#veritasium

[pna-x]

BRO FUCK OFF STOP SCARING MY STUDENTS I GOTTA TEACH THIS CLASS IN FALL TF???

[thursdayisbetterthanfriday]

The Crystal That Could Destroy All Medicine

A fascinating tale of crystallography, and of the existence of disappearing polymorphs - different forms of the same compound that can be seeded based on physical environmental conditions, sometimes exceedingly difficult to reverse!

[maybeasunflower]

Something is jamming GPS over Europe. Here's what we found

(Would love someone to break out the SDR and see whether the comms thing is plausible/decodable)

[betterlivingindustriesss]

has anyone seen that one veritasium vid abt rainbows i think about it often

[inoxygen]

Thoroughly enjoyed this video about GPS jamming. As a commenter, mazri3530, suggested: "physics crime mystery is a genre i didn't know I needed".

[skipyou]

🎬 The Tiny Donut That Proved We Still Don't Understand Magnetism ✅ Fact Check: A The video explores groundbreaking physics concepts that defied traditional understanding. Beginning with a puzzling experiment in the 1950s, it challenged the physics community to reconsider notions like magnetic fields and potentials. While Lagrange's mathematical revelations delivered a new app...

The Tiny Donut That Proved We Still Don't Understand Magnetism | SkipYou

The video explores groundbreaking physics concepts that defied traditional understanding. Beginning with a puzzling experiment in the 1950s, it challenged the physics community to reconsider notion...

[yourzestiebestie]

elite hacker group spending years working on devastating programs that could destroy the computers as we know it versus random dude with a few hours of free time occasionally

truly the coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb of modern society

[zinderant]

Disappearing polymorphs

The topic of the most recent Veritasium video is something I'd read about before in the context of ritonavir and the disappearance of its water-soluble form, and with it, the form of the drug that was could be absorbed by the body in pill form. Spoilers for the video, I suppose, which takes a lot of detours to eventually arrive at the correct explanation: due to the slow but eventually global spread of a more stable crystal structure that 'infects' all instances of the original form, which is now impossible to manufacture. The phenomenon is called 'disappearing polymorph' (Wikipedia).

In the video they make it reasonably clear that this is a terrifying problem that could theoretically happen to any drug, and while the contamination by a more stable polymorph can be compensated for or worked around in some cases, in the case of ritonavir it was so difficult to do this that it became effectively impossible to keep that form of the drug on the market. It might even be that if you did manage to deliver ritonavir in its active form to a person who needs the drug, it would convert to an inactive form inside their body before it's had a chance to take effect.

Still, they fail to really capture the other part of why this is terrifying: the idea that microscopic bits of crystal can seed the atmosphere and stick to surfaces and clothing, resisting not only the deep cleaning procedures used in pharmaceutical manufacturing but also, for a while, the best efforts of industrial scientists to even figure out that they exist. Now, just as a result of being manufactured in a few places on the planet, the crystals have spread across the entire world. It was beyond our ability to clean them up when they were limited to the factory, and perhaps still is, so now this is an unsolveable problem on the scale of radioactive contamination of steel, but in this case, no one had to detonate any nuclear bombs to cause it.

What really terrifies me to imagine is what else might be floating around in our atmosphere, invisible and undetectable, until it suddenly creates an impossible-to-predict interaction with a chemical we might have come to rely on. We know the health effects of chemicals like PFOA only because they are present in high enough concentrations that it is possible to measure it and dedicate studies to it, but the scope of the different industrial processes that might have a global impact, even if only on a microscopic level like ritonavir, is quite literally inconceivable. We're looking at a tiny sliver of all the different compounds that have managed to become airborne since the dawn of the industrial revolution, say "those are bad for us, we should do something about those" while remaining totally unaware (not even wilfully!) of everything else in the atmosphere that could ruin our lives but doesn't. For now. I might be overreacting, but that's what really gets me about the ritonavir case.