Fume hood functioning — check. Chemicals labeled — check. Routine safety checks are excellent for catching the usual. But recent headlines remind us that danger can also come from outside the lab walls. Sometimes, it comes crashing right through them. On October 10,...

During a routine chemical inventory inspection at a rural school, the Laboratory Safety Institute encountered a bottle of nitric acid — generally, nothing that rings the alarm bells, especially since the bottle was in a secondary containment box inside an acid...

A Stink That Sparked Panic Recently, residents of a British town thought disaster had struck when a strong “gassy” odor filled the street. Soon an engineer was on the scene, checking businesses one by one for a suspected leak. The culprit? Not a ruptured pipe or...

This summer, the Laboratory Safety Institute (LSI) is celebrating a remarkable achievement: our Net Promoter Score (NPS) for all courses averaged an outstanding 75 – a score that industry experts consider world-class. Even more exciting, our four Safer Science Summits...

Boom Goes the Data: The 2024 Fireworks Injury Surge From 2008 to 2023, emergency room visits from fireworks-related injuries were steadily climbing upward, increasing by an average of 550 each year, according to the Consumer Product Safety Commission. But in 2024,...

Fire in the lab! What to do? Welcome to the Safety Q & A series, fire edition: the Laboratory Safety Institute's answers to your most burning questions.   Q1: What if the fire is small and contained? Do you always need a fire extinguisher? If the fire is...

The U.S. research ecosystem is facing a new kind of stress test: less funding, more expectations. From federal laboratories to university research centers, institutions are being asked to do more with less. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed a...

Science demonstrations are meant to engage, inspire, and educate. However, some of the most dramatic and attention-grabbing experiments also pose significant risks. One such example is the Whoosh Bottle experiment—a demonstration that involves igniting alcohol vapors...

Whether it’s Peter Parker being bitten by a radioactive spider or Bruce Banner’s fateful gamma radiation experiment, science accidents have long been a driving force in popular fiction. But these stories are not new—using a science mishap as a plot device to inspire...

In today’s rapidly evolving STEM fields, the need for safe and effective science education environments has never been greater. K-12 science classrooms face the challenge of managing complex safety requirements to protect both students and staff. Unfortunately,...