Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert.
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going to be doing the second part in our series on the single celled photosynthetic organisms called diatoms, and also focusing on the silica based sedimentary material made out of the fossilized remains of diatom shells. This material is diatomaceous Earth. If you haven't heard part one, I would recommend you go back and listen to that one before today's episode, but for a brief refresher. In the last episode, we talked
a bit about dietom biology. Diatoms are single celled, eukaryotic photosynthetic algae found in nearly every natural water source on planet Earth, including not just lakes, rivers, and oceans, but even more out of the way places like damp soil and Arctic sea ice. They are not plants, they are not animals, they're not fungi, but they do have a cell nucleus and they make their own food using energy
from the sunlight. Diatoms are a major source of both oxygen in Earth's atmosphere and primary organic material in the ocean, So they're responsible for estimates vary, but about one fifth of the air we breathe, and they make up a major part of the base of the marine food web. So if an animal is eating something in the sea, there's a good chance that either it's a diatom, or it's something that aid to diatom, or it's something that
it's something that aa die tom. So one of the most important and unique characteristics of diatoms, the thing that really sets them apart from other algal and planktonic organisms in the water, is that they create a rigid, fortified cell wall out of amorphous silica. So essentially, each diatom is a little cell of algae that surrounds itself with a porous piece of armor, a shell made out of a material that is very similar to glass, and this
shell is called the frustule. We spent a lot of time in the last episode just looking at and talking about these microscopic shells because the bizarre and the diverse forms these frustules take have been a source of amazement for people ever since they were first observed under microscopes.
More than three hundred years ago, and you get kind of different imagery depending on the first of all, in the different species of diatom you look at, but then also on the type of magnification and imagery you use.
So under light microscopes, diatoms often appear delicate and transparent, so they're often compared to like jewels or fine glasswork, whereas under electron microscopes they often look much stranger and in some cases alarming, like these these shattered pieces of alien machinery, and these frustules often accumulate in layers at
the bottom of bodies of water. After the diatoms dies, the diatom's dye, the shells sink down and they turned into a kind of diatom skeleton sludge or ooze that over the eons can solidify into a porous, low density kind of rock that we call diatomite. So millions of years later, this sedimentary material can be dug up and ground into a powder and sold in bulk for tons of different household and industrial uses, including as an insecticide
like we talked about last time. Something we'll get into a bit more this time is its use as a filtration medium for liquid. It's used as an abrasive, it's used in some toiletry products, it shows up in all kinds of things, and so in the last episode we were talking about just how bizarre it is that you can go to the hardware store or the tractor supply and buy a bag of this dust or a can
of this dust. But if you put that dust under a high powered microscope, depending on how it's prepared, you can probably still see that the grains of this mundane stuff are filled with the broken remnants of Martian pocket watch gears and these tiny, you know, jagged mesh tubes and things that look like a stadium built for viruses.
And so at the end of the last episode we ended up talking for a bit about one of the most common mundane uses for diatamacious earth, which is as a mechanical insecticide, and we got into some of the grizzly details of how this works from the bugs perspective.
So if you missed that episode, go back and listen to it wherever you get your podcasts, or if you want to watch a as well, you can get the audio video version of that episode and this one on Netflix.
Best way to see what our heads look like.
Yeah, yeah, what sure are we wearing this? This is how you do it.
So we're going to talk more in today's episode about human uses for these fossil alkyl skeletons. And one of the historical human uses of dietamacious earth that I referred to briefly in the last episode is its role in the invention of dynamite. So I'd like to come back and talk about that a bit more today. So if you know one fact about the history of dynamite, it is probably that it was invented by the Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the same Nobel from whom we get the
Nobel Prizes. Nobel lived from eighteen thirty three to eighteen ninety six, and for Alfred Nobel, explosives were the family business. I was not aware of this beforehand, but so he didn't just like out of no where, decide I'm going to start making explosives. This was like a patrilineal thing. So Alfred's father, Emmanuel Nobel, was an explosives and munitions manufacturer who had contracts, for example, with the Tsar of Russia.
I think this would have been Zar Nicholas making things like underwater mines, for the Russian military, which, yes, that might be kind of surprising, but naval minds did exist in the nineteenth century, primarily based at the time on gunpowder, which was a granular mixture of potassium, nitrate, sulfur and charcoal, which, for hundreds of years at this point, for hundreds of years since its invention in ninth century China had been
the most important practical explosive known to humanity. There was really nothing else out there that was more powerful, that could be manufactured practically in significant quantities.
And if you want to know a little bit more about the Chinese history of explosives, we've recorded at least a couple of episodes on this in the past. I believe if he did an invention of fireworks episode at one point, So go back, you'll find that in the audio archives.
Yeah. So I was reading about Nobel in a number of sources. One of them was a twenty twenty five history dot Com article by Christopher Klein, and just one funny thing he noted is that the young Alfred Nobel had actually been interested in studying poetry. Maybe he had kind of the soul of a poet or an artist, but his father was not a fan of this path, and so tried to steer him elsewhere. He tried to funnel his son into the explosives business like his own business.
