You can’t swing a cat in this world without hitting something made up of chemicals. That cat is made up of chemicals. The air you’re swinging it in is made of chemicals. Even if we tend to think of chemicals as dangerous substances like acids or volatile substances made in laboratories, basic things like water still qualify as chemical compounds since they have a simple chemical formula. But you’re not here for boring, everyday chemicals. You’re here for the weird ones.
10. Firefighters Use a Chemical Called “Wet Water”
Most of us are sufficiently familiar with fire that we understand water is a good weapon to use against it, electrical or grease fires notwithstanding. When we see firefighters responding to a blaze, we expect that they’re using a fire hose that shoots water to put the fire out. Turns out, that’s not always the case.
Firefighters will sometimes turn to a chemical known as “wet water” to fight fires. No, that name is not very helpful at all in explaining the difference between this chemical and actual water which also seems to be pretty good at getting things wet. Nevertheless, it is a different substance entirely.
Wet water dates back to the 1960s and involves the addition of chemical wetting agents to regular water. These chemicals, generally emulsifiers, reduce the surface tension of the water and allow it to penetrate more thoroughly. It also spreads more easily, so it has more effectiveness in fighting fires. In practical terms, it really does make water wetter.
9. Walnut Trees Make a Toxic Chemical Called Juglone
Walnuts are one of those second string nuts you don’t see nearly as much as pecans or almonds out in the world. They have their place but they’re not a headliner. However, when it comes to curious chemical production, walnuts get to take center stage.
Walnut trees produce a chemical called juglone. Juglone is a very antisocial substance when it comes to other plants and causes something called “walnut wilt.” If plants like tomato, potato, raspberries, carrots, beans and a handful of others are planted too close to a walnut tree, they’re doomed. Juglone can extend 80 feet away from the base of the tree and kill almost anything in that circle.
The chemical has an insidious method of working. It basically chokes other plants to death, preventing them from exchanging carbon dioxide and oxygen. The only way to deal with it is to separate plants from walnuts.
Be warned, it’s also potentially dangerous to humans. Some people have a strong reaction to it and if you handle the nuts or leaves, you can end up with red welts. If it gets breathed in from sawdust, it can also harm your lungs.
8. Sodium Citrate Is a Chemical Pun
Sodium citrate may sound vaguely familiar to you. It’s one of those things you’ll see on the ingredient list of many products, way down with various preservatives and other things that don’t sound particularly natural. Famously, it’s an ingredient found in certain cheese products.
If you want a cheese sauce, like nacho cheese, to be smooth and creamy, sodium citrate is the chemical that can pull it off. To be clear, this is the stuff that comes out of a pump at your local 7-11, or in a jar that you buy at Wal Mart when you want a creamy, oozy, cheese-like sauce in which to dip tortilla chips.
Sodium citrate is an emulsifier. It makes the cheese sauce creamier while reducing acid content. It allows the cheese to stay in a liquid form without separating, something you may know is an issue if you ever tried to just melt cheese with nothing added to it to make your own sauce.
So what makes sodium citrate interesting? There are lots of emulsifiers in the world, but sodium citrate is the only one that’s a pun in chemical form. The chemical is made of six sodium atoms, five carbon atoms, five hydrogen, and seven oxygen. You may recall the chemical symbols for each of those elements, in order, are Na, C, H, O. Yeah, it spells Nacho.
7. Resiniferatoxin is 10,000 Times Hotter Than the Hottest Pepper in the World.
If you’re a fan of spice, you may know that Pepper X is the hottest pepper in the world. It’s a special hybrid pepper that was grown specifically to be this hot, and it ranks at a whopping 2,693,000 Scoville. For some context, Sriracha is between 1,000 and 2,200 Scoville. Frank’s Red Hot is a positively timid 450. Keep that in mind as we discuss Resiniferatoxin.
Resiniferatoxin comes from cactus, not your go-to source for spice. On the Scoville scale, this chemical ranks at 16 billion. It’s powerful enough to destroy your nerve endings, and that’s actually what they want it for. Not a food additive, but a potential painkiller. If it can scorch away your ability to feel pain, it can help people who suffer chronic pain conditions live more comfortably. It’s being investigated now for its potential to help cancer patients.
If, for some reason, a person did eat it, what would happen? Conventional wisdom says that a gram or two would cause severe internal damage and possibly even death.
6. Cadaverine is the Name for the Chemical Smell of Rotting Corpses
Have you ever smelled death? Whether it’s roadkill, or food that’s gone rotten somewhere, the smell of a once living thing that is now decaying is almost impossible to ignore. The smell of rotten vegetable matter, like a swamp or old produce is bad, but there’s something much more gross about a dead thing.
The smell produced by a rotting carcass is a very complex chemical soup. Researchers have identified over 800 compounds in the smell of death. In humans specifically there are two chemicals that help really hit you in the nose when you smell a rotting one. They are cadaverine and putrescine. Other animals, like rotting pigs, don’t produce these chemicals.
As unpleasant as it sounds, we’ve actually found a commercial use for the smell of a rotting corpse – haunted houses. Only the top of the line haunted houses pay to do this sort of thing, but you can have smells mixed up to add to the air in a haunted house experience so that guests who walk through have to endure the smell of actual corpses when they’re being chased by people in zombie makeup.
