The thread for mad (aka amateur or hobby) science!

[Bootstoots]

I'll start with a definition of mad science. Mad science is scientific tinkering and experimentation done on an amateur basis, without direct support from institutions like academia, government, industry, etc. Not all mad scientists are amateurs IRL, but they also do their own experiments on their own time, limited only by their (typically) shoestring budget and (hopefully) any laws applicable to whatever they're doing.

Just because an experiment is done by amateurs doesn't mean it's conducted in a non-rigorous way, within the limitations of whatever you can acquire. It also doesn't mean it can't be sophisticated: for instance, the people at Fusor.net make fusors, in which they do D-D fusion by smashing deuterium nuclei together in self-constructed vacuum chambers at high voltage (20-80 kV), and then measuring the number of neutrons that are produced. At Sciencemadness.org, people learn chemistry by doing it at home, and some of their experiments can be quite involved. It is true, sadly, that the days of people making important discoveries in modest home labs are for the most part long gone, but that shouldn't stop people from learning things that are new to them.

As some of you know from the Raves threads, my hobby is playing around with sciencey things at home and doing a bunch of experiments, just for curiosity's sake. As some of you know from the Rants thread, the FBI showed up a month ago, because making a bunch of chemical purchases is a good way to get Big Brother's attention. While it was clear they were convinced I am a (relatively) harmless eccentric rather than a meth cook or a bomb maker, they did let the fire department know, and the fire department made me get rid of most of my fun chemicals, with special emphasis on the several gallons of flammable solvents I had lying around the apartment in a big plastic bin. Still, I learned a lot, and now I'm back to an old project of mine that doesn't involve anything flammable. It involves polonium instead. Legal polonium!

I'll talk more about my experiments, past and present, in later posts. This thread is for anyone to discuss any mad science they have done, and to talk or ask about what might be possible. You're also welcome to share any non-mad scientific experience you may have, ranging from lab exercises in school to "real" research.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I don't do mad science stuff, but I hear about it from time to time. The 21 year old son of a friend of mine got interested in 3D printing a few of years ago. He now has a working, five axis printer that prints carbon fiber.

 

[Glassfan]

The term "Mad Scientist" has traditionally been used to describe insane (Frankenstein) or criminal (Mengele) scientists or their activities - usually resulting in death or atrocity. If you mean amateur scientist you should say so.

 

[Bootstoots]

I'm stealing from Science Madness's definition of mad science, which I explain in the first paragraph, but I'll edit the title to avoid confusion.

edit: Title edited, and also it's been a really busy summer so I've not managed to post any writeups like I had planned. They're coming eventually but not for a while longer.

 

[Glassfan]

Thanks for that.

My only experience of hobby-science was with chemistry sets as a kid. Naturally the only real experiments for boys in those days (1960's) was making gunpowder. Which is probably why they don't sell them in our risk-averse society today.

 

[Ferocitus]

Dear Sir/Madam:
I hope that this is sufficiently crackpotty for this thread. If not, I would be happy
to put some words in ALL CAPS, and to discuss how the same hidebound
reactionaries that imprisoned Galileo also conspired to impede my immensely
valuable contribution to science.

Now, read on...

About 30 years ago my colleague (Brian) and I wanted to test some ideas we had
about Vertical Axis Wind Turbines. Lacking any funding, Brian thought that we
could get some useful data by mounting a scaled down version on top of a car
and then driving up and down a straight piece of road at different (constant)
speeds on a still day. We logged the results on some equipment we managed to
beg and borrow from friends.

Crackpot Brian, already a clever, innovative civil engineer, eventually got a PhD
out of the research we did over the next 10 years. I ended up teaching myself
aerodynamics while staying home with a baby my wife had about 3 months after
this photo was taken.

The Enb.
(not really: there's a lot more but that's enough for now.)

 

[Bootstoots]

That's really cool. I hear a major problem with vertical wind turbines is that they're bird-killing machines (much worse than regular wind turbines) and hard to maintain. But it's great that you managed to collect data on that over 30 years ago.

Aerodynamics, and fluid dynamics in general, is tough - I don't know much about it myself. I took a course on meteorological aerodynamics, but I can't say I learned much other than how difficult the Navier-Stokes equations are to solve and how hard it is to do partial differential equations on a 3D rotating sphere. Somehow I got an A or A-, but that's just because the professor was a softy with curved grades, and everyone else found it really difficult to do PDEs on a rotating sphere too.