So he sent young Alfred away at age seventeen to study under a prominent chemist in Paris to learn about the cutting edge of explosives in chemistry. And while pursuing his education, Nobel became familiar with the work of an Italian chemist named Ascanio Sobrero, who in eighteen forty six had discovered a new chemical explosive called nitro glycerin.
You know, this just really goes to show how crushed his poetic aspirations probably were because you can't rhyme anything with nitroglycerin or diotomaceous. I mean, maybe with great skill you could, but you know, this alone had to just really finish off his poetic dreams.
Diatomacious rhymes with gracious. You know, gracious, I feel so gracious about this diatomaceous earth that goes in my nitroglycerin. Hey, I'm I'm maybe.
I mean I've heard shakier rhymes before, so maybe it could have worked.
So to make nitroglycerin, you start with a common and widely used sugar alcohol called glycerol or sometimes sold as glycerin. Glycerl is a naturally occurring organic molecule, so it's produced in the bodies of plants and animals, but you can also make it in industrial settings. For example, it has historically been one byproduct of the process of manufacturing soap, and other industrial processes can create it. And what Sobrero discovered is that if you do a process called nitrating glycerol.
If you nitrate glycerol by mixing it with a combination of nitric acid and sulfuric acid, you get a massively exothermic chemical reaction, so chemical reaction that puts out a lot of heat. This mixture starts to heat up rapidly and can become very dangerous. It can even possibly explode. However, Sobrero figured out that if you keep cooling, if you aggressively cool the mixture while you're stirring the constituents together, you can prevent this heating and you can stabilize it.
And what you are left with is an oily liquid explosive sometimes described as yellow in color, though I think it's supposed to be colorless at very high purity levels. So maybe a pale yellow color often and this mixture that you're left with is much more energetic than gunpowder. So in the mid nineteenth century, nitroglycerin would be one of the most powerful chemical explosives that anybody had ever discovered, and it promised to be revolutionary for tons of industries.
When we think of explosives, of course, you know, we can think of like the dark side, like violence and warfare, but you can also think of lots of very productive, peaceful uses for dynamite, and that was a major part of its economic value. Value in like mining, civil engineering, and transportation basically anything that involved blasting or tunneling through rock, those industries could be could get a huge step up from the invention of nitroglycerin. However, it came with a
major downside. While extremely powerful, nitroglycerin was also incredibly sensitive and thus incredibly dangerous.
Yeah, for a cinematic example of this, you know, I instantly think to the film The Wages of Fear or the remake Sorcerer, in which you have, for plot reasons, a truck loaded with nitroglycerin having to having to navigate extremely bad mountain roads, and there's just a risk of explosion almost you know, at every bump because of this.
That will get more horrifying when I start talking about some of these historical examples. But yeah, so you had this kind of liquid fire that before it was called nitroglycerin. Actually Ascanio Sobrero was calling it pyro glycerin. So like the glycerin of fire, this alcohol sugar alcohol molecule of fire. And Sobrero's journals from early synthesis do, of course, because it's nineteenth century, they do include tasting notes. He says it is sweet and pungent on the tongue and that
it smells aromatic. But he also like includes a lot of caution in his early writing about it. He says research must be carried out with the greatest of care. Several of his experiments in the lab ended with unintentional explosions, including one case where a drop of nitroglycerin in a test tube exploded and embedded fragments of glass in his face.
A Sobrero would also later say that he was so horrified by the destructive potential of nitroglycerin that he was ashamed to have discovered it, but he also took solace in the idea that if he had not created it, somebody else would have pretty soon, you know. So it wasn't like, you know, nobody else would have ever come across this formula. It's just kind of it's waiting there in physics for us to find.
Yeah, a lot of people were working in this field and trying to trying to find just such a substance.
Yeah. One more note about the fact that he tasted it. Chemists who tasted nitro in the mid nineteenth century sometimes reported that ingesting it would create pounding headaches. I think this is related to nitroglycerin's effect as a vasodilator, so it relaxes blood vessels and increases blood flow and perhaps surprisingly, though I would not recommend ingesting it without the you know, without the supervision of a doctor. It is still used today to treat like angina, pectorus, like chest pain.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, you still do hear about people who are taking nitroglycerin.
Yeah.
Yeah. So, sobrero kind of leaves off with nitro for a while, and Alfred Nobel picked up the trail. He saw enormous potential for nitroglycerin, given the power that it could unleash. So Nobel started experimenting to see how he could make it practical to use. Reading about the early history of nitroglycerin is this morbid mix of comedy and tragedy. Mostly tragedy, but there is a sort of grimly ironic element when you just read, like tail after tale of
these horribly deadly whoopsies piling up. So there are constant stories of unintended explosions during storage and transport. If the nitro got too hot might explode. The even more important thing is if it got jostled the wrong way might explode. It was highly sensitive to temperature, but especially shocks, physical shocks, And though this probably isn't quite true about how it works, it, I think sometimes it seemed to people at the time that it would just explode randomly.
Yeah, and even if not true, that's just a minor exaggeration based on how sensitive it was.
