How are acids and bases harmful?

How Are Acids & Bases Harmful?

People must take special precautions when handling acids and bases. Their chemical makeup can cause damages to the human body in several ways. They are useful in science as well as around the home, so misuse of acids and bases is plausible.

Skin Contact

Chemical burns happen when exposed tissue comes into contact with an acid or base. In most cases chemical burns are minor and only cause some skin irritation. Chemical burns must immediately be neutralized, then go to the doctor. An acid can be neutralized with a base and vice versa. The doctor will offer treatment and they will also be able to tell you whether there was any deep tissue damage.

Ingestion

Ingestion of an acid or base can cause the human body to change its pH level; if the body is not at normal pH level, the organs will not function properly which can result in organ failure and even death. Ingestion also causes immediate burns that are similar to skin contact in the mouth, throat, and stomach.

Inhaling

Strong solutions of acids and bases can cause respiratory distress and even organ failure. This can be exacerbated in those who have asthma.

Tissue Damage

Deep tissue damage can occur in addition to a chemical burn. It is important to get to the doctor after a chemical burn so they can tell you if there is such damage. Avoiding the doctor can result in extreme pain in infected muscle and muscle death.

Eye Damage

All solutions, such as pure ammonia, can cause eye damage. This includes burning of the exposed tissue, and can cause burning of interior tissue that can result in permit blindness.

World's most dangerous acids

Worlds Most Dangerous Acids / Chemicals

What i’m about to show you are the top 10 worlds most dangerous acids and other chemicals. Some of these chemicals were so explosive that it was hard to even find an image of them. No wonder considering some would explode in contact with air alone.. Other’s are so acid that they will burn through just about anything. No more spoilers, here we go!

10. Hydrogen Peroxide

Kicking this list off with the known hydrogen peroxide. It’s the simplest of the Peroxides, with the formula  H2O2. It may only oneone extra oxygen atom that seperates it from water, but this is an extremely explosive

9. Thioacetone

This acid is not dangerous because it’s explosive, not because it will burn through your skin. No. It’s dangerous because the smell of it. Yes you heard right, this substance is the worst smelling substance on the planet. Heard of a shark can smell 1 drop of blood a thousand meters away? Well, you can smell 1 drop of this with a distance of 500 meters (and you have a human nose).  In freiburg, Germany in 1889, chemists in a soap factory accidently made this substance by breaking apart Tri-Thioacetone. The ENTIRE city had to evacuate because of this smelly acid.

8. VX

This is a nerve agent with no other uses than in chemical warfare. Only 10 milligrams of skin contact is enough to be fatal. With inhalation, far less is needed. Maybe you’ve heard of the extremely toxic nerve agent called Sarin, well that is nothing in comparison to the dangerous VX. The production of this substance was discontinued, with the only exception in medical research.

7. Batrachotoxin

This toxin is actually produced by the known dart frog ( read top 10 most dangerous animals here). According to wikipedia, only 2µg/kg is enough to kill a rat. That is a 10th of 1 000 000g. (yes extremely little) If a human licks the skin of this dangerous frog, he will die, guaranteed. Batrachotoxin is dangerous because it will simply tear down your nervous system and there’s NO effective antidote. So stay away!

6. Aqua Regia

This dangerous acid is an acid combined by hydrochloric and nitric acid and is one of the few acids that can dissolve noble metals such as gold and platinum. Not only will this acid dissolve your body, but it will also release toxic gasses such as volatile chlorine, which is extremely poisonus on it’s own.

Recommended : World’s most dangerous animals in the amazon

5. Substance N

In germany 1939, this substance was discovered by nazi agents in a secret bunker. It would explode when it was exposed to water, boiling when exposed to air and was dangerous by even being close to it because it left dangerous gasses. This chemical caught so easily on fire, that it could burn thorugh solid ground by one meter or more, depending on the amount of this substance. Even the Nazis realised that they couldn’t use this substance in the war, because it was simply too dangerous to even experiment with.

4. Dimethylcadmium CH3-Cd-CH3

Some scientists claim that this chemical, is the most toxic of them all. This substance was found by Erich Krause 1917, you guessed it, he later died (hint: not from age). If you breath in the gas from this, it is instantly absorbed into your blood stream and therefore it affects your lungs, kidneys, liver and heart. If the dangerous metal it leaves in your organs doesn’t kill you within hours, the cancer that you’re going to get from it, will.

So how much is needed to kill you? a million of a gram per cubic meter of air is enough.

