If you’re an avid horror movie watcher, it’s likely that you have seen at least one horror film that’s somehow related to catastrophes in a laboratory. And while usually these movies are rather dramatized, the inspiration behind them still comes from real life.
We’re not saying that lab disasters are happening around every corner. What we are saying is that there are enough instances of them nearly happening to make a full-blown list that we’re sharing with you today. So, let’s jump in to read about incidents that could’ve ended our world or at least someone’s life.
#1
Grad student left a hot plate on, burned down his/her advisors’ lab, entire floor of the building destroyed by smoke and water damage. Nobody k***d but the advisor’s rare collection of butterfly wings went up in. smoke – he’d been studying evolution of butterflies and had to abandon that. Took about a year to rebuild everything and get back on track.
That was 20 years ago and I still have a big sign in the lab where people will see it when they leave: “IS THE HOTPLATE OFF?”
edit: forgot to mention severe water damage in the entire rest of the building. The affected lab was on the top floor so the whole department was pretty much flooded. We were all shut down for a while. I ended up staying in grad school another year because of all the delays getting the labs up and running again.
Image source: NorthernSparrow, Edward Jenner
#2
Previous Post Doc in my lab had a bad habit of touching/pushing hair away from her face whilst wearing gloves. She continued this habit whilst making her own poly acrylamide gels for protein seperation. Only figured out it was very bad when her hair started to fall out in a very specific spot on her head.
Image source: pandodle, Beth Macdonald
#3
A girl in my lab forgot to turn the blower on in the hood and inhaled a small amount of an e. coli toxin we were supposed to put in solution. didn’t feel well, went to the ER, got pneumonia, then got an intestinal infection. her mom had to fly to the east cost from california to take care of her when she couldn’t leave her apartment for two weeks. it’s a month later and she still hasn’t fully recovered.
Image source: chickenpotpiee, RDNE Stock project
#4
Undergrad accidentally pricked himself with a syringe full of mouse breast cancers cells. He was convinced he was going to die for weeks. He lived.
Image source: Writtenfrommyphone, Devi Puspita Amartha Yahya
#5
A (really dumb) postdoc in my previous lab placed an unrinsed bottle in the bleach bath to be picked up by the glassware folks. She didn’t sink it; just left it floating. When the glassware guy got up there, he sank it to rinse/clean it. Too bad the bottle had a bit of HCl in there, and created chlorine gas when he sank it into the bleach water. A staff scientist found him passed out next to the sink. EDIT: because a couple people have asked, no, he didn’t die. A visit to campus medical, I’m sure, but those facilities folks are made of stronger stuff than I am.
Image source: KirkLucKhan, Nothing Ahead
#6
I was an undergrad, getting some experience in a mosquito genetics lab. I heeded my copious amounts of safety and PPE training, and always made sure to wear pants, close-toed shoes, gloves, and goggles. However, contrary to what my professors had always told me, absolutely nobody else gave a s**t about wearing PPE. After a decent while of being teased by my supervisors and fellow undergrads, I decided to cast off my previous training, and wear shorts and sandals.
On that very day, we were moving some (glass) mosquito cages around the lab. The bottom fell out, shattering not only glass, but also a swarm of live mosquitoes all over the floor. And my feet.
I wear PPE again now.
Image source: solinaceae, Jimmy Chan
#7
I spilled a load of 35% NaOH solution over myself. Burned right through my coat, overalls and pants. Quickly pulled down my pants, and ran half naked to the showers. The pain and humiliation… I’ve never been more angry with myself.
Image source: joskelb, Artem Podrez
#8
I’m a lab manager, where do I begin?
The worst one I have seen is when someone placed a vial of some HCl on a top shelf then threw a giant funnel up there as well, you know, for fun. Of course the funnel rolled around, hit the bottle of HCl and came crashing down on one of my co-workers. She handled it with grace, ran into the shower immediately and I got to go on a shopping trip and buy her some new clothes.
Also saw some get hit in the eye with [chemicals] and mouse guts at the same time. They did not handle it with grace.