So there were massive explosions in Nobel's own laboratories, including one explosion that kill Old Alfred's younger brother Emil in eighteen sixty four. These explosions in Nobel's lab also got his research banned from the city of Stockholm in Sweden. They were like, okay, you can't do this here anymore. I think Nobel had a factory in Germany that exploded,
killing a bunch of people. And once nitroglycerin was being sold to the public in the eighteen sixties by Nobel and by others, it kept causing disasters all over the place. So in April nineteen sixty six, there were two different, just that one month, two different enormous, highly fatal nitroglycerin accidents in the Western Hemisphere. I was reading about these both of these accidents on a digital exhibit about railroad history hosted at the Linda Hall Library of Kansas City website.
So the first incident was on April third, eighteen sixty six. There was a steamship loaded with seventy crates of nitroglycerin among other carb cargo, sitting in a harbor in Panama. I think it was eventually bound for California, but it exploded while while tied up at the dock, and that
killed around fifty people. And then just a few weeks later, a roughly three hundred pound crate was awaiting delivery at a Wells Fargo office in San Francisco when the workers noticed that it was leaking some kind of oily fluid onto the floor, and this kicked off an inquest about
whose fault it was that the crate was leaking. So workers at the office got a hammer and they started trying to pry open the box to see what the damage was, and the process of opening the box caused an explosion that completely destroyed the building and killed fifteen people.
Nikes.
So yeah, horribly dangerous stuff and these mechanical shocks jostling could set it off and then the results are horrible. But eventually, after a lot of continuous work, no Better Well figured out some methods for making nitroglycerin usable by making it less dangerous and temperamental. And one of the most historically significant of these solutions involved diatomaceous earth, which
Nobel knew under the name the German named Kieselgre. Now there's another invention relevant to nitroglycerin that Nobel came up with. It's just as important, called the blasting cap, which was a two stage ignition or detonation device for nitroglycerin. This was created to solve a problem which was that, ironically, despite the fact that nitro would often explode when you didn't want it to, sometimes it wouldn't explode when you
did want it to. So, for example, you could not just run a traditional fuse to a massive nitroglycerin the way you'd run a fuse to a massive gunpowder to blow it up. You run a fused to nitroglycerin, and some sometimes the presence of fire would simply result in the surface of the nitro catching fire rather than in what you want, which is the sudden release of all of the nitroglycerin's energy in an explosion. The blasting cap
got around this problem with a clever design. So it was a multi chambered, multi explosive plug that used a fuse traditional fuse to ignite a primary explosive like mercury fulminate, and the explosion of that would cause a shock wave that would reliably trigger a second chamber of nitroglycerin to explode. So fuse ignites the primary, the shockwave from the exploding primary detonates the nitro.
Okay, So the blasting cap innovation does not in any way make the nitroglycerin safer or more stable in terms of like keeping it from randomly blowing up or seeming to randomly blow up, but rather it just makes it more reliable when you do want it to blow up.
The major safety and stability innovation comes in with the diatamacious earth the keesel gore. So, how does that come in? Nobell figured out that if you mix liquid nitroglycerine with keyesel gore, so with diatamacious earth, the ground up fossilized skeletons of this ancient algae, you end up with a multiple paste, which is useful for multiple reasons. One is that as a paste, you can shape it however you want,
so you can like shape it into rods. You're probably imagining when you think of dynamite a cylindrical stick, and that is actually useful because you can if you're blasting rock, you can drill holes in the rock and insert the sticks into the holes.
A big downside, though, is that a cartoon character might stick one in their mouth thinking it's a cigar or a cars for a light.
Yeah, that you don't want to get it mixed up with carrot. But the other major change, or the other major thing that makes this pay very useful, is that it is far more stable than liquid nitroglycerin, less sensitive to physical shocks, and less prone to random explosions. So by absorbing the liquid into this porous dust. You prevent physical actions like sloshing, which can happen with liquid nitro glycerine. Slashing is really bad. That can be you know, that
can make it blow up. And I think I think sort of the way it works, based on what I've been reading, is that you generally limit the propagation of mechanical shocks through the material by turning it into a paste. So you just make it less prone to unwanted chain reactions from shaking and jostling. If you picture like a bottle full of just liquid, you know, oil or water clear bottle, and you like flick the side of the bottle,
you can see waves rippling through the liquid inside. It will propagate, you know, the impact will propagate through the liquid. It's kind of hard to imagine waves rippling through a paste. You're not really going to see waves propagating. Mechanical shocks in a paste are absorbed and contained locally by deformation of the paste. So that's, to my best understanding, one of the main mechanisms of how it becomes safer in
paste form. So anyway, this combination of nitroglycerine and diatamacious earth, which Nobel patented in eighteen sixty seven is what became known as dynamite. Dynamite comes from the word dynamite comes from the Greek word for power dynamies, So dynamite is
like the paste of power. And though I don't know if this was intentional, I do like also that eight is the suffix we often apply to like a mineral or a rock, so you could also, I don't know if Nobel meant it this way, but you could also think of it as like the rock of power.
Oh nice.
Together with the invention of the blasting cap, dynamite paste was a revolutionary material throughout multiple industries. And a funny note on the name I think I also read this in that history dot Com article. No Bell had been trying to shake the bad reputation that followed nitroglycerin and followed him after like all these infamous deadly explosions, and so to put people's fears to rest, he initially wanted to call dynamite quote Nobel's safety blasting powder.
He can imagine the label, Yeah, Nobell's safety blasting powder, not for military use.
