Molecules: You'd better learn to live with them.
When you mix bromine with another molecule that has a carbon-carbon double bond, the bromine can add across the double bond.
The bromine atoms are very heavy - about 80 times as heavy as a hydrogen atom, or 7 times as heavy as a carbon atom. Bromination usually gives you a molecule that has higher density than the parent molecule.
Vegetable oil - which has a density of about 0.9 grams per milliliter - can be made as dense as water (i.e., 1 gram per milliliter) by adding the right amount of bromine.
Brominated vegetable oil can give an emulsion in water that is opaque and visually pleasing - it turns up in all kinds of opaque sodas and sugar/sport drinks. Is it OK to ingest bromine? Just about everyone gets away with the small amount he takes in from the occasional soda, but it's definitely possible to ingest too much - awhile back, there was a case of a person who drank as much as a gallon a day of BVO-containing soda. Turns out, he got bromine poisoning!
Medicine & Health
Physical Science
Comments
Good to have you back blogging on a regular basis. I'm glad I still had the RSS in my feed reader :)
Posted by: azmanam | May 7, 2010 10:41 AM
Jeeze! "2 to 4 liters per day" doesn't sound so far out of the range of normal consumption. I always thought that "brominated vegetable oil" sounded dangerous - now I KNOW it is!
Posted by: Rough | May 7, 2010 3:09 PM
I'll second the "good to have you back".
Posted by: shane | May 7, 2010 7:44 PM
third it.
Posted by: brook | May 8, 2010 10:53 AM
Good to see you back
Posted by: chemoptoplex | May 19, 2010 5:56 PM
Hi all;
A fatal flaw was that they failed to have any representative posts ready to go up when the blog went live.
Had they done so, and had the content been surprisingly acceptable, the reception might have been better.
Instead we get this "Hi! Welcome to ShillBlog!" (crickets) and everyone, quite reasonably, expects the worst.
Posted by: saç ekimi | July 12, 2010 3:23 AM
Isn't bromination stereospecific? If so why did you draw wavy bonds?
Posted by: prz | July 18, 2010 1:41 PM
I just found this blog and love it! But it's not daily, like the title promises. Any chance it can be?
Posted by: Katherine | July 27, 2010 10:35 PM
Would brominated oleic acid be considered a saturated fat?
Posted by: Ed | August 6, 2010 2:04 PM
wonder how easy it would be to make. Sounds like you could just mix bromine water and veggie oil :P
coolsciencetech.blogspot.com
Posted by: Jordan | August 8, 2010 6:02 PM
do we have this kind of soda on store shelf today?
Posted by: mded | August 16, 2010 10:27 PM
2 to 4 liters a day is normal consumption? Really? If you're drinking that much soda a day I think you have worse problems. It's all sugar.
Posted by: jj | August 21, 2010 3:05 AM
Bromine poisoning, what would be the effects of that thing! I bet that he wasn't keen to drink soda after that!
Posted by: reveillon | August 29, 2010 8:59 AM