As for actual crackpots, I'd prefer if we not get any in this thread, but would certainly not be surprised if we do. There are a lot of people out there who desperately want to find out some profound revelation about the world, like a grand unified theory in physics or a proved theorem in math, and the fraction who can delude themselves into thinking they can actually be the next Einstein or Newton end up babbling arcane nonsense all over the place.

One thing I find really unsatisfying is that most of the problems that can be solved by amateurs working independently have been solved already, and doing academic research these days involves finding some minuscule detail and zeroing in on it for years. I tend to prefer breadth to depth, so I've learned enough to be a dilettante in all sorts of things but make a really terrible grad student or specialist of any sort. In fact I'm supposed to be doing research right now for a paper whose deadline is really soon. I should really go do that now.

I'd have made a good scientist in the 19th century (assuming I'd be a white man born into personal wealth or with a wealthy sponsor, and not dying of diphtheria or something, of course), but I'm a terrible one in the 21st, which is why I'm going to write an MS thesis and get out of here rather than continuing to do a PhD as I'd originally planned. Instead I just do 19th and 20th century experiments to teach myself things and don't care about contributing anything original, while running myself into terrible amounts of student debt that is literally for educational purposes, but not for anything related to actually-existing academia.

I'll probably become a community college instructor or something, which pays peanuts but at least allows me to teach adults about things I understand (even if it's mostly basic algebra, because our K-12 educational system sucks so badly that a bunch of people graduate without being able to do any math). The debt won't be so bad because it's capped at 15% of income above 1.5x the poverty line and will be forgiven when I'm in my mid-50s should I continue to be a pauper then, because I totally know about the existence of income-based repayment.

Okay, back to running computer simulations.

 

[Ferocitus]

They are probably no better or worse than other wind turbines with regard to
bird kills. Many birds have established, or patterned flight paths so they can
sometimes hit any new object erected in the path. VAWT tend to operate at lower
rotational speeds (formally tipspeed ratios) than horizontal axis wind turbines
(HAWT) - the propeller type - so VAWT by tend to club birds rather than chop and
slice them. Eeeeeuuw!

I tend to prefer breadth to depth, so I've learned enough to be a dilettante in
all sorts of things but make a really terrible grad student or specialist of any
sort. In fact I'm supposed to be doing research right now for a paper whose
deadline is really soon. I should really go do that now.

I hated University. I liked the drinking, drugs and the social aspects, but the
formal lecture structure didn't suit me, which is why I never managed to finish
an under-grad degree. I was very lucky that the Professor here didn't care about
that and asked me to work with him after he read some papers I had published.
After 15 years of pestering me to do a PhD he said he could get me a scholarship
so, being able to subsist comfortably on next to no money, I did it. A year
before finishing he retired, and rubbing his hands with glee, he told me that
now that he had no administrative duties we could really get some research
done. 6 months later he developed a virulent form of prostate cancer and died
about 6 months later. That was desperately sad for all concerned.

I understand what you are saying about the minutiae of some research. When I
first met my Prof, it was to ask for advice on the VAWT. He laughed and said
that for most of his career he had been trying to understand how a single wing,
at constant angle of attack worked, and here I was spinning several around at
high speed. "What a useless nerd", I thought.

30 years later and retired, I'm working on my favourite problem: a single flat,
thin circular wing and trying to get >100 decimal places for the lift
coefficient and wing tip singularity strength!

There are hidden depths in some of those seemingly simple problems. They require
a lot of tools and knowledge that one accumulates over many years. So don't be
quite so dismissive. I believe that very little that you learn over time is
wasted. Some of it can be used to avoid starting down fruitless avenues; other
seemingly useless knowledge you've acquired can be used in different ways to what
ws originally intended. Young people can't do that as easily: that's not a cheap
shot at "Millenials" or GenXers - it's just a physical impossibility in the time
they have been in the research racket.

All the best with your pursuits! I hope that your dilletantism eventually leads
to a novel way to discover something important by combining your particular
disparate interests, something nobody else could possibly have done.

 

[Ferocitus]

Thanks for that.

My only experience of hobby-science was with chemistry sets as a kid. Naturally the only real experiments for boys in those days (1960's) was making gunpowder. Which is probably why they don't sell them in our risk-averse society today.

Who needs a chemistry set from a store?

I never made actual gunpowder, but I made a lot of things that nearly killed me
from ages 10 to 17.

Without too many details (for obvious reasons).

