February 01, 2016 at 03:01AM

Today I Learned: 1) So thalidamide is this decently effective drug whose enantiomer is highly teratogenic, which led to tens of thousands of severe birth defects when the drug was first administered as a painkiller for pregnant women(!). It's always struck me that this was an awfully sloppy mistake to make. After all, chirality is something chemists know about, and presumably it would have come up during the synthesis of thalidamide that there was an enantiomer they should really deal with. Wy did anyone think it was a good idea to administer both isomers of a drug? Well, it turns out that it wasn't just sloppy chemistry -- thalidamide can *switch its own racemization*. If you make a pure mix of 100% of either thalidamide enantiomer, it will decay back to a 50/50 over time, *especially* in biological conditions. I had no idea there were compounds that could do that. (I'm actually not sure whether the original thalidamide problem was because of this, or because the chemists that made it were sloppy. This bears more research) 2) Here's a bit of a thought experiment I've been thinking about for a while. Take a box full of salt water (say, sodium chloride). Apply an electric field across the water by putting a positively-charged rod at one end and a negatively charged rod at the other. The sodium ions should be attracted to the negative pole, and the chloride ions should be attracted to a negative pole, so this will create a gradient of charged ions across the box. Now spoon out a bunch of the water at one end, near the pole, and seal it away in a jar. Do you now have a bunch of charged water? It seems like you really, really ought to, but the idea of water with a net charge seems really crazy to me... ...well, today I was reminded that we make charged water for a bunch of reasons using a technique called electrospray. There, though, you're putting charge on a bunch of water droplets and spitting them out using an electromagnet. It turns out that if you put TOO much charge on a droplet, the repulsive forces of the charge overcome the cohesive forces of the water and it explodes. There's a special name for this explosion -- a Coulomb explosion. 3) ...not to let the lab turbidostat sit on its own for more than a day, or it starts to spew slightly contaminated media all over the bench. My secondary containment system (a box) worked decently well at limiting the damage, at least....