Sciencemadness Discussion Board

Chemistry April Fools

Deathunter88 - 1-4-2017 at 12:19

So today is April Fools, and I thought I would ask you guys all if you had any ideas on fun pranks involving chemistry. Obviously, none of the pranks should be harmful/potentially dangerous. Maybe some of you have experience with doing this in the past?

Metacelsus - 1-4-2017 at 13:36

Many years ago, I made a small amount of aluminum sulfide powder and put it above a ceiling tile in my school. Over time, it hydrolyzed from atmospheric moisture and released hydrogen sulfide (not enough to be toxic but enough to be unpleasant).

For the rest of the semester, people complained about the smell in that wing. Most thought it was a sewer leak.

My only other notable prank was a coded message in my high school yearbook, listing my "favorite elements." They caught it, but only after I had graduated.

A Halogenated Substance - 1-4-2017 at 13:37

Fake blood trick?

https://youtu.be/ZgbY7WzkplI

Then again, if the person(s) you're fooling legitimately think you gave yourself a nasty wound or something, they may not be laughing afterwards.

Tin man - 1-4-2017 at 21:07

Add a gram or so of citric acid to your coworkers coffee. If it has milk in it these gross slimy blobs will precipitate out and it will tast like it got left out for a day to long.

Herr Haber - 3-4-2017 at 02:50

http://r.labfirst.net/19wvumaki3g3f.html

This is what I got on Saturday from one of my suppliers. Loved it :)

BromicAcid - 3-4-2017 at 03:43

I filled a 5L flask on a vacuum distillation setup with soda and asked someone to finish pulling it under vacuum while I went to lunch. They stopped in the lunch room 10 minutes later apologizing profusely about bumping it over.

AJKOER - 3-4-2017 at 07:10

Put sugar in the salt shaker, with a revised lablel ('Sweet Salt' ?), an added a non-diabetic warning label, and a revised list of ingredients, just in case things go unexpectedly bad.

More prepared would be having a list of good lawyers, OR, cash in hand, a packed bad and having pre-researched airlines schedules to countries with a good sense of humor!

[Edited on 3-4-2017 by AJKOER]

Melgar - 3-4-2017 at 09:14

Quote: Originally posted by Metacelsus  
My only other notable prank was a coded message in my high school yearbook, listing my "favorite elements." They caught it, but only after I had graduated.

Did those include fluorine, uranium, carbon, and potassium?

My brother was going to write "666" on his roommate's forehead with silver nitrate when he was asleep, but then (wisely) decided against it. Nitrogen triiodide placed in small amounts among the victims things is always fun, and not necessarily dangerous if you do it right.

Praxichys - 3-4-2017 at 10:46

A little denatonium benzoate in the coffee gets immediate and hilarious results. It can also be mixed as an ethanol solution and painted onto the rims of, for instance, a whole stack of styrofoam coffee cups in the cafeteria.

Crystal violet is awesome at staining things purple. You can sprinkle an imperceptibly small amount of the dark greenish powder into a latex glove in the lab. When someone puts it on and then sweats inside it for an hour or two, their entire hand is stained an intense, bright purple. Neutralize with weak hypochlorite, or let them have purple hands for a few days.

The crystal violet thing is also funny when sprinkled onto a dry bar of soap, or into cups at the water cooler.

As Melgar mentions, NI3 is super funny when used responsibly, especially when dabbed sparingly under the feet of a toilet seat where it can dry overnight, leading to unexpected bathroom snaps and crackles the next day as people sit down. It can be dabbed onto the top side of caster wheels for carts where it will explode when the cart is moved.

Liquid nitrogen is a great source of prank material. You can rob a coworker of their lunch and freeze it to 300 below zero, then put it back into their lunch cooler. When they go to eat, they'll find grapes as hard as gravel and a PB&J that has the properties of plywood, even an hour or two after the freezing.

Dry ice is good. Scoop some of the pellets into a zipper bag, and add plenty of confetti from the office hole-punch. Tape this under your victim's desk in a place where their legs won't hit it. As the CO2 sublimes, the bag inflates and will eventually pop, blowing confetti everywhere. The little heavy-duty freezer bags with the zipper are pretty loud and are enough to blow a desk drawer open, so use with caution. Obviously never do this with a sturdier container like a bottle or you'll hurt someone. These also work well when taped behind a monitor, assuming the cube wall is tall enough.

You can replace the Cremora (a powdered nondairy coffee creamer) with sodium polyacrylate powder. Pouring this into a hot coffee will cause it to gel up and probably get some surprising reactions.

Another coffee joke is to put a little neotame in the sugar shaker. Rated at 8000 times sweeter than sugar, a little goes a LONG way. You can make every teaspoon of sugar they add to the coffee taste like 40 with just 5mg/g sugar. Watch them try to figure it out! Food grade neotame is sold on Amazon and eBay. Sucralose will also work but you'll need more of it.

