Thunderf00t - 2021-04-06
http://www.sci-news.com/biology/heavy-water-sweet-taste-08486.html https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.05.22.110205v1.full.pdf+html You can support this channel directly through patreon: https://patreon.com/Thunderf00t or at my amazon affiliate store: https://www.amazon.com/shop/thunderf00t or my other channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUrdmVprSahXaPKqr04VfgQ
Imagine doing a urine exam after drinking d2o and h2o-18
"your test results came in and our mass spectrometers couldn't make heads or tails of what's in your urine"
In the great history of chemistry, multiple chemists have discovered artificial sweeteners by doing exactly what you're doing Phil. I look forward to the day when heavy water soda is a thing... Holy shit, maybe this is Nuka Cola's secret formula.
Nuka Cola: Delicious and deutricious!
It's still toxic. You just need to drink it for about a week.
Nina Cole Quantum, with colloidal lithium and Americium!
Or how about Mountain Dew-terium
I'm almost certain the enthusiasm behind this project all came from the same childlike sense of wonder and excitement that got you all into becoming researchers of the sciences in the first place.
This is the kinda video that they should show in schools to get kids fired up about science. It was a lot of fun and intriguing too.
Yes! I’ve been waiting for this one.
Ya Cody
Cody it I'll be great move to europe.
yes, when i saw the video title i remembered your video from like 5 years ago.
Still sucks you had to take down your earliest heavy water videos. The 5 part series where you produced a heavy water sample for a class.
Sad that this is what thunderfoot should be known for as a productive scientist but this has multiple times less views then your sub count. Its like your viewers are there for the hype not the science.
So much more entertaining than a
Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola taste test
The difference is one tastes sweeter!
Take the Deuterium Challenge*
*Just not too much or you could die
This brings the question, so the pepsi challenge was based on temperature, now will heavy water taste different at different temperatures.
No calorie sweetener!
@Super Chuck A very expensive sweetener.
Truer words.
Great stuff. I love the "Busted" videos & rants against the world but the nice juicy science videos are just as brilliant. Must admit the ability to taste heavy water as sweet was sparking of some of the stuff about the ability of human olfactory organs being able to detect chirality (left & right handed molecules) work done back in the 70's/80's. But my retention of science knowledge is no longer good enough to wonder if there could be a bearing on your groups work?
Keep up the excellent work please, this is what the internet should be for, not cute cats & reaction videos.
Working with Thunderf00t
Monday: splosions
Tuesday: weigh yourself every half hour, no peeing!
Wednesday: Drink this expensive water
Thursday: radioactive carrots for lunch
Sign me up
Friday talking shit about Elon 😜
@Mr Andersson Friday: road trip to throw rocks at the hyperloop tunnel
Ah, yes my free 43min science lectures on why thicc water tastes so sweet.
This is the Thunderf00t I love. I even remembered to capitalize your name this time lol.
As mush as I love the debunking videos , I do still love theese more wholesome science videos
Mush?
Props to the Nobel winner who pointed out no taste difference with the caveat that the test had N=2.
"That was the time I started dropping the chemicals on my colleagues tongues."
Your autobiography is gonna be fun to read, if you ever decide to write it.
I believe this to be one of your greatest videos. It's one thing to preach the scientific method in a video, but this really shows the hard work involved and the exploration and discovery throughout. Well done to you and your team!
People: Water has no taste.
Scientists: You can taste atom weight difference in water.
@Jonathan Odude I agree, I even talked to a guy who was so retarded that he thought cereals have no taste, everything has a taste, it's why you can distinguish between rice and grain.
@Jonathan Odude Lead pipes are fairly rare in the states.
I've only ever seen copper or pvc, and I've only ever been in fairly old places.
@Max Pulido is that to the premises or the distribution lines? Though I don’t remember what my source was so it may have been outdated. It said that the lead pipes are being replaced currently.
Not really sure. I only know about my city. I believe the supply side is concrete, and plastic lined steel. The oldest ones may be brass or raw/galvanized steel, but lead is unheard of.
