Teen loses stomach after drinking liquid nitrogen cocktail

[gotpasswords]

[QUOTE=panache45]
Oh great. Now we’ll be having people doing this to control their weight.
[/QUOTE]

Depending on your insurance, going from “Hmm, maybe gastric bypass surgery would help me lose weight” to actually having the surgery can take a long time. It was close to a year for my husband to get through all the exams, tests, approvals, sign-offs and whatnot, and that was with having documentation of three years’ medically-supervised weight-loss plans (e.g.: prescribed diets and/or Weight Watchers).

Hopefully we don’t see a rash of people drinking LN2 in an attempt to avoid all of that just to get a bypass faster.

[Colophon]

@Michael63129

How does one even drink a mixture of liquid nitrogen and alcohol/water? Pure ethanol does have a pretty low freezing point (but it rises as concentration falls), but liquid nitrogen is even colder. Never mind the effect on mouth and throat tissues before you even swallow it (if you’ve ever touched dry ice you’d know what I mean, and mouth tissue is no doubt more delicate); the leidenfrost effect may provide some protection but not for long.

That’s the point - you’re not supposed to drink the mixture. The liquid nitrogen is meant to boil off, creating lots of cool vapour (the vapour is visible because water from the air condenses on contact with the very cold nitrogen gas), and just reducing the temperature of the drink by a relatively moderate amount. Ever since I heard this story I’ve been struggling to work out exactly how it happened. As others have suggested, I think it must have been a “bubble” of liquid N2 trapped inside ice.

Liquid nitrogen is not all that nasty, in part because it does boil so readily. You can dip a finger in it briefly with no ill effects (just about any student who has worked with it in a lab has probably tried this). I remember once trying the same finger-dipping trick with a mixture of dry ice and acetone, which was a very bad idea - the temperature is not nearly so low (-78C against -196C) but, vitally, it doesn’t evaporate, so your finger is directly in contact with the chilled liquid. That hurt, a lot.

Ferret Herder, that story is rather scary. We regularly used dry ice in cocktails at student parties, and I used to put chunks of it in my mouth and blow big “smoke rings” and plumes of vapour out of my nose. As long as you roll it around in your mouth it doesn’t freeze you, but reading your account I am very glad I never accidentally swallowed any!

[Ferret_Herder]

@Szlater

It’s a common enough trick, it’s how Heston Blumenthal makes his scrambled egg and bacon ice cream. I’ve seen it done, but its advisable to wait long enough for the fog to clear, and all the LN2 to have boiled away.

The fact that people are treating cryogenic gases with the kind of care that they treat normal ice doesn’t surprise me, people have been huffing helium without regard for the safety implications for a long time.

Yup. Dear aforementioned husband just had a taste of liquid nitrogen-chilled vinaigrette (IIRC) at a restaurant we just went to on Saturday. We were at the “chef’s table” basically in the kitchen, and the head chef showed us how he makes the stuff. He says he treats liquid nitrogen like he’d treat boiling water, which isn’t a bad way to deal with it I think. And he only keeps a very small container on hand, maybe the size of two gallon jugs of milk.

And Colophon - yes, it was rather dramatic, and we didn’t figure out right away what it must have been. I know everyone suspects a puking college student had a ton to drink, but he really didn’t.