Just last week someone set a beaker of ethanol on fire and just stared at it unsure of what to do. Thankfully I was right there and moved the even bigger beaker of ethanol out of the way before it caught on fire.
Image source: cyclopspanda, Rodolfo Clix
#9
Sophomore year of my chemistry degree, and I was in organic chemistry. We were doing a semester long synthesis experiment, and had just started the process. Part of it was melting sodium down and swirling it in ethanol to add a particular group onto the sodium. Directly prior to that, we had used glacial acetic acid for something or other. Well, not all of the acid had been reacted before we added the sodium. Now I don’t know if you know this, but elemental sodium is highly reactive. I was gently swirling the flask with the ethanol and sodium, and some of the sodium bits went up the side of the glass wall and found some acetic acid. Sodium in water makes a loud pop. Sodium in hot water makes a louder pop. Sodium in acid goes boom. Sodium in glacial acetic acid is downright explosive. There was a tremendous boom, a six inch flame shot out of the mouth of the flask, and I almost had a heart attack. The professor supervising the lab looked up in mild surprise (he was very old and probably almost deaf; he retired that year), and the professor in the lab next door came running to see what was going on. I was very lucky. If more sodium had reacted, or if there was more acid, the flask probably would have shattered and I would have injured my hand. As it was, nothing really came off it and we went on with our experiment. We eventually succeeded in synthesizing ethyl cinnamate.
Image source: thanks_for_the_fish, Artem Podrez
#10
We do a lot of fieldwork in my lab, all by SCUBA. I’ve had labmates lost at sea (we found them after a few hours), threatened by aggressive sharks, our boat almost capsized during a storm, couple broken bones and injuries. Once another boat almost dropped an anchor on my dive buddy, if it had hit him I wouldn’t have known until it was too late. Science can be dangerous.
Image source: Fidilisk, GEORGE DESIPRIS
#11
Not my lab, but a graduate student in an adjacent lab needed to sterilize cultures of anaerobic *Clostridium*.
Rather than simply bleaching the culture and leaving it in the fume hood like you were supposed to they opted to autoclave the live culture.
For those who don’t know what anaerobic bacteria smell like, imagine smelling someone else’s liquid s**t thats been incubating in a hot, stale room for a couple days, that’s about it. Bleaching a live culture and then leaving it in a fume hood essentially k**ls the culture slowly and then the fume hood exhausts the nasty smells outside. Autoclaving will k**l your culture but does not exhaust any of the smells and instead aerosolizes it to share its lovely goodness with everyone.
So this grad student, in their mistake, caused an entire floor of microbiologists to evacuate the building because the smell was so horrendous that they couldn’t work without gagging. The autoclave was also out of commission for a couple days to ensure decontamination of the unit and inlet/outlet pipes. I felt for that poor autoclave tech who was tasked with that job.
Image source: LostinWV, Kaboompics.com
#12
3rd Year Chemistry student chucked a lump of sodium in the aqueous waste (chemicals dissolved in water that can’t go down the sink) by mistake. Blew the container apart, and ignited at least one of the more flammable waste containers it was next to, which blew the fume cupboard apart and a hole in the wall.
After that everyone in the university had to fill in a full COSHH assessment for every single lab, no matter what it involved.
Image source: NuklearAngel, moein moradi
#13
Various stories from around the lab:
– Coworker accidently spilled a mercaptan in a hood. Being a s****y old building, the entire building filled up with the smell and had to be evacuated for the day.
-Mouth pipetting by experienced techs- organic solvents of all things. We had the proper equipment, they were just too lazy to get it.
-There was a communication issue, and someone threw out about $20,000 worth of samples.
-Many years before my time, it was accepted practice to heat your lunch in the GC oven. Or to even make french toast. Guess the ovens were so precise temperature-wise it made awesome food.
Image source: blackday44, Nothing Ahead
#14
I accidentally prepared a rat mesanteric arteriole for the wrong experiment. For the cost of the rat and materials I wasted: $1200
Don’t go to labs on Percocet after getting your wisdom teeth out.
#15
I’m not quite a scientist, but this is lab related.