Yeah, So the name did not stick, But if it had the safety in the safety powder would come in large part from the dietamacious earth. However, I do want to note that diatamacious earth is not the only substance that can stabilize nitroglycerin in this manner, So a lot of absorbent powders and materials will work the same. And I and I believe many subsequent dynamite preparations used other absorbent solids like sawdust or paper pulp, which work as
well or better. But dietom skeletons were there first.
All right, Well, you know, since we're talking, you mentioned the absorbent qualities of the diatamacious earth, So let's let's talk about another big one previously kind of invisible to me. There are various diatomic products out there, you know, toothpas for example, and so forth, but in any number of industrial and product based uses. But a big one that I was that I was completely unaware of is cat litter.
So to refresh your indoor cat, if you have one, or your friend's indoor cat, whatever your exposure level to these feel lines happens to be. These are creatures of the desert, and being a creature of the desert, they require a miniature desert in your house in which to do their business. The cat is a lonely hunter, but it is also prey for larger creatures, so it adapted to hide its urine and its feces in loose substrate
to mask its scent. You know, given you know that they'll prefer to use something like sand or you know what we think of a litter But of course they will, as many of us cat owners know, they will also try to use other things, be it a bedspread or what have you, something where they're like, okay, I could go here and then maybe disguise it, you know, falling back on these these highly evolved practices that apply to a dry environment.
This is interesting. This is something I feel like I should have already looked up and known the answer to. But I didn't really know. Why do cats I mean again, not all cats, that's all the time, but why generally do cats know to use the litter box without training? So you put out cat litter, cats go to the litter box and do their business there. That seems strange.
I guess I would have assumed there's some kind of smell or scent that manufacturers add to it that attracts the cat, but you're saying it's more of an evolutionary attraction to doing their business in a sandy or gravelly substrate because that's yeah, okay, so that is their natural tendency is to go in the sand. So if you only have sand and sand like substance in one place in your house, that's where they'll go exactly.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's what's going on. And it's really I was thinking about it the other day. I mean, I think about the litter box every day because I scoop it every day, but sometimes multiple times a day.
But it is one of the great things about a domestic cat, a house cat, an indoor cat, but also a frequent pain point because on one hand, it's like it's basically a miracle because, like you say, you can bring in a cat and for the most part, it's just going to know to use the litter box or use a litter box instead of all the various places that it could be messing up with. It's urine and
it's fecal matter. Not to say they won't still get fecal matter or you're in elsewhere in the house, they absolutely will, But on the whole it will be isolated to one spot.
It's a miracle. Really. Yeah. Imagine if you had to train a cat where to go to the bathroom.
Yeah yeah, yeah, I mean some people do. That's a topic for another time, but yeah, it's pretty amazing. But of course it is also one of the pain points of owning a cat, because you've got to scoop the box, you've got to clean the box. And even though cats are rather clean creatures, they can still make a litter box pretty foul for a number of reasons, many of which we can't really blame on them. They're interfacing with
the technology that they did not invent it. We did so briefly about the invention of cat litter as a whole. So prior to around nineteen forty seven, owners either of course didn't use litter, as cats were primarily outdoor creatures or the very least indoor outdoor. The advent of the true indoor cat is relatively recent, and if they were going in some sort of a substrate that was provided for them, people would use sand, they would use ashes,
sawdust or something like this. And then in forty seven, a man by the name of Edward Lowe who lived nineteen twenty through nineteen ninety five is generally regarded as having invented the first cat litter made of clay, basing it off of what he knew regarding industrial absorbent materials. So, you know, knowing that, okay, if we have some sort of a spill and a factory, there are certain things we can throw on that to help absorb the moisture and you know, aid and clean up. And he began
to apply some of that to the cat cat box situation. Now, clumping cat litter comes later. Most of us were familiar with some sort of a clumping cat litter. I remember I have had some friends that were themselves not cat owners, and they volunteered to cat sit for another friend. And I remember stories of one of these individuals being rather shocked by the clumps that they were having to get out of the litter box, like they didn't know what they were. They were like, what is going on here?
This is weird. Cat's going in the box leaving behind poop and big balls of clumped material. This comes later. This is like a nineteen eighties innovation via moisture locking minerals that are added into the mix. So yeah, we end up in the age of litter and the pros. You know, cat will use the bathroom on its own time in a designated space. You don't have to walk the cat. Depending on conditions and individual cat personality, the cat might even bury what it leaves in the box.
Your experience may vary out there. My current cat, Mochi, generally does not bury anything she may and again this is not entirely on her. Cats are following certain programming. The cat will do something like go in the box and then like scrape on the top of the box like do the digging motions somewhere or in some manner that doesn't actually bury anything. So you know, like she's
going through the motions. It's not her fault that. Again, this technology is weird, and maybe the litter boxes should be much larger, I don't know, but you know, we make do with what we got.
Many's kind of like when if you've ever seen people out walking their dog and they they like stoop down to pretend they're picking up the dog poop. They don't really pick it up.
Well like that, but without intent. It's like if that person were just like so distracted that they were just going through the motions of picking it up. I guess there are some things that humans do kind of like if you ever find yourself going to put dirty dishes in the laundry hamper or or our dirty laundry into the swasher, and you're like, what am I doing? I guess it may be on some.
