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Comment by burfog | Hacker News Reader

It's "easily prepared", eh? Let's take a moment to appreciate the toxic, volatile, pyrophoric nature of this concoction:

"sodium powder, crown ether, trimethylsilyl bromide and N2"

Well, the N2 is probably fine.

The pyrophoric sodium powder might even be a good thing, because it will cause an inferno long before the crown ether has a chance to form explosive peroxides.

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Yea, seriously. I love how nonchalant it sounded in the article, too. "They also treated the nitrogen with a silicon compound that allowed the nitrogen to combine with benzene."

I flinched when I got to "silicon" out of force of habit...

The reaction should be conducted in an oxygen-free, pure nitrogen atmosphere where those compounds should be safe to handle.

When it’s boiled to dryness, crown ether can produce peroxides that are unstable enough to explode on their own with shock or additional heat - no oxygen needed.

It’s a not-uncommon mistake to make in a synthetic lab.

sounds like a classic In The Pipeline "Things I Won't Work With" [0] tale

[0] example: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/th...

My understanding is that evaporating solvent away doesn't form peroxides. Rather, as an ether ages, it can peroxidize. Removing the solvent concentrates the peroxides is all. Sure, it's a little tricky, but they're reporting results of chemistry research, which doesn't mean immediate real world application.

Sounds super easy

In a chemistry lab, it's not so tricky.

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