3. Hydrofluoric Acid

“The bone breaker”. Yes, pour some of this acid on your foot, you’ll have a hole in it, just like that (don’t do it). Now you may think that it will hurt when you pour this on your foot right? Wrong! This acid attacks your nerve system, so you might not realise that you have been burnt until a day after. If this is a good thing or a bad thing, is something you can argue about.This dangerous acid can go though just about anything, but plastic.

2. Azidoazide Azide C2N14

Extremely sensitive, extremely reactive and EXTREMELY explosive. This acid is the worlds most explosive chemical by far. To put into perspective how explosive this is, according to wikipedia this substance can explode if you:

• Expose it to light
• Expose it to x-ray
• Move it
• Touch it
• Put it in a different solution
• Leaving it on a plate, undisturbed

I hope you will stay away from this acid now.

Fluoroantimonic Acid

Is the “super acid”.  Just to get you an idea of how strong and dangerous this acid really is, it’s 10 000 000 000 000 000 (quadrillion) times stronger than Sulfuric Acid (H2So4), which has a Ph scale of 2. So i bet you’re already wondering what this acid is capeable of. It has no problems going through a human body. Pour some of it on your hand and it will go through your skin, other tissues, muscles and even bones..Yes, it can go trough all sorts of metal too, glass becomes sugar to this acid. The only way you can store this in a safe way, is in a teflon cotainer.

Types of chemical bonds

4 TYPES OF CHEMICAL BONDS

Atoms tend to arrange themselves in the most stable patterns possible, which means that they have a tendency to complete or fill their outermost electron orbits. They join with other atoms to do just that. The force that holds atoms together in collections known as molecules is referred to as a chemical bond.There are two main types and some secondary types of chemical bonds:

1Ionic bond

Ionic boning involves a transfer of an electron, so one atom gains an electron while one atom loses an electron. One of the resulting ions carries a negative charge (anion), and the other ion carries a positive charge (cation). Because opposite charges attract, the atoms bond together to form a molecule.

2Covalent bond

The most common bond in organic molecules, a covalent bond involves the sharing of electrons between two atoms. The pair of shared electrons forms a new orbit that extends around the nuclei of both atoms, producing a molecule. There are two secondary types of covalent bonds that are relevant to biology — polar bonds and hydrogen bonds.

3Polar bond

Two atoms connected by a covalent bond may exert different attractions for the electrons in the bond, producing an unevenly distributed charge. The result is known as a polar bond, an intermediate case between ionic and covalent bonding, with one end of the molecule slightly negatively charged and the other end slightly positively charged.

These slight imbalances in charge distribution are indicated in the figure by lowercase delta symbols with a charge superscript (+ or –). Although the resulting molecule is neutral, at close distances the uneven charge distribution can be important. Water is an example of a polar molecule; the oxygen end has a slight positive charge whereas the hydrogen ends are slightly negative. Polarity explains why some substances dissolve readily in water and others do not.

4Hydrogen bond

Because they’re polarized, two adjacent H2O (water) molecules can form a linkage known as a hydrogen bond, where the (electronegative) hydrogen atom of one H2O molecule is electrostatically attracted to the (electropositive) oxygen atom of an adjacent water molecule.

Consequently, molecules of water join together transiently in a hydrogen-bonded lattice. Hydrogen bonds have only about 1/20 the strength of a covalent bond, yet even this force is sufficient to affect the structure of water, producing many of its unique properties, such as high surface tension, specific heat, and heat of vaporization. Hydrogen bonds are important in many life processes, such as in replication and defining the shape of DNA molecules.

Chemical bond

A chemical bond is a lasting attraction between atoms, ions or molecules that enables the formation of chemical compounds. The bond may result from the electrostatic force of attraction between oppositely charged ions as in ionic bonds; or through the sharing of electrons as in covalent bonds. The strength of chemical bonds varies considerably; there are "strong bonds" or "primary bond" such as metallic, covalent or ionic bonds and "weak bonds" or "secondary bond" such as dipole–dipole interactions, the London dispersion force and hydrogen bonding.

Since opposite charges attract via a simple electromagnetic force, the negatively charged electrons that are orbiting the nucleus and the positively charged protons in the nucleusattract each other. An electron positioned between two nuclei will be attracted to both of them, and the nuclei will be attracted toward electrons in this position. This attraction constitutes the chemical bond. Due to the matter wave nature of electrons and their smaller mass, they must occupy a much larger amount of volume compared with the nuclei, and this volume occupied by the electrons keeps the atomic nuclei in a bond relatively far apart, as compared with the size of the nuclei themselves.

