These elemental toxicity problems should be a problem of the past.
We have the science and the devices to detect and track them easily.
I'm speaking about XRF analyzer. Currently it's still expensive : a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Today they are used for checking the paints for lead. They are used by precious metal buyers and sellers to identify precisely the content.
But I dream of the day where anybody can just check its steak or salmon with it for traces of anything toxic. It won't detect all food safety problems like bio contamination or organic pesticides, but it can definitely make heavy metal poisoning a thing of the past, by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.
The amount of X-rays needed to detect trace amounts of lead with a handheld device are probably more dangerous than the lead itself if such an device is used on a daily basis. There is a reason why your dentist goes to stand behind a wall when you she takes an X-ray of your teeth. If you would have a sample with 10% lead, the amount of X-ray used during for taking an X-ray of your teeth might be enough to measure its concentration within a few 1% accuracy, but if you are talking about 1ppm (and that is far above the 15ppb that is considered safe) you need a lot more X-ray to get a good enough reading.
Measuring exact contents with XRF is difficult if you do not have homogeneous samples due to all kinds of complicated effects where the XRF from one element interacts with the XRF of another element. To get within 1% accuracy you often need a controlled (vacum) environment and callibrate your instrument with a set of standards at regular interfalls. At least that is how it was 20 years ago when I developed software for a company that produced high-end industrial XRF measurement devices.
It's viable to get something like it on your supply chain. It's even viable to X-ray inspect fish at random in fisher's markets if you move your machine between them.
What if rather than everyone needing their own, there was just a certification standard (like organic) which says the food has been scanned and confirmed to contain less than X lead/mercury/whatever?
Side note, is this what archaeologists use, to figure out the composition of a coin, etc.?
Certifications are the current situation for first world countries but it takes time to get them adopted everywhere. And if you have lead paint or pipes in your house, or if you have bought some Chinese plates with beautiful colors, who will tell you that some pigments may leak into your food.
There is the question of trust of the measurement where they will just sell you an approval stamp for 100$.
There is also the problem that some actors have incentives to cheat, like feeding insects to your salmon, and feeding the insects from literal garbage that may get contaminated by electronic components in the dumpster. Or maybe the specific salmon just ate a ball of mercury but was not selected for testing.
A generic tool, that can analyze your immediate environment without having anyone else involved is empowering and can catch a wide variety of problems that you can track further if necessary; feels like a freebie offered by Science. Although it will still need some years of work to make it as sensitive as they show it in Science-Fiction.
Humans have not evolved alongside everything we extracted from the ground since the industrial revolution. It's like a new pair of eyes that would help you avoid a bad apple or smelly fish.
If we could also get a cheap and easy to use Raman spectrometer to complete the XRF analyser it would also be a great addition.
(I don't know what archaeologists use but they definitely can use a XRF analyser to find the composition of coins)
Did the water quality certification miss something in Flint? Certification means trust. Someone breaking that trust can have life long implcations for large groups of people. Giviing the individual power is better.
It probably passed at the treatment plant where it is easy to test. It would have failed at everyone's home though, where testing needs to be done house by house. (or maybe a statistical sample of houses)
Are they really that sensitive to be able to detect trace amounts of heavy metals distributed in let's say a relatively large piece of meat (larger than the detection area of the device, so the amount of metal it "sees" is even more decreased)?
well icp (inductively coupled plasma) is the gold standard (expensive but highly sensitive and used for heavy metals like lead in stuff).
xrf can spot higher concrntrations, but one can concentrate beforehand and then use xrf. while xrf fixed cost is 30k usd its cost is a dropjn the bucket compared to icp and solid state keeps on going.
It probably isn't important whether the lead content is 10 ppm or 20 ppm in most cases, since neither is acceptable, so the standard of sampling involved here is far less demanding than the standard of sampling needed for analytical chemistry. You just need to avoid contaminating your sample with lead from some other source.
I would like to add a video on XRF from Applied Science, as the device is not very well known (at least in .cz, I have learned about it only recently).
The dream future is both utopian and dystopian. Technology is advanced enough that such things are in hand of common man but society is so dysfunctional that basic things like clean water and food aren't ensured.
> These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Hasn't that been around, in handheld form since the 60s? I think they're called tricorders.
> a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
Is this inherently true? Do the raw materials and parts the final factory buys to make the machine really cost <$100 (or so) and the cost is all in the up-front investment in the machinery to make it?
Yeah I doubt it. Applied Science on Youtube did a teardown of one and they've got crazy oil-filled high voltage electronics. It would take an insane amount of engineering to bring them down to an affordable price. Not just economies of scale.
You mean those same high voltage electronics that every CRT TV from the 90's has? The same TV's that give off so many xrays they have to shield them with leaded glass?
They were pretty affordable then, and I expect that now they can be made even more cheaply if there is demand for them.
