The first blue pigment discovered in 200 years is now commercially available
news.artnet.com
news.artnet.com
>Yttrium is mostly dangerous in the working environment, due to the fact that damps and gasses can be inhaled with air. This can cause lung embolisms, especially during long-term exposure. Yttrium can also cause cancer with humans, as it enlarges the chances of lung cancer when it is inhaled.
>Indium compounds are encountered rarely by most people. All indium compounds should be regarded as highly toxic. Indium compounds damage the heart, kidney, and liver, and may be teratogenic.
It's now banned in paint thinners as a result of some pretty long lobbying efforts. It's a little sad, since chemicals like DCM are hard to replace, but if it saves the lives of our artists at the expense of them having a bit of a harder time cleaning their brushes, maybe we can live with that.
It does not matter if the chemical compound is inert or not, the elements will be well incorporated into a new vector of nature.
For example, you probably shouldn't drink OH- or H2O2, even though it is made of the same atoms as water.
Just because the pure elemental form is toxic doesn't make compounds with it toxic as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barium_sulfate#Radiocontrast_a...
Mercury salts are corrosive, organomercury compounds are highly neurotoxic and elemental mercury is relatively non-toxic if ingested.
The form of the element matters a lot.
"Numerous other organizations have also publicly declared the safety and effectiveness of amalgam. These include the Mayo clinic,[21] the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA),[22] Health Canada,[23] Alzheimer's Association,[24] American Academy of Pediatrics,[25] Autism Society of America,[26] U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,[27] National Multiple Sclerosis Society,[28] New England Journal of Medicine,[29] International Journal of Dentistry,[30] National Council Against Health Fraud,[31] The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research NIDCR,[32] American Cancer Society,[33] Lupus Foundation of America,[34] the American College of Medical Toxicology,[35] the American Academy of Clinical Toxicology"
“A large retrospective cohort study found a significant association of mercury based fillings with the development of Parkinson's disease.”
(Reference to 2000 - 2008 study in Taiwan.)
Your link is interesting. It seems like the arguments against mercury amalgam being a problem include:
1) organizations like you listed saying don't worry
2) obvious scammers making a living blaming everything on fillings, even nonexistent ones
3) only 5% of people with fillings having elevated mercury in urine, particularly gum chewers
4) "hypersensitivity or allergy" are the "most likely health effects" but there is not clear evidence for or against autoimmune disorders caused by fillings.
It seems to me that it's perfectly conceivable, at the same time, that there is or has been a scam/cult of mercury fillings causing every possible problem, and at the same time, that they do do something to a minority of recipients that is different from acute mercury toxicity that we know about. There could be a combination of more than normal mercury released and more than normal sensitivity.
Something that would be interesting to research, I think, is the microbiome of people with and without different kinds of fillings. There's been some recent claim(s) about the bacteria that cause gingivitis being linked to Alzheimers.
"molecules are not the same as elements"
now repeat it with me
"molecules are not the same as elements"
[0]: http://www.isb-gym8-lehrplan.de/contentserv/3.1.neu/g8.de/id...
Even if thiomersal is more effective at killing bacteria than at killing humans, there are no doubts that it is also toxic for humans and for any other animals.
While the thiomersal dose injected together with a vaccine is small enough so that in most cases it will not cause damages before being eliminated from the body, the risks are not negligible.
To willingly inject yourself with poison, even in a quantity that hopefully will not hurt you, seems rather stupid.
Better alternative bactericides must be found for vaccine preservation.
That's why it wasn't justified.
Personally, I eventually discovered that my terrible problems with wearing contact lenses in the 1990's were caused by the thiomersal used as a preservative in the saline solution I was using. Given my known and tested reaction to having it in my eyes and on my skin, I would be very reluctant to have an injection that contained it.
Dental amalgam
Obvious one is water. H - explody. O2 - burny. H2O - puts out fires, quenches your thirst, no longer a gas, not very reactive.
The point being made is that you can take dangerous elements and then create a compound that doesn’t share the properties of the elements.
So a counter argument is to show that’s not true for the elements that make up the compound for this blue dye.
Most corrosive substances release their effects on the surface they contact you, but toxic effects, especially the problematic ones, are way deeper.
The distinction is fairly important, especially regarding heavy metals.
Like hydrofluoric acid, for example. It's fairly easy to not notice you spilled some on your hand/arm until after it soaked through your skin, upon which the issue is systemic toxicity or at least bone damage. In contrast, sulfuric, nitric, and hydrochloric acids at any concentration up to azeotropic just cause burns and, for sulfuric acid, dehydration. There are no acute systemic risks from all but large-area burns, and even then it's mostly due to fluid loss which can be compensated for. (Yes, there are later risks due to loss-of-skin and skin graft surgery, but none of those complications try to have you pronounced dead you within a few hours of the spill.)
