• 7 years ago

The related linked article at https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2005/12/17/ho... is also well worth reading.

tectonic• 7 years ago

They're all amazing. Here are past issues: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/?s=things+I+won%27t+wo...

shoghicp• 7 years ago

Better link pointing to the category, includes more results https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...

phkahler• 7 years ago

From the comments: At least in the States you can have potassium bromate added to the flour in your bread.

They say bromine stands in for iodine, which is critical for many things.

m0zg4• 7 years ago

Reminds me of "Ignition!", which is, if nothing else, a very entertaining read. Those dudes out of necessity had to work with every dangerous and explosive chemical known (and discovered a few in the process). At one point in order to boost the thrust of engine they _sprayed liquid mercury_ into the nozzle. Unsuccessful tests often meant that the building housing the rocket motor would be demolished by explosion, often simply because some chemical ran the wrong way in the tubing due to pressure differential or some newly discovered rocket fuel or oxidizer had a reaction with some minuscule contamination in the fuel or oxidizer line. There were also some proposed fuels (butyl mercaptan) that smelled so foul, they had to evacuate buildings, but that did not stop them from experimenting with them in a wooden shack 200 yards away from the main building.

pfdietz3• 7 years ago

They didn't spray mercury into the nozzle; it was injected into the thrust chamber itself with the fuel and oxidizer. The point was to maximize "density impulse" (specific impulse x density of propellants).

Using zinc would have been much less dangerous.

ncmncm2• 7 years ago

Somebody criminally contaminated a desert somewhere west of LA that way.

wnkrshm• 7 years ago

My favorite story is the lemon oil (limonene) test - they did an engine test with it because of political pressure and according to the author, the desert smelled like lemon for 2 months after that.

twic2• 7 years ago

There's a link in the comments to some nutter who does mildly horrifying syntheses on YouTube, like this one for chromyl chloride:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saANxD0cqy0

girvo3• 7 years ago

NileRed is great fun to watch - but his clean up processes are sometimes a bit horrifying to watch knowing he’s doing it alone and at home with a semi-stocked amateur lab haha

sq_• 7 years ago

Wow. I just watched that one and his toilet paper moonshine video. I can’t believe he’s doing all of this in a home lab!

emikulic• 7 years ago

These days he rents a commercial space. He's done videos on setting it up.

It's NurdRage that lost his lab and is doing stuff in his bathroom again.

zdkl• 7 years ago

Speaking of horrifying home chemistry, Australia is well represented with Explosions&Fire/Extractions&Ire https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVovvq34gd0ps5cVYNZrc7A/vid...

ComputerGuru2• 7 years ago

@dang and co: The old title with “things I won’t work with:” is both the name of a series HN is familiar with and presenting in TFA as the category the post was made under; perhaps it should be returned?

dang• 7 years ago

We tend to remove names of series, as well as names of sites and other repetitive markers from titles, in the interest of keeping things unpredictable. An unpredictable HN is a good HN.

The fact that this is a "Thing I Won't Work With" instalment shows up immediately in both the article and the comments, so the information is only one hop away. Also, the article being at #1 is a strong clue that the content is interesting to more than just chemistry specialists. It's generally good for HN if not everything reveals its secrets right away, and readers have to work a little (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). When you have to do a tiny bit of work before getting the dopamine hit of pattern-matching, it seems to put the brain in a slightly less predictable state.

Before we changed the title, the thread was mostly about the series, not the specific article. That's poorer for discussion quality, which gets more predictable and less varied as topics get more generic. (For lots of explanation of that phenomenon, see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... and https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...)

If anyone wants to read (a lot) more about title changes on HN, some recent things are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21617954 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20429573.

ComputerGuru2• 7 years ago

Thank you for the explanation -which you did not have to provide. I have learned something new today!

Thank you to you, Scott, and everyone else for keeping this site so wonderfully curated.

Karunamon3• 7 years ago

Thank you for the explanation. I was debating on whether or not I should have included the category when submitting this.. I leaned on including it because it was right there on top of the headline, and figured nobody would find it interesting enough to click without the pointer that it's a part of an established, interesting series of articles.

nitrogen• 7 years ago

I noticed that all of these reactions are performed at very low temperatures. Could there be enough chemistry for life at these very low temperatures?

dnautics10• 7 years ago

I do think derek lowe is a bit too paranoid about HF. I've worked with HF before, and with a proper setup (negative pressure, calcium carbonate filter, teflon equiment) it is really quite reasonable to handle. I would entrust a conscientious first year grad student to it (as I was entrusted). I only screwed up once [1], and the consequence was we lost about 1/8 of our calcium carbonate filter column. You can tell because the section that has most recently been expended is warm on the outside of heavily shielded carbonate vessel).

