> In tests with mice, however, the animals did not seem to prefer drinking heavy water over regular water, although they did show a preference for sugared water – suggesting that in mice, D2O does not elicit the same sweet taste that people can perceive.
I was reminded that rodents also can’t taste aspartame[1], and that in general human taste buds are more finely-tuned than many other mammals (we can detect isomers and many complex bitter chemicals, whereas many other animals can only do the amino acids, sodium, and simple carbohydrates).
Having never drank it myself I was wondering if the sweet taste of heavy water is distinctly “artificial” in the way that sucralose/aspartame/etc in water is immediately distinguishable from regular sugar.
Huh. So, when Reepicheep in Prince Caspian discovers that the ocean is no longer salty but tastes sweet, we can rule out that the oceans of the far reaches of the world containing Narnia are made of heavy water, because if it were then he wouldn't have been able to taste it.
Though I suppose any fan theory in this direction could be salvaged by the conjecture that talking mice are different.
Wouldn't the olfactory bundle above your nose be a number of times larger than an entire rat's brain? Not to mention everything downstream of it ...
A lot of the smell sensitivity comes from ("carefully tuned?") positive feedback loops int the olfactory systems which amplify small signals.
Or something like that, supposedly. Not my area. At least, not the input side. On the output side of stink, I'm no theorist either; maker, for sure, though!
As a kid, I used to get stomach aches and a long list of other issues. Fast forward after a bunch of tests as an adult and the results reported to me by a doctor spelt out that most artificial sweeteners are effectively poison to me. If I want a headache, stomach ache, etc I just consume one of the many sweeteners out there.
The "hyper-sweet" taste and after-taste I get from most artificial sweeteners for me is a signal of poison or bad food. Its a clear signal to avoid that food in future.
My question is the same: I wonder if D2O would have that same kind of "twisted" sweetness?
Secondary questions: I wonder if our ancestors did the same? Noticed that they didn't feel well and that was enough to tip the selection balance such that we now have the ability to detect D2O? How subtle would that effect be? or is just it tied into a specialised "anti-poison" set of structures we've got to detect bad-food? I think this is more likely. D2O is bad water. We have senses for other kinds of bad water as well.
Then it went to him recollecting the heavy water that has passed through him. Which is very Cody, but also, well, gives off strong Howard Hughes vibes.
Cody is a heck of a smart person, but then does some pretty questionable stuff. His mercury vids are a good example. Like, I believe him when he says that if you don't have open wounds, you can slosh mercury about in your mouth safely. But for the life of me, I just can't think it's actually safe.
Or the time he was sweeping the center median of a freeway at night trying to collect platinum dust from catalytic converter exhaust. Yeah, it was under the lights, but daytime would obviously have been better.
Or his noble gas vids. Inhaling them seems safe per his description, but the vibe is just so, well, not safe.
A lot of his vids are like that. It feels very early-1800s-chemist, back when they had to taste all the reactions cuz they didn't have pH paper. Like, it all has to be sensorial for him/the views.
Not mentioned in the piece is that a small fraction of naturally-occurring water is "heavy" for a somewhat different reason. Oxygen as well as hydrogen has stable isotopes, O17 and O18.
Summary of O16, O17, O18 formation inside massive stars, here:
Unrelated to water heaviness, while not the hardest, NYC tap water always tested sweet to me. I love that taste. It's amazing how used I got to it, to the point that drinking tap water anywhere else feels like some sort of punishment. It really made me realize after living outside of NYC how infrequently New Yorkers actually buy bottled water.
BTW: "New York City department of environmental protection is one of the 5 municipalities in the US that is allowed to supply unfiltered water based on their water quality, and the water is well known for its fresh taste (which is based on the absence of chlorine, a chemical often used for water treatment)."
NYC tap water is astonishingly good. Not just better than you'd expect for a big dirty city, but better than you'd expect from a pristine mountain glacier in Norway. It's because of those giant underground tunnels that bring in the water fresh from far away in upstate NY. It's the best tap water I've tasted in the US.
I've always found Boston tap water to be excellent too. It comes from the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts, and is a claim-to-fame for Sam Adams beer. They even mimic the water in their breweries elsewhere.
In general mountain water I think is the best.
People don't really think about it this way, but New York is actually very close to two mountain ranges (the Taconic range of the Appalachians, and the Catskills). The Taconics are the dramatic peaks you see when crossing the Hudson a bit further north around Newburgh, and the Catskills are the much larger mountains slightly more inland.