I was on a team building a BSL4 lab. I couldn’t even tell you what all the scientist were going to do inside the lab, but BSL4 is the highest level of containment. Anyone going in had to have on a full containment suit.
Well, it’s getting near to the end of the project, and since the lab is not yet occupied nor has any hazardous agents in it yet, personnel is walking through without any protective gear on. On the exit to this lab, there is a large washdown station. Basically, the doors close, and everyone gets hosed down with something like bleach to ensure nothing gets out of the lab. The team in charge of that station was preparing to test it when another team walking the lab tried to leave. They get stuck in the washdown, and sprayed for nearly a minute, screaming in horror the entire time. Luckily, the system was only filled with water, but the people inside didn’t know that at the time.
Image source: Cygnus_X, Mikhail Nilov
#16
I had a large washing machine sized centrifuge explode. Imagine it sounded like an [explosive] because I had tinnitus for a couple of days afterwards. That was two years ago and I am still wary of centrifuges.
Edit:spelling.
Image source: Loyblt, Kaboompics.com
#17
Ph.D. student didn’t have any pipette bulbs so he s***d the chloroform into the pipette with his mouth… For months until someone saw it.
edit: Another student was sitting for hours next to open bottles of chloroform, ethanol and other chemicals and was complaining about headaches.
Image source: razor108, RF._.studio _
#18
Throwaway… because of what happened. This happened around maybe 3 years ago while I was a contractor temp scientist.
So I was preparing a 300L batch of cell culture media and I added the wrong solution at the end. I was suppose to add a manganese based chemical and added a magnesium based chemical by accident. All the medium was to be used for a high visibility and quality study. Also, some of this medium was given to cell molecular biology so they also had to repeat experiments there. My senior scientist at the time caught my error from comparing batch and lot numbers of chemicals I was using maybe 2 weeks after our experiment was finished. Mind you these experiments take 4-6 weeks to fully complete. Even if my senior scientist did not see the error, we saw the untypical results from analytical studies another department perform.
Because of this, we had to redo the entire experiment and I had to create a plan to get this experiment fully grown and finished within 2-4 weeks rather than 4-6 weeks since the timeline was already delayed due to my error. Mind you, with all the operations costs, labor, and amount of consumables, repeating this experiment probably cost over $150,000 to do. All this because I added the wrong chemical (and mind you, this is just
I owned up to it, admitted my mistake, busted my a*s and plowed through it. I shall NEVER make that mistake ever again I triple check and always second guess myself when I make these solutions. My manager at the time was very upset with me, but appreciated how I handled myself in handling the whole situation, since I volunteered to repeat the experiment all by myself without my senior scientist’s assistance (she of course just double checked my documentation). In the end, she did cover for me and admit fault, which is something she did not have to do and to this day and give her my utmost respect for doing that. Two months later, I interviewed for a full-time position in the group and got it, and since then I’ve been promoted twice and have since transferred to another group that caters to my overall skill set.
TLDR: Added the wrong chemical to a 300L solution that compromised an experiment and wasted $150,000 of company money.
Edited: for spelling errors.
Image source: LabMoneyWaster, Polina Tankilevitch
#19
Spent 6 years getting a masters and a PhD. I saw some things…
During my masters work we had this completely incompetent person in a lab that shared offices with our lab. She was getting her PhD in material science but did not understand ANYTHING. She had to be walked through how to save files on the computer, what chemical to use, how to not mix certain chemicals, etc. To make things worse, she had this s**t head friend that always hung around with her who would tell her all the wrong things.
Well one day she wanted to clean some crucibles and s**t head told her to use acetic acid, since you know, it’s in vinegar so it can’t be that strong… Our offices were in a larger lab (read cubicles in a corner of a chem lab… not so safe) so we heard her go to the sink run some water and then we begin to get this extremely strong acid smell. Like burns your nose strong. We all look around and walk out to the sink and she has poured a large volume of concentrated acetic acid into her crucible and is attempting to wash it with paper towels, which are melting into her nitrile gloved hand. She has tears pouring out of her eyes and the smell near the sink is an incredibly strong putrid acid smell.
