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From Valley Forge to the Lab: Parallels between Washington's Maneuvers and Drug Development3 weeks ago in The Curious Wavefunction
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Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.3 weeks ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
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Course Corrections5 months ago in Angry by Choice
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
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The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
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Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
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A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
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Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
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Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
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Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
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WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
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post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
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Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
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Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
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The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
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Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
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Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
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Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
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in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
The weight of water
While writing a piece for Nature Chemistry about the hidden depths of the periodic table (the more than 3000 isotopes that could be stacked onto their elemental spots), I wandered across an interesting set of papers on heavy water and isotopic tracing, which led to another piece for Nature Chemistry (The weight of water). In one of the papers, future Nobelist George de Hevesy deuterates goldfish by crowding some twenty (albeit tiny) goldfish into 60 ml of water, in another he reports making thousands of distillations of urine to recapture the water, measure its density and track deuterium through the human body.
Heavy water (D2O) is water where the hydrogens have been replaced with deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen that weighs about twice as much as standard hydrogen. Heavy water weighs just over 10% more than regular water, a tablespoon weighs only about a gram more, so it is probably not noticeable should you heft a glass of it.
And that's the question — should you heft a glass of it? In small amounts it is certainly safe to drink, and as I recently learned, used in human metabolic studies in doses of about 10 ml. An interesting question raised in the papers I read was about the taste of heavy water. One report suggests a burning sensation might be felt when drinking it, another (by Harold Urey, who discovered deuterium) suggests it tastes like undeuterated water. But other reports say it tastes sweet.
With a bit of help from my youngest son, I set up a repeat of Urey's blind taste test. And was surprised to find I could indeed taste the difference. It is sweet.
And for the next few weeks, until the last of the extra deuterium clears my systems, I'll be just a little bit heavier than usual.
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