So you are worried about aspartame or a little Red #3 in your food? You know what you would have to worry about back in the early years of the 19th century? A little strychnine in the beer. A...
I must admit I’m not sure if the woman is just an intellectual simpleton or a clever charlatan preying on the gullible. I suspect the former. In any case, here is the story. Upon invitation, and...
Like most chemists, I like to cook. After all, what is cooking but the appropriate mixing of chemicals? In the lab we use flasks and beakers, but how do we equip our kitchen? Tiffany's in New...
The common word in French for dental fillings is “plombage”, which may sound a little surprising since it roughly translates to “to fill with lead”. That is because if you had a cavity in France in...
It’s probably not news to anyone reading this that lead exposure is dangerous, but when most of us think of routes to lead exposure we think of leaded gasoline, paints, drinking water or pencils ...
Pencils do not contain any lead, and they never did! The mistake in terminology can be traced back to the ancient Romans who drew lines on papyrus using pieces of actual lead, all the while not...
Glass is made by heating sand and then allowing it to cool down. Sand, or silicon dioxide, has a highly ordered arrangement of its silicon and oxygen atoms. In other words, it has a well-defined...
It’s hard for us here in North America to believe that gold is killing hundreds of children in Nigeria. Well, it isn’t exactly the gold that is killing them, it is the lead oxide and lead carbonate...
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