Of course we pull her out of there and ask her what the hell she was doing. She just says s**t head told her she could do it because it was just vinegar acid. She still got her PhD and I lost faith in humanity and my department. I ended up changing schools after I got a masters.
In my PhD lab, I saw a girl get a needle stick while injecting mice with an extremely aggressive form of glow in the dark human breast cancer cells. She went to the doc and they told her that she was fine because the cells would most likely die due to immune reaction. I was still pretty freaked out.
In our lab we also had a jar of [chemical waste] go off like and IED. Apparently when pouring out the waste from fixing samples, someone poured waste that had catalyst in it. One of our grad students felt the bottle when pouring waste in it and it felt really hot. They tried to put it in the sink and run cold water on it. As they walked out of the lab the bottle exploded sending [chemical waste] and glass shards all over the thankfully empty lab. We began to add inhibitor to all our methacrylate waste bottles from that point forward.
tl;dr: Labs are only as safe as the least safe person working in them.
Image source: 3Dnovice, DC Studio
#20
I am a Nuclear Engineer, and typically work in and around the control rooms.
Avoiding catastrophes is our business, so thankfully nothing went fatally wrong, but the most hair-raising event went as follows.
Bad storms were playing havok with the network, and we had been warned we might lose our connection. We were making all the preparations we could, but some systems were out for maintenance, so we expected trouble.
In the early hours of the morning, the worst happened and a tree fell on the power line, cutting us off and tripping our main transformer. The system starts running down, and it looks like everything is safe.
Some of the most essential systems are supported by a no-break electrical system, using batteries to keep them propped up when we are in transitional situations. One of the transformers that supported this was out for work. Unfortunately, in the chaos the other transformer exploded.
The no-break supplies came to the rescue, but one of the motor-alternator sets didn’t start, so the board couldn’t power up properly. We had lost supplies to the seal oil system.
The seal oil system maintains the seals around the generator, which is filled with hydrogen for maximum heat conduction. We’ve lost the system, and the generator is spinning down, so we had just a few minutes until gas started leaking, and a fire or explosion started. If anyone hasn’t seen a turbine/generator explosion, imagine 500 tonnes of steel shrapnel flying for a couple of miles in every direction.
The control room was pretty much useless at that point. The reactor was safe, manages by automatic protection systems, and displays were clogged up with over 72,000 unique alarms. The only thing to do do was throw on a helmet and run towards the potential turbine death-trap.
Once we arrived, we had to purge the generator with CO2 as fast as we could to block the explosion. If we had been even a few minutes later, we could have easily been disintegrated in the fireball, and half the building levelled from the worlds largest shotgun. At the time it didn’t scare me, but once I got home it took the better part of a bottle of whiskey to get to sleep.
TL;DR – i rode a nuclear shotgun to hell and back. Whiskey was involved.
Image source: Dincfish, DC Studio
#21
Guy left a puddle in a liquid hydrogen container boiling off overnight, came back next day and switched on light. People 7 floors above thought there was a terrorist attack.
Insanely smart PhD student fired a vacuum gun the wrong way. 5kg maraging steel projectile embedded itself in wall.
EDIT: It is fairly easy to guess the establishment. Please refrain from posting the name here.
Image source: IC_Pandemonium, Polina Tankilevitch
#22
It was the second week of my PhD, so my supervisor was still hovering around, making sure I wasn’t disastrous in the lab. I was making viral stocks, so I was growing up about 10 flasks of virus-saturated RK-13 cells. I’d taken a load out of the incubator and put them in the hood, when suddenly my supervisor says “why is there media all over the floor?”
I check all the flasks lay down in the hood – no leaky lids, no puddles in the hood, but one flask has a huge crack on the front.
That’s when I feel a bit damp.
I look down, there’s media ALL down the side of my lab coat. S**t. my second bloody week and I’ve potentially infected myself.
Luckily it hadn’t soaked all the way through as most of it was on my lab coat pockets so double layer, and my normal clothes weren’t contaminated. Also luckily, I work with Vaccinia virus, and, as one of my previous supervisors once put it “If you’re going to accidentally infect yourself with anything while you’re here, the smallpox vaccine prooooobably isn’t the worst thing in the world to do it with”.