In general, strong chemical bonding is associated with the sharing or transfer of electrons between the participating atoms. The atoms in molecules, crystals, metals and diatomic gases—indeed most of the physical environment around us—are held together by chemical bonds, which dictate the structure and the bulk properties of matter.

Examples of Lewis dot-style representations of chemical bonds between carbon (C), hydrogen (H), and oxygen (O). Lewis dot diagrams were an early attempt to describe chemical bonding and are still widely used today.

All bonds can be explained by quantum theory, but, in practice, simplification rules allow chemists to predict the strength, directionality, and polarity of bonds. The octet rule and VSEPR theory are two examples. More sophisticated theories are valence bond theory which includes orbital hybridizationand resonance, and molecular orbital theorywhich includes linear combination of atomic orbitals and ligand field theory. Electrostaticsare used to describe bond polarities and the effects they have on chemical substances.

Overview of main types of chemical bondsEdit

A chemical bond is an attraction between atoms. This attraction may be seen as the result of different behaviors of the outermost or valence electrons of atoms. These behaviors merge into each other seamlessly in various circumstances, so that there is no clear line to be drawn between them. However it remains useful and customary to differentiate between different types of bond, which result in different properties of condensed matter.

In the simplest view of a covalent bond, one or more electrons (often a pair of electrons) are drawn into the space between the two atomic nuclei. Energy is released by bond formation. This is not as a reduction in potential energy, because the attraction of the two electrons to the two protons is offset by the electron-electron and proton-proton repulsions. Instead, the release of energy (and hence stability of the bond) arises from the reduction in kinetic energy due to the electrons being in a more spatially distributed (i.e. longer de Broglie wavelength) orbital compared with each electron being confined closer to its respective nucleus.^[1] These bonds exist between two particular identifiable atoms and have a direction in space, allowing them to be shown as single connecting lines between atoms in drawings, or modeled as sticks between spheres in models.

In a polar covalent bond, one or more electrons are unequally shared between two nuclei. Covalent bonds often result in the formation of small collections of better-connected atoms called molecules, which in solids and liquids are bound to other molecules by forces that are often much weaker than the covalent bonds that hold the molecules internally together. Such weak intermolecular bonds give organic molecular substances, such as waxes and oils, their soft bulk character, and their low melting points (in liquids, molecules must cease most structured or oriented contact with each other). When covalent bonds link long chains of atoms in large molecules, however (as in polymers such as nylon), or when covalent bonds extend in networks through solids that are not composed of discrete molecules (such as diamond or quartz or the silicate minerals in many types of rock) then the structures that result may be both strong and tough, at least in the direction oriented correctly with networks of covalent bonds. Also, the melting points of such covalent polymers and networks increase greatly.

In a simplified view of an ionic bond, the bonding electron is not shared at all, but transferred. In this type of bond, the outer atomic orbital of one atom has a vacancy which allows the addition of one or more electrons. These newly added electrons potentially occupy a lower energy-state (effectively closer to more nuclear charge) than they experience in a different atom. Thus, one nucleus offers a more tightly bound position to an electron than does another nucleus, with the result that one atom may transfer an electron to the other. This transfer causes one atom to assume a net positive charge, and the other to assume a net negative charge. The bond then results from electrostatic attraction between atoms and the atoms become positive or negatively charged ions. Ionic bonds may be seen as extreme examples of polarization in covalent bonds. Often, such bonds have no particular orientation in space, since they result from equal electrostatic attraction of each ion to all ions around them. Ionic bonds are strong (and thus ionic substances require high temperatures to melt) but also brittle, since the forces between ions are short-range and do not easily bridge cracks and fractures. This type of bond gives rise to the physical characteristics of crystals of classic mineral salts, such as table salt.

A less often mentioned type of bonding is metallic bonding. In this type of bonding, each atom in a metal donates one or more electrons to a "sea" of electrons that reside between many metal atoms. In this sea, each electron is free (by virtue of its wave nature) to be associated with a great many atoms at once. The bond results because the metal atoms become somewhat positively charged due to loss of their electrons while the electrons remain attracted to many atoms, without being part of any given atom. Metallic bonding may be seen as an extreme example of delocalization of electrons over a large system of covalent bonds, in which every atom participates. This type of bonding is often very strong (resulting in the tensile strength of metals). However, metallic bonding is more collective in nature than other types, and so they allow metal crystals to more easily deform, because they are composed of atoms attracted to each other, but not in any particularly-oriented ways. This results in the malleability of metals. The sea of electrons in metallic bonding causes the characteristically good electrical and thermal conductivity of metals, and also their "shiny" reflection of most frequencies of white light.