As The Toast searches for its one true Gal Scientist, we will be running a ton of wonderful one-off pieces by female scientists of all shapes and sizes and fields and education levels, which we are sure you will enjoy. They’ll live here, so you can always find them. Most recently: Why Are There So Few Female Scientists?
There’s soap in your mayonnaise!
As a scientist with a degree in chemistry, the surge in chemophobia over the last five years has been both baffling and frustrating.
While there are plenty of toxic substances that we should be well frightened of, there are also many safeguards against their use – by and large, the chemicals you encounter in your day-to-day life are benign, even the ones with the scary unpronounceable names and the ones made from substances that can literally chew your face off (sodium chloride, I’m looking at you). But it’s incredibly easy to fall into the trap of common-sense-based marketing. Scientific literature is not exactly reader-friendly, and scientists have a long history of alienating themselves from Normal People.
“Just kicking back with a brewski in my favourite fuck-off flask. What’s with the side-eye?”
There’s one particularly painful tactic which anti-chemical lobbyists love to use, and that is the faulty generalization. You’ve no doubt seen it enough times already…
- “I had the flu vaccine and still got the flu, therefore vaccines don’t work.”
- “This chemical gave rats cancer in a study, we need to take it out of our shampoo/food/clothing!” (Despite the fact that the rats used in these sorts of studies are specifically bred to grow tumors like they’re going out of style, and to receive the amount the rats did, you’d have to mainline a swimming pool’s worth of shampoo/food/clothing every week.)
- “Mineral oil comes from crude oil, therefore you’re rubbing petrol on your face! Use our natural, organic face cream instead, because you know exactly what’s in it.” (Which is ironic, since natural products are notoriously variable in composition.)
- “It contains chemicals! Chemicals are bad.” (Except for the million or so chemicals that you unwittingly use every day to stay alive, like oxygen and water and neurotransmitters, one of which is pretty much MSG dissolved in water.)
To demonstrate how easy it is to make these grand leaps from benign facts to chemophobic, scaremongering argumentum ad Natural News, let me introduce you to my lovely assistant, surfactants, one of my favourite categories of chemicals (yes, chemists all have their favourite chemicals, it’s a disease.)
Chemicals can be roughly divided into two broad categories. On one side are the hydrophiles, which dissolve readily in water, and are highly charged, which lets them interact favourably with other highly charged things – common examples are water, salt, and ethanol (drinking alcohol.) On the other side there are lipophiles, which are oily, and tend to be weakly charged or neutral. The two don’t interact favourably enough to hang out together in a happy stable mix, and despite any amount of violent shaking, they invariably separate and go to their respective sides.
The line between oil and water here is called a phase boundary – a term you might want to casually whip out at your next dinner party. Or not.
Surfactants are magic because they’re essentially the double agents of the chemistry world – a hydrophile and a lipophile chemically bonded into one neat package:
There’s the charged end which dissolves nicely in water and other hydrophilic chemicals, and a long fatty tail, which mingles with oily lipophilic substances. Since the hydrophiles and lipophiles repel each other, there’s a natural drive towards minimal contact. Adding surfactants reduces the repulsion (aka surface tension), which means it actually allows water to dissolve oil, or vice versa (depending on which one you have more of). The surfactant molecules surround the droplets of oil, kind of like a microscopic pin-cushion:
Since they’re such handy molecules, you can find surfactants everywhere. And now for my magic marketing trick! (I mean, illusion.) By simply conflating surfactants and their main use, soap, I will now proceed to warn you that soap is in absolutely everything, and we should all freak the hell out, NOW.
There’s soap in your soap (and detergents)
Soaps and detergents are almost all surfactant – they help lift oil from your skin (or clothes, or dishes) so it washes off into water.
There’s soap in your soap-free foaming cleanser
Believe it or not. Technically, soap is made from a strong alkali reacting with a fat, so as long as one of those components is missing, it can be labelled “soap-free,” regardless of whether it’s harsher or not. (Those “micellar cleaning solutions” contain surfactant too – they’re mild enough to be left on the skin without washing off.)