[1] the screw up was I had left the HF open (but not pulling) for 20 minutes instead of 5.

omar_a14• 7 years ago

I think you're not paranoid enough about HF. It doesn't wash off, and is small enough to pass through skin to form insoluble mineral precipitate with calcium in bone and blood, which can result in amputations from dead tissue. It's one of the few acids capable of eating through silicates in glass or rock.

Even at lower concentrations, you still need specialized gloves, apron, and ideally a face shield, in addition to standard PPE. Source: worked with HF for 3 years.

refurb4• 7 years ago

Agreed.

If I had to choose splashing my arm with a concentrated acid, I would choose sulfuric or nitric acid over HF.

Unlike the other acids that just burn the surface of the skin, HF rapidly penetrated the skin and can mess up your potassium levels. Plus tissue destruction is much deeper.

dnautics10• 7 years ago

The irony is that HF is probably worse in lower concentrations partly due to it's dissociative properties, which I won't get into a technical discussion about, and general human stupidity. If you're using 100% HF it's safer, because you're using not very much (we're talking 5-10 mL at a time), the equipment you're using is by nature safer, and you're more vigilant. It's also much easier to mechanically handle 10 mL than 100 (or more mL).

But hey I worked with 100% HF for seven years (BOC protected amino acid synthesis), so what do I know...

scarmig• 7 years ago

https://www.chem.purdue.edu/chemsafety/chem/HFfatality.html

refurb4• 7 years ago

I thought of the same case.

Guy spills a beaker (100-250 mL) of HF on his thighs. They end up amputating his leg but he still dies anyways.

jdnier• 7 years ago

Here's the full list of "Things I Won't Work With" articles: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/category/thin...

sandworm101• 7 years ago

> ...a willingness to do things like redistill anhydrous HF, and you will at all times want to be suited up like you’re going to going to spay a velociraptor.

Best chemistry-related description since the one in Ignition about running shoes as vital lab equipment.

fuzzfactor4• 7 years ago

Keep in mind the risk with just regular liquid elemental bromine.

Seems like a heavy red nasty fuming liquid because it is.

Concentrated nitric acid is heavy too, has aggressive red fumes of its own kind but it is a clear liquid.

And you can pipet nitric acid.

But you can't pipet bromine.

If you try it, you might think so at first since bromine can be drawn up in to the pipet like any other liquid, but once you remove the pipet from the source bottle, it expells itself from the pipet before any transfer can be made. With nature at work, it begins destroying anything it had come in contact with, while the majority of the carefully measured quantity rapidly evaporates and instantly triggers the evacuation instinct with great encouragement.

Even when handled under a fume hood, where most of it goes up the hood, people at the other end of the lab will be out the door in less than one second after the first whiff.

Don't ask me how I know but there was this graduate student who was a little bit of a loose cannon . . .

isoprophlex2• 7 years ago

Thanks for reminding me of this undergrad student who tried to recover the product of a bromination...

By sticking the reaction mixture, bromine and all, on a rotavap. Outside a fumehood.

dschuler• 7 years ago

How do you move it around if you can't use a pipette?

Or if you say "well, you can't", do you know how the manufacturer gets it in the bottle?

saagarjha2• 7 years ago

Some precise pouring, maybe?

fabian2k• 7 years ago

You pour it instead of pipetting. If you need specific amounts, you use a measuring cylinder.

Or you pipette it hastily, leaking some drops along the way. Which of course is a bad idea as it's not very safe, creates a bit of a mess and means your final volume is lower than intended. That is often what happens when students aren't warned about this behaviour of Bromine. It's not terrible (not good of course either) from a safety point of view, cleaning up some drops of Bromine in a fume hood is straightforward. Unless you don't work in a fume hood, which you and other people in the room will regret very quickly.

fuzzfactor4• 7 years ago

The manufacturer puts it into lead-lined rail cars and ISO containers:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/53243414@N00/3941298659/

https://www.wew.de/en/news/archive-20152/new-bromine-iso-tan...

Then often pressure transferred under inert gas into progressively smaller lead-lined or Monel cylinders.

These are closed systems as much as possible.

Then somebody who really wants it in glass finally pressure transfers into an open container, decent amounts can be dispensed under its own pressure.

In a regular glass-stoppered acid bottle it can best remain under a hood, or underhood cabinet after that.

