[ExI] myth or busted?

[John Clark]

I don't know if it's the same thing but when I was a kid I read Robert
Heinlein's novel "Farnham's Freehold", and one of the characters made
something he called "a poor man's dynamite" from nothing but bottles of
tincture of iodine and laundry ammonia he got at a drugstore. He didn't
give any more details but he must have been talking about Ammonium
Tri-Iodine, it would be extremely dangerous to make a lot of it because its
super sensitive.

In one Mythbusters show they were duplicating a scene from Breaking Bad to
find the ultimate acid for dissolving human flesh (they used a dead cow).
Ultimately they decided the best way to dissolve a dead body was with a
mixture of 3 parts Sulfuric Acid and one part of a mystery liquid that they
refused to name. But it's clear the mystery liquid was a 30% concentration
of hydrogen peroxide and they had brewed up something called "Piranha
solution"; labs find it useful when they absolutely positively have to get
rid of every last spek of organic material on their equipment. But if you
use this devil's brew you've got to be extremely careful, and you don't
want to use more than a 30% concentration, if you do it will blow up when
you mix it.

John K Clark
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