No, that's the metal acetates - usually lead acetate.
Cyanide is tasteless, but does have a smell. The smell is that of _bitter_ almonds, which don't smell much like almonds either. The best way to detect cyanide is to smoke, for you can taste a flavour difference in tobacco at much lower concentrations than you can smell the cyanide itself. Friend of mine (a devout smoker) tried very hard to have smoking made compulsory in his cyanide-handling lab,
I thought that's where I read it made you blind? Isn't that how the Italians got caught?
zaax wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ntl.com:
If there were a prize for the year's daftest comment, I'd nominate this.
mike
Erm, ok. You don't get out much, do you?
I know that people sometimes like to see the Italians as the source of all things bad, but it was in fact the Austrians who were poisoning wine with ethylene glycol.
Put some in a bottle, put it in the freezer, see if it freezes.
Ethylene glycol is used in most automotive anti-freeze mixture. It is toxic. It is used as a wood preservative. I don't know what you hope to determine from the taste.
The corrosion inhibitors degrade in use; the antifreeze mixture absorbs oxygen the glycols combine with the oxygen to form acidic compounds. When the reserve alkalinity is exhausted, the mixture becomes acidic and galvanic corrosion starts devouring some engine components. The usual recommendation is to drain and refill every 3 years. Some recent cars use OAT (organic acid technology), which lasts much longer, but I know nothing about.I
Propylene glycol is also used as anti-freeze in situations where a toxic mixture would be a hazard, for example in heating systems with an indirect hot water heater. It is non-toxic and it is very, very sweet. It is used as an artificial sweetener. I think that PG was probably what was used to adulterate the wine; I thought it was the Austrians.
Tasting is often used with propylene glycol to identify leaks, it is so sweet it will put your teeth on edge. Tasting is probably inadvisable, it has it's own hazards. A heating contractor I know of visited a dark basement in which he had installed a boiler system. The system had been filled with a propylene glycol antifreeze mixture. He noticed a puddle on the floor near the boiler, so dipped a finger into it and tasted it.
It wasn't sweet, so therefore it couldn't be anti-freeze. As he wondered what it could be, he noticed a large alsatian dog watching him from a corner.
Who discovered that?
Urine for a surprise....
The consultant urologist is demonstrating urine sampling to a class of students. As each sample is passed to him, he dips a finger in the bottle, raises his hand to his mouth and licks it. the standard tests follow and after each one he mutters "Hmm, thought so, too high/low a sugar level", etc.
The students were then invited to follow his example, which they duly did, including the finger dipping and licking.
At the end of the class, the consultant addressed the students. "While I cannot fault you on your general techniques", he said, "I would recommend that you pay more attention to observation". He continued, "If you had been more alert, you would have realised that, when I dipped my finger in the sample prior to testing it, I then licked a different digit.
Class dismissed".
It's ancient, probably Greek, although I've not bothered to check. The term "piss prophet" (a doctor diagnosing by inspecting urine) goes back to the 17th century.
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