7 ms·
> Form II was of sufficiently lower energy that it became impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form II was introduced, even indirectly. Scientis
by colanderman 3y ago
> Form II was of sufficiently lower energy that it became impossible to produce Form I in any laboratory where Form II was introduced, even indirectly. Scientists who had been exposed to Form II in the past seemingly contaminated entire manufacturing plants by their presence, probably because they carried over microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph.
If someone told me this entire article was fabricated I would believe them. I would never have thought that such trace amounts of… everything one has ever shared a room with, essentially follow them everywhere dispersing as they go. Chemistry is wild.
- uoaei 3y agoJust wait til you hear about car tires and microplastics!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- greggsy 3y agoNot really relevant?
- uoaei 3y agoThe relevant part: > I would never have thought that such trace amounts of… everything one has ever shared a room with, essentially follow them everywhere dispersing as they go. Everywhere you drive, you leave behind microplastics as particulate. These are washed into waterways and end up in aquatic ecosystems, including the seafood you eat. There's also some small enough to be airborne, thus prone to inhalation by humans and other animals.[1] Particulate production from road wear increases with the fourth power of the weight of the vehicle.[2] One has to assume by Newton's third law that the same is true of tires. Tires and roads are made of petroleum-based materials, i.e., they produce microplastics. This means a car twice as heavy (e.g. EVs vs ICE cars in the same form factor) produces sixteen times as much particulate matter. This also means that typical cars emit a minimum of four million times as much particulate as bicycles. E-bikes emit 10 times as much particulate as bicycles. Microplastics cling to everything, that's just the nature of particulate. So they follow you everywhere. [1] https://www.wbcsd.org/Sector-Projects/Tire-Industry-Project/Resources/Tire-Road-Wear-Particles-Papers https://www.wbcsd.org/Sector-Projects/Tire-Industry-Project/... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
- x3c 3y agoReminds me of ice-nine from Cat's Cradle.
- KapKap66 3y agoThis is mentioned directly in the wiki article!
- Benjaminsen 3y agoThis happens with protein folding in the body as well, leading to prion diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Once the badly folding protein is introduced there is no way back. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/prion-diseases https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseas...
- H8crilA 3y agoJust wanted to add two things: 1) the so-called mad cows disease is also caused by prions - that's why it is so scary, 2) cannibalism, or any other loop in the food chain, causes retention and amplification of such diseases in a population.
- joshuaissac 3y agoAlso scrapie, which is the sheep version of mad cow disease. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrapie > In Iceland in 1978, a program was implemented to eradicate scrapie, and affected flocks were culled, premises were disinfected, and sheep houses were burnt; after two to three years, the premises were restocked with lambs from scrapie-free areas. Between 1978 and 2004, scrapie recurred on 33 farms. Nine recurrences occurred 14–21 years after culling as a result of persistent environmental contamination with PrPSc. A human variant transmissible through cannibalism is Kuru (against which the locals have developed some resistance): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) > In 2009, researchers at the Medical Research Council discovered a naturally occurring variant of a prion protein in a population from Papua New Guinea that confers strong resistance to kuru. [...] G127 polymorphism is the result of a missense mutation, and is highly geographically restricted to regions where the kuru epidemic was the most widespread. Researchers believe that the PrnP variant occurred very recently, estimating that the most recent common ancestor lived 10 generations ago.
- gpderetta 3y agoAlso Fatal Insomnia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_insomnia . Stuff of nightmares.
- cyberax 3y ago> microscopic seed crystals of the new polymorph. "Microscopic" is also a mischaracterization. Apparently, just a few _hundred_ atoms can act as a seed. This is a "nanoscopic" quantity.