Boltbombs: shaving the red end of matches into a nut between two 6 inch bolts
and throwing them down hard onto concrete. One bolt whistled passed my ear and
I found it about 50 yards away.

Mixing potassium permanganate and some other stuff I'd read about, sealing the
concoction in a paint tin and putting in into a forty-four gallon drum we used
as an incinerator on a vacant block next door. Nothing happened for about an
hour so I went home. When it exploded I heard the sound of shrapnel all along the
corrugated iron fence separating our place from the block. When I went back the
only thing left was the bottom of the drum.

The first time I left home I was about 14. I lived on a building site of a house
that a friend's brother was renovating. I was cold one night so to light a fire
in a large drum of timber scraps I mixed some magnesium powder, aluminium powder
with potassium nitrate that I thought I could make cool fireworks with one day.
I was smart enough (Ok, ok, I know!) to throw the lit match from about a foot
away. Almost 45 years later, I still get a slightly blue circular patch on
the back of my hand in cold weather where the amazing, blinding white flash took
the skin off.

I was an IV drug user for a couple of years from ages 16-17. That's where
amateur chemistry combined with myths and half-baked ideas really gets weird.
I learned to always have an excuse ready to leave somebody's house the moment
you hear someone say something like: "I reckon this could work".

The Enb.

 

[Bootstoots]

Nobody needs a chemistry set from a store, and most chemistry sets are pretty lame due to paranoia about toxic chemicals and explosions and the like. It's much better and easier to source things from eBay and whatnot. Glassware can be cheaply bought from China and most common chemicals are pretty cheap and readily available as well. Of course the FBI might eventually show up, but they turned out to be surprisingly nice in my case.

Definitely never make explosives in more than 1-gram quantities, or use anything you make as a drug. I once made a few drops of nitroglycerin and set it off with a hammer; the explosion was loud enough to cause hearing loss for the rest of the day, teaching me a valuable lesson about wearing earplugs. I made a few thermites too, but nothing that didn't fit in a small graphite crucible. t'd really recommend avoiding explosives in general. Not that this is what a teenager wants to hear - they tend to be in it for the loud bangs rather than any actual chemistry. Ditto meth cooks, except the explosions there tend to be unintentional

 

[Ferocitus]

The development of the VAWT continued when we decided to see how they would
work in water. Again, lack of funding made testing physical models difficult.
I only do the mathematical modelling; the engineer does the physical work and
risks his fingers being mashed in the mechanism. (ProTip: That's what engineers
are for!)

Again, Brian found some innovative ways around the difficulties.

First cut: buy a cheap little catamaran and mount the turbine between the
demihulls. Messy flow, messy results!

Plan B: Find a mate in Canada with a decent size boat and tow the turbine behind
it. If all else fails, hey, trip to Canada!

Eventually we did get some funding and sold a patent for a device that controlled
the pitching of the blades.

The key, fellow amateurs and crackpots is confidence and persistence. Oh, and
have a good idea worth persisting with.

Part of the patent agreement was that I was not to work on turbines for anyone
for a year. At the same time I was also paid by someone else to not work on
designing rowing shells for anybody for a year. I miss those days - I can not
work on a huge number of things if people would just pay me!

 

[Ferocitus]

I'll probably become a community college instructor or something, which pays peanuts but at least allows me to teach adults about things I understand (even if it's mostly basic algebra, because our K-12 educational system sucks so badly that a bunch of people graduate without being able to do any math). The debt won't be so bad because it's capped at 15% of income above 1.5x the poverty line and will be forgiven when I'm in my mid-50s should I continue to be a pauper then, because I totally know about the existence of income-based repayment.

I recently re-watched an interview with Jim Simons, who also lamented the
parlous state of maths education in the US.

If I was young, and idealistic enough to teach, I'd find some way to use games
like Civ, Minecraft, or any other similarly complicated game as a vehicle.

Maybe there's some grants for a Civ player/maths teacher you could try to get!

Okay, back to running computer simulations.

Don't leave us guessing. What are you simulating (instead of playing Civ)?

 

[Bootstoots]

An example of the sort of trivial-but-instructive sort of things I do on an everyday basis is below. This one is from about an hour ago.