Level like that. Cats have a lot on their minds.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And the other great thing about cat litter is that many forms of litter will rapidly dehydrate fecal matter and cause urine to clump into those easily scooped clumps. So in general you're just left with a dryer clean up area, so like a cleaning up. This is, you know, an overstatement of the obvious, but it is so much more pleasant to clean up partially or wholly dehydrated cat crap and certainly clumped cat urine as opposed to say, a
puddle of it. I've cleaned up all of these things, all the different forms of urine and cat fecal matter before, and yeah, it's much easier if it's dried out.
Okay.
But the big cons of course, is that all litter box choices are subject to cat approval. All litter box arrangements are subject to change at any moment. New litters that you may try to gradually introduced could be just rejected out of hand or gradually rejected. This I've encountered many times before we're like, let's let's try a different litter, and I'm always like, yeah, let's do it. But you know, the cat has to approve of it, so you'll begin to change it over gradually, and a lot of times
this works. This is generally what's advised of cat owners, like gradually change over to this different litter so the cat can get used to it and you won't disrupt anything.
But I mean, like you use a mix or something, yeah, to like.
Use a little bit of the old mix some of this new mix and then gradually change the proportions until it's just the new mixture. But I've had situations where our cat will be like, no, this is not what I'm going to poop in anymore. I'll pee in it, but no more poop, or they'll just or they're just up and decide this is not it anymore. Now it's the bed in the guest bedroom.
So Rob, can I ask I don't have a cat and haven't had one for many years, But I have a vague, long ago cat memory from family cats that sometimes the cats attempt to be hygienic in burying the material will actually create more of a mess because they will end up kicking a bunch of cat litter out of the box all over the room.
Yeah, I mean this, there's a whole suite of problems associated with and it varies depending on what kind of litter you're using, Like, is this a letter litter that the cat is going to, you know, kick out of the litter box? Is the litter box constructed in a way that enables us to happen more readily, or is the cat going to track it out? Some litter litters
are more trackable and so forth. So yeah, they're they're fastidious little creatures, but you know, they they still can be quite foul, either accidentally or certainly as they get older. So yeah, that's the other big con is that litter boxes can still produce odor and or mess. They have to be maintained, they have to be cleaned, and the cat is only going to help you so much in doing any of that. So cat owners, I think already know this, But there are a variety of litters to
choose from out there. They range from clay baits clumping litter that that that my that I believe that's the kind of my cat uses and prefers. You also have plant based, clumping and non clumping litters made from all sorts of things like corn tofu. Newspaper is a big one. Uh, this is this is pretty fascinating. Anyone out there who's into growing their own mushrooms might be aware of this.
But there at least used to be one called Yesterday's News as a cat litter made from newspaper and it and something about the way that it was it was manufactured and like the purity of it it was ideal for growing oyster mushrooms out.
Of Now, I assume you wouldn't want to cross the streams there not like using it as cat litter and growing.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to know absolutely, but but it was apparently, uh you know, some some cat owners liked using it, but also mushroom enthusiasts were fond of it as well. And yeah, so so there are various other litters as well. Crystal litters are really big now, you know, to ones that were the color changes depending on what's going on in the cat's urine. And then you also have diatomaceous cat litter as well.
Awesome.
Yeah, so I have not personally, or I certainly have it personally, but my cat has not tried out diatamacious cat litter. But this is to understand typically food gray diatamacious earth that offers natural odor control and is often
sought out for being a physically lighter alternative. This is of course one of the big things about cat litter for using like a like, especially like a clay based This is like a big tub, a big heavy tub you have to bring into the house every so often, and it's not necessarily a workout you want to incorporate into your weekly life.
But as we've talked about, diatamacious earth tends to be very low density. Yeah, so for us, you know, it's made of these kinds of cages with lots of little hollows in the grains.
Yeah, so much lighter, much lighter. And then indeed, that's one of the appealing things about different non clay litters. It's like, oh it's lighter. Maybe I can get it shipped to me. You know, it's just gonna be less of a hassle to carry. Other things about diatamacious cat litter is that it's also generally chemical free and considered non toxic. I'd be interested to hear what listeners out there have to share if you've tried diatamacious cat litters.
But I think all of this makes sense given what we've established about the substance. Now cat owners in general, just looking around at some of the chatter online, they seem to go back and forth on diatamacious earth litters and diatamacious earth based litters. You know, some saying well, okay, I'm worried about potential respiratory impact and so forth. I'd say on any of that, you know, ask your vet, or if you're worried about yourself, ask your your actual doctor.
But this is another This is another thing with litters in general. Some litters they can throw up a great deal of dust into the air. Lighter litters, too, might track out a little more easily. So you know, there's there's there's no perfect world here. There's gonna be some drawback no matter what you're doing, because at the end of the day, there is a small predatory creature that's living in your house, and it is pooping in a.
Box, And so wouldn't it be cool if it was pooping into the trillions of fossilized skeletons of ancient algae.
I think it would be fitting, given that these are tiny little predators who seem very very high and mighty at times. You know that they venture into this mass grave of prehistoric organisms, and that is where they do their business, you know, on pyramids of fossils.