There’s soap in your mayonnaise…and your ice cream
To mix hydrophilic vinegar and lipophilic oil, the two undergo a frenzied tussle with the surfactant lecithin to form the stable goop that is mayonnaise. It’s the same deal with the dairy fats and water in ice cream – the lecithin stops your ice cream from becoming a field of ice crystals floating on syrupy cream (though that actually sounds like a Blumenthal recipe.) Lecithin occurs naturally in egg yolks. Which brings us to…
There’s soap in your eggs
What the hell do they feed our chickens??
There’s soap in your clothes
Now here’s one that’s actually scary. Lots of delightfully slippery, everything-repellent stuff (Teflon, Scotchgard) is made of fluorosurfactants, which are the same as regular surfactants, except for the replacement of hydrogen atoms with fluorine atoms. The fluorine atoms are the same size, but are very densely surrounded by negatively charged electrons (this is known as electronegativity – fluorine is the most electronegative element). This means that it’s difficult for anything, hydrophile or lipophile, to shove the packed-in electrons around and cause temporary uneven charge (also known as London dispersion forces), making the surface even less easy to stick on. This is the usual situation:
Unfortunately you can’t use this science to explain why homosexuality is wrong. It’s been done, sorry.
The negative charge on the surface of the fluorosurfactant is too dense to displace effectively. It’s not entirely unlike trying to climb a wall made of squishy foam rubber, versus trying to climb a wall made of rendered concrete. This makes the fluorosurfactants’ tail end the complete diva of the chemistry world – too almighty to interact with either hydrophiles or lipophiles.
The polar end of the fluorosurfactant is what sticks it to a surface, covering the object with a bristly everything-repellent carpet and allowing Stephen Fry to enact witchcraft like so:
Now, the scary part – the fluorine atoms make the fluorosurfactants extremely stable, and they persist in the environment without breaking down into simpler substances. This would be fine, except that they’re likely to be pretty damn bad for your kidneys, lungs, reproductive system, endocrine system, and so on. They also bind strongly to proteins, and aren’t easily removed by your body’s natural excretion systems – one of the main offenders, PFOS, has a half-life in the body of over 5 years.
Sleep well.
(The older, more stable fluorosurfactants are currently being phased out in favour of newer, less stable fluorosurfactants – unfortunately, they’re also less effective. )
There’s soap in your lungs
Now for some good news: there are surfactants that we want coating our tender, squishy bodies! Your lungs are basically balloon-like sacks covered in water. Because of how much hydrophilic water loves itself and hates lipophilic air, there’s a lot of surface tension – the water wants to bunch up as much as possible, which translates to your lungs collapsing and requiring a lot of energy to inhale. Luckily, the body naturally synthesises pulmonary surfactants, which decreases water’s tendency to bunch up in the presence of air, allowing much easier breathing. (This is also the reason why you can blow bubbles with soap – the surfactant allows water to stretch, and not go back to the default bunched-up state as quickly as when you try to blow bubbles in water.)
Infant respiratory distress syndrome is a condition where inadequate amounts of pulmonary surfactant are present in a newborn’s lungs, and can be treated by (amongst other things) blowing some extra surfactant down their throats.
Well, actually…
There’s soap everywhere in your body
Every plant and animal cell is bursting with surfactants! Living organisms are complex machines which have both lipophilic and hydrophilic parts, and without surfactants holding us together we would just be one big film of oily goop sitting on top of a puddle of water.
Cell membranes are made up of surfactants known as phospholipids, which are arranged into two surfaces of pinheads facing the water, with a layer of lipophilic goo sandwiched with the lipophilic tails – this arrangement, which is in All Of The Cells, is known as a phospholipid bilayer.
(Actually, I lied – in some crazy bacteria-like microorganisms that live in incredibly harsh conditions called extremophilic archaea, they have a lipid monolayer instead of a bilayer, which is essentially just the two layers squished together with their tails chemically bonded, so the environment doesn’t just rip the microorganism apart like a piece of snotty tissue.)