So it wasn’t that bad in the end, but I was mortified at the time, and I spent 3 weeks examining myself for pox pustules.
Image source: Applebiten, Pixabay
#23
Boil copious amounts of acid in our NOT corrosion-resistant fume hood. People call it the crying fume hood because the walls inside are leaking acid and the bottom of it has this weird viscous liquid that never evaporates.
I tend to keep that fume hood closed.
Image source: anon, Artem Podrez
#24
A Masters student in our lab needed some 100% ethanol which is stored in 5 L glass bottles. He wanted it to be sterile so he took the near full bottle over to the bunsen burner area to open it by a flame. Luckily, our lab tech stopped him before he blew up the lab.
EDIT: Just to explain a little more.
Yes, I think it was actually a 4L glass bottle of ethanol, I would have to check tomorrow in the lab. We buy high grade >99.8% ethanol as we do lots of sensitive molecular biology work.
The guy was doing a 1 year Masters, where he rotated around 3 different labs before starting a 3 year PhD. These were specially funded by the Wellcome Trust and anyone on these courses were considered to be the brightest of students…
I think he was adding the ethanol to some sterile media to grow cultures in and even though for most purposes 100% ethanol is sterile, he wanted to use aseptic techniques and a bunsen burner.
I was at the other end of the lab, when I hear shouting, the lab tech is like “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! That’s ethanol!” and the guy just stands there and says “but it needs to be sterile…”.
Image source: ThatScienceGirl
#25
During high school. We had a particularly intelligent guy in our lab that decided to light a beaker full of some sort of alcohol on fire. The genius decided that the best way of doing this would be to hold the beaker in one hand and then drop a match into the beaker. Surprise surprise alcohol burns. The guys was amused, “cool dude it burns haha”. Then he learned that fire is also hot and that a flaming beaker also gets hot. “Oh s**t man its hot, d**n” then the guy decided the best course of action to avoid burning his hand was to throw the beaker on the ground. The beaker exploded in a massive fireball and about half of the lab was on fire. People on the side of the lab that is now engulfed in flame are screaming as everyone on the other side is just staring in awe. Then from the front of the room desks being thrown out of the way and a rallying cry of “Jesus F**k!!!!!!” is heard as our teacher rushes into action and manages to put out the inferno before any real damage is done.
During another unrelated instance we had a kid that same year manage to stab some glass tubing into his hand while trying to put it into a stopper. blood came shooting out of the tube and the kid just stood there not knowing what to do. The teacher nonchalantly came over and suggested the kid come with him to nurse. there was a huge puddle of blood on the floor and trail all the way down the hallway.
Then during college someone managed to tip over an entire cart of chemicals while trying to get it out of an elevator and they had to call in the hazmat team and the fire department. The entire building was evacuated.
TL;DR — kid starts lab on fire, different kid stabs himself, and cart of chemicals gets dumped.
Image source: Spongey39
#26
My first science type job when I was a sophmore in college. I was sort of the undergrad chemistry TA for the small community college I went to. There was only one chemistry professor and he had just replaced the old professor a month before I started. The old chem professor left the chemical storage area in a horrible state of neglect and danger and I was tasked with helping clean it up. Included in the mess was some random piece of glassware from decades ago that had at least 2 pounds of mercury in it, an old broken mercury barometer (I don’t know how nobody noticed a pool of mercury on the floor, don’t know how long it was there – quite a health hazard) and a shoebox full of vials labelled “A”, “B”, and “C” containing either white or bluish powder. I don’t know what he was thinking, but the new professor instructed me to empty all of vials into an empty glass container to have picked up when the chemical waste guys come. At the time I wasn’t the safety oriented scientist I am now, so I didn’t question it and started working. After 5 or 6 vials I noticed some sort of reaction taking place so I call out the professor’s name and he walks in just as the mixture in the glass container starts to smoke. He grabs it and throws it in the fume hood and slams the door shut just as it bursts into flames and lets out plumes of dark brown smoke. I have been very careful with all of my work in labs since then.