Poop on the graveyard of eons past.
Yeah, okay, So I wanted to talk about just a few more quickly, a few more human uses of dietamacious earth.
Ranging from the weird to the mundane. Though again they're all pretty weird when you think about what dietamacious earth is these fossil skeletons. So one I alluded to briefly in the last episode is filtration. Diatamacious earth is often used to filter unwanted solids out of liquids. So, for example, one major use is in pool cleaning systems. You know, if you have a pool has a filtration device and
you can use different types of media there. So I think some just use like sand, But diatamacious earth is a popular choice there, but it's also in its food grade form used in the production of foods and beverages, for example, wine and beer. Pure dietamacious earth is considered a good choice for filtering drinks like this because it
will catch and sive out suspended particles. In the case of beer, this can include yeast and other particles of like proteins that can cause cloudiness or haziness in beer. In some beers, you know you want haziness. That's a In some cases that's a property you're trying to retain. In other cases, you want to filter it out and increase the clarity of the beer.
I've seen beers with names that invoke haziness as being an important part of their personality.
I mean, I like a hazy beer, but I also like a clear beer. You know, it's different, different different beers for different years.
I'm only clear if I am having a beer, it needs to be so clear that I can see the person on the other side of the table through it.
Well, I think then you're probably drinking some beer that has gone through some fossil Fossil dietm skeletons. It's not the only filtration system used, but it's a common one. So if you picture this process at the microscopic level, you're gonna have the liquid dripping through and you just imagine particles of yeast and the other floating objects becoming caught in the cages and crags of these machine elf
gears as the liquid is going through it. It's useful because it's good to you for filtration because, as you were just talking about with the cat litter, it is chemically inert. Basically it's glass, so it's not going to be chemically reacting with what's passing through it. It doesn't really add a taste of its own. This, of course, is provided you are using correctly food grade ditamacious earth. Use the wrong kind and you could add weird flavors
in addition to introducing safety issues. So I have to use the food grade kind, and based on what I was reading from Brewers, the biggest advantage dietamacious earth seems to have over membrane based filters is that you can pass a lot more liquid through it before it effectively becomes clogged.
If this is of course, this is going to be a no brainer for a lot of people, but generally, when you're dealing with any kind of filtration system, it will reach a point where it cannot filter anymore because it is filled of the stuff you're trying to filter. This is why if you have a filter for say your water supply in your refrigerator, that's why that needs to be changed out every so often or not used. Like it's either use it and replace it or don't use it at all.
Right, Yeah, Another common use of dietamacious earth is as an abrasive, so it's used as a mild abrasive and different kinds of polishes. This is true and everything from like you'll find like jewelry polishes that use dietamacious earth polishes for metal working, and in some kinds of toothpaste. I think at least it's not going to be in all of them, but at least some brands of like the gritty polishing paste that you get at the dentist, you know, and they were.
Run and taste like hopefully mint. But also if you're un lucky cherry or chocolate.
You never got bubblegum.
I have had bubblegum before. This is one of the about the only things I can talk about with my hygienesis. I'm like, what flavor do we have coming up? Hopefully they'll say meant and you know after that you just have stuff in your mouth the whole time.
And you can't talk again. It's not all of them, but like some brands of this kind of polishing paste can use dietamacious earth. A more cutting edge proposed use with some pun intended here that I thought was really interesting is a use of dietamacious earth potentially in future first aid when you are rapidly losing blood. So I came across a paper from twenty twenty two called diatamite hemostatic particles with hierarchical porous structure for rapid and effective hemostasis.
This was published in the journal Colloids and Surfaces B bio Interfaces. The lead author is named Changsu. A bunch of co authors listed, and the researchers in this paper showed that you could promote rapid blood clotting after an injury with the use of a topical granular treatment. So you have kind of a sand that you would are a sand based treatment that you would put on a wound.
Though it wasn't sand, it was dietamacious earth. Though to be clear, This is not just plain diatamacious earth straight out of the bag. So don't think like it's a good idea. Oh if I get cut, I'm going to reach into the bag and cram ditamacious earth on the It was specially prepared product that had gone through a
process to enhance its blood clotting capabilities. The product they created was called diatomite hemostatic granules, and so in a model where they used these granules for treating amputations and rats, the granules caused rapid coagulation without toxic side effects. And it seems like one of the major advantages here is again this absorbent the porous absorbent qualities of diatamacious earth,
the ability to absorb fluids. This seems to sort of concentrate the platelets at the blood at the exposure, at the place where the cut is or the wound is, and again promotes rapid clotting. And I think this is related to a lot of these other uses. One thing I didn't really get into, but it's sometimes used to clean up spills. You know, dietamacious earth because it has this absorbent quality, you can kind of soak things up in various situations.
So diatomite hemostatic granules, not for do it your self use, but maybe in the future, and certainly if you're writing some science fiction and you want to jazz up your your healthcare first aid scene, yeah, run with it.
I could imagine. Yeah, in the future, So somebody on the alien planet, they get their arms sliced off by a laser, and so you just cram some of the some of the diatamite sand on there and it seals you right up.
All right? Would you like to talk about some going back to the organism level of things, Do you want to talk about some diatoms of interest here?
