A great chemical not to have anything to do with.

[dsrtao]

http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2008/02/26/sand_wont_save_you_this_time.php

(Summary: chlorine trifluoride is an amazing oxidator.)

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

That is the closest thing I've ever heard of to Universal Solvent.

Very scary.

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

The phrase "this sound like another one of those moments in science where I question the intelligence of the people who discovered this" - occasionally I have to stand astounded that humanity has learned as much as it has, given some of the horrific things that have happened in labs from "Hey, I wonder what happens if you do this"

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a lot of us, and most disasters are fairly localized. :D

(And the curious survivors want to figure out what went wrong...)

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

It was reading Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything that I spent time going "You're kidding - what the hell would make you think that drinking something you don't know enough about was a good idea?"

I have tremendous respect for scientists. I guess I'm just glad there are a lot of them - some of the risks involved appear to involve surgically detaching your common sense first.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(/me folds this into the description for the Kukurri...whom you recall as the Au-based life we invented some years back, now appearing in Eden.)