Huh?

Spilling flaming ethanol onto a Kimwipe that was partially wrapped around a pipettor handle on the benchtop didn't seem funny at the time, but it does now. I kept the partially melted pipettor around for quite a while, and used it to put fear into the hearts and minds of incoming newbies.

Don't know if you'd count this as an accident, but I was present when someone in my former lab got distracted about two hours into a long afternoon of feeding and sorting small caterpillars. Somehow the cover never found its way to the top of the container, so several of us came in a bit later and found larvae crawling over every surface they could possibly reach. If you thought herding cats was bad, try herding caterpillars.

That sounds like fun, the caterpillar bit, especially since our Big Kid is into collecting them one at a time and breeding butterflies, maybe she'll do it wholesale soon.

If we're allowed to go back far enough, there was the time I was making a glass pipe through the heat-and-pull method, and it broke off and fell and I reflex caught it.
Turns out that molten glass takes fingerprints; that the thin crust that solidifies first is a very good insulator, and that sweat has a high heat capacity.
So mild first degree burns, and beautiful curved class sheets with my thumb and index finger prints in sharp relief on one side. I kept them around for a while, then got lost in a move. Reminding me why I should be a theorist, really.

Searle's bar experiment for measuring the thermal conductivity of a good conductor (see here for a diagram) uses 4 thermometers, all of which rather prominently stick out of the top of the apparatus. When I was describing how the experiment worked, I gesticulated rather wildly with one of my arms passing rapidly just over the apparatus, and ... snap-snap-snap-snap ... I broke all 4 thermometers at once. I decided that experiments weren't for me, so I became a theoretical physicist.

I don't know why my link above didn't work. Searle's bar experiment is described here:

http://media.paisley.ac.uk/~davison/labpage/searle/searle.html

Funniest lab accident ever:

I was observing at the Keck Telescope with Saul Perlmutter and Isobel Hook.

Now, it turns out that as the Sun is setting, typically the Keck observatory *spins the domes.* I don't know if they do this any more, but they did 8 years ago. Reason: if they don't, ice can build up on the domes and the dome can get stuck.

Well, one day, they forgot to spin the dome, and the dome was stuck looking 10 or 20 degrees off of north... but all our supernova candidates were on the equator, and thus in the south. So, we couldn't observe anything.

HA HA HA HA ha ha .. um, ahem.

Yeah, not very funny.

In any event, Isobel had a huge list of quasar candidates from (if memory serves) the APM survey. We spent the next hour with her franticaly calculating which were about to pass throught the location of the dome slit, and me taking 5 minute spectra of them. With a 10m telescope at her disposal, she was able to spectroscopically confirm them at a huge rate, evne considering that she could only do the ones that were going to happen to pass through the fixed northeastern (or was it northwestern?) location of the dome slit.

-Rob

How I Learned About Liquid Nitrogen,

http://www.darwinawards.com/personal/personal2000-25.html

During an optics lab in high school, I was trying to see one of the images of a candle we were using, and I singed my hair a little. That's what you get for using real candles.

I seem to remember that the first law of Chemistry experimentation is that "hot glass looks the same as cold glass"

A law that I should have remembered the day I was bending some glass rod... ouch... That stuff gets a bit heavy when it's hot... ;>)

A fellow grad student in our virolgoy lab was working on purifying a viral receptor. He wanted a way of getting large amounts of tissue as a starting point for his biochem purifications. Since we were up the hall from an Ob/Gyn wing of the hospital, he used human placentas. The protocol for preparing membrane proteins involved, first, grinding up the placenta: He used a blender. The next step was to dissolve the membrane proteins with a detergent (I've forgotten which one).

Anyway, one day Craig said to me, "What if I combined both steps, and just put the detergent in the blender along with the placenta? Wouldn't that work faster and save time?"

"I dunno," I said. "Doesn't sound like a good idea to me." But I couldn't come up with a solid reason why not, and he decided to go and try it.

A few minutes later there was a muffled PHOOOM from the cold room, and a moment after that Crag came staggering out, convulsed with laughter, and dripping with unidentifiable brownish-red bits. It turns out that detergent foams. Who knew? And it you blend it, it foams up real good, as one might call an "explosion". It blew half-liquified placenta all over the inside of our cold room. Fortunately, Craig is a good guy, and cleaned it all up solo.