Teschler on Topic
Leland Teschler •Executive Editor
回到我本科职业生涯的黑暗时代，我听说过在第二学期新生化学中注册的同学。他的一个实验室会话留下了不会出现的试管底部的油性碳淤泥。他试图清洁试管，他最终尝试浓缩硫，然后硝酸。当酸自身没有做任何事情时，他试图加热它们。
Readers who still recall common chemical formulas from their college days may have already guessed what happened. The acids and oily carbon combined to form an unstable compound
类似硝酸甘油，c3H5N3O9。如果你相信卫报天使，那么你必须说他今天值得下班。由一些奇迹，那个孩子碰巧弯腰，以从他的工作站的底部抽屉中取回一些东西，就像试管中的混合物一样。而实验室中的所有其他学生已经离开过。工作站附近有很多伤害，但没有人受伤。
This near-miss sounds suspiciously like an urban legend — it supposedly happened to a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend. But it came to mind recently when reading about the deaths of two people and injuries to nine others stemming from a lab explosion at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China. Unfortunately, those weren’t one-off events. In March, a grad student was killed following an explosion at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. A few years ago three students died conducting a sewage-treatment experiment at Beijing Jiaotong University. Three years prior to that accident, two students died in separate incidents at Tsinghua University and the China University of Mining and Technology.
It looks as though China is becoming more concerned about the safety record of its university labs. Last month,研究人员分析了110份公开的大学实验室事故in that country that happened since 2000. Ten fatalities and 102 injuries arose from these accidents. The researchers also found that university lab accidents have been rising in China, probably because the number of graduate students enrolled in lab-related disciplines in China ballooned from 90,000 in Y2K to about 5.3 million in 2019 — and the number of labs grew along with them.
Problem is, it’s hard to see whether such accident rates are good or bad compared to the rest of the world. Few countries keep detailed records on university lab accidents. According to加拿大温莎大学的研究人员研究了学术实验室安全, no organization systematically collects data about the annual incidence of academic lab accidents. (OSHA only collects accident data on workplaces, not about mishaps involving students.) The researchers say no comprehensive data is currently available on the type or frequency of accidents or near-misses in academic labs.
Nevertheless, what data that is available is attention getting. Since 2001, the U.S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board reported 120 academic research lab accidents resulting in 87 evacuations, 96 serious injuries and three deaths. But these represent only accidents universities have been required to report because they were severe.
Which brings us back to the urban legend nitroglycerin event. Anaccident在德克萨斯理工大学的2010年发生了类似于这座纱线的设置。有一名毕业生丢失了三个手指，遭受了手和面部烧伤，在污染材料的实验期间损坏了一只眼睛。学生在实验中使用10克材料，虽然推荐量仅为100毫克。
总而言之，如果您设法通过任何事故或近乎未命中的所有本科学化学工作，您应该祝贺您的好运。如果硝基甘油故事中的学生是真实的，他应该永远不会打扰买彩票：他明确用了在那个新生化学实验室里的终身运气。DW.
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