I got a sample of 2 g of barium as several chunks in a little vial filled with mineral oil. I just tried adding little chunks of it to methanol (99.8%) and isopropanol (99.9%) on my nightstand. Surprisingly the reaction of a 400 mg chunk with 10 mL methanol was almost as vigorous as it is with water, rapidly bubbling off hydrogen and heating the tube above 40 C. It dissolved completely and now I have barium methoxide. I figured it would react, but I thought it would be much slower and saturate far sooner. If anyone wants a superbase, not only stronger than the hydroxide ion itself but also containing a toxic heavy metal, I'm your man.

As expected, the isopropanol reaction with 70 mg wasn't anywhere near as strong, but it still gave off some decent bubbles until saturating about halfway through the chunk and leaving a chalky white suspension with a little chunk of barium metal on the bottom. I tried adding a little bit of sodium bisulfate (an acid salt) to it to raise the acidity, but then I realized that this was exactly the wrong thing to add - it just made more white powder in the form of barium sulfate, which is totally insoluble in anything.

Also, I added one piece of barium to the large pile of stuff next to my bed, and a bunch of mineral oil to the right half of the nightstand and the floor all around it. Just like me, leaving a chunk of a highly reactive and somewhat toxic metal lying around in a giant pile of gadgets and garbage in equal proportion. If only it were radioactive, I'd be able to find it with my Geiger counter. But it's not, sadly. At least it's less than 1/10 what would be needed to kill me even if I somehow ate it.

I do occasionally taste chemicals though, as long as I know I'm orders of magnitude away from a toxic dose. E.g. I did once taste a few drops of copper sulfate solution, and what stuck out to me is that it tasted a combination of bitter and metallic. I've long suspected that there are considerably more than five fundamental tastes, and "metallic" seems to be one of them. Wikipedia has a little bit of speculation that galvanic currents in the mouth might trigger some receptor response that's responsible for this.

So now I just thought of something else to try. I might try putting a copper strip in my mouth, then a zinc strip, and then both together at the same time on opposite sides of my tongue - the classic galvanic cell, with my tongue itself acting as the salt bridge. If galvanic reactions are responsible, both together will taste far more metallic than either alone. If not, there's something else going on; some transition metal ions might just trigger taste receptor(s) of their own.

Oh, and just so everyone knows: lithium, potassium, rubidium, and ammonium chlorides all do have a little bit of saltiness to them, but not much; bitter and sour sensations come up too and are usually stronger than the salty flavor. Our salt receptors are really looking only for sodium ions; similar +1 cations trigger them only weakly.

------
(edit: Second mini-experiment, done after the first post)

Screw copper and zinc. I just tried some bits of silver shot and magnesium ribbon. That's about as far apart as you can get in the galvanic series, without getting into stuff that's too expensive and unreactive (gold, platinum, etc) or that would react vigorously with my saliva, burning my tongue both by temperature, by extreme alkalinity, and in some cases even exploding (all alkali metals, plus all alkaline earths from calcium down to barium).

Both tasted fairly metallic on their own, but the combination of the two didn't seem to affect much on an under/over tongue basis. However, when the magnesium ribbon was placed on the top tip of my tongue with the silver also on the top but in the middle, the metallic flavor shot up, concurrent with feeling some electric sensation. This increased further as the magnesium was brought closer to the silver.

I think this lends some support to the galvanic hypothesis, with an added comment that the tongue doesn't seem to care as much about currents through it from bottom to top as currents across the top. The electro-metallic receptors are seemingly concentrated on the top.

I was still skeptical, so I just now tried two other things. First, tasting a Canadian nickel from back when Valka was young and Canada was making nickels out of pure nickel. There was a little metallic flavor there, but much less. Nickel in bulk form is closer to the middle of the series although closer to the copper end. And now I'm rolling around an ounce of tin (middle of series) in my mouth. Virtually no metallic flavor at all, and I gave it a good couple of minutes. So yeah, now I'm quite convinced we're mostly tasting galvanic currents when we taste metals.

-----
Comments and borderline-rant about why this sort of thing is important

What you see here is the value of experiential amateur "science", or if you prefer just playing with things until you've learned something about the world. All you can get from just looking at the Wikipedia page on "metallic flavor" is a bunch of tentative hypotheses, one of which was very easily testable. Google Scholar might come up with something more definitive, but in general the details are hard to figure out and it would take much longer to figure out what was going on.

Meanwhile it was totally simple to test out the given Wikipedia hypothesis, armed with a few bits of several kinds of metal and some chemistry knowledge about galvanic cells, and what I can safely put in my mouth, and whatnot.

