The Truth about Chile Peppers

After my blog about my salsa incident yesterday, I started googling for treatments for chile pepper burns, and I found a lot of people saying that if you immerse your skin in lemon juice, it gets rid of the burn. Lemon juice??? I wondered how that was possible, because if it's an acid from the chile burning me, I wouldn't think that adding more acid would help anything. So, I did a little research (aka looked at wikipedia and did another google search to find the chile pepper institute website) and found out some very interesting stuff!

It turns out, chile pepper "burns" are NOT acid burns. The compound that makes our skin feel like it's burning is called capsaicin (see the structure above.) It's made in the internal membranes of chile peppers (and in the other fleshy parts), with the highest concentration in the white pith around the seeds (no shocker there.) But here's the crazy part--it doesn't actually cause any real damage to the tissue when it's causing all that pain. Instead, it binds to some receptors in our cells (which, incidentally, are related to some of the ion channels we study in our lab!) and causes them to send a signal to the brain of pain and burning. It doesn't cause a chemical burn at all--just the sensation of one.

Apparently, birds are not affected by capsaicin at all, only mammals. And this makes sense, because when I bird eats the chile peppers, the seeds come out the other end unharmed, whereas when a mammal eats the pepper, the seeds won't germinate after digestion. So the plant is trying to make sure only birds eat it, not mammals.

So I didn't actually have chemical burns on my hands--that makes me feel better. But I'm still going to wear gloves next time!

Oh, the sacrifices we'll make for salsa!

Yesterday, I made homemade salsa from scratch. That's it above--not bad, eh? I had two small yellow peppers that I got from my CSA recently (what's a CSA, you're asking? Well, it stands for Community Shared Agriculture, and basically you pay some money at the beginning of the season to a local farmer, and then he gives you a share of his crop every week. It's pretty cool, actually, even though some weeks you get things like rhubarb, or much worse--BEETS. But mostly we get lots of yummy veggies and fruits each week. I especially like the raspberries. The joys of living in the middle of Illinois!) But anyways, the farmer guy knows I'm from New Mexico, so he gave me TWO spicy peppers instead of one, which is what everyone else got. I knew I couldn't disappoint him, so I made salsa. I chopped up the peppers last, and made sure to wash my hands immediately afterwards, and to not touch my eyes. We had chips and salsa as part of our dinner, and it was pretty dang spicey! And while we were eating, my fingers started hurting and burning like mad. I washed them again and again, and even tried soaking them in milk. But they just kept burning.

This morning the redness is gone, but they actually still hurt a little. Yikes! Who knew a tiny little innocuous looking yellow pepper (they are NOT habeneros, by the way) could be so dangerous! It's funny that just last post I was talking about lab safety and so on--I would NEVER use acid in our lab without wearing gloves, but here I am with acid burns on my fingers. Next time I'll make sure to put on my Personal Protective Equipment first! But I must say, I think it was worth it. That is some GOOOOOD salsa!

Lab safety comes back to bite us

In my lab I am the designated safety-worrier. Many of my labmates couldn't care less about safety (is that a cultural thing? it seems worse with the foreign students...). Anyways, parts of my lab are, well, basically disaster areas. The room where we have two of our fume hoods, for instance, is particularly bad. The picture here is not my actual lab, but it really isn't that far off from what our fume hood actually looks like. I've learned to just let some of that stuff slide--it's not my job to be the safety police or anything. But every now and then, I have to put my foot down.

When I first joined the lab, for instance, I learned that some members of my lab were using HF (hydrofluoric acid) with hardly any safety precautions--no goggles, no secondary container, no antidote anywhere nearby. For those of your who don't know, HF is a super-duper dangerous chemical that can easily kill you upon contact with your skin and which also gives off very toxic fumes. A palm-sized splash of HF on your skin, and you'll be dead by the next morning. I used to work with HF at BYU, and I had to wear safety glasses, a face shield, a labcoat, apron, and three layers of gloves. And I ALWAYS worked in a fume hood, and I ALWAYS had the HF antidote nearby. So that was one thing I decided to throw a fit about, and I got our lab to use secondary containers and stock the antidote and such. Not too long ago, we discovered one of the secondary containers totally full of an unkown concentrated acid because a bottle had broken, which actually turned out NOT to be HF (thankfully). And luckily, it was at least contained in that tub instead of leaking all over the room. But what if it had been HF and we hadn't had those secondary containers I insisted on--it could have killed someone! Or several someones.

Anyways, back to my point. Today was another day of me feeling vindicated for feeling anal about this safety stuff. A co-worker of mine was getting something out of the flammables cabinet, and because that thing is full to the utter brink with bottles hanging halfway off the edges, he accidentally knocked a bottle off the shelf as he was closing the door. It broke, and he started cleaning it up, only to start feeling dizzy and short of breath. Turns out it was very corrosive chemical with some moderately nasty fumes. We called the campus safety people and they came to check it out. Luckily, it was just like 10 mL or something, so it wasn't a huge deal, although they told my co-worker he should probably go to the doctor just to make sure everything was okay.

So, as soon as my advisor gets back from vacation, I'm going to have a talk with him about making some of my labmates clean up their work areas. The problem with bringing stuff like this up to my advisor is that he generally turns around and assigns you to be the one to fix it. But not this time--the messy ones are going to have to clean up after themselves!

Okay, so I'm making a blog

So, for a long time I've been avoiding doing the whole blogging thing for a number of reasons. Foremost among them is that I just can't handle the pressure! Unlike my blogger-type friends, I am not a hilarious person, I don't have any cute babies to post pictures of or fun toddler stories, I don't do digi-scrapbooking (and actually hardly ever take pictures at all...), and just don't have very many interesting things to say about my life. I'm a graduate student in physics--and even *I* am bored with my research these days! Pretty much everyday is similar to the last around here. Not that we have a bad life--in fact, life is very good to us. But, I just couldn't see why people would be very interested to read a blog post from boring little me.

But I feel kind of left out, and my friends tell me they wish I had a blog so they can keep up with what I'm up to (becuase apparently, email is too old fashioned nowadays.) So I am creating a blog, but I'm offering fair warning to any potential readers that it may very well be the boringest blog they have ever read, so no one *has* to read it unless they really want to. I'm not going to try to make my posts astounding and insightful or witty or anything. I'm just going to write, sometimes, and I'm just going to write whatever I want. And you, readers, can just read whenever you want but only *if* you want. Deal? Deal.