To get a few milliliters from the bottle you carefully pour the smoking liquid into a small graduated cylinder.

While suited up for dinosaur vivisection sans anesthetic in a toxic fog.

It's basically impossible to make the most precise measurements of such volatile materials anyway.

Then if you're making bromine water, once it's diluted it's not expected to come out exactly the same concentration every batch, you're either going to standardize it or run blanks each time.

philjohn• 7 years ago

A science teacher at the secondary school I went to was doing an experiment related to brownian motion by demonstrating with bromium diffusion in air, and then a vacuum.

It leaked, and the entire science block was evacuated.

nullc• 7 years ago

If you enjoy reading about crazy chemistry, I recommend the book "excuse me sir, would you like to buy a kilo of isopropyl bromide?" a 70's era autobiography by a chemist.

https://archive.org/details/gergel_isopropyl_bromide

dekhn• 7 years ago

I still clearly remember using bromine in high school chemistry lab... horrible fumes. "Do not pipette by mouth".

lostmyoldone• 7 years ago

My high school teacher in chemistry was a bit of an original. Dedicated and ambitious, and maybe a little bit crazy.

In our 2nd and 3rd year we did quite 'serious' organic synthesis labs, including bromination of benzene, which of course included elemental bromine. The teacher did ration it out in out small stoppered round bottom flasks, but then we all did the synthesis in teams of two/three.

He was still very serious on security, and I guess his main reason for including that lab was to make sure that all his students had understood the seriousness of chemical dangers.

If you had done anything even slightly out of line in any lab, but especially that one, you would absolutely have been sent home, and probably been advised that maybe experimental organic chemistry wasn't for you.

Right or wrong, but that's the story about how I got to work with elemental bromine in high school at the age of 16 or 17.

fuzzfactor4• 7 years ago

It can be an interesting head start at a young age.

I went to experimental school having more progressive and well equipped labs than supposedly others at the time. Everything was new and advanced, we were the guinea pigs. Not toxically by any intention, just behaviorally for the most part.

I got to the university early and had excellent professors, ended up interning when I was 20 at a leading research fluorochemical and silicochemical plant that had been a startup from one of them years earlier. By the time I got there they had a fluorine trailer on site, at times the only live one in North America back then, so "no insurance for you".

We stocked experimental silanes, silazanes, fluoromonomers, and things like fluorides of xenon in the main chemical room if they were under a few kilos. Osmium tetroxide too, but only a few grams.

But there was another building with the real nasty stuff on the shelves, where every single one of them was something most chemists would never want to see the bottle open. Especially if they were the poor soul that had to do it the previous time. Too bad a lot of the compounds would eat through the bottle cap within a faily predictable period of months or years according to the material, so somebody was going in there fairly regularly to accomplish cap replacement as needed anyway.

You could tell when something was coming out more agressively than normal when you walked by the building. It was easy to smell since it was built with the cinder blocks turned sideways for ventilation, just like the numerous systhesis labs scattered safe distances from each other, all far from the heavy concrete blast embankment which faced off into the woods. Only the labs didn't have actual doors in their four doorways. It didn't go without saying that 4 ways out still might not be enough for a single chemist, and you can't have any obstacles in your way. Firefighting training included extinguishment through the flow-through walls into the dummy lab from the outside, which was just a lab that had gone out of control but not been completely destroyed.

The agressive chemical storage had secure doors but it was still gagging you with its smell-through open walls. How much worse could it get to actually go inside? Well there was the thiophosgene. You think plain phosgene is bad, this is not your everyday phosgene. It was rough, once you got to know it, largely seemed like one of the main stench culprits. The bottle stayed in the room, measurement was done right there. You had to put on a disposable suit to protect you from the outer suit which was assumed to be contaminated from previous tasks. Full face respirator and shield, rubber boots and spats, multiple glove layers to open the crate, dig into the vermiculite for the can, open with sparkproof tools, dig into more vermiculite for the bottle of ugly red liquid its damn self. Any access to thiophosgene called for full replacement of the bottle cap, can, crate, and vermiculite, so it could hopefully be left alone as long as possible undisturbed afterward. Once opened and repacked, that room smelled about ten times worse than normal for a couple weeks even though the thiophosgene was sealed up like that.

Anyway, I have lived by my teenage decision but accept it as immature, I don't recommend such toxic or dangerous work to others and carry on partially because I want to use any unfair advantage for myself & others to handle risky things more responsibly or not at all.

The Higher States of Bromine

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