Originally posted May 22, 2012

Today is Day 2 of “Our Favorite Toxic Chemicals” blog carnival! Mind what you eat! Put some more lotion on your face!

I will aggregate the links here as they come in.

1. The Haystack Carmen kicked things off today with a stellar post on tetrodotoxin. The post starts with a quote from Captain James Cook, slides nicely into organic synthesis, moves into Zombieland and a discussion of “The Serpent and the Rainbow”, and ends with her own thoughts on how “we” present chemicals and chemical risks to the public and ourselves. This is a clinic in good and entertaining science writing! Oh yeah … and did I mention food … pufferfish … Anybody out there ever tried it?

2. Nature Nanotechnology This isn’t part of the #ToxicCarnival, but Carmen pointed out this timely editorial from Nature Nanotechnology: The dose makes the poison. Do go and read it.

3. Atomic-o-licious Rebecca moves us back into the world of personal cosmetics. After bearing her soul a little bit, Rebecca talks about a cosmetic chemical that she can not do without, hydroquinone. Much like other cosmetic ingredients, this one has severe health effects that display when large doses are taken. And, like with many of these chemicals, these studies can lead to confusion with respect to the amounts that we actually apply and the manner in which they are taken up into our bodies.

4. The Chemistry Blog See Arr Oh is back again today and is making the rest of us look bad for our lack of productivity! In the post, See Arr Oh discusses crying in lab. The tears in this case were due to 2-nitropropene. A quick minute outside of the hood in an uncapped NMR tube was all it took for this lachrymator to bring See Arr Oh to his knees … and to the attention of the local safety officer.