Wednesday, April 8, 2015

Labs come in many forms

Inside a rare earth mineral processing plant (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields)
Credit: Kate Davis/Unknown Fields/BBC
Via BBC and the Unknown Fields project, a lab (note buret) at a rare earth mining/processing facility in Inner Mongolia. (What does the sign on the wall say? "Wear safety goggles", I suspect.

8 comments:

  1. I suspect it means "cleaning equipment", but I am basing that on Japanese, not Chinese. The second character must have a different meaning in the two languages.

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  2. @Chad and CJ: Yes, the characters describe a cleaning equipment, or more literally "cleansing dissolution utensils". I wouldn't be surprised if the waste carboys are full of chromic acid and Piranha solutions. The wall-mounted fan does not exactly substitute a fume hood though...

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  3. To CJ: I see you notice burette. I also notice that something came off the wall ( a shelf but not fume hood) and you can see it left some kind of footprint behind. It seems to me that wash area and other fixtures are a later edition.

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  4. The stairs look like a travel lane, so that seems like an interesting place to do labwork...

    I wonder if the black magic spammers you keep getting can help out with this.

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  5. That must be where they titrate the acid waste before disposing it in the toxic lake of DOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

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  6. My God. My home lab when I was a kid (1960's) was better than that. I even had a homemade fume hood lined with transite (yeah, asbestos cement). Even had a decent bench and in later years, a homemade pH meter.

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  7. The green tank under the table on the left seems to contain base bath. There is a white residue on the top of the tank.

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looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20