Image source: snipehunt
#27
One day a colleague of mine was currying a higher-order function. His hand jerked, and lambda expressions spilled all over the lab. He would’ve had third-degree formal burns if he wasn’t wearing a lab coat.
Computer Science is hard s**t.
Image source: sixfourch, Edward Jenner
#28
I had a friend who washed a large chunk of pure potassium down the sink. That went bad quickly. For those who don’t know potassium catches fire in water.
Image source: Airsmash, Marek Piwnicki
#29
Late one night when I was in gradschool, my friend from highschool is visiting me. Its about 10:30PM and I wanted to drop by lab to pick up my laptop so we could use it while kicking back a few drinks. I also wanted to show him the lab since we had some really awesome equipment that I knew he would appreciate.
On the way (on the first floor; my lab is on the second) in I see the department head and another professor on the first floor. Its not unusual to see professors around that late but the department head is usually out much earlier. As I get closer I wave hello but he stops, looks at me with a stern face and shouts down the hall, “Diracdeltafunct there is a problem in your lab.”
Thats the moment I look down and notice he is wearing waders and hes standing in several inches of water. Instantly my face goes white as I remember I had just changed water lines on a diffusion pump earlier that afternoon and thought they failed to hold (they dump a total for 4gallons/min through all the pumps).
I rush up stairs to find everything submerged under 6-8 inches of water including a $100K laser power supply and many high voltage boxes. As it turns out it wasn’t my fault and a water line on the top floor broke and dumped thousands of gallons down through the building. In total it flooded our lab frying all the power supplies, missed dumping on an $80k amplifier by ~1foot, filled several laser tables with water (ruining them with rust), and completely flooded a clean room below us.
It could have been worse but it set back research for us by months and others by years (and probably over half a million in damages). Thank god for insurance.
Image source: Diracdeltafunct
#30
I had a really thick suspension of a nasty mixture of bacteria (non-pathogenic but still gloopy and grim) in a syringe. The needle got blocked, and like an idiot I tried to push harder on the plunger and force it through. It exploded. Luckily I was working in a cabinet so my face was ok but everything in the cabinet got coated in this nasty mix of bacteria. It took me an hour and a half to clean everything, and even longer to sterilise the place. Nobody got hurt so it wasn’t too bad in that respect but it made a mess, contaminated (potentially, so I had to assume it did) an ongoing experiment which set me back a few days, and was generally pretty nasty stuff to have sprayed all over you.
Edit for more: I learnt the hard way not to pick up bottles of crystal violet by the lid. My labcoat is very colourful! (and so were my hands for a while).
Image source: angrytrousers, olia danilevich
#31
1. Someone cleaned out a lab, found a jar filled with oil, in the oil was a big lump. The jar had no label.
They took this and put it in the queue for the autoclave. Anyone with some chemistry knowledge is probably cringing right now.
So yeah, the oil was there because the lump was reactive metal, best guess sodium. The autoclave heated the whole thing up to 121°C, and when the operator opened it, it exploded in their face. They suffered terrible, terrible injuries.
It is a terrible story, and reinforces what you learn in the basic safety classes. Labels, labels, labels. Treat everything like it’s dangerous until you know better.
2. Recently it was someone making PFA and they let the solution boil, we had to evacuate the floor. (PFA is paraformaldehyde, when it boils it acts like a very, very nasty tear gas that also happens to probably be carcinogenic).
3. And actually really recently, someone went to fill up a tank of liquid nitrogen, started pouring it into a tank, and then went for lunch and forgot about it. Flooded the basement with liquid nitrogen. They have to do a lot of reconstruction down there.
4. New student sprayed a bottle of phenol all over herself, her postdoc handler was not good at chemistry and just had her dab it off, I made her take her jeans off and there were big burns on her legs, so we washed it with PEG. PEG is magical stuff, I keep a bottle near me at all times.
5. A student taking a biopsy from a mouse for the first time, held it gentle, tried to massage the biopsy punch into the anaesthetised animals back, somehow misjudged the pressure and drove it through the animal, which sprayed her with urine and blood. I had to grab it and snap the neck before it even came close to waking up.