*
That’s an awful lot of surfactants everywhere! We have the same class of chemical in all our cells as the chemicals synthesised (in a lab!) from petroleum to clean industrial tankers and stabilize toxic paints. It also happens to be from the same family as the naturally produced secretion that lets all the Earth’s creatures breathe vital oxygen. See what I did there? With the clever use of generalisations and vague language, it’s possible to be completely technically correct, while at the same time, implying something completely wrong and scary, or completely wrong and good. One tiny assumption can set off a chain that snowballs into a new Hell dimension of frothing bullshit.
How can you avoid it? Well, the best course of action is to understand the science behind the claim. But unfortunately we don’t all have the time to be completely informed on every aspect of all the products we use in our day-to-day lives. A more practical approach? Learn the basics, and then ask all the questions. Pester, pester, pester. Ask the seller. Ask Google Scholar. Ask your friendly local scientist, who will probably relish the opportunity to wax lyrical to an enthusiastic audience. Ask multiple scientists and watch them battle to help you understand. (I guess what I’m trying to say is, be my friend! I’m useful, sometimes!) Then compare the answers, and see which ones fit together to give a plausible explanation.
And the next time you have to choose between the plain product and the one that sounds like it’s been squirted straight from Mother Nature’s orifices, think about how much of that premium price goes to the marketing department.
Tags: chemicals, chemophobia, gal science, michelle wong, science
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YESSSSSSSSSSSSSS.
(Also, “Sorcery! WITCHCRAFT!” Delightful.)
Burn him!
Standing, applauding. Especially that last line. BAM.
mother nature’s orifices – just in time for earth day!
This one is my gem: “One tiny assumption can set off a chain that snowballs into a new Hell dimension of frothing bullshit.”
I need it stenciled in huge calligraphic letters in strategic places, such as my office door.
Yesssssssssssssss this is great and I was yelling about this JUST THE OTHER DAY. Picturing Bill Nye yelling “everything is made of chemicals!” Thank you for explaining this better so I can just refer people to this post instead of gesticulating wildly.
Also, Alton Brown does a really great emulsion demo with large styrofoam balls and thumb tacks, talking about lecithin and other good things. Between that and your awesome explanation here, I think I may actually understand things now! Off to make mayonnaise and other good things.
Home-made mayo is SO AMAZING. And easy! Happy mayo-making!
Although trying to make mayonnaise out of animal fat is kinda difficult. I almost was successful with a 1:1 ratio of the usual oil (in my case, olive oil) and whatever animal fat you want (in my case, rendered pork fat). However, I really want to try again with duck fat – that sounds absolutely delicious.
See here for recipes and science-y bits and such things: http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-m…
Animal fat mayonnaise. How did I only come across this now.
I KNOW, RIGHT!?
THAT SOUNDS DELICIOUS
1. YES YES YES YES YES THIS ARTICLE FOR EVER AND EVER PLEASE
2. Gal Scientist, will you also teach us how to argue with stupid people who insist on telling stories like “Margarine will kill you because it’s just one molecule removed from motor oil!” or whatever it is, who seem impervious to stories like “yes, well, water is just one molecule removed from hydrogen peroxide, and we can’t live without water and yet you’re not usually supposed to drink hydrogen peroxide, so.” Because I can’t deal with that any more.
3. Also thank you for debunking “If you can’t pronounce it IT’S EVIL” because well, I can only barely pronounce deoxyribonucleic acid, will THAT kill me too?????
Alternately, I think I’m pretty good at pronouncing chemical names. Does that mean I’m safe from chemicals that would hurt other people?
(I’m not sure I always pronounce things correctly, but I’ve never seen someone who judges chemicals by pronounceability suggest that people check their pronunciation, so I should be fine.)
Hmm. Maybe try “butter is one syllable away from butt, so you’re eating poo”?
It’s analogous because bonding is the alphabet of chemistry, and the effect of taking away a molecule (note lack of information about the size of said molecule) can range from taking away a non-essential “in” from “inflammable”, to… well, butts. I also have a bias towards using arguments involving butts.