CRT TVs are commonly only about 10 kV, while XRF needs 20–60 kV. Larger TVs were up in that range but were not handheld.
I agree that you can generate 60 kV pretty easily, though. You can do it in a smaller volume if you fill the electronics with oil, but it's not essential.
It's a x-ray tube and a x-ray sensor + analysis. It's bad radiations (like in luggage detector or dentist machine) but when you turn-off the device they stop, whereas radioactive don't stop.
Individualistic isn't bad. Individualism is the fundamental basis for thinking that individuals have intrinsic worth; take that away and you may not like the result.
Your food can currently be poisoned "at will", assuming someone wants to poison you.
OP was saying he wants everyone to have one. Nothing to do with rich people.
> Individualistic isn't bad. Individualism is the fundamental basis for thinking that individuals have intrinsic worth; take that away and you may not like the result.
It's not that individualism is bad, that's a quality of people. The "solution" isn't able to be produced or acquired in any way that's close to calling it a solution. Nobody is coming after you.
Indeed, it's a lot easier to fix the problem when people can buy a cheap device and verify for themselves that the water is unsafe. Otherwise you'll only get government / corporate hand waving and have to pay lawyers a few million dollars to get anything to change.
It is indeed. It's trying to empower the individual so that it can fight back and help protect its community. It also helps create incentives to prevent cheating as it makes it observable by making general measurement cheap, so that the resulting system is better for everybody and not only those that can afford it.
Rich people can already buy premium food and own recent habitations with modern standards.
While the poor currently rent poorly ventilated tiny flats with lead-paint on the walls, lead pipes behind them, asbestos under the roof, while eating cheap food filled with heavy metals and pesticides, and not knowing it.
This is a bad idea. Defeating the possibility of knowing what’s in water because it doesn’t immediately force the fix of the root problem. Step A does necessarily come before step B.
I don't believe I've ever seen the US fix any root problem in my lifetime (I'm a millenial). There are historical examples, but it seems like all the problems of the country today are impossible. If anything, we're backsliding on issues previously considered solved, like black lung for instance. Given that, I'd rather just live in denial. That's me - obviously I don't tend toward the optimistic.
I could have written your comment when I was living with my parents throughout the Great Recession. The only way this gets better for you is to find those things you can do to make income or otherwise be productive and on your own and do them. True fatalism looks a lot more like the guerrilla world of “For Whom The Bell Tolls” than “Siddhartha.”
Huh? I make a good income and have for the past decade plus. I'm not referring to my situation - I'm referring to systemic issues in the US. Do you think a country where high school students are concerned with removing lead from their water is functioning well?
Entirely possible, but perhaps the same is true for you as well? And if the conclusion that said someone wants me to reach happens to be true? Does that make a difference?
Defense in depth, that’s all. Yes it’s a problem when people think fixes at the edge obviate the need for fundamental fixes, but that doesn’t mean fixes at the edge are bad.
>by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.
It is about making them cheap enough to be ubiquitous in the supply chain. Of course some middle-class-to rich people will also have access to personal devices, but the point is to make it cheap enough to become part of the supply infrastructure. Plus if the devices and do real-time reporting of results via an app, this could also even enhance the supply chain monitoring by red-flagging hotspots early - benefits their poorer neighbors too.
I have a BIL who's job is water & sewage monitoring. He's told me about how they have sensors at key points throught the system so they can identify when someone is dumping (often illegally) toxins down the drain into the system. The idea is to both find it as it is coming in to be able to make quick adjustments, and also rapidly ID the locale and then the source to stop it.
Such scanning systems in the food supply chain could be enormously valuable, and it will require them to become inexpensive and fast. And no, I do not begrudge rich people (even those who became rich via extraction vs creation of wealth) access to the tools - by buying them before they are truly cheap, they help increase production volumes so that it enables the production of cheaper versions.
I agree, but, "rich people" eat at mcdonalds, and buy food at normal grocery stores. "Rich" being able to afford a $100 detector.
So while not perfect, it would perhaps force suppliers, chains, and such to clean up their act. To test food themselves, otherwise a random person with a detector may catch something.
Outside of lead, arsenic is another biggie, often in rice. I'd love that to be tested, at home, per meal.
I'm speaking about XRF analyzer. Currently it's still expensive : a 30K$ portable device, but that's because it's a low volume production.
These are gun-like devices that you point to a material, it shines x-ray on it and analyze the rays that comes back, which allows it to determine the elemental composition and percentages of the material for free in a few seconds. Like magic.
Today they are used for checking the paints for lead. They are used by precious metal buyers and sellers to identify precisely the content.
But I dream of the day where anybody can just check its steak or salmon with it for traces of anything toxic. It won't detect all food safety problems like bio contamination or organic pesticides, but it can definitely make heavy metal poisoning a thing of the past, by helping track the supply chain, the same way that having an air quality monitor can help improve your air quality.