I don't think I've ever seen a lead pipe. If I did I'd probably keep it as a relic.
Scientists: "we need to know why! Quick! to the scientorium!"
I know they take more time but I love these videos more than the debunking ones. These make me curious instead of simply frustrated at people's idiocy
@Aled Long But do the debunking videos actually reach the people who need to see them?
@Aled Long Fair enough.
"What does it taste like" seems to be a pretty common question in NileRed's lab...
SMELLS LIKE CYANIDE MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
7:57 They make their safety officer swoon
And Cody's Lab
alexander shulgin, a very good chemist, also tasted many of his compounds ;)
I'm a layperson and I love these science videos. They make me feel a little smarter - and I see the tremendous amount of effort you put into them.
Haters gonna hate, thanks' TFoot!
This is amazing! What about sense of smell? I know taste and smell are somehow connected (though I don't know exactly how, should have paid more attention in first year). Could you isolate testing to sense of smell and see if results are affected and if that's how mice recognise the difference between heavy and regular water? Also do sweetness inhibitors work on mice and could you test with them and see if they can recognise the water as sweet but still avoid it?
That was fascinating! Just a question, no double blind taste testing of the different waters?
"This doesnt make any sense at all". Well, that's normal for Quantum physics, isnt it?
This is an amazing video, you can follow new science being done from the very beginning and are included in the process.
Big thanks to you Phil and all the other participants.
This was excellent! You’ve made me eager to get back into a chemistry lab.
Very Cool. More excited by this than anything I've seen in a high impact journal for a long time. The effect seems pretty clear. I would have liked to see a bit more detail around the receptor characterization to be entirely convinced that it is TASR3 mediated. But, that could get complicated quickly and like all good science, difficult to fund.
PS> @Thunderf00t The part of the video when you discussed people giving you a hard time over 'working in someone else's Lab', showed how little people understand about academia. I'd much rather 'work for someone' than be a glorified administrator. I'm very jealous.
"It's virtual heresy to ask in a chemistry lab what these things actually taste like."
That is exactly what my chemistry lab assistant told us in my first chemistry semester.
He was adamant about throwing anyone out of his lab who he caught eating or drinking ANYTHING in his lab, even if it were clearly labeled as food.
NOTHING should ever be consumed inside a chemistry lab. There are far too many compounds, or even elements, that will kill you in milligram, or even microgram levels that you could get in even one droplet of water vapor on your food.
What a great video. I really love this kind of videos. It's absolutely fantastic, that you share these results in such a great way with us.
I'm glad that I am a patron of you.
Continue being awesome Thunderf00t!
I find your mouse results really interesting (armchair scientist here): so they can tell the difference, but try it anyway, find it makes them feel kinda bad, and stop drinking it. Makes perfect evolutionary sense for a species like a mouse: there's plenty of them and they try out all kinds of novel food sources. I kept wondering what would drive them to nibble my plastic screwdriver handles etc: now I know that they don't come back to them once they figure that it upsets their stomach. They will try something else instead (not sure if they even survive the screwdriver handle "experiment").
Do we do the same? Or do we drink more G&T's tonight even though that lot we had yesterday gave us a bad hangover?
"Once you get into the super heavy objects that actually distort space time, it's no longer really such a good approximation that all objects fall at the same speed under gravity"
What? No, the equivalence principle is a fundamental postulate of general relativity, and it says precisely that it's impossible to locally distinguish acceleration from gravity, i.e., it implies directly that all objects fall at the same speed!
Wow, absolutely amazing! Is there any possibility to test whether semiheavy water would show an intermediary sweetness between normal and heavy water?
The next step (if the budget runs to it!) might be to try replacing the hydroxyl hydrogens in for instance ethanol, glycerine or glucose and seeing if that affects the taste. Also, could you "water" something like say mustard with D2O and see how the plant grows (and what it tastes like).
