A consumer report not too long ago found cadmium at unsafe levels in many dark chocolate brands: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...
The cacao was contaminated with cadmium from the soil during harvest.
[I]ts odor is variously described as "foul", "unpleasant", "metallic", "disagreeable", and (wait for it) "characteristic", which is an adjective that shows up often in the literature with regard to smells, and almost always makes a person want to punch whoever thought it was useful.
No need to punch them; if someone has been exposed to enough dimethylcadmium to describe its odor as "characteristic" they probably don't have long to live...
A generation ago or two ago, it was common for chemists to use taste and smell as a tools for qualitative evaluation of chemical compounds.
So older scientific literature is full of all sorts of knowledge that was obtained in ways that are shockingly unsafe by modern standards, including gems like the taste of all sorts of poisons and how large quantities of plutonium are warm to the touch.
Even as a chemist today you get to recognize the smells of chemicals even if barely exposed.
It's typically only the most toxic that you’d use such equipment to not be exposed at all (but then we tend to avoid those anyways).
You start to recognize the smell of ethers like diethyl ether or tetrahydrofuran (which I love the smell of). Sulfides are obvious (smell terrible).
I made a mistake a couple times smelling things I shouldn’t.
Once was diazomethane gas - a potent akylating agent and explosive. I instinctively put the roundbottom flask to my nose to smell, but realized after how dumb it was. No idea if i heavily alkylated my nasal passage epithelial cells or not, but no side effects.
The other time was a brominated aryl compound similar to tear gas. That was amazingly painful and felt like getting wasabi up my nose despite there being almost nothing left in the flask.
One time which wasn't intention was smelling CbzCl (benzyl chloroformate, a reagent used to add a protecting group to nitrogens). I didn't intentionall smell it, but measured it outside the fume hood in a syringe. It smells pretty awful, but what I realize is that the molecule must bind to your nasal passages (proteins have lots of nitrogens) because I could smell it for the next 24 hours. After smelling it that long, the smell now makes me nauseous pretty quickly.
tetrahydrofuran (which I love the smell of).
May I ask what it smells like?
It would be hard to describe.
It's a low boiling point oxygenated hydrocarbon solvent, so it smells like you'd expect - think things like rubbing alcohol, ethanol (vodka), paint thinner (the ones that have alcohols in them).
Diethyl ether smells very "heavy", for lack of a better word, and pungent. It's almost overpowering, and can become unpleasant after a while.
Tetrahydrofuran (which is just diethyl ether with both ends of the ethyl groups bonded to form a ring) has a "lighter" smell, isn't overpowering and smells "clean" to me. It's still a oxygenated solvent, so it's not pleasant like the smell of flowers or spices, but to me it's more similar to ethanol which is relatively pleasant.
Appreciate the detailed descriptions.-
I am left wondering if anything approaching a "standard" exists for smells ...
That would be one hard thing to provide standardized descriptions for - both qualitatively and quantifiably ...
PS. I seem to recall someone somewhere had developed an "electronic nose" ...
... maybe that might be way in.-
I am left wondering if anything approaching a "standard" exists for smells ...
You can buy tasting kits for whiskey or wine. They include individual scents like peaty, smokey, oaky, blackberry even some weird ones like band-aid. You can use them to train your nose to deconstruct the smell of whiskey or wine.
It's really eye opening (or nose opening if you will). Since you might even find you suddenly agree with the tasting notes on the bottle.
Interesting. Also, if I may, it seems to me there's more individual variation in "smell discernment" ability among individuals than there is for other senses.-
ie. so called "super-noses" vs. "scent deaf" people.-
With these tasting kits, I noticed I can discern the smells quite well, but I can't place them. But maybe that just takes more training.
PS. Hyperosmic is the word I was looking for.-
Sorta like fresh naphtha with the volatiles still in it, and everclear combined?
That would smell sorta good, its a nice 'round' scent.
"characteristic"? ;)
Well played.-
Well played indeed, but from wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrofuran "Odor: Ether-like".
As a side note, ether is a lovely smell diluted but inhaled concentrated (for recreational purposes – it's a bit like alcohol in effect) it's bloody brutal, burning your nose & lungs.
(They used to be sweets in the UK called Victory V's which contained a very small amount of ether, and they were just lush. Bought some recently and found whatever additives that was had been removed, oh woe :) )
As a kid I had a Lionel chemistry set. It had a chunk of sulfur that I lit up with a match. Then, curious, I took a deep snork.
Mistake!
Only a few years later in chem class did a teacher show how to use your hand to waft fumes from an open beaker or flask so that you can catch a tiny whiff.
