The Hibiscus tea I use turns blue when I steep it at my mom's place, but not at mine. I have a very good water filter, she does not. First time it happened, I was quite startled. She had a filter at her place she never used, so we tried it. Yep, filtered water resulted in pinkish tea.
What's in the water is unclear, but there was a lingering unease related to it.
silica dessicant. chemists use it in their dessicators to keep things dry - pink is dry, blue is 'full' (i think, it's been 25 years...). i think it's a low level cobalt doping and as the silica matrix swells with water absorption it changes the UV absorption and the colour changes. or something like that.
There could be something in the filter. A good test would be to make one tea with distilled water, and another with distilled+filtered water. Compare the colour.
It's been a couple years (or more), I think I was just fucking around with a newly sharpened machette. Also I never managed to replicate it, though perhaps for lack of trying.
Also, it is my understanding that calcium in water (which is a normal part due to the water taking up minerals in the ground) is making it slightly basic. I don't know enough about chemistry in this area, but I think the calcium in the water is mostly calcium carbonate, which definitely is basic[1]. So it's no surprise that water taken directly from the tap is making the tea blue, but after removing the calcium carbonate (maybe as part of a removal of any salts) that the tea remains red. I think this hints that an ion exchanger[2] is being used in the "very good water filter" e40 is using.
But removing calcium from water (along with other potentially beneficial minerals) is a bad idea, because we need it for building our bones etc. Hopefully those using ion exchanger are still getting enough calcium from other sources. But it's long been said that ion exchangers should not be used to "filter" water.
There are lots of people that love to mock those that prefer bottled water.
https://xkcd.com/1599/
I’ve lived in lots of areas were the water burned going down. One place were water was just brown.
Filtered leaves it weirdly bland. But acceptable for coffee / tea.
Not a migrobiologist, but I understand that labs are equipped with progressively more stringent procedures depending on the type of material they can handle.
They may work in a very regular, run of the mill lab that is not equipped to deal with anything that is even remotely dangerous.
And seeing they have only nitrile gloves for protection and everything lays on the table it looks like this is likely the case. (Not that I ever worked in a lab. My ideas of how lab safety works are based on The Andromeda Strain).
pseudomonas is a very common urinary tract infection, along with e.coli and proteus, none of which commonly cause deaths. it is not particularly dangerous. using common sense and basic aseptic technique will keep you safe.
back when (early to late 70s) we did not use gloves at all, because they were uncomfortable - just washed our hands a lot. nobody ever died or got infected. before i joined, someone did die from the hepatitis virus. we were not a virology lab, but we did do immunology, which is where the blood that caused the death came from - we did use gloves when dealing with that.
for the more dangerous organisms, such as mycobacterium tuberculosis, we used air extraction hoods.
the only sensitivity spectrum looks like this:
(1) fluoroquinolones (severe neurological and connective tissue side effects)
(2) IV tazobactam + piperacillin
(3) IV ceftazidime
If you're not in life threatening danger they will default to (1) which is a serious detriment to society and not adequately risk assessed. At least, this is how it was in 2014 when I was rendered disabled due to fluoroquinolone toxicity. It is possible because of public outrage over fluoroquinolones that the order has since changed but yeah. Nasty.
ok, i looked that up. i really don't believe ppe does anything useful, i have never seen any double-blind tests that suggests it does. pseudomonas clings to the petri dish agar medium and will not get on your body unless you do something very silly.
one way of diagnosing bacterial infections is by smell. for example, if you put your nose next to an agar plate where haemophilus influenzae is growing, you get a very characteristic smell. there are other smells. i have never heard of any microbiologist contracting an infection doing this.
too much snowflake stuff here. the most scary thing that happened to me was not dealing with the bacteria, but the reagents and stains we used. i was making up some gram stain (basically iodine and NaOH in solution) when i added the water to the two solids - result steam explosion (because NaOH + H2O is exothermic) in my face. my thought was "shit, you have blinded yourself" but luckily there was an eye-wash bottle and a sink next to me, so my eyes survived. why i did this i have no idea, as i had been taught from the age of 15 to always add solids to water.
anyway, so bugger bacteria - chemicals (and steam, electricity etc.) much more dangerous.
A reply this comment asked: "Do you believe parachutes do anything useful when jumping out of a plane? Do you have a double blind study that proves it?"
Parachute use did not reduce death or major traumatic injury when jumping from aircraft in the first randomized evaluation of this intervention. However, the trial was only able to enroll participants on small stationary aircraft on the ground, suggesting cautious extrapolation to high altitude jumps.
yes, i do belive that - there is clear and obvious evidence. there is no clear and obvious evidence that ppe (plastic aprons, masks) does anything. which is why we need a double blind trial.
i spent all my time as a microbiologist using only a white cotton lab coat (mostly for writing nurses/docs phone numbers on) , and often not that. nobody i have ever known that worked as a microbiologist has ever caught an infection. as i said elsewhere, reasonable common sense and aseptic technique does the job.
Yes, but they won't have done a risk assessment for it. As you will know, microbiologists are supposed to have risk assessments for precisely what they're doing; as you will also know, they are often pretty approximate about it; but in the case of work documented in a virally popular Twitter thread, it would probably be sensible to be seen following the rules.
Was there garlic in the soup? Garlic can turn green or blue when cooking depending on the ingredients involved. I assume the bright blue photo in the article isn’t an actual picture of the soup in question.
Once in 1991 I left some cooked rice in a pot in the kitchen. The next day, it was covered with a bright violet slime. I don't know what it was, but I still remember it vividly (as the colour was).
Oh, you don't want to hear about that. They lined us up in front of a hundred yards of prime rib. All of us, you know, lined up lookin' at it. Magnificent meat, really! Beautifully marbled. Magnific. Next thing, they're throwin' the meat into these big cauldrons. All of it! Boiling it! I looked inside, man, it was turning grey.
Soup with beef in it is relatively common in the two places I've lived - UK and Czech Republic. Couple of very common examples of "beef soup" from each:
I think what the saucier in your quote[0] was upset about was cooking good quality meat very badly, not the idea that meat generally could be used in soup :)
What's in the water is unclear, but there was a lingering unease related to it.