A joke of debatable health and safety is the classic "melting spoon" made of an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin. I haven't tried this because I don't know anyone who uses a spoon to stir coffee.

A couple milliliters of glycerol in the back of the company microwave just before lunch is a great gag. Prepare for fog-machine strength smoke after a couple of TV dinners get microwaved. The cafeteria will be hazy in no time.

Booze - 3-4-2017 at 12:46

Quote: Originally posted by Melgar  
Quote: Originally posted by Metacelsus  
My only other notable prank was a coded message in my high school yearbook, listing my "favorite elements." They caught it, but only after I had graduated.

Did those include fluorine, uranium, carbon, and potassium?

My brother was going to write "666" on his roommate's forehead with silver nitrate when he was asleep, but then (wisely) decided against it. Nitrogen triiodide placed in small amounts among the victims things is always fun, and not necessarily dangerous if you do it right.

Isn't nitrogen triiodide extremely sensetive?

I heared poking it will set it off.

XeonTheMGPony - 3-4-2017 at 13:55

Yup but while wet it is nice and paint-able.

My favorite was to dope all the cubards and close them and leave a clean one open. Some one slams it shut and all the other open!

Booze - 3-4-2017 at 16:41

So I reasearched nitrogen triiodide and made some myself because my school has a health foods store right by it, so I bought some iodine solution, extracted the iodine, and made the triiodide.

You should put some of that wet paste onto door hinges. It will even stain it brown!

Melgar - 3-4-2017 at 17:10

Quote: Originally posted by Booze  
So I reasearched nitrogen triiodide and made some myself because my school has a health foods store right by it, so I bought some iodine solution, extracted the iodine, and made the triiodide.

You should put some of that wet paste onto door hinges. It will even stain it brown!

Did it make banging and popping noises when you touched it, after it dried? I know it can be hard to extract much iodine from tincture these days.

Praxichys - 4-4-2017 at 04:59

KI is still widely available on eBay if you can't get it from where you work. You can get 100g for less than $12.

However, I wouldn't try a prank with NI3 anywhere but in the offices of a chem lab. Anyone who doesn't know what it is might pull the terrorist card, get the building evacuated for possible poisonous fumes, etc. At the very least, it's a great way to end up in a stern discussion with HR.

Chemist-to-chemist it's startling and hilarious, but I wouldn't use it on the purchasing department. Not these days...

DrP - 4-4-2017 at 05:05

Bit late now, but I used to like plopping some dry ice into a conical flask containing some coloured liquid and just leaving it on the bench or near the sink... it is fun to watch people's alarmed faces as they walk by and see 'smoke' bubbles bubbling out of some weird coloured solution. :D

BlackDragon2712 - 4-4-2017 at 12:32

Nitrogen triiodide, classic

mayko - 4-4-2017 at 12:45

"Fired from my job at the cyanide factory"

More NI3 Follies

Booze - 4-4-2017 at 19:11

Quote: Originally posted by Melgar  
Quote: Originally posted by Booze  
So I reasearched nitrogen triiodide and made some myself because my school has a health foods store right by it, so I bought some iodine solution, extracted the iodine, and made the triiodide.

You should put some of that wet paste onto door hinges. It will even stain it brown!

Did it make banging and popping noises when you touched it, after it dried? I know it can be hard to extract much iodine from tincture these days.

Yes. A gram was quite loud, it even made my ears ring.

Also, the tincture I bought was 4% potassium iodide and 2% elemental iodine, and the rest was water. I paid 13 dollars for this. Is that good?

Herr Haber - 5-4-2017 at 03:19

Less than 4 hours from "isnt it very sensitive?" to "I made some" with the iodine extraction included.

I hope if you research other EM's you'll take (a lot) more time to think it through :o

Edit: Tintures are in ethanol, not just water

[Edited on 5-4-2017 by Herr Haber]

Booze - 5-4-2017 at 06:21

Quote: Originally posted by Herr Haber  
Less than 4 hours from "isnt it very sensitive?" to "I made some" with the iodine extraction included.

I hope if you research other EM's you'll take (a lot) more time to think it through :o

Edit: Tintures are in ethanol, not just water

[Edited on 5-4-2017 by Herr Haber]

Well, after I did some looking around I found that I had all the ingredients on hand, besides the iodine.

tsathoggua1 - 5-4-2017 at 11:05

A mixture of ammonium polysulfides and 4-methylindole, once made into a hydroalcoholic solution ampouled, and whilst travelling on a tram, surreptitiously snapped open and emptied into the open slots of the upward-facing heater grilles.