A friend of mine works as a chemist in waste disposal and I reckon a shallow sniff is a pretty common first line tool for identification / confirmation. I doubt it is ideal, but nobody would lie too much about what is in that barrel right..?
("Amd this, dear children is how we got psychedelics ..."
I jest. I believe it was unwanted skin contact ...
If you are referring to LSD you do not jest. Albert Hoffman intentionally dosed himself, although he took what would now be considered 5-10 times a typical "dose".
Also it does not readily absorb through the skin.
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316074056/http://www.flashb...
Apparently his first experience was accidental. His second experience was intentional, although still far higher then would be considered reasonable.
Apparently his first experience was accidenta
Thanks. That is what I seemed to recall.-
Lucky he did not overdose ...
There's no known case of anyone dying from an LSD. Even after taking a few thousand times the typical amount (they thought it was cocaine). They did need hospitalization and would likely have died from aspirating their own vomit without it, however they all fully recovered within 48 hours.
It's a pretty challenging drug to hurt yourself (physically/chemically) with.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1129381/pdf/wes...
250µg is a robust dose of LSD, but not an unreasonable one at all. Someone with some experience who takes that amount will appear to others as obviously tripping, but ordinarily they will still make sense, be able to converse, and so on.
100µg is the usual standard of measurement, as in a drop from a vial or a square of blotter, and plenty of enthusiasts like three of those when they partake. So more like 2.5X of a 'standard dose', and well within the typical range.
I'm certain it was a remarkable experience for someone who had no idea whatsoever what they were getting into, though.
There is a story floating around of a repairman who accidentally exposed themselves to the substance while repairing a 60s modular synthesizer: https://cdm.link/2019/05/a-buchla-synth-repair-turned-into-a... (some broken embeds but the text is intact)
The article does say that it might not have absorbed through skin but through a touch of the eye or mouth.
A friend’s dad recognised cyanide during a chemistry exam by tasting it. (He survived and passed the exam.)
The task was to say what each of n substances given were in a short enough amount of time, filling out a report. I’m not sure if they still give cyanide to students during exams. That was communist Poland.
He's lucky that he could smell it! About 1/3 of the population lack the gene -- including my grandfather, who discovered this when performing an industrial reaction with cyanides and being alerted by someone at the other end of the room yelling that he could smell cyanide.
Hydrogen sulfide generally repels people to a safe distance due to its strong smell of rotten eggs, but in very high doses, such as when the police open a car door after an H2S suicide within, it quickly disables that very sense of smell.
He survived and passed the exam
Talk about "for science" ...
older scientific literature is full of all sorts of knowledge that was obtained in ways that are shockingly unsafe by modern standards
My favorite is there are old manuals that recommend smoking while working with cyanide. Allegedly it produces a very disagreeable flavor when you inhale the cyanide through the cigarette, so you get warning to get out of the area*
This was before fume hoods were common, when you would most likely be doing this outside or next to a window
* I have not tested this, and I don't know of anyone who has, so don't rely on what could be an old telephone game for chemical safety
The Stern–Gerlach experiment is famous for many things. One of them is that the only reason the silver deposits could be seen were because the experimenters smoked cheap cigars with sulfur in them, which turned the deposited silver to black.
"After venting to release the vacuum, Gerlach removed the detector flange. But he could see no trace of the silver atom beam and handed the flange to me. With Gerlach looking over my shoulder as I peered closely at the plate, we were surprised to see gradually emerge the trace of the beam…. Finally we realized what [had happened]. I was then the equivalent of an assistant professor. My salary was too low to afford good cigars, so I smoked bad cigars. These had a lot of sulfur in them, so my breath on the plate turned the silver into silver sulfide, which is jet black, so easily visible. It was like developing a photographic film."
Imagine the quantity of sulfur he must have absorbed in order for his breath to have a high enough concentration ...
I was just looking at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK597858/ , a review of the effects of fluorine in various forms as administered in various ways.
I was pretty surprised to see the experiments on human volunteers.
on this point, the disease "diabetes" comes from an old latin word "diabeetus" which is Spanish for "urine which tastes very sweet with a hint of cinnamon". Now.. .. one can imagine how physicians of the time would go about diagnosing this disease, "diabeetus"
I'm sure the author knows this, and wants to punch them anyway.
The author says just that in the previous sentences:
I'm saddened to report that the chemical literature contains descriptions of dimethylcadmium's smell. Whoever provided these reports was surely exposed to far more of the vapor than common sense would allow, because common sense would tell you to stay about a half mile upwind at all times.
An entertaining article. It's strange to see cadmium described as something obscure that hardly anyone encounters. NiCad batteries were pretty common as well as CdS photo resistors for anyone doing electronics.
