Kids, Don’t Try This: Practicing Safe Science at Home
As COVID-19 forces many science classes into the home, teachers and parents are left wondering, "How safe are home science experiments?" For three families in Bethesda, Maryland, the answer to that question, tragically, was "not safe enough." One year on New Year's...
LSI’s Guide to Teaching Science During the COVID-19 Shutdown
In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools, colleges and universities have been forced to make a breakneck switch to online instruction, which opens up its own Pandora's box of challenges: Where do I start with online science education? How does a remote class...
Lab Safety: Terrifying Statistics
In the November 18 issue of the journal Nature, husband and wife team Dana Ménard and John Trant paint a troubling picture of lab safety in academia today. Despite advances in scientific knowledge, the article reveals, the level of safety in academic laboratories...
Fail-Proof Fail: Microbiologist Killed by His Own Experiment
Dr. Ian Malcolm: How do you know they can't breed? Henry Wu: Well, because all the animals in Jurassic Park are female. We've engineered them that way. In the 1993 classic Jurassic Park, that's how all the trouble begins. Later, the scientists are shocked to discover...
1922 Lab Explosion with Clues for Today
“The funeral of William Eastman Spandow . . . will be held in the Chapel at 11 o'clock this morning.” This was the introduction of the obituary given by the Columbia Spectator in 1922 on the unusual death of a 24-year-old chemist. The obituary describes a shocking...
What are the rules of lab safety?
Labs vary from place to place and even within the same academic institution or industry. A high school science lab has different requirements from a commercial testing lab. This variety can make it difficult to come up with a standardized set of rules. While there is...
Lab Safety Posters in the Bathroom?
You have some great lab safety posters laminated and mounted strategically around the lab. Great! Problem is, after a few months, people get used to seeing them and don't notice them anymore. Your shiny new posters might as well be wallpaper. Here's an idea you may...
Safety Fail: EHS Lessons Learned From Sam the Safety Clown
In 1998, a small group of field techs were collecting groundwater samples in the wilderness area near the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado when they were surprised by a pickup truck tearing through the field toward them, leaving behind a cloud of...
What Potentially Fatal Things Did You Do When You First Learned Chemistry?
"What potentially fatal things did you do when you first learned chemistry?" This question was recently posted on the Chinese social media site Weibo in the wake of the lab accident that killed three researchers at Jiaotong University in Beijing on December 26. The...
Halloween Science Demonstration Goes Wrong, Burns Teacher
A high school science teacher in Duluth, Georgia, wanted to show her class an attention-getting demonstration for Halloween involving gas vapor, a pumpkin and a flame. But things did not go as intended. Students watched as flames surrounded their teacher's face,...