I couldn't wrap my head around how such a polluted city could have such clean water and found this:
"New York City drinking water springs from 125 miles away in the Catskill Mountains -- 90% of the water comes from the Catskill/Delaware watershed, where waters from tributary rivers collect in 19 reservoirs. The other 10% comes from smaller watersheds in Westchester and Rye -- all of it traveling through vast underground aqueducts to supply the city’s residents."
While growing up in a very dry region in India, I remember people get boring wells drilled in their land to extract ground water (sometimes even 1000 feet deep). This ground water often tastes subtly sweet and I remember drinking that water in summer heat, getting this amazing sweet after taste. In fact people go to neighbors who have "meetha pani" (sweet water) for their daily consumption. Not sure if that was D2O and not H2O.
I think from ground water trace elements like lead are more likely. In my experience when I've been in places where groundwater was the household source via electronic pump, it's always been a case where you weren't supposed to drink it. And either had a reverse osmosis machine near by to use to fill bottles, or you just relied on store bought bottled water for drinking and cooking.
It would be interesting if in your cases it was high deuterium water though. It's not something I ever considered really.
Of course when straight groundwater is your best or only option, that's a hell of a lot better than having no source of plausibly safe water available. I've drank lake water where we would just disinfect it with a few drops of bleach for a couple of weeks when on trips. But was always told that this is a short term solution for convenience.
>Experiments with mice, rats, and dogs[42] have shown that a degree of 25% deuteration causes (sometimes irreversible) sterility, because neither gametes nor zygotes can develop. High concentrations of heavy water (90%) rapidly kill fish, tadpoles, flatworms, and Drosophila. The only known exception is the anhydrobiotic nematode Panagrolaimus superbus, which is able to survive and reproduce in 99.9% D2O.[40] Mammals (for example, rats) given heavy water to drink die after a week, at a time when their body water approaches about 50% deuteration.[43] The mode of death appears to be the same as that in cytotoxic poisoning (such as chemotherapy) or in acute radiation syndrome (though deuterium is not radioactive)
That would be a very difficult experiment to design. Whatever process one used to isolate heavy water would invariably affect the concentration of trace amounts of other molecules. While the two samples might taste subtly different, the difference might be due to some mineral picked up (or lost) in the separation process. I wonder how rigorously they controlled for this? Would you run a spectroscopic analysis on both samples to ensure they were identical but for the DO2? And, even then, one would have to wonder whether the density of the liquid may be having some subtle effect on the manner in which contaminants—-even if identical in concentration in both samples—-are being uptook into the taste nerves.
Wouldn't that be potentially dangerous to drink, given that lots of these deuterium atoms now become part of your body and have slightly different chemical characteristics than hydrogen atoms?
It is talked about in Thunderf00t's video. You essentially need to drink only heavy water for a week for it to be a problem. It is one of the least effective and most expensive way of poisoning yourself.
But the most interesting part is when they tested it on mice. Mice are small and it doesn't take that much for heavy water to start having an effect. And what they noticed is that after some time, mice shunned the heavy water in favor of regular (light) water. Suggesting that mice are able to taste and recognize heavy water as harmful.
By the way, that video is excellent. Thunderf00t is a troll, but when he stops ranting and starts doing science, he makes really great content.
"Because of that altered bonding behavior – which can affect bodily chemistry if you ingest deuterium in D2O – scientists generally say it's not a great idea to drink heavy water, at least not in high doses."
But also note your body already has to be robust against it to some degree, because water will normally have a certain amount of heavy water in it naturally, so it's not like it's a deadly deadly toxin. It's just something you shouldn't drink a lot of.
"But, you have to continuously drink and eat only heavy water for several days to see an effect. Replacing 20% of regular water in cells with heavy water is survivable for humans and other mammals (although not recommended). Swapping 25% of water with heavy water causes (sometimes irreversible) sterilization. Replacing 50% of water with heavy water is lethal. It’s not a pretty death, either. Heavy water poisoning resembles radiation poisoning or cytotoxic poisoning from chemotherapy."
It looks like from the paper's methods [0] that they did "sip and spit," maybe similar to wine tasting? Plus rinsing with normal water in between tastes. I think that, plus D2O not being particularly poisonous in low quantities, would make that a safe enough experiment.
In the same paragraph they say "All research procedures were ethically approved by the Committee for the Use of Human Subjects in Research" at their university, so they probably had to provide a lot of evidence that it was safe beforehand.
That's really amazing that human taste buds are such sensitive chemical detectors. We still can't build anything as good at anything near that size.