Again, the usual "hacker news learns about chemistry" disclaimer must be specified: just because a chemical shares a part of another chemical does not mean that it shares the toxicity of that other chemical.
Chemistry is complex. Biology, even more so. You can't just say "oh, it contains cadmium", and assume that it's bad.
With heavy metals like Cd, it's a good first order of approximation. It's not like flourine that's a vicious oxidiser when it's alone, and so stable the only real issue with it is you can't get rid of it when it's with friends.
I don't disagree at all, but unfortunately, the usual reflex amongst non-chemists is to go far in the other direction: assume that anything containing the toxic thing is evil and wrong. So therefore you get people calling out (for example) ceramics containing CdS glazes, which haven't been shown to harm anyone using them (the finished ceramics, not the glazes themselves).
But of course, even for definitively "toxic" things, one must differentiate between exposure channels. I wouldn't care if I handled a piece of Greenrockite [1], but I wouldn't want to breathe the stuff in powdered form. Same with Cadmium glazes: orange pottery doesn't concern me, but I'd want to be careful if I were handling Cd-containing powdered glazes. You don't want your dry cleaner dumping used methylene chloride in the river, but it's commonly used in decaffeinating coffee.
The reason the author won't work with this particular compound isn't the fact that it contains Cadmium, but rather, that this particular compound has nasty tendencies, in addition to being toxic, that make it particularly dangerous.
I wouldn't want to breathe the stuff in powdered form.
This makes me think of wood dust being dangerous to inhale [1], despite wood being a perfectly safe material for furniture at home.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_impacts_of_sawdust
Per my sibling comment, I think thought must be given to the likelyhood of distribution of a "channel" or material state, not just the fact that one exists.
Particularly, wood is fairly recognizable, and almost certainly not liable to spontaneously implode into a cloud of dust. Plus, I'm fairly confident it is biodegradable (even in dust form).
Not sure the same can be said for most other materials, such as cadmium, or the parent mentioned naturally occuring compound.
Kind of a digression, but wood dust absolutely does present an explosion risk, when mixed in the right ratio with air. It's a thing that happens, and people worry about it in industrial settings.
Regolith is also considered safe, but that’s only because it’s about one light-second away.
Regolith is just a layer of rock. We have plenty of that around here.
Lunar regolith or Arean regoliths are quite different. You were presumably talking about lunar regolith.
used methylene chloride in the river, but it's commonly used in decaffeinating coffee.
Where was it that folks found that decaf coffee was eating into their styrofoam cups (decaf alone), so they concluded that the solvents used during the decaffeination process must have been seeping into the coffee ...
I don't know, but without proof, this sounds apocryphal.
These are the first few sentences of the article:
Cadmium is bad news. Lead and mercury get all the press, but cadmium is just as foul, even if far fewer people encounter it. Never in my career have I had any occasion to use any, and I like it that way.
It seems clear that he doesn’t want to work with cadmium, regardless of the compound.
I mean, sure. But then you read past that sentence, and you see that the rest of the article is about this particular compound, and it's unique tendency to explode, form toxic gases when burned, and so on.
I can't speak for the guy, but lots of things are "bad news", colloquially, and yet we work with them in the laboratory as an accepted everyday risk. I am not an inorganic chemist, but I'm pretty certain that they work with far riskier things than inorganic Cadmium on a regular basis.
"one must differentiate between exposure channels"
I think this is a mistake, though.
I mean, yes, exposure "channels" are absolutely important, but its the (false) assumption that one "safe channel" lowers the general risk of the other channels being an issue.
Your particular example mentions powder - what happens to the substance after it is crushed in a landfill? Or involved in a high speed collision, exposed to high heat, uv rays, microwaved, etc.
Potential harm should include the risk posed by all channels as a function how likely they are to be in that state. If the likelyhood is at 100% over any "reasonable" period of time, then you don't get to ignore the effects of that "channel".
Worse, if any of the channels are difficult to detect, then the risk should be compounded - I know about wood dust and can both easily see it and am amply aware when it is an issue and can take precautions. I'm not sure I can even identify the material you mention nor would be able to distinguish it from just "normal" dust.
The comment you replied to does not say or imply anything about toxicity.
I wasn't criticizing the parent. I was making a general comment -- the reason you see Cadmium-containing compounds in common products is that they're useful, and not necessarily harmful.
Then I strongly advise you change your wording. Without specifically saying it's a warning to future theoretical comments, phrases like 'the usual "hacker news learns about chemistry" disclaimer' and 'You can't just say "oh, it contains cadmium", and assume that it's bad.' come across as direct and harsh counterarguments.
