Ancestors

Toot

Written by Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on 2025-01-22 at 17:04

There's lots of science fiction stories about a single molecule being able to "infect" other matter. Ice-nine, grey goop stories, Borg/Cyberman nanoparticles, Strange matter etc...

But this is real, and scary. A particular crystalisation of an HIV drug was able to "infect" labs and production plants, making the drug useless.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PccOwGEbtQU

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Descendants

Written by Denis Warburton on 2025-01-22 at 17:08

@_thegeoff The wikipedia article is fascinating reading.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph

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Written by Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on 2025-01-22 at 17:15

@artandtechnic We use phenyl salicylate to show different crystal sizes depending on cooling rate at high school level. It's really easy to supercool it, so when that happens I can just drop a tiny crystal of the original in and we get a nice rapid nucleation. But I'm now going to have nightmares about the day that experiment never works again... 😳

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Written by WokStation on 2025-01-22 at 17:11

@_thegeoff if I remember right, it was one of the orbital drug making experiments recently, the crystals stay more pure, apparently. Something like that

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Written by Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on 2025-01-22 at 17:17

@wokstation In this case they don't want crystalisation at all, it needs to stay in solution as the crystals aren't water soluble.

Was the orbital stuff down to zero g crystal growth?

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Written by WokStation on 2025-01-22 at 17:39

@_thegeoff Varda did it with ritonavir, which is a microcrystal that has this infection phenomenon. Landed at the start of last year. https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/02/vardas-drug-cooking-winnebago-will-be-remembered-as-a-space-pioneer/

Great pic tho:

=> View attached media

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Written by Geoff 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 on 2025-01-22 at 17:44

@wokstation Yeah, that's the subject of the original video, although all about the original discovery of the issue. Must read up, that looks fascinating :)

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