Blah, I feel like just last week I saw some nonsense floating around about how [thing you thought was safe] contains [chemical], which is the main ingredient of carpet cleaners, foam slides, and airplane fire extinguishers. Stupid bullshit like that, making everyone less informed about the world they live in.
Not entirely on the topic of chemicals, but that’s how I feel every time I see that one infomercial about how you need to take this supplement to make your bowel movements regular or you’ll be carrying around all this “Toxic Fecal Waste!” in your colon, like, that’s what it’s for, dude.
YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SAFE BUT YOU CONTAIN CARBON WHICH IS THE MAIN INGREDIENT OF POOP.
I went to a herb shop yesterday to buy cinchona bark to make my own tonic water, and I had difficulty not bursting out laughing at some of the “natural remedies” there. Like, “this will solve your flatulence/diabetes/blood pressure/inflammation/acne/x/y/z/anything else we can fit on the label” levels of nonsense. Give me my tested chemicals, dammit!
Seriously. I was debating with a coworker who’s all about “natural remedies”/”get all your anti-inflammatory properties from this weed in your yard” and dude, give me lovely, lab-tested, specifically-formulated modern medicine any day.
RIGHT. I will gladly consume your natural herbal remedies, once they have been rigorously tested for dosing, efficacy, interactions and side effects, guaranteed as to uniformity and purity, and followed carefully for late-breaking side effects. Until then I’ll be sticking to stuff that’s, y’know, gone through the review process and been approved by a majority of well-informed professionals.
Ok two things A: How can I make my own tonic water?? and B I love natural stuff as much as the next gal but I love science more. When I see stuff in the natural-goods store that’s like “rub this on your skin it’ll cure your acne with some lavender oil” or whatever, I just thank my lucky stars that I’ve got my super-strength prescription chemicals that actually work.
I’m also a fan of DIY herby stuff, and I feel a strange combination of hilarity and resentment when I have to hand over money to someone standing in front of a stand of homeopathic fancy-water.
Wait, what does a bottle of homeopathic water contain? Besides two whole statistical molecules of H2O?
NATURE.
Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMGIbOGu8q0
Excellent, top-notch post! I love reading about the science of cosmetics, so I will be binge-reading Michelle’s Lab Muffin blog. I also recently came across another lady scientist who blogs about makeup at Brightest Bulb in the Box, for anyone interested.
Micelles in the Toast… my day is made!!!
AND A BILAYER!!! OH MY….
Surface chem was my favorite elective!
Basically I just want to know which dish detergent to buy that isn’t going to harm my friends the fishes. Sodium lauryl/laureth sulfate is in everything and I just can’t seem to get a good answer about whether it’s bad for marine wildlife or not!
I have a slight allergy to SLS and I use this company’s dish and hand soaps. No problems so far, skin-wise, although I’m still weirded out by how the dish soap doesn’t stay sudsy. I know that’s just conditioning from years of being up to my elbows in sudsy dishwater, but still…
I don’t know much about SLS and most of the stuff you find online is probably made-up crap; but I know that for fishtanks, you can generally wash almost anything in a weak bleach solution and it’s safe for most fishes! But, I mean, confirm for your particular case with an expert, which is not me on this particular topic.
I heard plain bleach is actually not the worst for the environment as it breaks down pretty quickly, but all the fragrances and crap that goes into fancy bleach (fancy bleach?) are bad. We are a long way of any claim I might have to expertise tho, this is pretty much hearsay. I’m sorry.
<3 you, bleachie.
I also don’t know anything from an environmentalism standpoint, but you’re almost certainly safe with just a bleach solution bath for sanitizing. The advantage of the soaps is that they help with the food-removal-stage, so get extra-good with your scrubbling behavior/comfortable with small amounts of food-carryover. But like cast iron pans that never touch soap, it can be done.
Can someone science-y expand on/point me towards more information about the whole “rats used in these sorts of studies are specifically bred to grow tumors like they’re going out of style” thing? Does that mean that if a rat in an experiment gets a tumor, could it be completely unrelated to the thing they’re testing?