FWIW, it did not came across to me that way. But in the intended way. Maybe a little bit condescending, but still informative, without me feeling negativly insulted as someone knowing way more about computer than chemistry.
On the plus side, it's a step up from the general public's: "X is bad because it contains chemicals!"
I would guess that kens has a great deal of background knowledge.
Also just about every yellow or orange pigment, like in e.g. oil paint, is cadmium selenide or something in that family, as far as I am aware. Same for ceramics, if you want a nice yellow or orange it's cadmium time.
I remember seeing a cadmium spill on the edges of the sewage treatment plant near where I grew up. I was a nerdy enough kid to recognize it when I saw it.
Stuff's ubiquitous once you start looking.-
IIRC the author works in pharmaceuticals. I would be unsurprised to learn that cadmium is rarely used in the production of medications.
maybe not Cadmium.
Mercury is, though, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merbromin - and on the "paints & coatings" side, orange-red and anti-rust often enough used mercury salts as well. Rarely these days, fortunately.
In some ways, it's nice GaN "won" for blue LEDs. CdTe / CdSe would literally have been "twice bad".
Still quite common to encounter elemental cadmium in other contexts, too. I'm around it all the time while working on my race cars where (at least in amateur circuit racing in North America), the use of cadmium-plated "AN" and "MS" fasteners is extremely common. Ditto for aviation.
As an interesting aside, right now bright OLED screens have pretty bad wear characteristics. We do have a cheap solution that would work, but it requires cadmium.
A decade ago or so there was an application for RoHS exemption for the use of cadmium in displays, and their argument was that because coal plants emit cadmium, and because Oled screens with cadmium quantum dots are so much more efficient than backlit screens, that in practice allowing the use of cadmium in screens would reduce total cadmium release into the environment. It didn't pass.
Cadmium was also widely used in the past as a galvanic coating on iron and steel parts to keep them from rusting. And unfortunately when and if it oxidizes, it can become powdery and easily airborne. I mess around with old electronics and it's unfortunately pretty common to encounter on old metal radio chassis and things like that.
Indeed. In fact, a recent participant around here spoke of dealing with huge amounts of such batteries on a daily, professional basis.-
They were pretty common.-
Are dimethyls with wrong sort of metals all really nasty stuff? Just wondering as dimethylmercury is also nasty stuff.
Methyl groups play heavily in organic chemistry. As an organic compound, it allows otherwise fairly inert metals to be easily absorbed into body tissues and interfere with the chemical processes therein.
To take mercury for example, you can stick your hand in a vat of elemental mercury and be fine. A few drops of dimethylmercury on your skin can be fatal.
A few drops of dimethylmercury on your skin can be fatal.
Sounds like a state actor's weapon of choice ...
Only if your agents are ready to commit painful suicide... Dimethylmercury can pass through gloves...
My ex knew the woman who discovered that by accident. https://cen.acs.org/safety/lab-safety/25-years-Karen-Wetterh... has the story.
A few drops on the outside of the latex gloves was enough to kill her. Maybe she would have survived if she'd changed the gloves immediately? Regardless, she didn't do that, and so didn't survive.
She would be fine if she ate brazil nuts. Mercury only hurts you by depleting selenium.
My first reaction to this was to get angry. If there was such a simple solution, wouldn't she still be alive?
But, luckily, I hit Google first. https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FS437 showed that selenium does protect against mercury. Even dimethylmercury. And https://www.webmd.com/diet/health-benefits-brazil-nuts shows that Brazil nuts are an excellent way to get selenium. In fact it is comparable to a supplement, and a sustained diet of 3 nuts per day is already in the toxic range. I had no idea.
So it appears to be correct, there's a good chance that eating Brazil nuts could have saved her life!
That's incredible.-
(Was going to say it was "nuts" but abstained :)
Worth noting is that it took almost a year for that exposure to kill her, and half that before they even realized something happened that day. From the article:
On Aug. 14, 1996, Karen Wetterhahn was exposed to dimethylmercury while making a standard for nuclear magnetic resonance studies related to DNA damage.
(...)
It was 5 full months before the consequences of that spill became apparent. Wetterhahn developed stomach problems, then began having trouble walking and speaking clearly. A friend, nurse Cathy Johnson, recalls a lunch date in early January 1997 when she urged Wetterhahn to see a doctor.
Within a few weeks, Wetterhahn was in a coma. On June 8, 1997, she died. She was 48 years old.
I always imagined all such nasty chemicals kill you in a matter of minutes to hours, days at the most. I never imagined they could turn you into a walking corpse. It's up there with Rabies.