Sometimes you can find things out on your own just by playing with stuff. I like my Wikipedia and Google Scholar voyages, but I also learn like two or three things a day just by making up little experiments and trying things out.

Screw paranoia about safety when you're many orders of magnitude from danger. Science paranoia has killed many people's interests in science altogether, and shunted more into fields of science where you have to look at a computer screen all day. If we want real STEM education, we need to stop overplaying risks.

Yes, don't make high explosives or drugs, and treat caustic and/or toxic chemicals with respect, and do wear gloves and goggles whenever needed, and beware of chemical incompatibilities. But we should stop creating a world where nobody tries to figure science things out on their own, preferring instead to just memorize them for the exam and then purge them from memory immediately, or look them up on Wikipedia and then forget them because they haven't connected enough dots to know where the new knowledge fits.

 

[Ferocitus]

I did once taste a few drops of copper sulfate solution, and what stuck out to me is that it tasted a combination of bitter and metallic. I've long suspected that there are considerably more than five fundamental tastes, and "metallic" seems to be one of them. Wikipedia has a little bit of speculation that galvanic currents in the mouth might trigger some receptor response that's responsible for this.

Have you ever had metal fillings in teeth?
I'm sure I can taste metal when I have certain acidic drinks, like
lots of lime juice in tea, Coke, or chinotto.

A friend and I were bleeding the brakes of an old car. I shouted out to him
to start pumping the brake pedal and I got a mouthful of brake fluid.
That was about as vile and long-lasting a taste as I have ever had.
(I exclude cold porridge because that's just a sick joke.)

 

[Ferocitus]

You don't need chemicals to be a hazard to yourself and others. Applied
mathematicians also can be dangerous in their own uniue way.

Here's a novel observation/experiment that still sends shivers down my spine.

My research colleague was driving home alone from Melbourne to Adelaide (about
700 kms) on a rainy night. He noticed that some droplets on the windshield
stayed in exactly the same position for a very long time.

That meant that the upward force of the air pushing against the droplets,
combined with the skin-friction of water against the windshield glass, exactly
balanced the gravitational force tending to pull the drops downward. He also had
some insights about surface tension which tends to maintain the drop in a
constant shape.

Ernie said he spent at least 6 hours observing those drops and formulating the
mathematical model in his head. He got a good paper out of it, but whenever I
read or refer to it, I always imagine his head ploughing through the windscreen
just at the moment he had his insight.

 

[Ferocitus]

Here's a yummy experiment that demonstrates how applied mathematicians think,
and it might interest geologists.

Take a spoonful of honey from a jar, lift the spoon up and turn it upside down.
Watch the honey fall onto your toast (or foot if you are a real mathematician
who got distracted by something shiny).

In cold weather, when the honey is thick and viscous it takes a second or two
before the blob starts moving.
However, within a couple of seconds the blob starts accelerating and then the
long strand back to the spoon lengthens very quickly until it breaks.

This is an example of "explosive" growth. It is much faster than exponential
growth.

In exponential growth, increase is proportional to the amount present at the
time: f'(x) proportional to x. A familiar example is the growth of (non-student)
bank accounts.

In explosive growth, increase is proportional to the square of the amount
present: f'(x) proportional to x^2.

Now repeat the scene with your head turned 180 degrees, or imagine it happening
upside down.

The blob of honey starts moving slowly upwards, then within a few seconds it
erupts. Just like a volcano!

The Enb.
(Clean up before others see the mess and think you have gone crazy!)

 

[Bootstoots]

From TIL, but belongs better here. A finger-wagging about tasting chemicals, and a long response about when exactly to taste chemicals and why. (Still, I agree with The_J about uranium chloride. )

TIL that lithium chloride tastes just as salty as sodium chloride does! I already knew that potassium, rubidium, and ammonium chlorides taste a little bit salty but also trigger bitter and sour responses too, which is why salt substitute (which is just KCl) doesn't work very well. Apparently LiCl briefly took off as a salt substitute in the 1940s, and then a bunch of people died from lithium overdoses and the FDA put the kibosh on that.

In closely related news, my chances of entering a hypomanic episode today are quite low.

Please don't order uranium chloride just for tasting it .
EDIT: Or for anything else ^^.

I have 5g of uranyl nitrate, which is a soluble uranium salt. It would definitely be much easier to chemically react it to UCl3 than to buy UCl3 directly, although I don't know much about uranium chemistry. That's part of why I got it to begin with!

