Glass and Magnets
During my undergraduate years, there were various practical experiments to be done, but us spotty students weren't let near the good equipment for very obvious reasons. However, in the final year, each of us did a research project, doing proper research for one of the professors in the dept. Which meant that we needed to use all the cool stuff.

A friend of mine had a project, involving the synthesis of a protein from various building blocks. Not a particularly interesting project, just a proof of concept - looky here, we can make this protein from bits of these six other proteins!!! OMG Lego blocks in molecular form. Wow! etc.

Quick bit of background - Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a really cool technique for looking at the structures of various chemicals, and if you have one that works at a high enough frequency, you can even deduce the layout, connectivity and mother's maiden name of something as complex as a protein. The NMR machine is basically a supercooled superconducting set of perpendicular uber-electromagnets with some very good sensors that detect changes from within the sample tube as one of the magnets is alternated. As you might imagine, the higher end machines are *very* expensive and analysis time on them is like gold. Using it even briefly depleted your research grant by hundreds.

The setup: Dissolve your unknown stuff in a certain solvent. This goes into a fine glass NMR tube, attach a magnetic ring to the top. This is placed inside the reactor, where it hovers due to the ring.

Four months of painstaking work, and my friend has created his protein. He dissolves a sample, puts it in the tube... and has a problem. He's never used an NMR machine before, but that's OK, he's knowledgeable! He's a final year student now! He books time on the most powerful machine in the dept (the 800Mhz beastie, costing nearly £2 million). And he does what he's watched everyone else do, drops the tube into the machine and sets the program running, and daydreams of sugarplums and carbon atoms dancing in sequence.

...a few minutes later, someone queries why the magnetic ring is still on the preparation table. He'd forgotten to attach it. Rather than hover in the middle, the glass tube fell straight through and broke at the bottom.

When you take one of these machines apart to retrieve the glass shards, you have to totally disassemble it, and you lose a lot of very expensive liquid helium, and about the previous year's worth of tweaking and calibration getting it just right.

It took a week to be taken apart and put back together, and five months for the calibration to get back to the level it was at.

So my friend got crappy results for his project (would you let him use another of the decent NMR machines after that cockup?), earned the hatred of half the department and of course screwed up a multi-million pound machine.

I'm impressed though. Something no bigger than a stack of three £1 coins lead to that.

I'm referring to his brain of course, the magnetic ring is the size of a single pound coin.
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 14:39, 7 replies)

Ah yes
The amount of damage you can do with an undergrad and an NMR magnet is phenomenal. Mind you, I liked the (possibly apocryphal) story of the NMR lab who had a mahoosive sign on the door, banning the cleaners from coming in, due to the potential for magnet based accidents. One completely ignored the sign and was surprised to find her vacumm cleaner ripped from her hands and attracted at fairly high speed to the spectrometer. That took a fair amount of sorting out...
(Rakky (forgot her password) The muffin maverick, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:10, closed)

tales of highly powerful magnets....
never cease to amuse!
( Vipros. clever got me this far, then tricky got me in, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:13, closed)

Magnets
Yeah, I've heard the story myself a few times, but never found a source. It's probably apocryphal as you said :) The best I've ever done is with a 2p piece - it sticks nicely to the outside of a (200Mhz, much weaker and cheaper than the one above) NMR machine, edge out.

Just had a nasty thought though... most piercings in... intimate places are stainless steel. *RRRRRRIP!* :P
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:13, closed)

NMR machines
are great beasties, although here students were never allowed to use them. We had to submit samples to the operator, and come back when the run was done.

The best apocryphal story here was about the bloke who sat in the lecture theatre directly above the machine, on its axis. His bank cards were all wiped. That's believable, although I'm less sure about vacuum cleaners etc.

I'm also always amused by the change from "NMR imaging" to "MRI" for medical scanning machines, because the populace was scared of the word "nuclear"!
( K2k6 has a proper job these days, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 15:27, closed)

Ouch!
I got to 'use' and electron microscope for my project. When I said used, my supervisor wouldn't let me near it and I just looked at stuff he found on my sample.

Although I did get to use uryl acetate- which is a radioactive stain.

So basically I was allowed to get cancer and stuff from radioactive substances (I actually stabbed myself several times with tweezers that had been soaked in the stuff with NO gloves on) but I could ruin their precious equipment.

GAY!
(purplefairy, Thu 25 Oct 2007, 21:58, closed)

Transmission
:P Unlucky. For my final year project, I got to use a very cool electron microscope, and I was terrified of breaking it. The holder (yes, just the sample holder) cost £20k :S
(calamarain just invented dehydrated water, Fri 26 Oct 2007, 2:23, closed)

Limonene in the NMR
Guy B was a walking disaster in the lab. He did the same thing to a 60Mhz NMR way back about 1974. He saturated the coils with limonene, which at least did not need the workup that the protein did. Maybe dropping a spinnerless sample tube into an NMR is more common than you'd think.
(Redemption blamed it on the Bossa Nova since, Sat 27 Oct 2007, 10:31, closed)