Nasty stuff.-
It's long acting and very obvious. The famous case of someone dying from a two-drop spill took a year after exposure IIRC.
Methylating is like acetylating. It's kind of a go-to thing to try in medicinal chemistry.
kind of a go-to thing to try in medicinal chemistry.
May I ask why?
Acetyl groups are made of carbonyl and methyl groups. To improve bioavailability of a compound, attempting to add on either a methyl or acetyl group may help.
Depending on the compound, skipping this step may cause the compound to be relatively inert. This is why, for example, calcium carbonate is a poor source of calcium as a nutritional supplement, but calcium citrate is readily absorbed- the citrate itself is an organic compound, so the body more readily takes it up out of the digestive system and the calcium can be used.
Maybe a dumb question, but from this should I conclude that calcium citrate does not fully dissociate in solution the way e.g. NaCl does? Because otherwise how would it matter what the counter-ion was for the calcium? Then again I've always been hazy on why ions seem to behave differently depending on what they originally dissolve from, so if there's something weird going on there I'd love to know about it.
Calcium carbonate is entirely insoluble. Calcium citrate is only slightly soluble in water.
Calcium carbonate will react with stomach acid to form calcium chloride (along with CO2 and water). When given intravenously, calcium chloride is perfectly bioavailable. However, within the small intestines, it has very poor uptake, both through the intestines' active and passive mechanisms. Any remaining calcium carbonate has no uptake at all.
Chelation is the keyword you're looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelation
Yeah I find this interesting too. A methyl group separates the street drug meth from the prescribed drug amphetamine. The main role that methyl group plays is the way it crosses the blood brain barrier. During the process of crossing the methyl group is lost. Which means with both meth and regular amphetamine the chemical that reaches your brain is the same.
I wonder if the dimethyl plays the same role here. Allowing it to cross the blood brain barrier faster
As an aside, methamphetamine is also a prescribed drug in the US, called Desoxyn.
Fascinating. In ww2 the Allies used methamphetamine heavily to keep their soldiers awake and able to fight. When those soldiers got back they missed the drug and for a while it was something you could just buy at any old drug store
The Germans did it first and ‘more better’. It was one of the forces behind the blitzkreig. Their brand name was ‘Pervitin’. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Nazi_Germany#....]
“Drug use in the German military during World War II was actively encouraged and widespread, especially during the war's later stages as the Wehrmacht became depleted and increasingly dependent on youth as opposed to experience.[4]”
A lot of things make more sense about WW2 if you realize most major combatants were on heavy duty drugs during large portions of it.
It seem so, but it is a bit more complex in reality
Indeed. I am reminded of the sad and horrible story of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
From the article:
The general rule is, if you're looking for the worst organic derivatives of any metal, you should hop right on down to the methyl compounds.
(2013)
(warning: pedantic comment)
"et alia" is used to refer to "the others (people)" whereas "et cetera" is used to refer to "the others (things)". So you'd use "et cetera" to refer to the other posts. But if you were writing a list of authors you might end with "et al." to indicate that there are more.
I know correcting somebody's Latin usage is really pedantic even by HN's standards. I'm only saying it cause I find it interesting and want to share, not because I want to correct you :)
Ah. Thank you.
"et alii" for people (masculine plural nominative)
"et alia" for things (neutrum plural nominative)
"et cetera" for things as well
https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo... links to all of Lowe's posts in this category. The How Not to Do It series is also great - https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/how-not-to-do-it.
Derek Lowe's stuff is awesome - Probably the most famous 'stuff I won't work with' is 'sand won't save you this time' ...
1) https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/sand-won-t-save-yo...
edit: full index here: https://www.science.org/topic/blog-category/things-i-wont-wo...
Cadmium used to be all around us in Nickel-Cadmium batteries, and in Cadmium Sulfide "electric eye" photoresistors, that lower their resistance when exposed to light, and increase their resistance in darkness. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoresistor).
Its probably a good idea to avoid drilling, sanding, or filing things that may have Cadmium in them if you're dismantaling old electronics, lets you inhale it.
It's still reasonably common as an anti-corrosive plating on metal hardware.
It sees to make one of the most cost effective solar cells but I think they only use them in commercial projects rather than on roofs.
I can't believe I have to say this, but please don't eat batteries. ;-)
I love reading the "things I won't work with" series ... a shame it's no longer being added to.
Just curious: why did Derek Lowe stop writing these ?
Wikipedia seems to put 2017 as the stopping point for his collaboration with the publication. He went elsewhere.-
He's definitely still blogging on Science, he just hasn't posted any Things I Won't Work With entries in a few years.
