9/7/07 – 0720
Chicago, IL
Undisclosed Location

Frozen Benzene anyone? Yup, a great way to slowly get leukemia.  It cleans up axle grease quite nicely and was used to clean auto parts, back when they weren’t all computers.  There was buckets of benzene lying around.  And when your hands got all greasy in the shop, what did you do?  Yup, wash your hands in it.  For obvious reasons, that’s really not practiced anymore.  I also find it interesting that it was used as an aftershave and to remove caffeine from coffee.  Watch out Sanka drinkers! Is that stuff even around anymore?  Now I have a sudden urge for Tang.

In any case, I wanted to degas 3mL of benzene without evaporating it in the process.  So a few cycles of freeze and thaw with a vacuum pump outta do it.  Also currently playing with solid CO2, which some of you may already know as dry ice.  Ok let me digress a little bit.  A friend had a student in one of his labs and the procedure called for dry ice.  So after several tries with a pile of paper towels, the student just couldn’t get the ice dried.  The student finally complained to my friend that it melts to quickly to be dried and pointed to the puddle in front of him.  And they all want to be MDs…. Ok that’s enough science blogging…..