Who Doesn't Like the Smell of Rotten Eggs?

Everybody's done something in the lab that they are not supposed to (yes, that means the cup of coffee in your hand) -- and at Bitesize Bio, Nick Oswald and Suzanne Kennedy drew up a list of 10 common and serious safety mistakes people make. At the top is handling a chemical without reading the MSDS. "It is easy to get blase about safety and think that MSDS's are as neurotic as an over-protective mother," Nick writes, adding that despite their fear-mongering, the safety sheets offer sensible advice. Their list also includes not wearing safety goggles, balancing centrifuge tubes by eye, opening beta-mercaptoethanol outside of a fume hood (it's poisonous and smelly), and more.