08:01 – Barbara spent most of yesterday at the hospital. Her mom is doing better. She may be released today or tomorrow. Barbara came home yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours to shower, pick up some clothes, and see Colin and me. She headed back down to the hospital around dinnertime to have dinner with her dad and sister, visit with her mom, and then spend the night with her dad at her parents’ house. She’s going into work today, and may or may not be home this evening.
I got started yesterday on the final lab session for the forensics book. This is the one I skipped back in the first group of lab chapters on soil analysis. I knew I wanted to do a session on chemical analysis of soil, but at that point I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to do. I decided to do an assay of soluble inorganic phosphates using molybdate reagent, which is a 1% to 2.5% w/v solution of ammonium molybdate in a 30% to 40% aqueous solution of sulfuric acid. This reagent provides a quantitative color change in the presence of inorganic phosphates, and is sensitive down to the sub-ppm level.
So, I perusing James Lileks’ blog and looked into one of his sub-sites, devoted to . On the there is an ad for “Glycerite of Kephaline”, which includes the formula! I did some quick Wikipedia lookups and the ingredients, mostly glycerine with hypophosphates of various kinds, are given. Said to be good for TB. I wonder if Derek Lowe will be trying it out for Big Pharma.
One of the ingredients, hypophosphorous acid, can be used in cooking meth, so it’s highly controlled.
Quick lesson. Don’t use the embedded HTML for links. Doesn’t seem to work.
The links above are to one of blogger James Lileks’ subs-sites, devoted to one issue of “Medical Record” magazine from 1883.
Several pages in is an ad for a stabilized Hydroiodic Acid – the chemical that the hypophosphorus acid is used to produce in meth labs. Maybe the old tyme docs were on to something. Or on something.
an assay of soluble inorganic phosphates using molybdate reagent
Do you know, I actually know that one. I was (briefly) a trainee with our state Department of Agriculture. Australian soil is notoriously deficient in phosphorous, and during one vacation I spent a lot of time doing mass chromatography tests of soil phosphorous. I can’t remember the details, but it involved massive amounts of soil samples, a small sieve, weighing scales, ten by ten blocks of test tubes, one molar sulphuric acid, sodium (? I think) molybdate, a mechanical agitator, and produced a result which was anything from a pretty blue to near-invisible. Then run the test-tube blocks through a German-name chromatagraph and (early days) have it print a strip of sample numbers versus readings. The big problem was contamination of the sample with organic matter – roots, litter, or manure.