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 dad’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 about…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 you’re manufacturing in those quantities, we’ll be reading about you in the news on BoingBoing.

.

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I think we’ll first hear about him…

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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 teacher’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 can’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 didn’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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That’s why such demos should involve also show of the thing’s brisance. Blow up something with counterintuitively small amount of the stuff. Or some other kind of respect-inducing show.

Have y’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 won’t work withā€ blog.
I had no idea some of those things were even possible. I’d think they would even fall apart at -78°C (coincidentally, the temperature at which dry ice sublimates at atmospheric pressure)…

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How to spell ā€œnopeā€ with 14 N’s

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In this case I’d suggest ā€œKABOOM!!!ā€.