I find I have less need to understand the conditions of an experiment once I know who funded it.
Most animal studies are done in inbred strains, meaning that over many years scientists have mated littermates until they’re genetically identical. This is very useful because it’s much easier to control experiments and isolate the effects of your gene of interest if the mice or rats are otherwise genetically identical. However, because these strains are inbred they haven’t necessarily inherited the hardiest genes and they’re genetically predisposed to some conditions like cancer.
Furthermore, I haven’t read the specific studies being mentioned but it’s very possible that the scientists used strains that are specifically predisposed to developing tumors. Sometimes when you want to see if a substance is capable of having an effect it’s easier to see the effect if you make the environment for developing the effect more favorable. To try to control for completely unrelated tumors you always use an untreated group of animals and compare the amount of tumor development seen between groups. This controls for the amount of unrelated tumors that would develop outside of the treatment but doesn’t really account for the fact that the animals were already predisposed to tumor development and needed less of a stimulus to develop a tumor than a non predisposed animal. So, even though the effects of unrelated tumor growth are taken out of the conclusion of the study, the amount of tumor growth in the rats is much greater than would be expected in non predisposed rats or humans.
Not to say that using rats that are predisposed to tumor development in these studies is a bad thing, just that you need to take the straight up results from those studies with a grain of salt when determining how much of a chemical you do or do not want to eat.
Thanks, that makes sense.
I don’t have any good links, but off the top of my head, 1) domestic rats in general are really prone to tumors, as anyone who has raised rats has probably had at least one develop some sort of tumor and 2) the strains of laboratory rats used for most of these kinds of experiments are bred to be very tumor-prone, since if something is going to cause tumors in 1 out of 1000 humans, that’s important to know, but you don’t want to have to use thousands of rats to find that link.
Note, while I am a scientist, I don’t do medical research so hopefully someone with more knowledge can correct me if I’m wrong.
Hopefully someone who works with mouse models can chime in (I’m just a science writer), but the National Cancer Institute has some basics, and the < a href=”http://www.epa.gov/iris/carcino.htm”>EPAt; has more on how the translations from animal to human exposure are made. The parallel between mice and humans is not perfect, but researchers aren’t just making it up, either. (As long as we’re talking peer-reviewed research in respectable journals, anyway!) (ETA – And that research isn’t being willfully misinterpreted.)
Not 100% sure if this is what the author is referring to, but some genetically modified animals are designed to develop cancer in response to a particular chemical exposure (<a href=”http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17703211″ target=”_blank”>example), allowing researchers to study how the cancer forms, its genetics, etc. That’s all well and good, but it doesn’t mean that the chemical they use is necessarily a deadly carcinogen in most situations or doses — though I imagine some natural remedies marketers would portray the studies as such.
Ugh, sorry for all the HTML fail there. My internet connection is sucking right now and keeps timing out when I try to edit.
Yerp! One particularly egregious example that irritates me to a ridiculous extent is the really badly designed and now retracted Seralini study, that someone will inevitably mention every time the term “genetically modified” comes up. More deets here and here, but essentially they fed a bunch of rats GMO corn, then published very tweetable photos of tumoury GMO-fed rats in lieu of, you know, RIGOROUS STATISTICAL ANALYSIS (which they couldn’t really do thanks to the small number of rats they used in each condition, but whatever, LOOK AT MY LOVELY RATTY LUMPS), and naturally no photos of the also quite tumoury non-GMO-fed rats.
Also, even if a gene does legitimately affect cancer predisposition, unless it’s a strong tumorigenic driver, you could potentially be sitting around waiting years for your stupid mice to get tumors, so a lot of studies sensitize their mice to already be kind of cancer-prone (e.g., a p53 mutant background).
