Fun With Chemistry

Alex

In The Pipeline: Things I Won't Work With

The above may be one of the most entertaining blogs I've found in a long while. A sample, to help you understand why:

And they're a livelier bunch. The selenium tetra-azide is another yellow solid, like the tellurium compound, but it's rather harder to keep it down on the farm. Taking some selenium tetrafluoride (see below) and condensing it with trimethylsilyl azide at -196 °C did the trick. After warming things up (you'll note the relative use of that term "warming"), they saw that:

"Within minutes, the mixture turned yellow, the color intensified, and a lemon-yellow solid precipitated while the reaction proceeded. Keeping the reaction mixture for about 15 min at -64 °C resulted in a violent explosion that destroyed the sample container and the surrounding stainless-steel Dewar flask."

Did I mention that this prep was performed on less than one millimole? Spirited stuff, that tetra-azide. The experimental section of the paper enjoins the reader to wear a face shield, leather suit, and ear plugs, to work behind all sorts of blast shields, and to use Teflon and stainless steel apparatus so as to minimize shrapnel. Hmm. Ranking my equipment in terms of its shrapneliferousness is not something that's ever occurred to me, I have to say. It's safe to assume that any procedure which involves considering which parts of the apparatus I'd prefer to have flying past me will not get much business in my lab, no matter how dashing I might look in a leather suit.

Andrew

How to make a Hollow Penny.