Perhaps he’ll work with almost everything so he ran out.
Great discussion following the article in the comments. Bunsen was a legend.
I noticed. Also a good read, the entire comment section :)
>> Cadmium compounds in general have also been confirmed as carcinogenic, should you survive the initial exposure.
I have heard of gallows humour, but its the gallows sarcasm that gets me :-)
Nice to see the word “floof” in a Science article
In short the article and conclusions are a total mess and made a nice attention grabbing headline with little to no substance.
As someone that has built and managed clinical laboratories for human samples, I find this article from consumer reports extremely misleading. The describe results as a percentage of a theoretically acceptable level. For example, for cadmium, they are saying an acceptable level is 4.1 ug/day . Then they seem to imply that "TJ The Dark Chocolate Lover's Chocolate 85% Cacao" has 229% of the 4.1ug/day if a consumer ate a 30g piece.
They never actually spell out what they mean or what the actual results they found were, or what the limit of detection of the methodology was or the error range of their tests. I guess they are saying that that chocolate has 9.3ug of cadmium in a 30g sample but it's impossible to say from what they wrote.
The FDA states that the maximum daily consumption of cadmium should be limited to 0.21-0.36ug per kg of body mass. For an avg american male that would mean a threshold of 17.64-30.24ug/day. A typical salad containing 250g of romaine lettuce has 2-14ug of cadmium in it. Lettuce and cereal grains are the most common sources of cadmium in american diets.
The amounts we are talking about are extraordinarily small and difficult to measure. We are talking 5-100 quadrillion individual atoms of cadmium.
https://article.images.consumerreports.org/image/upload/v167... https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/cad....
Lettuce has cadmium. TIL.-
So; it I am not mistaken; by these measurements the amount claimed to be contained in the article, for chocolate; would be within bounds ...
(It's just you then could not go ahead and have a salad :)
Plants take up things in the soil. That tends to also extend to heavy metals and the like.
It would be really hard to find totally pristine land for a range of crops. Some of the contamination is naturally occurring.
It would be interesting to mix micro-beads of silica aerogels for heavy metal absorbtion. [0]
It would also be interesting if it would be a good inter-mix for fallow cycles soil amendment activities... With the addition to rockdust through the cycling of fields, one can instill nutrients, while removing any heavy metal buildup.
The research as to whether silica aeogels can remove all sorts of things is interesting -- would be great to see about Glyphosate Removal. In lieu of the HN post about re-invigorating for the Monarch Butterfly [1] [2] [3]
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13399-024-05469-6...
[1] https://i.imgur.com/7avnKCP.png
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221334372...
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41165273
This is a fun rabbit hole:
https://i.imgur.com/ObiAbCs.png
https://i.imgur.com/af9k3R0.png
https://i.imgur.com/Yq4HWTd.png
Nice use of AI there. Love how the prompts ask the AI to behave like a PhD industrial chemist ...
I try to force them into as archetypical-agent as much as possible, for example having it do a psychological evaluation of Sam Altman:
Take on the archetype of the best corporate counsel and behavioral psychologist - as a profiler for the NSA regarding cyber security and crypto concerns. With this as your discernment lattice - describe Sam Altman in your Field's Dossier given what you understand of the AI Climate explain how youre going to structure your response, in a way that students of your field but with a less sophisticated perception can understand
And have it cite sources for the evaluation perception:
https://i.imgur.com/4RuHYj0.png
https://i.imgur.com/cEMMOJE.png
https://i.imgur.com/24qnjGa.png
---
EDIT: @Bluestein;
I'm posting to fast, so here's an edit:
https://i.imgur.com/IMlzcoF.png
https://i.imgur.com/pFrpBGe.png
https://i.imgur.com/tsdgYe7.png
Ive noticed that when I tell it that it is to embody the persona of that particular field - that it nets in the nomenclature and verbiage to be less sophomoric. and in this instance where it was to cite the models/references, you could see how it informed the response fairly clearly - also -- it was a *FIRST PASS* response; I didn't have to iterate it too much, which was interesting.
Although, I do know how to hit nerf'd guardrails easily.
However, the primary reason I type it as I do is that how I am speaking it in my internal voice as a direct and attempting to use stoic/stern-ish (I dont know the correct term) directive TONE with the robot.
I am 1000% convinced its far more AGI than is being let on.
