dualmindblade [he/him]

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  • 24 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2020

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  • Yeah Tylenol is a trash med that would never get approved today, especially not OTC. Unfortunately it’s one of the only things they let pregnant women take for pain. We need more research into the opiate drugs, there are atypical mu agonists that actually don’t carry as much addiction and overdose risk (gee I wonder why these didn’t get discovered when they were looking for a replacement for heroin/morphine), kappa antagonism might be useful in chronic pain, and delta agonists seems promising as well.







  • Yeah seems like it, the gold standard coil alloy is kanthal and, don’t quite me on this, but I think it’s been basically the only one considered acceptable for “roll your own” coils since like forever, so almost certainly what you were using. And most DIYers used to use nic freebase only (not sure if that’s still the case), the paper implicates the hcl salt nic as possibly making the metal leeching thing more efficient:

    Nicotine salts introduce organic acids (5) in e-liquids, which may facilitate metal dissolution in e-liquids through ligand–metal interactions.

    Anyway, the metal of concern in kanthal is chromium which can be non-toxic depending on the chemical form. The paper stated they didn’t detect any toxic version of chromium in the vapor, although they speculate it might be possible for this to undergo a further chemical change in the lungs:

    Nontoxic Cr(III) was the only oxidation state of Cr observed in aerosols

    But they also detected metals that didn’t come from the coils! Like Escobar brand apparently has a coil sheath that is 40% lead. Like what the actual fuck were they thinking with that design decision? And sure enough the juice had lead in it before it was even vaped. Also they found antimony and stated they didn’t know where it came from, presumably it would be something the juice came into contact with before the device was put together.



  • Holy shit, that’s what I get for using a heuristic. Unless the results were faked this seems highly concerning. Relevant quite from the study:

    Across all devices, virgin e-liquids exhibited relatively low concentrations of the primary elements observed in the heating coils, including Cr (3 to 20 μg/kg) and Fe (148 to 1090 μg/kg) (Table S2). Across ELF Bar and Flum Pebble virgin e-liquids, Ni was similarly low to Cr and Fe (14 to 29 μg/kg; Table S2). Unexpectedly, elements that are not present in heating coils (Table S1), including Pb, Cu, Zn, and Sb, were observed at excessive concentrations in Esco Bar device virgin e-liquids, with the exception of Ni which was elevated in virgin e-liquids relative to ELF Bar and Flum Pebble virgin e-liquids and present in coils (Figure 1). Esco Bar Flavored and Clear virgin e-liquids showed extremely high concentrations of Pb (64,000 to 127,000 μg/kg), Ni (13,000 to 38,400 μg/kg), Cu (344,000 to 533,000 μg/kg), and Zn (240,000 to 376,000 μg/kg) (Table S2). For context, concentrations of Pb, Ni, Cu, and Zn were universally and comparatively low in all other virgin e-liquids from Elf Bar or Flum Pebble devices, at ≤15, ≤29, ≤24, and ≤331 μg/kg, respectively, with the exception of Zn in the ELF Bar Flavored virgin e-liquid at 4420 μg/kg (Table S2).








  • I’ve wondered about this since I don’t like hurting wasps. They will move out if you consistently get them wet, but it takes a long time. You can also blast the nest with water (they can’t fly when wet) to remove them then cut it down, they always try to rebuild at least 2 or 3 times but eventually they get the idea and move. There’s a video which shows how to move a while colony manually, sounds hard but might be a fun project: https://youtu.be/ml4IRBFuOvs

    I believe I tried a paper bag once for a fake nest, that didn’t work, you can buy more realistic ones online though. Unfortunately I may never know, new strategy is just to leave them be, the ones we get around here (South central Texas) are really non aggressive, the only way you get stung is making physical contact.

    One more thing, most of these social wasps abandon the nest over winter and rebuild the next year. If you catch them really early in spring it’s much easier to discourage them from building just by hosing it down, in this case it’s probably even easier than killing them with pesticide.