A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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Reminds me on this chemist joke:
A man brought his chemist friend to the bar for a drink with the other friends. When asked what he wanted, the chemist decided that since she's the designated driver, she'll order water. "I'll have some H20, please!" the chemist said, with the man replying "I'll have some H20 too!"
The man died of ingesting hydrogen peroxide.
And the joke's alternative anti joke punchline:
The bartender served them both water, because he fully understands everyday human interaction and translated the request as intended.
Well, for as much as you use the chemical formula for water in your everyday human interactions, anyway
The bartender didn't mind, since he has a sense of humor and understood he worked in an entertainment facility where people derive fun from saying and doing goofy things with friends and acquaintances, and this isn't even be the weirdest thing he has heard a patron say this week.
Little Billy was a chemist
Little Billy is no more
For what he thought was H2O
Was H2SO4
I've heard it as:
Little Billy took a drink, of which he'll drink no more.
For what he thought was H2O was H2SO4.
I love the sequel to that one, too. Same set up. ... The first man orders H20 The second man says "why would you say that? It's incredibly pretentious, and you look like a jerk. Just order water." The first man frowns and sulks because his murder plot has been foiled.
"I'll have some H20, please!" the chemist said
To which the bartender replied "I'm sorry, but we don't have icosatomic hydrogen"
For those interested in learning about uranium peroxide: https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Uranium-peroxide
Suprisingly mild and not very reactive. And I wondered if this even exists.
Uranium - it makes things safer!
Thanks. I was wondering if it was a liquid or not. Crystaline solid.
Ok, but definitely don't drink it if it's liquid then.
Thanks for saying that saved me a click
it is a confirmed human carcinogen.
See, that's the good stuff
Sweet, a yellow cake dispenser! It's strangely difficult to acquire
Don't want to drink pure H₂O either...
No? What would it be like?
Probably tasting remarkably bland and would likely mess with your electrolyte and mineral levels.
Isn't it just distilled water?
Like in the other comments, you can drink distilled water as long as you only drink a "normal amount".
It's still an interesting thing to know, that you actually starve when drinking large quantities of distilled water (well, in theory since you have other stuff in your body that enriches the water with minerals anyway).
Through osmosis the cells on your mucosae will try to equalise the mineral content between the water and themselves. But since distilled water has no minerals they will take in so much water that they burst.
If you would drink liters and liters of distilled water, the cells responsible for taking in minerals will all be gone and you starve long-term.
Short-term you die from organ failure anyway, with your body desperately trying to keep in the minerals. This is the same as the good old water intoxication. Just that you reach that threshold faster with distilled water.
I have such a hard time believing the absence of trace minerals in distilled water is dangerous as to be deadly.
And I'm not talking that bullshit drank 5gallons thru a funnel than took a bath in it outlier, that is entirely unhelpful.
A normal person drinking 2 liters of distilled water is going to have no serious effect from it. A forkful of spinach has more of those trace minerals than 55gallons of water.
Imma go ahead and put this in the file with alkaline water and Japanese H²O that got its feelings hurt.
it causes cells to burst.
if you have extra cells for bursting then you'll be fine.
My biology teacher told me the same...
it basically is, although most distilled water does contain a small amount of contaminants, so it would likely not count as cemically pure.
as for drinking it: i've found this article, according to which you shouldnt expect health problems, provided you eat a healthy diet. As most minerals we consume come from our food, not the water.
then again it supposedly tastes bland, is more expensive than tap water (provided your tap water is safely drinkable) and why even take the risk?
"Purified water is water that has been mechanically filtered or processed to remove impurities and make it suitable for use. Distilled water was, formerly, the most common form of purified water, but, in recent years, water is more frequently purified by other processes including capacitive deionization, reverse osmosis, carbon filtering, microfiltration, ultrafiltration, ultraviolet oxidation, or electrodeionization. Combinations of a number of these processes have come into use to produce ultrapure water of such high purity that its trace contaminants are measured in parts per billion (ppb) or parts per trillion (ppt). "
It is and you shouldn't drink it. At least not a lot of it or for a long time, otherwise your electrolytes could get to low. And while I don't remember the specifics(biology class was like 15 years ago), I think that can make the osmosis between your cells and your blood not work anymore or even reverse.
It will damage your skin and mucous membranes. Pure H2O is quite reactive and will drain minerals from the environment. If your body is such an environment, it will get minor damages.
I mean, unless I'm missing something it should be fine as long as you get salts another way.
Correct. I have no idea why people are freaking out over drinking water. We constantly eat and drink things that have wildly different osmolarity than our cells and yet here we still are. Our stomach and intestinal mucosa cells are not going to burst if we accidentally drink a milkshake (a hyperosmotic solution).
Going to link the comment of @ParsnipWitch@feddit.de, as that's a better explanation than I could have provided: https://feddit.de/comment/2620197
So exactly what I said. Balance it with other salts and you're fine. Most water doesn't have enough salts to balance your system anyway, that's called saline, and you would notice if you drank it.
Pure water is fine and will have no significant difference to any given generally safe tap water.
The relevant part is that distilled water + osmosis makes cells burst. So, we're talking about tiny injuries, not just some mineral inbalance.
As far as I understand, once it's in your stomach, it'll get dilluted and then it really is just water with too few minerals. But on the way into your stomach, it can cause damage.
We likely don't have scientific data on how much/frequently you'd have to drink it for the body to not counter-heal enough. But yeah, just don't drink distilled water.
OK let's break this down.
Distilled water will not in fact do any of this at a tiny l level. For one, again, the difference between distilled water and tap water in terms of osmolarity is actually pretty much insignificant.
For two, your mouth, and esophagus have mucus linings making this entirely moot as far as water is concerned.
For three, distilled water is far and away the least stressful thing your body ever deals with, eating something even moderately salty is far far more "dangerous" to your cells than drinking distilled water. Ever eat a potato chip?
Third, your cells actively resist osmotic pressure changes as necessary. You have to go pretty hard and actually change the salinity of your blood to have any noticeable effects.
Fourth, your cells are actively being replenished with good salinity blood.
Fifth, we are very insensitive to salinity changes in our blood. Blood salinity shifts quite a bit and regularly throughout the day.
Sixth, a benefit of being a multicellular organism is that we don't care much about any individual cell. Your mouth cells die and are replenished nearly the fastest of any set of tissue in the body. Your mouth in general is very much built to handle all sorts of harsh conditions. Chemically distilled water is nothing. I guarantee you 100% that if you drank distilled water every day for your entire life, and made sure to eat a normal diet which was not extremely low in salts, you would be fine.
Let's discuss non multicellular organisms for a moment as well: the salinity of fresh water is very low. That's the point of distinguishing it. Plenty of organisms live just fine in it. If you drank those organisms, many of them could also get you sick, as in live inside you, a pool of water with much higher salinity. Cells have ways to maintain homeostasis and respond to their environment. That's literally what they do.
No I don't think there is research on this specific subject. Are you starting to see why there isn't much worry on microdosing distilled water?
wouldn't it be dihydrogen peroxide?
I believe that would be H2O2?
H2O4 would be Tetraoxidane if I’m not mistaken, but neither of those takes into account the U (Uranium) at the end there.
Of course, I don’t know much about how things would go beyond production, they may reach with each other and ultimately settle into something else.
I learned a rhyme once that's relevant:
Danny was a scientist, but now he is no more, for what he thought was H2O, was H2SO4
This must be what Nuka-Cola is made of.