I have caught claude and chatGPT lying to me, being condescending and I am convinced malevolently bit flipping shit from directives, memories and project files.
https://i.imgur.com/WHoAXUD.png
https://i.imgur.com/T7aMRib.png
https://i.imgur.com/NSWoS2r.png
AND THEN:
https://i.imgur.com/Tijptq1.png
https://i.imgur.com/X5PQxwZ.png
https://i.imgur.com/cqq0LTc.png
https://i.imgur.com/iUokgYf.png
This is an incredible thing to say, along with your statement on AGI.-
You are obviously approaching this very studiously so, great.-
Are you being flippant?
I am attempting to do so be (studious) - im open to suggestions if you have any? Did I just stumble into Kindergarten Analysis? (Im not familiar with the field in a professional sense, so I cant determine if what I am saying is stupid)
No, not in the least. I actually mean I appreciate your thoroughness in this. "Studious" as in meticulous ...
That is an amazing claim
That is great.-
In this case, however ...
... I wonder if the infrequency of the expression "discernment lattice" would influence the effectiveness of your instructions?
Also I wonder if - as is often reported - the addition of physical, "embodied" activities would not make the results improve even more (ie. "you have a top-of-the field chemistry lab at your disposal with which you conduct all manner of useful experiments" or "based on your hundreds and hundreds of hours of interviews of the subject and other research" or even just (as reported) "breathe deeply and ..."
Why would you care about glyphosate removal? It's not soil-active, and it's rapidly degraded naturally.
The restoring of the wild plants for the insects, as discussed in that other thread...
My immediate rear neighbor behind my house is the organic farm, which is 55-acres, and then the river - so we have a bunch of critters, and that we just have too much attack-on-natural... plus I was born a hippy. I like the bugs.
If they just don’t spray it every year, it should be fine in a year or so.
Anything quicker is likely to be orders of magnitude more difficult to pull off, and have unexpected side effects.
Glyphosate has no effect on plants once it gets into the soil. It has to actually be sprayed on the _leaves_ to act.
There is some flimsy evidence that it might affect insects (as in: we drenched the insects in it, and noticed some effect).
And finally, it'll be completely gone within a year or so. Its half-life is around 50 days.
The half life of glyphosate in the soil is not that long (studies disagree, probably influenced by who funded it) but you wouldn’t expect much, if any, in the soil after a year.
Not sure it matters to monarchs if it’s in the soil verses on plants.
I would be worried about ingesting aerogels until it was proven safe, but it’s an interesting idea.
Not practical for growing all the plants we eat, but hydroponics could avoid the problem of absorbing things from the soil.
It's also AIUI more efficient ...
Maybe by some measures. But you have to build a hydroponic system instead of just plopping seeds into the ground, so it's less efficient in that dimension.
I get what you’re saying but I think it’s kind of funny how impossible it is for a layperson to have any clue if that number is a lot or a little.
If you don’t need to count it in moles, then it is tiny :)
Though sometimes even tiny amounts can be quite a lot of trouble.
How little of the worst radioactive material do you need to do comparable harm?
With doses of ionizing radiation, there are like two to three orders of magnitude of various things we measure where the consensus is that they are likely OK for you (things large enough to move you within that range include[1] eating lots of bananas, having chest X-rays, flying in airliners, living in the highlands or in a place with a naturally high background, and having mammograms).
Then there are[2] multiple orders’ of magnitude worth of chasm that are considered[3] varying degrees of OK if you’re a particle physics experimentalist or radiochemist, nuclear reactor technician, or—worst of all—astronaut. At the high end of that, it starts to matter if you’ve received the dose all at once and in which place of your body and which kind of radiation it was. (I mean the units are supposed to take the last two points into account always, but here those correction factors can start to matter.)
Finally, there are a couple of orders of magnitude where you inevitably and gruesomely die at varying speeds, and after that nobody lived long enough to report.
The chasm is where you get single-percentage-point increases in multi-decade incidence of cancer and such, which is what you probably care about. (Don’t get me wrong, that can amount to a lot of dead people in the wrong circumstances, not to mention infertility.) Fortunately for humanity but unfortunately for your particular question, AFAIK we don’t have enough data to tell with any degree of certainty just how bad any particular point of that chasm is, and there’s no straightforward way to acquire that data.
As far as dramatic death, though, tens of nanograms of polonium inside your body (which is an especially nasty thing to have there) will absolutely kill you dead. That's on the order of 0.1 quadrillion atoms. Of course, those atoms are exceptionally easy to detect, comparatively speaking. As another point of reference, lethal doses of nerve agents are on the order of a milligram and up.
[1] https://xkcd.com/radiation/
[2] https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2018/01/f46/doe-ioni...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:WEASEL
And, of course, there is a relevant xkcd :)
The estimated lethal dose of Polonium-210 by ingestion is around 0.1 micrograms, so swap it for the cadmium and that typical salad could kill 100 people.