5. You Can Taste DMSO By Touching It
Dimethyl sulfoxide known as DMSO is a solvent that is widely used commercially for a number of applications. It also has uses in medicine and can be found in stem cell cryptopreservation and also as a way to help deliver drugs. Some people even claim it has properties as a painkiller because it’s used to treat horses even though no medical research supports that for humans.
The interesting thing about DMSO is not what people use it for but the curious attributes it displays. It’s a byproduct of pulp and paper manufacturing and it smells. Nurses who reported the chemical smell in oncology wards say it can give them headaches and even stomach aches.
Contact with DMSO causes some patients to excrete an odor like garlic from their skin. More perplexing is that, just by touching it, you’re going to taste it. You can get some on a finger and you will experience a garlic taste in your mouth fairly soon afterward. It absorbs rapidly through the skin and then enters the bloodstream where it can be excreted by the tongue and also into the lungs giving the taste and bad breath odor. Depending on the amount absorbed you could be tasting and smelling garlic for a day.
4. The Chemical That Gives Raspberries Their Flavor Has Been Found in Space
Ethyl formate is what is known as an ester. These organic compounds occur naturally in all kinds of food and provide fragrance and flavor. In the case of ethyl formate, it smells like rum and tastes like raspberries. In fact, it’s one of the compounds in raspberries that provide their unique flavor. Synthetic versions made in labs flavor all kinds of fruity concoctions including alcoholic drinks.
While you can find it all over the place on Earth, it’s off earth that’s even more interesting. If you’ve ever looked at an image of the Milky Way galaxy, you probably noticed that giant, hazy cloud at the center of it all, part of what puts the “milky” in Milky Way. That’s the Sagittarius B2 dust cloud.
This cloud is about 150 light years across. It also contains 10^27 liters of 200% proof alcohol. If you recall, ethyl formate is used to flavor alcohol, and it’s also all over that same boozy gas cloud. Which means the heart of our galaxy is a raspberry-flavored alcoholic cocktail. Unfortunately, it’s spread remarkably thin as a gas so it’d take some effort to scoop it all up and have a taste.
3. Bees Produce Isoamyl Acetate Which is Also in Bananas
Bees in a hive use chemical signals to communicate with one another. Queen bees release pheromones and that’s how the drones know where to find her. Likewise, when there is a threat to the hive, the drones need to communicate the danger to one another so it can be dealt with.
In the 1790s, François Huber observed that a bee will sting a person and that other bees will soon arrive to sting as well. He wanted to find out how the other bees knew that the first bee, who died in the act of stinging, had engaged a threat.
It would not be until 1962 when Canadian researchers identified the chemical released from a bee stinger that drew others to attack. The chemical compound they isolated was isoamyl acetate. It also smelled suspiciously like bananas.
Ironically, isoamyl acetate is in bananas but that was not discovered until later. It’s still used to make banana flavored products. Despite the link between them, however, there’s no evidence that smelling a banana will make bees aggressive.
2. Bell Pepper Pyrazine Can be Detected in the Most Miniscule Doses
If you’re a fan of the taste of bell peppers, this might please you. If not, then you’ll be entirely displeased. The chemical that gives bell peppers their flavor is called bell pepper pyrazine. This compound sometimes turns up in wine because it can be present in the skin of some kinds of grapes and ruins the overall aroma and flavor of white wines.
On its own, it’s a potent flavor maker. In fact, you can detect the flavor in something at the incredibly low concentration of 0.2 parts per billion though some sources report it as 0.002 parts per billion. One drop could add pepper flavor to five whole swimming pools. As for the small? That can be detected at two parts per trillion.
1. Artificial Grape Flavor is Thanks to Methyl Anthranilate
Are you a fan of grape candies or grape soda? You may have noticed that a lot of artificially flavored great things don’t really taste like grape at all. There’s a vague grapiness, but it doesn’t really hit the mark, right?
Artificial grape flavor comes from a chemical called methyl anthranilate. That doesn’t sound very appetizing, does it? You could do a lot of ranting at this point about artificial flavors and how terrible they are and so on and so forth.
The chemical was first isolated back in the 1890s and at the time, chemists were using orange blossoms to get it. Once they had it isolated, they thought it smelled like grapes. If it smells like grape, why not use it to flavor grape candies and soda and such?
In a super weird twist, methyl anthranilate could be artificially produced using byproducts from the coal industry. Doesn’t that sound delicious? That made it easy to mass produce.
Some years later, scientists were looking for a more genuine grape taste so they looked at actual grapes. Novel idea, right? Guess what chemical they isolated from grapes? Methyl anthranilate. Turns out it smelled like grapes because it’s the actual reason grapes smell like grapes.
The final irony, of course, is that most of us don’t think this stuff tastes like grape. But part of that is because we aren’t eating the same grapes people ate back in 1890. They were eating mostly dark purple grapes like Concords back then. The common red and green grapes we eat today were never native to the United States and were rarely eaten at the time. They also don’t contain methyl anthranilate, so they never had a chance of tasting like artificial grape.