My sister in law is an artist and is writing a proposal for funding a project. She intends to use red clay to make some figurines. She has heard an old story that the composition of red clay is similar to the composition of the human body and is wondering how much off the mark is that statement. I am pretty sure that at the level of molecules/compounds the difference is huge, but I am not sure how big is the difference if one breaks down the chemical composition down to elements/atoms. I suspect that carbon and hydrogen may be close, but how about nitrogen, oxygen or, even more difficult for me to find out: copper, phosphorus, iron, sulphur, manganese, etc.? Do you know?
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Every once in a while Scienceblogs (through its publisher, Seed Magazine) gets a question from a reader that is circulated to see if one or more of the bloggers wants to take a crack at answering it. Recently a 9 year old wanted to know what is in the air we breathe (chemically speaking). On its…
It's bigger news in the UK than elsewhere but it's still big news. Apparently Russian dissident and former KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko was fatally poisoned with Polonium 210. Time for some science.
Polonium 210 is a radioisotope, meaning it is an isotope of the element Polonium that is…
A lot of brain power has been devoted to establishing Biosignatures, as a means for remotely detecting alien life.
But, what if alien cows don't fart? Can we still conceive of robust generic biosignatures that are not just slavish restatements of what we think we know about the Earth?
One of my…
Over the six months tÃ¥hat I've been writing this blog, I've gotten a bunch of email from people asking about what it's like working as a researcher in industry vs working in academia. It's a good question, one which I've spent a lot of time thinking about. So I thought it was worth turning into…
I don't know much about human body composition (other than there's a lot of water) but I doubt there's a close relationship between clays and living organisms. The chemical formula for the most complex family of clays, montmorillonite, is
X0.2-0.4 Y2 Z4 O10 (OH)2 * nH2O
where
X is some combination of calcium and sodium,
Y is some combination of aluminum, magnesium, and iron, and,
z is some combination of silicon and aluminum.
Other clay chemistries are basically reductions of this. Red clay would undoubtedly have a fair amount of iron in the Y position. But no carbon, lots of silicon and aluminum, and enough iron for a red color (which actually doesn't take a whole lot). *
If this is similar in composition to the human body, I'd be very surprised. Just as a guess, I'd say the story came about because the red color reminded somebody of blood.
* source: Perkins, D., 2002, Mineralogy, 2nd ed., Prentice Hall, Inc., p 313.
The information on Wikipedia seems to indicate the same: That there isn't very much similarity.
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay
and the various links listed therein.