If you’re interested in the history of mice as model organisms, I recommend Karen Rader’s Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900-1955. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Rader is focused on geneticist C.C. Little and the development of the JAX standardized mouse, originally bred for cancer research and then also used to look at radiation exposure and cancer development. There’s also supposed to be a fabulous book about the history of the Wistar rat, but I can’t remember the title right now, and some quick googling isn’t helping. (Maybe someone else HistSci inclined in the Toast commentariat can help?)
I, for one, would love to be your friend. Thanks for makin’ chemicals fun, Michelle!
So great! Super timely, as it is a weird time to be both a scientist and a hippie. I’m also amazed that you have molecule diagrams, and yet somehow, this is accessible, interesting, & engaging. Well done!
“A scientist and a hippie”
The best thing to be!
Hippie scientists unite. I am also a newish parent and at an age at which a few friends and close friends parents are getting cancer. So much bad science in my life. My tongue, it is sore from the holding and the biting.
I feel you. I have a very beloved friend who is a full naturopath and new mum and while I’m into herbs and nut oils and all that I really cannot take the anti-vac conspiracies.
Anti-vacc is the only discussion I will entertain. I can now relatively politely shoot that shit right down.
Urgh, god, once I was having a conversation with clever people and i said “chemicals” — by which I meant as a shorthand for “harmful chemicals” — and they jumped all over me. GOD YES I KNOW EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS. But then everyone smirked at me for the rest of the evening.
Thanks for all the lovely comments everyone! It’s been a downright pleasure. I also need to thank the endlessly patient Cassie (Reluctant Femme) for not telling me to eff right off when I sent her stuff to proofread at bizarre hours.
LOL! You weren’t nearly as demanding as you seem to think you were 😉
What a perfect rebuttal to the recent online foofaraw about Subway sandwiches being made out of yoga mats that were just used in a Bikram class of Athelete’s Foot sufferers, which would inevitably lead to a new form of hoof in mouth disease. I’m pretty dumb, but come on!
I feel we should be friends!
Also, ooh ooh, let’s have a party in the comments where everyone says their favorite types of compounds! And oh! favorite elements?
(Of course, now I have to think carefully before I can join my own comment party.)
Okay, I’m not letting myself say “magma,” because we’ve covered that already. So, I also have a great fondness for pyroxenes. They’re the very first minerals I synthesized myself!
Elements: oh man oh man, so many. They are all so awesome. But, holy shit, mercury, that is some crazy shit. I have nothing but respect.
Favourite element is a hard one. I’m tempted to go with something sexy and unusual, like mercury (shiny), or unununium (chemical symbol Uuu before they ruined the fun and renamed it), or xenon (noble gas that forms cool compounds), or bismuth (forms super sexy rainbow crystals), but I think I’d have to go with hydrogen for its simple elegance. One proton, one electron; can be metal or non-metal, cation or anion; solvable Schroedinger equation; basis of pH; represented by aesthetically pleasing little white balls in molecular modelling kits; explodes.
*puts on party hat*
Ooh, ooh! Scandium, Gallium, and Germanium are my three favorites. They’re the three “eka-” elements predicted by Mendeleev in his provisional 1869 periodic table, and they’re all named for European countries (or regions–Scandinavia, Galla [i.e. France], and [then newly unified when the element was found in 1886] Germany). So you get Mendeleev being clever, elements with interesting properties (especially Germanium), and late nineteenth century High European Nationalism with a Side of Science!
(Historian of science OUT!)
I have very little science knowledge, but I’m also sort of attached to scandium, because when we had to do a report on an element in the eighth grade it was my assigned element.
Favourite compound is also hard, I have too many! I have a synthetic organic chemistry background, so I have a heavy organic bias, and anything organic and not white or yellow is pretty exciting (azulene! I also made a pink compound once but I think it was actually my red suba seal leaching into it). I get excited when I have to make short peptides because making them is generally a cakewalk. And I think all organic chemists get massive hard-ons when we see any sort of strained cyclic compound, like propellanes or adamantanes or cubanes – I vaguely remember seeing an article about how organic chemists forcibly making structures with angle strain is a form of BDSM, but I may have dreamed it.