Off-topic: Is anyone else reminded of that episode of Hogan's Heroes where the Germans store heavy water in the POW camp to protect it from allied bombers, and Hogan tricks Colonol Klink into drinking the heavy water by telling him it had some kind of health benefit? https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/584201382887878852/
There's a remarkable spectrum of subtle differences in the way water tastes. Plastic bottles, metal pipes, using a straw, city tap water, spring water, well water, chlorine, filters, they all add a little flavor.
I remember sitting in an APS talk 7 or so years back where the room more or less laughed at a researcher presenting hypotheses on how deuterium detection might be possible in fruitfly proteins.
I hated that entire room and what it stood for. Philistines masquerading as professors. No scientific talk which was done systematically should be laughed at like that.
I'd be very skeptical that there is an actual biological mechanism that detects deuterium intentionally, there simply isn't really any need to this given that D2O is very rare. I'm not saying they don't exist, but there is no compelling argument why they would evolve. I'm not saying this can't exist, but I'd need some pretty convincing evidence that there's an actual biological reason for such a mechanism.
But of course detection would be possible, it has been known for many decades that different isotopes change reaction kinetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_isotope_effect). That is a measurable chemical effect, so of course a protein could make use of it. This is something I was taught in university, so this is not any kind of obscure knowledge, but mainstream chemistry.
Agreed, the suppression of research in this area, for decades, reveals a fundamental failure in how we as a society conduct science.
E.g., now that it turns out that saturated fat is wholly harmless, the past five decades spent failing to investigate why meat consumption really causes circulatory disease is practically criminal. How many early deaths are traceable to this sustained failure? How many, to having continued permitting trans fats in stuff sold as if it were food? How many to oxidized unsaturated fats?
People like to insist that science always gets it right in the end, but these corrections are always isolated flukes. The pattern suggests a clear majority never get corrected.
mRNA vaccines are just such a fluke; their inventor spent her whole career being spit on. How many died, for lack of mRNA vaccines in past decades when the method could have accelerated vaccine development by years back then, instead of only now?
A great fount of suppressed truths must lie dreaming in the work of women and minorities driven from their fields.
As an student, ta and undergraduate instructor the one thing that offended me outright was people being discouraged from engaging. 99% of instruction is communication, largely one direction and engagement is the only data to evaluate the effectiveness.
To me it reinforces the one correct reason to become a professor: you want to raise the standard of professionals / colleagues in the field by mass education. Your goal is to increase quality across the board, and the only way to be successful is to be a good and engaging communicator. There are networked benefits from creating success for your students.
So is this ability surprising though? As water is essential for surival, the ability to taste when water is 'off' would be a powerful evolutionary tool. This is maybe why water tastes 'like nothing' so we can better tell when there is something wrong with it.
It is pretty suprising!. There's no strong evolutionary reason for being able to taste the difference: there's no natural source of such concentrated D20 and it's only toxic if you ingest a lot of the concentrated stuff. It's not something any animal is going to encounter in nature.
And by conventional chemical wisdom D20 and H20 are virtually identical: the electron structure is the same and that basically dictates the chemistry. The only significant difference is the mass of the molecule (about 10% heavier), and experiments with oxygen-18 water (which has the same mass as D20) showed it doesn't taste of anything, so it must be due to very slight changes in structure between the two.
Please do not give me heavy water without asking. I might not have been compiled with CONFIG_D20 support. I can tell you, but with small children, you have to check.
A side effect of improving the taste of tap water would be less soft drink consumption. I hate the taste of chlorine in the water. Its probably bad for you if you bath and shower in it too. Britta Filters for the tap water, and charcoal filter for the shower head are two very inexpensive ways to improve your quality of life. Highly recommend both. And probably some sort of glass bottle for on the go water consumption. I can taste the plastic in water bottles, especially on a hot summer day while it was left in the car.
The TLDR is that also chemistry is mostly about electric charges, actually speed plays a role in which reaction is favored when there are competing reactions, and reaction rate decreases with mass. Hydrogen being very small, one neutron makes a big mass difference, so it's the most susceptible to mass change.
[+] [-] nicklecompte|4 years ago|reply
> In tests with mice, however, the animals did not seem to prefer drinking heavy water over regular water, although they did show a preference for sugared water – suggesting that in mice, D2O does not elicit the same sweet taste that people can perceive.
I was reminded that rodents also can’t taste aspartame[1], and that in general human taste buds are more finely-tuned than many other mammals (we can detect isomers and many complex bitter chemicals, whereas many other animals can only do the amino acids, sodium, and simple carbohydrates).
