Nitrogen triiodide: "So volatile that a mosquito landing on it will make it explode"

Yeah, FOOF seems like just the perfect name for the stuff.

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I also suggest carbon diselenide. What it lacks in temperament it gets in stench.

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This is what I think of whenever someone brings up FOOF:

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I once placed a couple grams of this into my dadā€™s tool box out in the garage. I forgot all about it until a few weeks later when my dad called me out to the garage to ask me if I knew anything about why his entire collection of tools had fused together into one huge rusty mass of metal. Must have been the iodine, I guess.
Also, in California, there is an automatic 14-year sentence, without the possibility of parole, for the possession or manufacture of nitrogen triiodide.

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Iron(III) chloride does something similar. Dad used it to etch circuitboards, and me too until I switched to the acid-peroxide route. Leave an open vessel with it next to something ferrous, and shortly you get its surface decorated with rust like it was left on a seashore. Chloride (and bromide and iodide) corrosion is a nasty thing.

Such laws should have small-scale exceptions.

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A thing of beauty! Now if I could just get a pesky mosquito that bit me twice last night
to land on some.

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I think just fining the mosquito and applauding its performance will do the job.

Boy! I remember that stuff. When I was a kid decades ago, I made it using a bottle of iodine (can you even buy that anymore?) and household ammonia filtered through a filter and dried. It was OK. Then I decided it would be more fun to use crystal iodine and industrial strength ammonia, both of which were cheaply and easily obtained in Spain in those days. So I cranked quite a lot out and separated it into batches for air drying.

That night at dinner, there was a laud explosion from my room, so I exited and returned to explain to my parents that there was nothing to worry aboutā€¦A flask broke! (I had a lab in my room). Dinner was subdued, but back to normal.

The next day, I decided to drop some of the crystals off our 6th floor balcony, and very carefully wrapped up a batch of crystals in cotton and placed them in my shirt pocket. Half way across the living room, the batch went off, leaving a hole in my pocket and a big purple stain on my chest.

I destroyed the rest.

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Ok so what I got from this video is that you can spread this stuff all over your lawn right before your next BBQ to take care of those pesky mosquitoes (and ants).

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If youā€™re manufacturing in those quantities, weā€™ll be reading about you in the news on BoingBoing.

.

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I think weā€™ll first hear about himā€¦

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We had a high school chemistry teacher do a demonstration with ammonium triiodide that was very similar to this. It was extremely easy to make, so of course, we made it ourselves. One kid put a pile on the teacherā€™s seat about the size of the palm of your hand. The teacher freaked and had the school evacuated. He said it would have sent him through the roof.

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And this is why we canā€™t have fun things.

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Our chemistry teacher called this ammonium triiodide (also more decades ago than I care to admit).
Just mix anhydrous ammonia and iodine crystals and filter out the precipitate.
Probably lucky we didnā€™t injure or kill ourselves.
Oliver Sacks wrote about the importance of experimentation like that in one of his books. RIP

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Thatā€™s why such demos should involve also show of the thingā€™s brisance. Blow up something with counterintuitively small amount of the stuff. Or some other kind of respect-inducing show.

Have yā€™all ever made carbon tetrafuckthis?

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That looks pretty similar to the C(N3)4 compound described in the ā€œThings I wonā€™t work withā€ blog.
I had no idea some of those things were even possible. Iā€™d think they would even fall apart at -78Ā°C (coincidentally, the temperature at which dry ice sublimates at atmospheric pressure)ā€¦

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How to spell ā€œnopeā€ with 14 Nā€™s

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In this case Iā€™d suggest ā€œKABOOM!!!ā€.