6. A student in the building was playing with Ln2, pouring it into his hand and showing off to his friends. He reasoned that if it could be safely handled on the hand, why not in the mouth? He drank some… So we are pretty lucky to have our lab around 30 metres away from the hospital.
7. I have just heard about this one, but from a good source. They have a 2-photon microscope for live animal work, it works by shooting two lasers into an animal or whatever, and they come from different directions, so at the point they meet there is excitation of the tissue and you can see on the screen what is in there. It means you can look at body parts internally on living organisms. The problem is heat, there is a lot of it. And apparently someone had been working on a mouse and bumped the power up quite high, and didn’t realise that he had killed his mouse until the smell of cooking meat hit his nose.
#32
Radio astronomer here! I don’t really have a lab, because instead we have the observatory take data and put it on a supercomputer after a preprocessing stage, and we then put it on our lab’s supercomputers and analyze it. But if you want to know the worst things that happened in my experiments…
– The supercomputer abruptly dying, or at least nodes on one of them dying. This happens more often than you’d think, and why you *always back up your data*, especially when you remember our local machine relies on the good graces of university IT systems.
– Parts of the radio telescope were getting destroyed in the field because of all the rain and damp. This radio telescope is based in the Netherlands, where clearly it never rains, right?!
– We do a piggyback instrument sometimes for my thesis work that operates independently and remotely, but requires someone to be at the observatory to be there to flip the switch, so to speak. Had a time sensitive observation to make with a piggyback instrument, so you check the schedule and make sure the observatory staff will be in the middle of an observation then- great! But when it comes time to make the observation the main observatory isn’t on, and no one’s picking up the blasted phone or responding to email. (Later they claimed they were, but I suspect it was a really long lunch break.) Observation is deferred a month.
– I’m still a bit pissed off about this as it happened two weeks ago, but the observatory lost a crucial bit of my data for my thesis for no real reason except they spent too long waiting to do the preprocessing. It was commissioning-related data, so after a month of no one accessing the data where it was it was automatically deleted. Which made the rest of my two months of work suddenly pretty worthless, which was really frustrating! :(
To be clear, building a good modern radio telescope is hard and it’s a miracle we ever get any of these things to work well enough to get science out of them. But d**n, I’m pretty sure a PhD is more an exercise in frustration than anything else.
Image source: Andromeda321, wirestock
#33
One time a fly got in, nearly contaminiated my product. My lab assistant had the brazen audacity to suggest that our customers wouldn’t notice since they’re all a bunch of [illegal substances users].
Image source: Lux42
#34
Just a couple of weeks ago we all got sent home early because of a ‘Nitrogen leak’
Incidentally it was the day after that new COD game came out.
I’m on to you, men!!!
Image source: TheCatKnowsEverythin, cottonbro studio
#35
Our chemistry lab has been on fire twice in the last six months.
Great research output though.
Image source: anon, Pavel Danilyuk
#36
I worked in flood defence as a civil engineering technician for a while (drawing up dams, correcting things as engineers altered specs) and while it was an office not a lab, our work directly affects the general public, we maintain and build nearly all of the UK’s sluices, flood gates, dams and weirs, rurally and urban.
Anyway, one time there was this guy on his first project that he was managing (a prestigious but nervewracking experience for any civil engineer) and as usual site surveying is done, and they concluded that the bottom of the river at that point was concrete from a previous weir. This is obviously a really important part as this is where the new dam’s nape and reinforced concrete will be seated.
Turns out it wasn’t concrete, ~~it was a rock lobster~~ it was decades-old twigs and mud compacted by the river and the installment over time to a consistency of concrete. For all intents and purposes, that bar was concrete by our readings.
So the dam finally gets built and the guy is ready to go over his work and finalise and earn the company a buttload of money. Then, it dislodges from the crumbling ancient mudshit at the bottom and washes downstream, leaving debris and floodwater for miles.
Apparently he needed about 6 months of counseling before he could even return to work. Infrastructure has its risks.
Image source: anon
#37
Just a little resonance cascade, I think we got away with it though.
Image source: Nukem88
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