• Question: Have you ever set anything on fire or blown any thing up?

    Asked by scoodle12 to Ben, Dave, Ed, Sam, Susana on 17 Jun 2013.
    • Photo: Benjamin Hall

      Benjamin Hall answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I tend to set things on fire every day.

      When I need to spread bacteria onto petri dishes, I do it with a little glass rod. This needs to be sterilised and I do that by dipping it in ethanol (alcohol) and passing it through a flame.

      I nearly created a very large fire once when trying to change the camping stove we use to sterilise these glass rods. The attachment was loose and when I punctured the gas canister all of the gas escaped into the room I was in and began moving around our entire lab. That could have been very dangerous.

    • Photo: Sam Horrell

      Sam Horrell answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Ohh yes! Every scientist needs a good fire story.

      A bit of back story and science. When practicing microbiology you have to make sure everything stays clean and no contaminants get in your solutions. This incolves passing the tops of bottles etc through a flame to kill any unwanted bacteria that may try and get into the bottle. This is called aseptic technique.

      Anyway, on my first day in the lab in my third year of uni I passed a tube through the fire forgetting it contained an antibiotic dissolved in ethanol. Ethanol being rather flamable sent a fireball flying out of the tube which landed on my supervisors pipette and melted it a little.

      No explosions just yet but fireball has to be half way there.

    • Photo: Susana Teixeira

      Susana Teixeira answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      I may or may not have tried to play with potassium and water in high-school. There are rumors… Since then I have actually turned into one of those people who teach students how not to blow things up nor set fire to your colleague’s hair.

    • Photo: David Briggs

      David Briggs answered on 17 Jun 2013:

      Oh yes.

      Most recently, I was doing something similar to Ben – sterilising home-made glass cell spreaders by dipping them in pure, 100% Alcohol (Ethanol) and then setting fire to it (for about 2 seconds).

      Some alcohol got inside the glass tube that the spreader was made from. When I lit it to sterilise it, the air behind the ethanol heated up and expanded, shooting some ethanol out of the end of the spread, and it caught on fire.

      This little drop of burning ethanol landed about 1 metre away right in the middle of a beaker about one third full of ethanol!!

      It set on fire and I get to move it quickly to the sink and put it out with a fire blanket. 😳

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