Only after I had typed it

[nojay]

 did it seem a slightly weird thing to say.

"...measuring the LD50 figure for ingestion of octonitrocubane"

Hmmm. Youtube, no hits. Damn.

Comments

[rattleback]

Is toxicity an issue before there are bigger problems? Yow.

[nojay]

Toxicity levels for stuff like hydrofluoric acid have, I understand, been determined. John D. Clark's excellent and side-splittingly funny book "Ignition!" describes several rocket fuel candidates which had reported problems with toxicity although how they had determined this was a problem in chemicals which could dissolve pipes, tanks, test stands and slow-footed rocket engineers was never adequately explained.

[cairmen]

Um, please tell me this is a theoretical enquiry? Or alternatively please call 999 :)

[ffutures]

The stuff looks to be pretty stable so if it isn't actually toxic just eating it wouldn't be a problem. After all, people take nitroglycerine as a medicine.

[harvey_rrit]

8\

Yeah, in milligrams, with a huge proportion of inert material keeping it stable. Nobody's going to be buying 0.1% dynamite any time soon.

I'd never even heard of cubane, but I have this visualization app in my head and got it. Of itself I didn't think it could be too stable; the corners of a cube are not the angles of a tetrahedron, which is what carbon is equipped with. Turns out it seems to be one of those self-correction things like benzene rings. Huh. Carbon is weird.

But I'm pretty sure the get-along-with-everybody effect will not extend into the nitrate radicals. I think rattleback is asking a valid question.

Nitrates are old news anyway. Now if somebody would just synthesize perfluoric acid....

[alan_crowe]

octanitrocubane

[harvey_rrit]

Not when I was growing up.