Having never drank it myself I was wondering if the sweet taste of heavy water is distinctly “artificial” in the way that sucralose/aspartame/etc in water is immediately distinguishable from regular sugar.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature726
[+] [-] Knufen|4 years ago|reply
Edit: The taste was definitely different but not enough so that I could say it wasn't placebo
[+] [-] elihu|4 years ago|reply
Though I suppose any fan theory in this direction could be salvaged by the conjecture that talking mice are different.
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
A lot of the smell sensitivity comes from ("carefully tuned?") positive feedback loops int the olfactory systems which amplify small signals.
Or something like that, supposedly. Not my area. At least, not the input side. On the output side of stink, I'm no theorist either; maker, for sure, though!
[+] [-] sfgweilr4f|4 years ago|reply
As a kid, I used to get stomach aches and a long list of other issues. Fast forward after a bunch of tests as an adult and the results reported to me by a doctor spelt out that most artificial sweeteners are effectively poison to me. If I want a headache, stomach ache, etc I just consume one of the many sweeteners out there.
The "hyper-sweet" taste and after-taste I get from most artificial sweeteners for me is a signal of poison or bad food. Its a clear signal to avoid that food in future.
My question is the same: I wonder if D2O would have that same kind of "twisted" sweetness?
Secondary questions: I wonder if our ancestors did the same? Noticed that they didn't feel well and that was enough to tip the selection balance such that we now have the ability to detect D2O? How subtle would that effect be? or is just it tied into a specialised "anti-poison" set of structures we've got to detect bad-food? I think this is more likely. D2O is bad water. We have senses for other kinds of bad water as well.
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lANjwPzISQw
[+] [-] DetroitThrow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tsovlerg|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXHVqId0MQc
TLDR - sweet, has an aftertaste, feels cold on the lips (compared to regular water)
[+] [-] Balgair|4 years ago|reply
Then it went to him recollecting the heavy water that has passed through him. Which is very Cody, but also, well, gives off strong Howard Hughes vibes.
Cody is a heck of a smart person, but then does some pretty questionable stuff. His mercury vids are a good example. Like, I believe him when he says that if you don't have open wounds, you can slosh mercury about in your mouth safely. But for the life of me, I just can't think it's actually safe.
Or the time he was sweeping the center median of a freeway at night trying to collect platinum dust from catalytic converter exhaust. Yeah, it was under the lights, but daytime would obviously have been better.
Or his noble gas vids. Inhaling them seems safe per his description, but the vibe is just so, well, not safe.
A lot of his vids are like that. It feels very early-1800s-chemist, back when they had to taste all the reactions cuz they didn't have pH paper. Like, it all has to be sensorial for him/the views.
Great guy though.
[+] [-] db48x|4 years ago|reply
It seems that Cody’s video inspired the research.
[+] [-] gcanyon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eMGm4D0zgUAVXc7|4 years ago|reply
It's a really nice nerd content channel with science of lots of different areas!
[+] [-] everybodyknows|4 years ago|reply
Summary of O16, O17, O18 formation inside massive stars, here:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_oxygen
[+] [-] xyzzy21|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Teknoman117|4 years ago|reply
I wonder if D2O(18) would have any flavor difference...
[+] [-] cromka|4 years ago|reply
BTW: "New York City department of environmental protection is one of the 5 municipalities in the US that is allowed to supply unfiltered water based on their water quality, and the water is well known for its fresh taste (which is based on the absence of chlorine, a chemical often used for water treatment)."
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thehappypm|4 years ago|reply
In general mountain water I think is the best.
People don't really think about it this way, but New York is actually very close to two mountain ranges (the Taconic range of the Appalachians, and the Catskills). The Taconics are the dramatic peaks you see when crossing the Hudson a bit further north around Newburgh, and the Catskills are the much larger mountains slightly more inland.
[+] [-] astrea|4 years ago|reply
"New York City drinking water springs from 125 miles away in the Catskill Mountains -- 90% of the water comes from the Catskill/Delaware watershed, where waters from tributary rivers collect in 19 reservoirs. The other 10% comes from smaller watersheds in Westchester and Rye -- all of it traveling through vast underground aqueducts to supply the city’s residents."
[+] [-] schrodinger|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandliya|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jebeng|4 years ago|reply
It would be interesting if in your cases it was high deuterium water though. It's not something I ever considered really.
Of course when straight groundwater is your best or only option, that's a hell of a lot better than having no source of plausibly safe water available. I've drank lake water where we would just disinfect it with a few drops of bleach for a couple of weeks when on trips. But was always told that this is a short term solution for convenience.