I’m taking a bunch of medicines so my kidney transplant can keep chugging along (go kidney! 16 years in June!), and a bunch of them have cool histories. Tacrolimus is one of my two main immunosuppressants, and it was discovered in a fermented soil sample from Japan in 1984; the drug itself is actually a product of a bacteria called Streptomyces tsukubaensis. I also take an ACE inhibitor, and that family of drugs was derived from a compound found in the venom of pit vipers. It just blows my tiny little mind that I’m staying alive and healthy because curious and talented people did things like ferment broth and study snakes and tinker carefully in the lab so they could make lots and /lots/ of these chemicals people needed to get better. GO, SCIENCE.
Tryptophan! It glows in strange ways. And being more of a biochemist I would have to say my fav element is Carbon.
Thank you so much! As a fellow chemist I regularly rip my hair out in exasperation, and you have just given me the perfect example for educating people.
Although I suppose I’m blessed with particularly well-informed friends, as our green chemistry prof asked for experiences on how people react when we tell them we want to work in the chemicals industry. She then proceeded to ignore anything that wasn’t along the lines of “mad scientist in a basement lab” or “breaking bad” or “evil pharma”, just to prove a point. I guess I’m sorry I sometimes talk to open-minded people without any negative perceptions of the chemicals industry?
Thanks for the article-timely and great! I had ‘chemicals=just all stuff don’t be dumb’ drummed into me form an early age; my dad’s an engineer and also tends to ruin scenes in Robin Hood/LOTR by exclaiming ‘those bows would have LOST ALL TENSION by the time he said ‘fire’ and so on. Now, having praised the article, I’m going to do the non-science thing and zero in on the worrying snippet:
Sorry what was that about Teflon? Are slightly flaking non-stick pans ok or not? B/c the fuckers always flake no matter how careful you are with them and I am deeply suspicious.
I just bother Michelle with my inane questions. But I probably shouldn't suggest everyone do that. 😀
Dear Michelle,
thank you for this awesome article.
You wrote:
“Adding surfactants reduces the repulsion (aka surface tension), which means it actually allows water to dissolve oil, or vice versa (depending on which one you have more of).”
Afaik that’s not quite right. Whether water dissolves oil or vice versa depends on which one you dissolve your surfactant with. Theoretically (I don’t know up to which amount technically) you can produce an oil-in-water emulsion with 99 percent of oil in it if only you dissolve the surfactant with oil. This works vice versa.
That’s really interesting! Thanks for the correction 🙂
Dear Michelle,
thank you for this awesome article.
You wrote:
"Adding surfactants reduces the repulsion (aka surface tension), which means it actually allows water to dissolve oil, or vice versa (depending on which one you have more of)."
Afaik that's not quite right. Whether water dissolves oil or vice versa depends on which one you dissolve your surfactant with. Theoretically (I don't know up to which amount technically) you can produce an oil-in-water emulsion with 99 percent of oil in it if only you dissolve the surfactant with oil. This works vice versa.
Why is the article called “Gal Science”?
That is actually the title of our ongoing series showcasing female scientists.
I have looked up Lab Muffin and I think that will be really informative on these subjects. Because this is something I could really use for work (science librarian w/o a science background) I'm always looking to build some kind of knowledge base that I neglected to get in school. Unfortunately the most effective ways of doing that usually involve going back to school/spending $$$. 🙁 But asking questions of Michelle and other experts can only help, I know. So (this is a long-winded) thank you!
So I absolutely agree about all the scare-mongering. But on the other hand, we (in the reality-based community) have this tendency to look at one or two studies that say that something is safe or effective, almost always done by a company with a huge vested interest in proving that thing is safe or effective, and saying, ‘ha ha ha you idiots how could you have imagined otherwise?’ When those who don’t actually have a vested interest rarely have the money to do such a study. And when they finally do, it turns out that hey, that thing wasn’t safe, or wasn’t effective, or whatever.
