Long Burn

This just in from the lab

Here's a letter a student just sent me:

The craziest thing happened yesterday. We'd ordered some bottled air for the experiment and were filling up the chamber. Suddenly ozone increased,temperature increased and everything was acting weird. Since it had happened right after we changed a bottle we took the suspicious bottle off andeverything returned to normal. Then we analyzed the bottle on our MS and it contained ~60% O2 and ~40%CO2! Turns out this is a mixture used by the meat industry to preserve the red colour of meat. The meat industry! They'd given us sausage air!Well, that cost us a day of experiments, but will make for a funny story (perhaps it will be featured in the conference speak...).

posted by Matt_J @ 9:57 AM