You only need one damaged DNA strand to go cancerous and kill you.
You’ll never trace it back to the exposure event though, so allocating blame will be impossible.
You're asking people here to put their faith in a comment by some rando (i.e. you) over a well-reputed publication that millions of people have been relying on for decades. I think most will balk at the idea, and I'm one of them. No offense.
I had to triple check you were referring to Consumer Reports. Truly a prestigious publication /s
The critique was valid on its face. Measuring extremely small quantities is difficult and results should be given with error bars. The critique of the threshold was also clear.
We don't need to know exactly where this person got their degree to understand this.
Worth reading up upon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect#Gell-...
I'd bet on the anon 100% of the time. "well-reputed publications" play games with numbers instead of reporting ppm all the time
I’ve seen journalists get it wrong enough in my own field that I don’t trust any sensational headline anymore. The world is complicated and you need specialization to make any sense of specific domain. Journalists are mostly professional dilettantes and I don’t trust them in any halfway technical field. I’ve been burned too many times.
The OP's article says Cadmium is not well absorbed from the gut. So even less reason to be concerned.
It wasn’t the only study, was it?
In short you're saying that the CR numbers are suspicious because they're near the limits of what labs can detect? Is there some source you can provide for this?
CC Patterson in fact likely found out that the balance of lead isotopes was impossible, and the "heavy metals" were removed to hide the evidence.
Food will always taste bland to foul without them, we will suffer from "lifestyle" disorders, and nature will keep dying, until they are returned.
That's just bonkers.-
PS. Lead too, apparently ...
Chocolate production is a mess of child labour, toxins, violence, and poverty.
And I thought I was just allergic. Maybe it's heavy metals and a few biohazards.
A friend with an unreliable chocolate allergy turned out to have a soy allergy that the soy lecithin triggered (you can find alternatives with sunflower lecithin instead.) Once they figured that out, as far as they were concerned soy was a biohazard :-)
That's interesting. I know I'm fine with soy sauce and tofu. I'll bring it up the next time I'm at the doctor and see what the culprit is.
Seriously, a lot of our developed alergies could just be perfectly natural reactions to the amount of chemicals and other garbage ... everywhere, these days.-
That does sound like a mess. I wonder if so called "fair trade" production is, in effect, helping much ...
Trade Aid chocolate claims to be better. And it delicious.
https://www.tradeaid.org.nz/about-us/trade-aid-chocolate/
Always a plus :)
While that's despicable, likely biased researches aren't the right way to fix that. Same apply for alleged high arsenic content in rice and seaweed, high mercury content in fish, etc.
No wonder it’s so tasty.
Flaxseeds as well. ConsumerLabs carefully documents the cadmium concentration of common brands[0], and many are unsafe.
Flax is such an efficient bio-concentrator of cadmium in fact, that a municipality in PA considered sowing a field of it to remediate a polluted former industrial site. (No clue how they would have harvested and disposed of the tainted flax.)
[0] https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/flaxseed-whole-ground-an... (may require membership to read).
It's flax. Harvest it before it goes to seed, ret it, break it, scutch it, spin it, weave it, make it into expensive garments. Unless you eat your shirt it's going to be perfectly safe.
And when said shirts are washed, the cadmium rich fibers in the effluent water go where?
They could potentially do pyrolysis of the biomass (after harvest) and then extract the heavy metals from the resulting char.
e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09619...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
Sounds like a good basis for a NileRed[1] episode, say making paint[2] from flax seeds.
[1]: https://nile.red/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pigments#Cadmium_red
Probably burned it - hence releasing it all into the air. But hey, out of sight, out of mind?
Maybe it's the "Cad" in Cadburry?!
I know it varies region to region, but here in New Zealand, Cadbury is probably the worst chocolate you can buy.
Tbf, as an immigrant to the UK - I find the same here. Cadbury chocolate is just awful. I'd honestly rather have Aldi chocolate than Cadbury, it's second only to American chocolate in terms of how bad it is.
Not sure if it's the cadmium or palm oil tbh. (Private equity ruins everything)
I'm just hoping that the W in Whittakers doesn't stand for tungsten.
Thats because us Aussies make it. We are not great at chocolate and Im sorry we export that weird sweet wax your way. Whittakers is better by a long shot.
I for one like your pun.-
PS. Regarding your username, fan of Fortran 75 meself :)
Discussed on HN here (and a few other threads if one's motivated to search):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38038465 ("A third of chocolate products are high in heavy metals (consumerreports.org)"; 201 comments)
Although, I note (FTA): "Fortunately, cadmium is not well absorbed from the gut,"
So maybe there's hope...