I've learned so much from these videos than I ever did in school. The way you explain things makes science fun, sure, your busted videos are very entertaining too and educational, but these in-depth videos makes me want to go into science very very much haha.
Thank you for your videos I find them VERY interesting and educational.
Awesome job dude! Congratulations to you and all the people that worked so hard to bring this to us!
Can you compute moments of inertia for D2O and H2O18, to check for how different they may be as a sanity check? Seems like another factor that could be throwing off the receptor.
Really cool stuff Phil. Makes me think of the book & lectures by Jim Al Khalili on prospective quantum-effects in biology. In particular, the proposed 'credit card mechanism' for scent and taste interactions, where a molecule does not just have to fit in the active site of the receptor, but also needs to induce the correct 'transaction', i.e. have interactions at resonance frequencies that promote quantum tunneling. Since these resonances will be different for D than for H, it could result in one interacting strongly with a given receptor, and the other very poorly.
Absolutely fascinating! I am addicted to your channel. I guess my chemistry background helps, but in no way explains just why D2O tastes a "little sweet". Thanks for the very interesting post.
Great video Thunderf00t and thank You for making and sharing it for free. It sure took a lot of work and time.
I was thinking about the mice experiment and I thing it doesn't fully proves that mice can taste heavy water. You mentioned that heavy water is toxic after replacing about half of your "regular water". I thing that this is happening to those mice. They feel toxic effects on their body during a day so they drink from bottle that do not worsen those toxic effects. If they could taste it, they would avoid heavy water almost immediately after few days.
Just something that crossed my mind.
Man, I was already hoping that we could use wine tasters as a substitute for mass spectroscopes.
Why? Spectroscopes are cheaper.
Well wine tasters are more mobile so that is the trade of.
@Oxon good point! I raise my glass to the idea!
Just dont use high vacuum with them, the wine tasters usually wont tolerate high vacuum. :)
spectro"scopes"? you means spectrometers?
Very interesting. It raised a question, though. Obviously, you have way more insight in this matter than me (studied chemistry and biology). Could you maybe make a prediction of the outcome of your experiments if you have used tritiumdioxide instead of D2O?
Would that, probably taste sweeter than D2O or maybe would this have provided you with the salty taste you were wondering about?
Or have you already tried T2O during your adventure of breaking all chemistry lab rules and regulations?
(Btw, during uni we actually broke them ourselves. Distilled gin, flavoured our yoghurt with selfmade artificial flavourings and even sythesized aspirin for the day after our end semester party. :D )
32:05 "in earlier tests she couldn't taste D2O"
...how much you wanna bet that there's a gene for detection probably both of D20 and H20-16, which would take about another at least 5 years of focused research and testing to find?
this is the only bit i hate about science - whateve next step you're sure about or wondering about or would like to try... it's always not less than 2 years of full-time research and testing from actually upgrading from just a hypothesis to a proper theory.
but i bet that's just a problem stemming from my personal impatience...
What an amazing video! My mind wondered around and I remembered that Chris Ryan when escaping Iraq towards Syria during the Gulf War he drank from a stream that came from a Iraqi yellowcake plant and he said it tasted 'lemony, sweet and metallic' - thanks for the video - super interesting!
I read a new scientist article a few years ago which was kinda interesting. It hypothesized that it may be possible to slow aging by replacing an amount of H2O in your body with D2O. Not enough to be lethal of course but just enough to make the intermolecular bonds stronger and slow deterioration. Of course the more I studied chemistry and the nature of water the more skeptical I became of that but I would be interested in seeing that experiment. As to the sweetness I wonder if it has more to do with the structure of your tongue and the receptors themselves rather than the water density.
Thunderf00t spent 30 days distilling water to avoid people like himself debunking him, lol!
@Random Nobody It's in the supplementary material of the paper. doi.org/10.1101/2020.05.22.110205. However, they tested hexane extracts of water for organics using GC-MS, and not the complete water fraction. This doesn't eliminate the possibility of a polar contaminant that has the same boiling point as water, however EXTREMELY unlikely that must be.
