Hi I'm a chemist, my current work is with PFAS compounds, often known as forever chemicals. Please ask me about those, or anything else you are curious about related to chemistry. I will try to give you a solid response.
Well, it's "ask me anything" not "ask me questions I'll answer."
When people use that stat that PFOA is found in 99% of organisms on Earth, what concentration are we talking here? I remember my analytical prof saying once that at a low enough concentration (I think he was saying like the picomolar range) basically everything is in everything.
Follow up - how does the concentration level relate to the level we assume is dangerous to organisms?
Follow up #2: to what degree is there someone at the wheel when it comes to guarding consumers against industrial poisons? I got pretty blackpilled after watching Dark Water, but realized I don't really have any sense about the capture of (or existence of) global oversight on this sort of thing.
I don't live in the US but I bought some BBQ tongs and then I found a little sticker that said they could cause cancer with a California regulation ID on it. I sent a pic to some friends in the US and they just rolled their eyes like "yeah California is overboard with cautionary labeling" - is California doing it right and everyone else is fucked? What's your take on this kind of thing?
isn't that an op to make people disregard those labels altogether by overusing them
PFAS probably won't be the thing that does that, it tends to affect body functions that have tubes. Liver, endocrine system, reproduction. I find it unlikely that they will directly affect your cognitive ability, but your ability to think is effected by every supporting system, not just your physical brain.
What chemical property/properties make things elastic? Like why are rubber bands so stretchy?
a lot of factors affect elasticity. for plastics (rubber included) elasticity is mostly conferred due to the molecules configuring in a way that minimizes free energy. when you stretch a rubber band you are stretching the molecule, increasing the free energy of the molecule (rubber bands are actually one big molecule which is why it doesnt melt and will just burn if heated), when you release the rubber band the molecule settles back to its preferred configuration. latex fluid from trees has many free isoprene molecules (which is why it is liquid) but can undergo a reaction to fully polymerize the isoprene to create usable rubber
in plastics that are more than one molecule elasticity is reduced but has higher plasticity (opposite of elasticity). this is because molecules can more easily separate from each other as they are only affected by weak intermolecular forces rather than strong chemical bonds. applying heat in these plastics increases plasticity/reduces elasticity as there is more energy in the system and the molecules are more "comfortable" being separated from each other
rubber bands are actually one big molecule which is why it doesnt melt and will just burn if heated
I already knew this, but I'm gonna take this opportunity to ask something that's been bothering me about it for a while:
If a rubber band is one big molecule, then what's going on chemically when a rubber band gets stretched too far & snaps?
good question.
when you stretch the rubber band you are increasing the energy of the system. with enough stretching the molecule has enough energy for the chemical bonds to spontaneously cleave. you will still have one molecule but if you break it in two places you get two molecules!
good question.
when you stretch the rubber band you are increasing the energy of the system. with enough stretching the molecule has enough energy for the chemical bonds to spontaneously cleave. you will still have one molecule but if you break it in two places you get two molecules!
oof im having problems with site buffering so i posted twice lol
Jesus Christ, don't use any herbicides or pesticides, especially not Roundup that's like the worst one.
My partner won’t allow me to get a flamethrower to deal with the weeds what should I do instead?
Ya, I don't get people who do not depend on their agricultural output using the associated poison
I'm feeding mealworms a diet of polystyrene and water. They eat the EPS and subsequent waste, but I'm unsure of if/when said waste is safe to introduce to a soil/compost environment? It browns and reduces volume after cycling through the bugs, when left to soak in water, it results in scum and bacterial growth, is it ever 'safe' to reintroduce this to soil?
I mean put any shit into water and it'll produce a scummy biofilm.
They smoked it out of the Gatorade bottle. You can't make meth in a Gatorade bottle.
My best friend who died in Feb had a chemistry degree. He ended out working for banks doing fraud checking which could lead to a private investigation firm where we planned to use our TruAnnon style gumshoe skills to be the coolest non profit detective agency to have its only two members killed. Then fentanyl.
I'm over a decade deep in kitchens and have done literally every drug. The kitchen I'm in is actually hilariously wholesome. But yeah, don't worry, I smoke a stupid amount of pot and drink more than one should but have a real good handle on anything else. I appreciate the concern but I'm fine, have fallen into worse shit but worse shit just doesn't really keep a hold on me. Like, I smoke crack a few times a year and have for a good long time and am genuinely a casual crack user. I can go worse into booze maybe but that lasts about a day or so cause my tummy is shitty, so yeah, don't worry
In his honor go to the linen section of a target to drop acid and then blast agoraphobia nosebleed inside the store.
Acid and psychedelics in general make me a combo of hunter s Thompson and Brace Belden and a bit of David Byrn in True Stories. This was also while blasting cybergrind about Japanese War crimes. My friend who i did acid like this with died recently and now I'm not sure how to do acid cause when I trip I wanna watch eraserhead, look at gravel lots and talk about how awful everything is in a truly deep way. I do psyches different and it sucks I lost my cohort for it.
Edit: also where he worked at a bank and I could +1 we went to like six sigma meetings and things like that on acid, like real ass corporate shit. It was a Matt Christman at cpac experience.
It's my favorite movie hands down. I'm gonna cry and listen to the soundtrack because we basically would trip and go to shitty 5 over 1 developments and make similar comments as David.
"It's an all purpose shape. A box. No one knows what goes on in there"
I'm may not touch psyches again now that my buddy is gone unless I can find someone equally on my wavelength that way because I honestly hate the fabricates cuddly love atmosphere people usually wanna trip to. I don't want comfort on acid, I want to actually hate the halogen lights and ails of a department store in absolute clarity. I actually trip better on an adventure to uncover further pox marks in the fabric of our world than a manufactured good time. I'm really weird that way though and can't not recommend it harder.