Absolutely? I would love to look at some of these weird little guys.
Yeah. We talked a little bit about specific varieties and species in the last episode, and as we close out this episode, I just wanted to talk about a few that turned up in my research as being particularly interesting for one reason or another. A lot of this is just how they look, you know, like why does this one look like a star? Why does this one look
like a tube? Why does this one look like a gear? Again, there's so much variety, so much visual variety in what's going on and sometimes that does seem to cross over into their functionality as well in fascinating ways. The first one I want to talk about here is Corathron castra
khani previously known as corathron cryophillum castra khani. This one is a spiky diatom, sometimes compared to a mace, though I think that's a bit of a stretch trying to infuse a little medieval warfare into it, because when I see it, I think, okay, Chinese finger trap, which by the way, is a toy of non Chinese origin, but everyone knows what I'm talking about, a Chinese finger trap, but with spikes I see.
I see a vacuum tube with tentacles.
Yeah, yeah, that's that's more the vibe I get.
Unless something that came out of the back of a guitar amplifier and but then came alive and is now it's also the thing.
Yeah, yeah, a little bit for sure. Yeah, definitely a strange looking thing. Maybe not the most exotic of diatoms if you just looking at an illustration with a bunch of them, but once you really start looking at it, it is a weird one. So we're dealing with the marine plectonic diatom genus here, and one that's pretty widespread today and in the fossil record back as far as
the Cretaceous period. This according to this I was reading about in the intriguing marine diatom genus corethron in late Cretaceous amber from Vendt, France by Martin at All, published twenty fifteen in Cretaceous Research. The interesting thing here is that the fossil evidence of this particular organism it shows up.
In amber, oh like in Jurassic Park.
The authors described this as a special case of biostratinemy. This is a fancy term for the study of an organism's remains after it dies. And they say that this is a case quote where a marine taxon is incorporated into the liquid resin produced by trees. Implied that the Vendine amber forest grew in a near shore environment where wind sea spray or high tide introduced the marine diaton frustules into the terrestrial realm.
WHOA, Okay, So if I'm understanding this right, they're saying that the fossil amber is going to be something that came out of a plant like a tree. Maybe the resin before it got hardened, and so it comes out and it's this sticky substance and it is somehow getting seawater incorporated into it. So maybe it's at the shore and it's getting sprayed by the waves, or there's a
flood and it gets seawater on it. Somehow out the seawater gets onto it, the seawater has these shells of the diatoms in the water, and thus it gets incorporated into the fossil amber.
That's right, Yeah, okay, so pretty pretty amazing awesome. Yeah, So that in and of itself was worth focusing on. But there's more interesting about this. This this type of organism, the corthron, is the only diatom genus that features separate movable components spines of the cell wall. The authors point out that all corthron species can move at least to some degree, and that the movement is mechanical, as these spines are outside of the.
Cell wallh Okay.
Again, coming back to what we talked about before, where with diatoms we're talking about a single cell organism. We're looking at a cell. Yeah, so this their cell body here,
this tube. It has a valve at either end, one circled by long spines with tiny barbs, and the other has these short hooked spines, forming what is sometimes called a crown or described as a crown, and the hooks lock the spines in place, apparently until the organism reaches maturity, and then the spines swing out seemingly to quote keep cells apart or serve as a physical defense against zooplankton that you know might eat them.
Oh okay, so it's it's got some weaponry or defensive mechanisms.
Yeah, in a very kind of basic sense, you know, just sort of like creating space with spines. That's sort of yeah.
Okay.
The way that the silica spines are attached to the dome shaped valves, though, is sometimes described as very much being a ball in socket style joint. You can look up imagery of this. I included an example here from a study Joe for you to look at, and folks at home you can look up at the examples of this as well by just doing a Google search. But you do, yeah, you do get this sense of like a ball in socket sort of joint. So it's pretty amazing.
Okay, So is that how if I'm understanding this right, that's how the spines kind of move on the outside is Yeah, they have a they are loosely attached at the opening, but they have something, a thicker element behind the opening that keeps the spines from falling out.
Correct, Yes, okay, all right.
For the next one I want to talk about, there is Basilaria pack Silafer. This one is also very fascinating. This was very interesting to look at visually, at least if you're looking at a bunch of them, a colonial assortment of them. So this is a because this is a colonial diatom with a unique form of movement. Individually, they are not very interesting. Each one of these looks maybe like a toothpick. I've seen them described as looking
like pegs. They're just long and narrow. They look like little sticks.
Yeah, long, thin, wand yeah.
Yeah, so noting, nothing really remarkable in that. But they'll align parallel with one another to form these colonial formations that look very mechanical.
Yeah, okay, so they're all lining up side by side, and what originally was like a toothpick becomes kind of a row of toothpicks and takes on this look like, I don't know, the expanding part of an accordion, maybe or like blinds or something.
Yeah, blinds. That's a good example, a good way to think of them. I was trying to think, well, what is this reminding me of? And I think it was reminding me a bit of collated framing nails, you know, where you'll have like the nails that are kind of like stuck together with this stuff and they kind of like line up parallel to each other.
Okay.