An example: pseudoephedrine (sudafed) is a very effetive decongestant, but it is hard to get now (because people use it to make meth, so you have to stand in line for it at a pharmacy etc). Companies mostly changed the formulation of their medications to use a different substance instead, phenylephrine. It was originally approved as a nasal spray, but is now in use as a tablet, despite the fact that every study run on it that was NOT funded by a manufacturer has found no difference between it and a placebo. But you bring this up in ‘reality-based’ company and you often get accused of being a weirdo, lunatic, fringey anti-science type. Because STUDIES were done. They had to be done. It was approved as an OTC drug!
Another example, one that hits closer to home for this article: there have been a couple supposedly ‘definitive’ studies of MSG, each one proving that MSG has no effect when compared to placebo. There have been several that ‘proved’ that it did, but those were mostly terrible studies, not worth the science they were printed on, often because funding for such studies is very hard to come by but also often because the people trying to prove that are fringey types with questionable or outright awful scientific credentials.
But here’s the thing: just because all of the people on one side are cranks doesn’t mean that the studies on the other side are great. If you look at one of them, it was designed as a double-blind study… good, so far. They gave the dose to people, and recorded reactions to it later. But here’s the thing: their analysis was that someone only showed a ‘reaction’ if they reported two or more symptoms (headache, bloating, dizziness, etc). And if you look at the actual data, the reason they chose to require two or more symptoms was because there was a small but possibly significant (it’s right on the edge, and I don’t have enough confidence in my own ability to calculate confidence levels to know which way it tips) correlation between MSG and a reaction, if you only require one symptom. Apparently they didn’t want that result.
Another of the definitive studies was pretty good, but their sample size quite small and did not include a single person who indicated that they thought they were sensitive to MSG. If we hypothesize that people who are sensitive to MSG mostly figure that fact out, then one would expect the results of this to be negative: a small sample size would be unlikely to capture the unusual case of someone who was sensitive but did not know it.
So far as I know there has never been a credible (i.e. not ridiculously biased and poorly run by known MSG-haters and designed exclusively to get a positive result) study on migraine sufferers, which are those who most often report that they are MSG-sensitive. And yet you see actual mockery of people who claim to be MSG-sensitive, by people who have not actually bothered to look into the science, and just assume that because there are cranks on one side, the other side must be right.
Another example of this might be illuminating: the consensus among ‘the smart people’ was that it was ridiculous to think that antidepressants might cause suicide, and that any reports to the contrary were just anecdotal, correlated but not causative. Until suddenly there were a few good studies, and hey look… they do.
It’s a tricky balance, avoiding both easy routes of “everything is bad for you” and “everything is fine for you”. Taking everything on a case-by-case basis is the only way to go, to avoid harming yourself and other people… but it does take an awful lot of effort.
For what it’s worth, almost everyone I know who has a pharmacological background agrees with the fact that phenylephrine is pretty useless (and if you go to a pharmacy and forget which one is which, asking for “the one that actually works” will get you pseudoephedrine without further questions most of the time).
I'm currently teaching senior high school chemistry in Australia, and I've taught first year university chemistry as well. I think senior high school chemistry is a good level to master – first year is great of course, but a lot of the course will involve being able to do calculations, which isn't that useful for a non-practicing chemist. In my opinion, textbooks are quite difficult to wade through, especially if you're more of a visual learner (chemistry is one of those subjects that lends itself really well to animations), so if you have the time and bandwidth I would point you towards YouTube. TED-Ed and CrashCourse have some really great video explanations of the basics. CrashCourse has more of a structured approach, and it's engaging and passionate, so I think that would be a great place to start – their Chemistry playlist is here.
I've done some Coursera courses but I haven't looked at any chemistry courses yet, so I can't help on that front!
Thank you so much! This is exactly the type of thing I was looking for.
This one is my gem: "One tiny assumption can set off a chain that snowballs into a new Hell dimension of frothing bullshit."
I need it stenciled in huge calligraphic letters in strategic places, such as my office door.
Love it!! I myself am a Food Scientist, and I come across this every day. Thanks for a great article. I’m off to have a sandwich made out of yoga mat chemicals!