@Alan H. Wow, nice catch. If this is the reason the paper doesn't past peer review we'll probably know in the next revision lol...
@Random Nobody It would have to be a polar contaminant that can trigger the sweet receptor and that is common to their third party D2O, and the D2O Cody's lab tested, that is not common to their water. Is there some level of purity where it becomes unsweet? I'm probably a biased fanboi but I don't think its a contaminant that is making it sweet; there could be other explanations though... I am sure we will hear about it, here, if this paper is objected to in the community.
I suppose the easiest way to 'debunk' this would be to find some very pure D20 that is not sweet?
@rev.c.russell Looking at his rig, it does seem he designed for fractional distillation. All those other ampules branching off. But, the main proof is that it was tested after by a competent spectrometrist (is that the right term?).
@StinkPickle4000 if there is a contaminant that's as sweet as 1% sugar at very very very low concentrations, I think thunderfoot has just become a millionaire 😉
Very interesting video. I've also heard that our sense of smell is due to quantum effects, i.e. that our scent receptors are doing some sort of spectroscopy using electrons to induce vibrations in the sampled molecules.
Not sure why, but this makes me want to know how replacing water with d2o in various recipes would change the taste, like caramel or jello. Or maybe if one dehydrates say milk to milk powder and rehydrates it with d2o. Or how perhaps fermenting in d2o to create a possibly "kinda sweet" vodka. Loving this content ❤️
I am a year and a half into my PhD and your channel has been inspiring me since my A levels!
So H2O and D2O is a very cool comparison, I really liked bringing in H2O[18] even if I was shocked at the price. Now I'm wondering what the cost of D2O[18] would be! I'd have to guess the price of the energy it cost to make it as well as probably special kit to make it bond similar to the neutron reactor potassium we saw before.
This brings me back to Cody’s old videos tasting heavy water
lol me too :)
Great video! After watching this I wondered if there is such a thing as water which is 1x oxygen, 1x hydrogen & 1x duterium atoms kinda a medium weight water lol I'm sure there's probably a rule of nature that they need to balance or something but I can't find anything as yet and it's driving me mad. Anyway if someone knows please let me know but in the meantime I'll keep investigating.
Thanks from the video, this kind of stuff is awesome. Just out of curiosity, did you or the Prof. Niv's lab test dropping the D2O to different parts of tongue? What kind of results did that reveal?
I can detect quantum effects right in my own home using cheap, fairly every day equipment. Using an oscilloscope, or even a $10 chinesium multimeter, I can detect the dip in current as the voltage across one of my soviet surplus tunnel diodes goes up. Or I can detect the voltage across a reverse biased avalanche diode as the electrons tunnel across the depletion region. The oscilloscope isn't even necessary, it's just more convenient. But I still think it's pretty cool that I can measure the effects of quantum mechanical processes right in my own home using relatively cheap equipment, though.
Although I'm sure there are all sorts of other quantum mechanical effects in the electronics I play with that I don't even realize are going on. Like in an LED, or in a bipolar trasistor or FET. And other active devices.
Thank you Phil! That was so interesting. Something else to know and hopefully intrigue my grandchildren with at some stage. One can but hope that they will take a great interest in science rather than bunkum. I do my best!
Martin Verrisin - 2021-04-08
Lvl 001: I have faith!
Lvl 010: I have to see it to believe it.
Lvl 100: Spends 5 years to convince himself that D2O could be kinda sweet, despite tasting it himself in the beginning.
jfbeam - 2021-04-20
And ropes in his entire lab group. And two other labs. And spends untold thousands to get there. (you have to do it in a way that's publishable!) As Adam Savage would say, the difference between science and messing around is writing it down.
Egon Freeman - 2022-09-13
@jfbeam Writing it down, repeating it several times (while writing it down), and then having others repeat it (several times! (while writing it down!!!)). Bonus points if you can get someone in that group that really wants to prove you wrong.