Briefly in the news

-- Deepa Bharath

UC Irvine students and officials got a scare Friday afternoon when

smoke started swirling from an experiment in the physics lab, officials

said.

“Smoke was coming out of a student’s experiment,” spokeswoman Lori

Brandt said. The incident happened about 3:30 p.m.

Orange County Fire Authority firefighters arrived on the scene and

inspected the lab in the university’s Reines Hall, Brandt said.

“But there was nothing,” she said. “There were no flames or fire, just

smoke.”

On July 23, an explosion and fire ripped through a UCI chemistry lab,

injuring a researcher and forcing the evacuation of two buildings.

The explosion happened as a graduate student purified benzene in a

solvent purification still. The residue of the purification process,

metallic sodium, had apparently caught fire, causing the explosion.