Or perhaps I'm thinking about some sort of licorice. Maybe there's a licorice out there that I'm only half remembering that has this kind of formation. So the crazy thing about this formation is they're not just again, this has to do with how they end up moving as a group. So in this formation, they're able to slide against the neighbors, and they can coordinate these movements in their own way to move the entire formation by compacting it and expanding it.
Okay, So each individual dietom is its own single celled organism, but they group together into these colonies, these groupings, and as a group they are able to kind of expand and contract in a way that moves the whole group.
Yes.
Yeah, And one of the fascinating sort of science world things about this is that this is mentioned in like the Wikipedia article about this type of diatom, but I dug into it and found the paper where it was being discussed in detail. This diatom has its own dance, its own dance that some human scientists have performed on occasion, though I'm not sure if it's recommended that scientists do this at any conferences today. As we'll discuss, it was
acceptable in the eighties. It was acceptable. This was detailed in the Colonial Diatom Basilaria Paradoxa. This was by using it all, published two thousand and five, and it is referring back to something that would have occurred in I believe nineteen eighty seven, and this would have been at the North American Diatom Symposium or NADS. The dance was allegedly invented by Edward C. Theiat and p Rogers Sweets. Okay, so this basically involved We already talked about the way
that the diatoms move colonially. This basically involves biologists in varying states of sobriety lining up next to each other, I think like front to back sort of a situation, lining up with each other like this, and then rubbing, moving against each other in order to move like colonial diatoms. Okay, this paper that I referenced, they include an interview snippet with the biologist theiat who had produced some footage of the organism's movements prior and like this led into the
different biologists trying it out. So reading from this interview snippet in this article, he says, quote choreography was very basic. Chant do the bas cellaria? Do the basilaria up in tone on the first, uh down on the second. During the chant, everyone slid tightly against the next person front to back. As I recall, central nodule job was to try to keep both ends moving at approximately the same rate. And I'll point out, he notes later, there would be
no such role for the actual diatoms. There is no leader for the diatoms, but they're just trying to sort of physically recreate the movements here, he says, as we got more practiced at it, we tried to move everyone but at different rates, much like a real basilaria.
The dance. Cause, I do admit I'm having a little trouble picturing how the movement happens.
But yeah, and it's worth noting here that the dance caused some of the drunker or less coordinated dancers to fall down on the floor fall out of the arrangement. Also, some of the dancers were going to be were more comfortable with this dance because they're having to rub up against their neighbor, and in many cases like maybe that neighbor is a significant other other times I guess it's maybe a stranger. In general, I realized today this sounds
like an hr nightmare. But apparently at the time in eighty seven it was acceptable. But they said they tried it again at the Finland International Diatom meeting, but quote it did not have the same magic.
The moment's gone.
So I don't know if biologists are still doing this at any diatom symposiums out there. I imagine there's a lot more paperwork involved if you do.
I guess if it's on a volunteer basis.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One more thing about Busselaria here, and I realized I may have pronounced it like three different ways, but is the author's going out Like The really fascinating thing about its movement is that it moves like a segmented organism in some respects, but each segment is an individual. So what we have here is synchronize mechanical behavior in single cell organisms.
Interesting.
Yeah. The final one I want to talk about is a plankton Alis soul. This one is just this one's very beautiful to look at because it looks like a like a solar disk, or some describe it as looking like a maybe like a nineteen fifties UFO is seen from above.
I was going to say, it's it's the wicker Man. We have the face of Nuada here.
It does kind of look like New auDA. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's one that's going to stand out if you look at some of these illustrations of various diatom species. But it's also one of these where if you don't know what you're looking at, it's easy to miss. Because we know that diatoms are cells, so it would be easy to assume that we're just looking at a cell.
Here.
It's round, you know, it has different parts to it, and maybe you don't remember all the parts off the top of your head, and you're like, okay, there's the cell, but the central part of it, well you might think of the is the yolk of this fried egg. This is the diatom cell. Meanwhile, the egg white part is essentially a sale, and we see these structures kind of
holding the sale out as well. And this segment, this wide of the egg on this particular diatom, this is called the corona, and it is a ribbed extracellular matrix that does act as a sale. So the corona increases its surface area with this structure, and it allows it to catch and travel on ocean currents more easily. So, you know, something so small, we don't think about it so much, but yeah, it is having to essentially sail
around in its watery environment. This seems to be a very successful design because this particular type is widely distributed, common in tropical and subtropical waters, but with possible greater temperature tolerance in general. Apparently that's something that scientists are still studying. But it does not have a signature dance. That's that's worth noting as well.
But if it did have a dance, I think it'd be the wicker Man dance Christopher Lee is doing at the front of the parade with the yeah yeah and some japes.
Man.
I think he does some spinning around, you know, he does make sense.
Yeah, absolutely, Okay, well does that do it? For part two? Are we going to come back for one more episode on diatoms? I believe, we move on to something else.
I believe, so we have a little more history to cover, we may have some more specific types of diatoms to discuss, and who knows what else, because again, its uses are so widespread, so specific at times, so mundane at times, but also fascinating in the way that again, these kind of this kind of you know this, this dead soil leftovers of these little tiny glass shelled creatures, you know they they end up playing an important but almost role in so many aspects of our lives.
Yeah, okay, well more next time.
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