moonwise | (no subject)

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Amines stink. Oh yes they do. The clear winner in the smelly nitrogen category is probably collidine with that lovely dead fish odor, but whatever I got a noseful of today is a close second.

Though I must say that dilute piperidine is responsible for one of the biggest laughs I have ever had in my life because it has a very distinctive odor...

Signs that Arafel Might Possibly be Losing It: Bottle says Caution! May develop pressure! Store at O degrees C! Arafel tries to put it away in the drying oven.

I just have to make it until 6:30 PM...

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When I was an undergrad, our tech dropped a bottle of TEMED on the floor, and it was so heinous... very steeenky. It also left a big scratch-n-sniff stain on the floor.

What does piperidine smell like (she dares to ask...)?

What's TEMED? Nothing like a nice big yummy stain on the floor - the gift that keeps on giving.

Once someone dropped a load of manganese porphyrin on the floor and it looked like a large bloodstain. (this was before my time.) Some wag drew a body outline in tape around the red stain.

heh heh heh... the smell of piperidine is not something to be discussed in public, let's put it that way.

TEMED is N,N,N,N-Tetramethylethylene-diamine... smells very intensely fishy. Stinko...

Some wag drew a body outline in tape around the red stain.

Ha!! That's excellent...

It was pretty funny. There's a picture of it around somewhere. If I find it, I'll scan it for you.

Is this TEMED a cousin of EDTA (meaning is it used the same way?) It sounds like something you'd want to be far away from if you spilled it on the floor - bleah. Then again, there's nothing like a good thiol to really clear a room. I was interning once where a coworker was using hydrogen sulfide in a bomb reactor. He cracked the bomb open by accident and we ragged him about the nature of the stench all day...

We use EDTA and TEMED for different stuff, but I don't know how closely related they are or aren't... We put EDTA in our buffers, and use TEMED to polymerize our polyacrylamide gels.

All of this is bringing back memories of how bad my clothes and hair smelled after orgo lab in college. It was an all permeating chemical smell, and when I'd meet my boyfriend for lunch, he was always wrinkling his nose and pretending to wipe tears from his eyes, saying that I was quite pungent. None of the chemists that I know stink though, so I'm not sure what it was that we were doing back then that made us so stinky. :)

Another stinky favorite: beta-mercaptoethanol! Whoohoo! Nothing like that good old-fashioned skunk smell, bottled for your enjoyment. We used to have a farty graduate student in our lab who would uncap the bottle of beta to cover up her more heinous crimes...

>Bottle says Caution! May develop pressure! Store at O degrees C! Arafel tries to put it away
>in the drying oven.

Hopefully that wasn't a bottle of amines.. or you'd have a smelly surprise later on. :)

*laughs* it was... it was my bottle of propylamine. But I realized my mistake as my hand was reaching for the door of the drying oven.

It's kind of like putting the cereal away in the fridge and the milk in the pantry. :)

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