Thanks a bunch. It's been since february but he was the IRL hexbear user esque pal people seem to pine for and...there were neat schemes that died with him.... just hard to do things you enjoyed with someone that are intense experiences especially when they're horrifying and possibly dangerous.
We actually dropped 2cb nbomes in the target linnen section the first time and didn't tell anyone we were with. We tried to unionize to the food court and made a contest between who could convince.theost people to go on the wrong escalator.
yeah, like @GalaxyBrain mentioned meth is easy to make. LSD is harder but still not crazy difficult. you could make millions of doses of acid (and many other psychs) for a few thousand dollars with the right synthetic method (see PiHKAL and TiHKAL)
LSA (precursor to LSD) is somewhat easy and very cheap to get a hold of. just buy morning glory seeds and extract then purify the LSA
Yeah, you should be ready around halfway through your second 4th semester, if you are trying to understand what is going on and not just use a recipie.
It looks like it is possible to do, but it seems like the efficacy is related to the type of compound. It also requires very high concentrations to be effective.
Just make a gas out of something that isn't a gas, then try to prevent said gas from occupying the volume it wants to occupy
Well yeah if you weren't using your anal sphincter as a gas release mechanism try just keeping them in
That's a broad question, what are you trying to blow up? That changes the answer a lot.
You're going to want the physics department's help for that one.
Buy 1P-LSD. It's nearly 1:1 the normal LSD experience and can be legally imported from Canadian chemists to most places.
That's weird to me too. Individual states regulate its import under analogue laws. My supplier won't ship to Virginia, Wisconsin, or Illinois. Other states regulate other tryptamine analogues they sell. 1P-LSD's just been around since 2015 more or less unchecked.
It's even thought to be a prodrug that metabolises into LSD. This is like outlawing psilocin but not psilocybin.
Have you guys cracked the 'turning lead into gold' formula yet?
That's been figured out for a while now, stars turn metals into other metals all the time. Knock three protons off a lead nucleus and there you go. We've done similar stuff on Earth. There was an experiment in 1980 that transmuted bismuth into gold, atomic number 83 down to 79. Several issues. It takes a particle accelerator to do it and it's prohibitively expensive, like far more expensive than the value of any gold produced. Other problem is most stable gold on earth is the isotope gold 197, and slamming alpha particles and radioactive neon into chunks of metal is kind of a brute force approach, so most of the gold they got was radioactive.
In fact, the researchers in that experiment only knew they had gold because they measured radioactive decay for a year, because the amounts were so small they couldn't be weighed or seen visually.
Yeah, it's just that it costs like 8 times more than the gold is worth.
the important thing is we have access to asking questions :the-democrat:
very difficult synthesis since estrogens are a four-ring system. i did find a good synthetic route for estrone which can be easily converted to estradiol https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/chemistry/estrone
its a 9 step reaction with starting materials of 3-ethynylanisole ($50 for 1 gram) and 1,5-decalindione ($200 for 1 gram). reactants/catalysts include potassium hydroxide (cheap), hydrogen gas (not that expensive), palladium (expensive but reusable since its a catalyst), a strong acid, aluminum chloride (relatively cheap for the small amount you need), benzaldehyde (cheap), methylene iodide (relatively cheap), potassium tert-butoxide (cheap), ozone (hard to find and i think its expensive), acetic anhydride (cheap), and hydrobromic acid (relatively cheap)
ik its not what you want to hear, it being prohibitively expensive to synthesize, but i wish you the best in your search for HRT chemicals
on a more optimistic note, with a functional lab and $10,000 one could synthesize enough estrogen to provide a lifetime supply for dozens of trans comrades, probably hundreds
Honestly... that answer is awesome. Doing research is hard because most of what I get back is on estrogen synthesis in living organisms; which is interesting, but not very helpful. At least it isnt helpful until we find a way to stick some plasmids in ecoli and then just harvest whatever they poop out.
:soviet-heart: yeah with FALGSC we will have bacteria farms pumping out hormones and drugs of all kinds :bloomer:
how involved is older (with higher risk of cancer I think?) manufacture of premarin? I understand it was prepared from pregnant mare urine but that's as far as I got
Hmm I don’t know anything about that but people with ovaries have estrogen in their urine, moreso if they’re pregnant. So it’s probably as simple as just extracting the mixed estrogens from from horse urine. From what I’ve found googling, the cancer was caused by mixing premarin with progestin
Yeah that'd be an interesting side product. I would add another 5k or so for purification and testing, in order to validate the purity. You need an effective distribution method. It'd have to be fairly scaled unfortunately.
- Is there any actual known dangers of PFAS in your system other than it never leaves your system?
- Is PFAS hsed in foams that US firefighters sometimes use? If so:
- how often is it used?
- what concentrations would it be?
- If there is a water supply contaminated with PFAS, how bad would that be for people having to drink from it and the general environment?
Yes, they don't degrade so can clog micro fluid pathways, leading to all sorts of here-to-unknown effects. The recorded effects tend to be related to endocrine, liver, and reproductive systems. Unfortunately, the science is only just starting to really get a handle on the specifics in the broader body.
Yes, but I don't know the specifics. It seems to be not overly common, i.e. for specific types of fires, and in very high concentrations.
Pretty much everything is contaminated with PFAS, it's a question of how much. High concentrations are detrimental to people's health, but the wider environmental effects aren't well known.
