poison
dblum | February 7, 2010Just before this weekend's stunning snow storm arrived in the Mid-Atlantic, poison control centers started issuing chirps of alarm.
I thought of them as chirps - something like the peeping alarm calls of small birds - because they sounded so faint against the other looming worries - adequate food supplies, airport closures, shut downs in government services.
And yet the fact is that more people have already been poisoned as a result of the monster storm than have suffered from starvation. The Washington Post today reported eight people treated for carbon monoxide poisoning and in…
dblum | February 6, 2010When I bought my poison ring (I think I mentioned earlier that I do own one), I was browsing around at an antique show. While I stood admiring an ornately chased Victorian ring, the dealer came over smiling. "What makes that one so good," she said, "is that it's a poison ring."
Good is, perhaps, not the best word to describe such an elegantly dangerous device. And yet, I was immediately fascinated. I'd always imagined poison rings as rather obvious, an enormous golden blob like thing on the fingers of Lucretia Borgia (although, apparently, her brothers were far more murderous).This was dainty…
dblum | February 5, 2010So one summer evening in 2008, a Maryland family sits down to a dinner of home-made beef stew flavored with mint from the backyard and, oh yeah, some other plant growing in the leafy borders by the fence. It looks like this:An hour after dinner, another relative shows up to find the members of the dinner party dazed and incoherent, some giggling uncontrollably, some staggering with hallucinations. Then they start to throw up. The dismayed relative calls 911; by the time all six of the stew-eaters arrive at the emergency room, two are unconscious. All are struggling for breath, their heart-…
dblum | February 3, 2010Browsing through the most recent annual report of the American Association of Poison Control Centers, I began to worry that my choice of reading material is becoming too dark. Didn't I used to relax with novels instead of lists of household materials used in suicides?
My husband is sitting across the room, reading a normal book. I peer at him over the top of my laptop. Can he tell that I'm comparing the toxic effects of drain cleaners in the kitchen cupboards and foxglove plants from the backyard?
No, he's engrossed in his book (and I'm sorry to tell you that it's not my masterpiece, The…
dblum | February 1, 2010On Friday, a 41-year-old Missouri woman was charged with poisoning her granddaughter with an anti-clotting medication. The reason: she wanted to scare the one-year-old's parents into uniting over the child's illness and giving up their divorce plans.
The poisoning was discovered when the little girl began bleeding uncontrollably from her mouth and nose. Although doctors treated her successfully, they expressed concern about long-term damage. High exposure to anti-coagulents, usually members of the Warfarin family of drugs, such as Coumadin, has been linked to heart and bone damage.
Bizarre as…
dblum | January 29, 2010In 1854, the essayist Henry David Thoreau published an ode to a morning fire: "Light-winged Smoke, Icarian bird... Lark without song, and messenger of dawn." Scientists, of course, saw the hazing blue of wood smoke - or any smoke derived from burning plant material - as something less poetic. In particular, the smoke from dried leaves of the tobacco plant attracted serious attention from chemists by the end of the 19th century.
Victorian scientists had, for instance, calculated that cigarette smoke was about four percent carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas which directly interferes with the…
dblum | January 27, 2010Late last summer, six researchers at Harvard University's medical school fell into a poisoner's trap. Each poured a cup of coffee from a communal coffee maker in the school's pathology department. All of them ended up in the hospital; some had fainted, others were dizzy and nauseated, most couldn't hear over the ringing in their ears.
Investigators quickly discovered that the coffee machine's water tank had been laced with laboratory preservative called sodium azide, used to keep bacteria from growing in chemical solutions. This offered up an almost limitless pool of suspects - anyone…
dblum | January 25, 2010
Speakeasy bar, 1933
I love the cocktails of the 1920s, invented by Prohibition-era mixologists trying to cover up the taste of bathtub gin. The Bee's Knees, which stirs lemon juice and honey in with the liquor; the Sidecar (personal favorite) which blends lemon juice and orange-infused liqueurs like Cointreau with whiskey. At one point I acquired the 1930s Savoy Book of Cocktails thinking to gain even more, um, experience.
I gave it up up though. Those Jazz-Age cocktails are just too potent. During Prohibition (1920-1933), of course, they were even more so because the bootlegged liquors…
dblum | January 13, 2010My new book - The Poisoner's Handbook - will be published next month (February 18). But it's already having this effect on my life: my husband has developed a nervous habit of moving his coffee cup out of my reach. When the Wall Street Journal published an excerpt of the book (see link below) I promptly received the following e-mail: "Read the wonderful weekend section front in the Journal. But the coffee my wife just handed me tastes a little odd."Â When the invitation was sent out for my book launch party, it read: "We promise that the beer, wine, and snacks will be completely…
edyong | December 21, 2009It's a dinosaur tooth, and clearly one that belonged to a predator - sharp and backwards-pointing. But this particularly tooth, belonging to a small raptor called Sinornithosaurus, has a special feature that's courting a lot controversy. It has a thin groove running down its length, from the root to the very tip. According to a new paper from Enpu Gong of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, it was a channel for venom.
Thanks to a certain film that shall remain nameless, a lot of people probably think that we already know that some dinosaurs are venomous. But the idea that Dilophosaurus was…
razib | May 18, 2009Ed Yong has an excellent review of new research which casts substantial doubt on the trivia chestnut that Komodo dragons kill their prey with their extremely pathogen rich saliva. The more prosaic answer seems to be that they utilize poison, not particularly surprising or trivia worthy for a reptile. But the truth is not always sexy.
grrlscientist | May 17, 2009tags: religion, fundamentalist nonsense, poison, humor, satire, comedy, streaming video
In this video, we are reminded about Mark 16:17-18, which tells us that drinking poison will do no harm to those who believe in god. Edward Current celebrates this amazing gift from our loving Father by drinking a bottle of cyanide that is so potent that it can kill an adult atheist in less than ten seconds [3:50]
zooillogix | April 22, 2009
by Katie the lowly intern
Just when you started to feel comforted by the surge of popular culture embracing cephalopods on TV, apparel and porn, scientists spoon out a dose of brutal reality. Researchers from University of Melbourne, University of Brussels and Museum Victoria have revealed another terrifying fact about octopuses. It's not enough that they can squirt ink, have beaks, move by jet propulsion, change colors in seconds, turn their eyes to keep their pupils horizontally oriented, have no bones and most horrifically: have eight arms... but give very few hugs*.
The original octo-…
edyong | March 10, 2008
The story of evolution is filled with antagonists, be they predators and prey, hosts and parasites, or males and females. These conflicts of interest provide the fuel for 'evolutionary arms races' - cycles of adaptation and counter-adaptation where any advantage gained by one side is rapidly neutralised by a counter-measure from the other. As the Red Queen of Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass said to Alice, "It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."
The Red Queen analogy paints a picture of natural foes, wielding perfectly balanced armaments and caught in a…
zooillogix | May 17, 2007A team of Florida International University zoologists studying poison arrow frogs in South America have identified the source of the colorful critters' toxicity. Researchers have long known that the amphibians do not produce the toxic compounds, alkaloids, themselves, but were uncertain of their origins. The FIU team discovered that the frogs were eating tiny oribatid mites that are abundant in decaying plant matter. Analysis of the mites determined over 80 types of alkaloids present in their tiny bodies, explaining the source of the frogs' defense.Come on... just one quick taste... all the…