[+] [-] sbierwagen|4 years ago|reply
>Experiments with mice, rats, and dogs[42] have shown that a degree of 25% deuteration causes (sometimes irreversible) sterility, because neither gametes nor zygotes can develop. High concentrations of heavy water (90%) rapidly kill fish, tadpoles, flatworms, and Drosophila. The only known exception is the anhydrobiotic nematode Panagrolaimus superbus, which is able to survive and reproduce in 99.9% D2O.[40] Mammals (for example, rats) given heavy water to drink die after a week, at a time when their body water approaches about 50% deuteration.[43] The mode of death appears to be the same as that in cytotoxic poisoning (such as chemotherapy) or in acute radiation syndrome (though deuterium is not radioactive)
[+] [-] istjohn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr_toad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lurquer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tanvach|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] amelius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|4 years ago|reply
But the most interesting part is when they tested it on mice. Mice are small and it doesn't take that much for heavy water to start having an effect. And what they noticed is that after some time, mice shunned the heavy water in favor of regular (light) water. Suggesting that mice are able to taste and recognize heavy water as harmful.
By the way, that video is excellent. Thunderf00t is a troll, but when he stops ranting and starts doing science, he makes really great content.
[+] [-] jerf|4 years ago|reply
But also note your body already has to be robust against it to some degree, because water will normally have a certain amount of heavy water in it naturally, so it's not like it's a deadly deadly toxin. It's just something you shouldn't drink a lot of.
[+] [-] ortusdux|4 years ago|reply
https://sciencenotes.org/can-you-drink-heavy-water-is-it-saf...
[+] [-] sndean|4 years ago|reply
In the same paragraph they say "All research procedures were ethically approved by the Committee for the Use of Human Subjects in Research" at their university, so they probably had to provide a lot of evidence that it was safe beforehand.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01964-y#Sec10
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] del_operator|4 years ago|reply
https://www.quantamagazine.org/a-new-spin-on-the-quantum-bra...
[+] [-] eloff|4 years ago|reply
Off-topic: Is anyone else reminded of that episode of Hogan's Heroes where the Germans store heavy water in the POW camp to protect it from allied bombers, and Hogan tricks Colonol Klink into drinking the heavy water by telling him it had some kind of health benefit? https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/584201382887878852/
[+] [-] calibas|4 years ago|reply
In certain cases and depending on the person, human taste and smell is an incredibly accurate chemical detector. https://www.sciencealert.com/this-woman-can-smell-parkinson-...
[+] [-] ramraj07|4 years ago|reply
I hated that entire room and what it stood for. Philistines masquerading as professors. No scientific talk which was done systematically should be laughed at like that.
[+] [-] fabian2k|4 years ago|reply
But of course detection would be possible, it has been known for many decades that different isotopes change reaction kinetics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_isotope_effect). That is a measurable chemical effect, so of course a protein could make use of it. This is something I was taught in university, so this is not any kind of obscure knowledge, but mainstream chemistry.
[+] [-] ncmncm|4 years ago|reply
E.g., now that it turns out that saturated fat is wholly harmless, the past five decades spent failing to investigate why meat consumption really causes circulatory disease is practically criminal. How many early deaths are traceable to this sustained failure? How many, to having continued permitting trans fats in stuff sold as if it were food? How many to oxidized unsaturated fats?
People like to insist that science always gets it right in the end, but these corrections are always isolated flukes. The pattern suggests a clear majority never get corrected.
mRNA vaccines are just such a fluke; their inventor spent her whole career being spit on. How many died, for lack of mRNA vaccines in past decades when the method could have accelerated vaccine development by years back then, instead of only now?
A great fount of suppressed truths must lie dreaming in the work of women and minorities driven from their fields.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pc87uvk8GBc
[+] [-] omgJustTest|4 years ago|reply
To me it reinforces the one correct reason to become a professor: you want to raise the standard of professionals / colleagues in the field by mass education. Your goal is to increase quality across the board, and the only way to be successful is to be a good and engaging communicator. There are networked benefits from creating success for your students.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aseerdbnarng|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rcxdude|4 years ago|reply
And by conventional chemical wisdom D20 and H20 are virtually identical: the electron structure is the same and that basically dictates the chemistry. The only significant difference is the mass of the molecule (about 10% heavier), and experiments with oxygen-18 water (which has the same mass as D20) showed it doesn't taste of anything, so it must be due to very slight changes in structure between the two.
[+] [-] minitoar|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dukeofdoom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdontillman|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nraynaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]