You are also likely to find vinegar in your store cupboard acting as a preservative. While brine can be used in pickling, the most popular approach for picking vegetables is to use vinegar, which ironically, given its bacterial origins, has the role of killing bacteria to preserve otherwise perishable food.
This tart liquid has also found its way onto the medicine shelves in a range of traditional cures and treatments, perhaps on the basis that anything that is shocking to the taste buds should be good for taking on disease.
It was originally used widely to treat infections and is still used to reduce the pain of jellyfish stings. For those who are encouraged by the term 'natural' on a household product, vinegar can also be a useful cleaner to remove grease and mineral deposits and to de-rust iron. And to find out the chemistry enabling this wide range of uses for vinegar, join Brian Clegg in next week's Chemistry in its element. Until then, thank you for listening, I'm Meera Senthilingam.
Promo Chemistry in its element comes to you from Chemistry World , the magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry and is produced by thenakedscientists dot com. There are more compounds that count on our website at chemistryworld dot org slash compounds. End promo. A DNA researcher tells the story of how humans have shaped the evolution of living things on Earth.
Site powered by Webvision Cloud. Skip to main content Skip to navigation. Related audio. Book club — Deep Sniff by Adam Zmith. Book club — Lessons from Plants by Beronda Montgomery. Meera Senthilingam This week, beware of the poison lurking in the plant beneath you. There are some steps you can take if you get to a hospital immediately; for ingestion, a stomach pump can sometimes prevent the ricin from reaching the rest of the gastrointestinal system at its full force.
Well, that depends on what your aim is. Ricin is much easier to produce than other popular biological weapons like botulinum , sarin, and anthrax, but it is not as potent as any of those, which limits its effectiveness as a weapon. It also is not very long-lived; the protein can age and become inactive fairly quickly compared to, say, anthrax , which can remain dangerous for decades. Well… no. Like, not at all. Chromatography is a blanket term for a set of techniques used to separate mixtures, usually by dissolving in liquid or gas.
The techniques involved are undergraduate-level chemistry, creating a slurry with the castor bean mash and filtering with water and then a few easily-found substances like hydrochloric acid. Ah, yes. Castor oil is perfectly safe, according to the FDA and your grandma, but ricin is not castor oil. The first thing you need to know about making Ricin is that it is very deadly. Place 2 oz of hot water in a glass jar and add one teaspoon of lye, mix thoroughly. Wait for the lye mixture to cool. Place 2 oz of castor beans into the liquid and let them soak for an hour.
Pour the liquid out taking care not to get any on your skin. Rinse the beans off with cool water and remove outside layer of bean with tweezers. Place the bean in a blender with 4 oz of acetone for every 1 oz of beans. Blend until completely mixed or a milky substance. Place in air tight jar for approximately 3 days. After three days shake jar to mix thoroughly and drain through a coffee filter. Throw away the liquid portion. Make sure to squeeze the bean portion so that all the acetone is out of the mixture.
Spread on pan covered with newspaper and let it dry. The final Ricin should be free of acetone and contaminants. The product should look like a powder when complete. Once again, someone appears to have sent envelopes stuffed with ricin to the government.
The tests need to be confirmed, but two suspicious letters to the Pentagon were caught in an off-site mail screening. No one was exposed. The same person is also reported to have sent letters to Senator Ted Cruz and to the White House, though the contents of those have not been confirmed to contain ricin. Ricin is a deadly toxin extracted from castor beans, and the directions for making it are no more than a Google search away.
The process takes only a few days, and it requires equipment no more complicated than a coffee filter and chemicals you can buy in a hardware store.
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