sodium hydroxide

(Newser) - Thousands of people in a Florida city could have been poisoned had a hacker's plan come to pass. Authorities say the as-yet-unknown person hacked into Oldsmar's water treatment system Friday and tried to increase the levels of sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, to more than 100 times...

(Newser) - More than 50 children were injured at a kindergarten in China on Monday when an attacker sprayed the room with sodium hydroxide or lye. Three teachers and 51 children suffered injuries in the afternoon attack in Kaiyuan, Yunnan province, though none were life-threatening, reports CNN . The state-run Xinhua agency identified...

(Newser) - As if coffee isn't amazing enough already. A team of researchers—who, yes, got the idea over a cup of coffee—are reporting in the journal Nanotechnology that soaking spent coffee grounds in potassium hydroxide and then heating the grounds in a furnace creates a material that can store...

(Newser) - An employee at Dickey's Barbecue Pit in South Jordan, Utah, appears to have mistaken lye, an odorless chemical found in drain cleaners, for sugar, and made a batch of "sweet" tea with it. Jan Harding, a 67-year-old grandmother out to lunch with her husband and friends after church...