The reaction to that one was pretty hilarious with everybody trying to work out where the sudden nasty stink was coming from, or who it was coming from. Everybody looking daggers at each other, after it had been let loose just after a stop and the tram starting away from its station, making sure nobody had the luxury of leaving. Everybody else seemed to think that somebody had shat themselves, crawled back up their own arse and died. I had contemplated worse stenches still, such as adding a little cadaverine, putrescine and/or a trace of a nontoxic isocyanide, but I had to stay on the same tram, albeit moving far from ground zero. Was just a little kid when that particular prank got pulled, but by then I was inured enough to that kind of revolting smell. Not so confident on the other hand I'd have been so willing to endure 10 minutes to a quarter hour of that blended with isocyanide/putrescine/cadaverine. The 4-methylindole really carried it off, in a way that just rotten egg odor alone might well have just been put down to bad food.

That on the other hand, caused chaos, with looks of fury directed at pretty much everybody, by everybody else, at least, anyone in the same general direction as the resultant odious reek. Didn't dilute the 'product' much either, just about enough to get it into solution.


Of course, I'd never pull a nuclear 'prank', thats way beyond prank material, but for the 'B' in 'NBC', I did once level the scores for somebody with a load of durian fruit left to rot in a buildings airvents. Was on one of those awful enforced 'job courses' as a teen, in order to get any income whatsoever, and unfortunately they were and doubtless still are absolutely useless, this particular one was worse than useless. We had a 'tutor' who's raison d'etre was to spend her time being a total complete and utterly beyond redemption fucking bitch, picking on those she perceived as weak. A bully, a real nasty little dried up old hag of an X-chromosome refuse tip. She'd pushed it too far, going out of her way to humiliate this one particular youngish girl, can't have been more than 16-17, quiet, kept herself to herself, wouldn't altogether surprise me if she was somewhere on the spectrum, and this whoreson of a bitch 'tutor' had been deliberately making her life a misery, without any provocation whatsoever, to the point she ended up bursting into tears.

Cue the durian, a couple of pounds of the stuff. Stuffed up into the ventilation system of the building, and some discarded in the classroom rubbish bins, a hunk or two, each a little bigger than a man's fist and covered over with some paper trash, with a friend of mine doing the female toilets, pushing up some of the ceiling boards and throwing more up into the ductwork, whilst I saw to the men's bogs.

Got the girl in question the rest of the day off, plus everybody else in the building whilst they called in the gas company. Despite the fact the building had no gas supply, all the heating being done electrically. And made the tutor's life shite in return. Let the girl who'd been picked on know what had been done and why, to offer her some comfort in the tutor's misery, because she was the very last sort of person who would or could possibly have deserved being bullied as she was, the kind of sweet, quiet, kind-seeming young girl who wouldn't have hurt a fly, and I really, really do not take kindly to bullies, so I decided it was high time the score sheet was amended in this girl's favor, and get her the day off in a way that would let her save face. Worked a treat, they evacuated the entire multi-storey office block type building:D

Don't believe a word of the crap you might read in books about 'sweet raspberry-banana flavoured custard' either. They taste as bad as they smell, if not worse. Tried one bite and couldn't bring myself to swallow it, spat it out in a bin and a few minutes later got the inspiration for that particular bovine twat tutor's being brought to justice. Or at least something towards it. She was just lucky that the location and description of her car was unknown, or it might well have been a chalcogen or two down the table in lieu of things sulfurous, in order to cause the stink. One that would have followed her around like, well, stink on shit. Because it would have and she is:P


Another, more benign and humorously received chemical prank was played when my paternal-side grandmother was still alive, she used to love her cups of tea. And when I, as a pretty young child got wind of her coming to visit, I made her a cup way in advance, using gelatin to turn the entire thing into a solid block, she saw the funny side though.


As for nitrogen triiodide, sensitive isn't the word. IIRC its the only known explosive so sensitive that alpha radiation is sufficient to detonate it! about its only saving grace is that it CAN only be used for pranks really, because it could never be loaded into any kind of casing intended for terrorist weaponry purposes, nor could sufficient be got together in any one place to do large scale damage, since it will detonate due to internal strain if crystals be grown of too large a grain size. Not sure how large they can be, I've never tried to find out, I'd rather not waste the iodine when there are much better things that can be done with it, such as alkylating agents and halogenating agents like MeI and ICl respectively.

Booze - 7-4-2017 at 14:40

Quote: Originally posted by Herr Haber  
Less than 4 hours from "isnt it very sensitive?" to "I made some" with the iodine extraction included.

I hope if you research other EM's you'll take (a lot) more time to think it through :o

Edit: Tintures are in ethanol, not just water

[Edited on 5-4-2017 by Herr Haber]

Actually, the one I bought did not have ethanol.