Still, I won't be tasting it. There's a method to my madness; tasting chemicals is something I do only if I know it's already non-toxic in the small doses needed to establish a taste. So a commercial food additive in small quantities, or less than 1% of the dose required to produce any obvious effect for things with well-characterized pharmaceutical use (lithium falls here), or less than 0.01% of published rodent or primate LD50s with no history of human toxicity in small doses. Also, no cumulative poisons, so all the heavy metal poisons are out. This includes lead - which actually does have a known sweet compound, lead acetate, which Romans used to flavor their wine, probably causing more lead poisoning than their plumbing did. Also includes beryllium, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, thallium, thorium, and uranium, among others. Here I use "heavy metal" used loosely: Be is a really light metal, and As is a metalloid and not very heavy.

(Ironically arsenic actually is probably a required ultratrace nutrient based on both rat and bovine experiments, needed in such small doses that arsenic deficiency is only seen in lab conditions where the food is specifically formulated to exclude all arsenic.)

Even without established toxicity, I only do it if I think there might be some value to it. So, for instance, tasting alkali metal chlorides tells me about how our (or at least my) ability to detect salt works. Tasting alkaline earth chlorides is valuable too because there's some debate about whether there's a specific receptor for calcium that imparts a unique taste, but here it's going to have to be limited to Mg, Ca, and Sr because Be and Ba are toxic. I'm going to throw in lanthanum chloride as well as a negative control, because rare-earth metal ions (and La specifically) are well-known to be non-toxic in milligram amounts and are trivalent, which should trigger effectively no taste receptor response.

Preliminary data on the alkaline earths+lanthanum: CaCl2 definitely imparts a "fresh" taste to water that is missing without it, helping to support that we have some taste sensitivity to Ca that is also not considered as a "fundamental taste". Unsurprisingly, people prefer hard water to distilled water. But then I moved and ironically lost the CaCl2 while still knowing where the MgCl2, SrCl2, and LaCl3 all are, and I can't do a proper taste test without them all being there simultaneously.

(also see the post above about the "metallic" flavor)

 

[Bootstoots]

In other news, I made the ultra-strong pigment Prussian blue, using ferrous sulfate, hydrogen peroxide, and sulfuric acid to oxidize the Fe(II) sulfate to Fe(III) sulfate, then combining with potassium ferrocyanide to make the pigment. Basically the goal was to convert Fe4(CN)6 to Fe7(CN)18, which it does quite readily with aqueous iron (III). I wouldn't have had to do the first step if I already had a soluble iron (III), aka ferric, salt. Iron (II), aka ferrous, salts are much more soluble in water for the most part, but ferric sulfate is somewhat soluble and is helped along by co-existing ferrous ions as well as acids.

It actually looks more green than blue in a bottle at really high concentrations, but it's obviously blue at lower concentrations. I suspect what's going on is that it passes more blue than green, but the eye is more sensitive to green than blue, so it looks blue at low concentrations (and when put on paper as a pigment in oil) but when it's at really high concentrations, your eye preferentially sees the tiny bit of green light that gets through over the still tiny but larger amount of blue light. I could test this with the amazing $75 spectrophotometer I got on ebay, but sadly the cuvettes are missing ATM.

One of the fun things about this whole little project is that, while you're playing with cyanide ions, they're so tightly bound to iron that they're totally nontoxic. It's very hard to release them; throwing the ferricyanide (but AFAIK not the ferrocyanide) directly into a strong acid will do this slowly, and heating ferrocyanide to like 600 C can do it, but it takes that sort of thing to get cyanide loose from iron.

The nontoxicity of iron cyanides is related to why cyanide by itself is so toxic: it loves iron so much that it binds to the iron in your mitochondrial Complex IV and totally jams it up, preventing your mitochondria from producing ATP. Without ATP, you die very, very quickly even with oxygen - because the mitochondria are what use the oxygen to make energy out of food in the first place. It does also have a CO-like effect by binding to hemoglobin, but that's secondary to the main way that CN kills you, hence why HCN is more toxic than CO.

 

[caketastydelish]

Do you have any autobiographical experiences similar to this?

 

[Ferocitus]

Do you have any autobiographical experiences similar to this?

Just saw this old post...

I'm not sure what you mean.
My partner blinded me with Genetics in her 1st degree, Anthropology, Classics,
and Linguistics in her 2nd, and Law in her 3rd.

From an autobiographical pov, the Jesuit and public school principals who threw
me out of high school would agree with a line repeated throughout this song: