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Asked by emmaswagmcqueen to Kate, Kieren, Nicola, Rowena, Roy on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by jamieg, .
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Rowena Fletcher-Wood answered on 10 Mar 2014:
When I was doing my masters research project I did an experiment to make sodium iron selenide. To make one of the materials I needed to melt sodium metal in liquid ammonia. To do this I made a slurry bath colder than an ice bath by putting solid carbon monoxide in propanol, a kind of alcohol. I then submerged a flask in it under vaccuum and let in ammonia gas. The toxic, invisible ammonia gas condenses into a dark blue liquid. Silver sodium metal was dissolved in it, turning an amazing bright gold colour. When it was ready I would open the top and quickly throw in selenium powder, then slowly get rid of the ammonia by warming it up gradually.
It was a very beautiful but extremely dangerous experiment, working with toxic gas, low pressures, toxic powder and a metal that is set on fire by WATER. It went wrong and something broke about half the time we did the experiment, but nobody was ever hurt.
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Kate Nicholson answered on 10 Mar 2014:
Shining a laser on a book worth almost 10 million pounds is pretty much topping my list at the minute, especially when we found 2 of the 4 pigments they used in the first 5 minutes.
Next best was one in my PhD where the system I was using made crystals both when it was cooled down (normal) and heated up (very weired!)
Last favourite experiment was part of my masters project when I was sticking glowy stuff to glass slides, then making the glow by waveguiding a laser down them. To clean the slides I had to use Pirhana solution (explosive, spontaneously boild when mixed, and not the wimpy version that uses dilute peroxide either….) which got exciting when the guy from the explosives lab came asking why I stole his blast shield, and when I told him why ran out of the lab saying – ok you need it more than me!
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Nicola Rogers answered on 10 Mar 2014:
flowing my nanoparticles in blood under a microscope, and tracking the nanoparticles by seeing them fluoresce, to calculate the speed of the blood flow in very tiny vessels
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Roy Adkin answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Hi Emma,
I think my favourite reaction is making gun cotton. It is an explosive form of cellulose. Basically you have normal cotton wool which is made of cellulose…a type of sugar…that you dip into what is called a nitrating solution (I won’t give the reactants for here!). Anyway it is really dangerous if not prepared very carefully and even more dangerous when it is dried out. This is because what once was normal cotton wool, that doesn’t burn very well, becomes nitrocellulose which will burn in a split second in a big ball of flames leaving no soot at all…it just vanishes (well actually, if the reaction is perfect, it becomes H2O, CO2 and N2 gases). It’s so cool 🙂
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