"Dental amalgam is a mixture of metals, consisting of liquid (elemental) mercury and a powdered alloy composed of silver, tin, and copper. Approximately half (50%) of dental amalgam is elemental mercury by weight. The chemical properties of elemental mercury allow it to react with and bind together the silver/copper/tin alloy particles to form an amalgam."
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/dental-devices/dental-am....
Chloride is also deadly in high enough concentrations (or rather, in non-trace concentrations), but we also use low amounts of it in pool cleaners.
Mix the two and you get salt.
So, probably pretty safe when used appropriately. I wouldn't go inhaling it, since any fine powder's not great for the lungs, but that shouldn't be news to anyone. Just wear your N95 when mixing dry pigments as you always should.
Wiki says this about cobalt: "it causes respiratory problems when inhaled. It also causes skin problems when touched; after nickel and chromium, cobalt is a major cause of contact dermatitis"
So for people looking for an example of something that's somewhat toxic, but much less toxic as a paint. Here you go, Cobalt Blue. The color this new can be substituted for. yeah the toxicities are different, but it's the same idea.
A great influence on me as an artist, and a good friend, died prematurely almost certainly as a result of his exposure to dangerous materials. In his case, asbestos.
I'm not surprised by them selling indium solder wire, but they offer all kinds of solder under that brand.
It just comes with the territory oddly enough...
The quality of paint is measured by several characteristics such as pigment load, lightfastness, opacity/transparency, tinting strength, etc. Not its scarcity in nature.
Although, you can just use Richard Schmid's palette, replace all the toxic junk with modern pigments and you're good to go. The thing is to stick with the palette forever for many decades so that your paintings have a cohesive harmony.
> In economics and consumer theory, a Giffen good is a product that people consume more of as the price rises and vice versa
https://www.npr.org/2016/07/16/485696248/a-chemist-accidenta...
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-quest-for-billion-do...
Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color Paperback – Illustrated, April 15, 2003 https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Earth-Art-Invention-Color/dp/0...
This! I've noticed that blue exterior house paint, even with an expensive primer, just doesn't cover very well. This stuff seems about 100 times too expensive for that application.
I wonder who told these scientists "stop what you're doing you've just discovered a new pigment".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IG_Farben
Do you know what the name means?
I suspect it starts with "this compound has a nice colour, how about its other properties?"
How would you know what you’re looking at is novel?
There are extensive lists of existing pigments.
Pigments are chemicals. Chemist can use various techniques to analyse a sample and tell what is its composition. After that they search for it in the literature and if they find that the given chemical was not described previously then it is novel. That’s it.
> I don’t get it, how would you even discover a pigment?
The article answers this. “ Chemist Mas Subramanian and his team serendipitously came upon it while conducting experiments with rare earth elements as part of their work with semiconductors.”
That is to say they were experimenting and something turned out as blue. They didn’t expect this so they analyzed the sample and then did a literature search.
It wasn't that long ago that a blue pigment—anything at all that was blue and that would be durable over time—was extraordinarily rare and valuable.
Indium is completely irreplaceable in LED's, especially in the LED's used for lighting, and also in other important semiconductor devices, e.g. in the GaN transistors that are now used in the latest miniaturized power bricks.
Currently the largest quantity of indium is used for the transparent conductors required in all displays, from smartphones to TV's and monitors. There are alternatives for this use, but all have various disadvantages, e.g. a lower lifetime or a lower efficiency.
I agree that wasting indium, which is probably the element with the lowest known resources compared to the known future needs for it, to make something like pigments, where there are a lot of mostly equivalent alternatives, is a serious mistake.
Its arguable that using precious resources for products that last less than 20 years, in many cases less than 5 years, is a true waste.
However, if instead of using this pigment in a few valuable paintings, it would be used in a high number of ephemeral sketches done for practice, that would be a waste.
Nevertheless, the high price at which the pigment has been launched is good, because it will probably deter casual use.
Just like a high number of ephemeral smartphone screens would be a waste?
$4.485 per ML versus $0.116 per ML. That's a difference of almost 40x cost. I wonder how much of that is offset by how saturated/opaque the pigment is. Still, an incredibly expensive blue.
> Connecticut artist Michael Rothman got his hands on some Kremer YInMn blue pigment in 2019 and produced his own paint, “hand milling the dry material in acrylic emulsion resin,” he said.
I wonder what the difference in cost is for the dry pigment
It's nice as techinical name, I guess, but I'd hope they have some better brand name they are going by.
Tangentially, as a non-native speaker, "ultramarine" has a fairly similar amount of information encoded in the name as "Yinmn"--pretty much zero. So, the two names ("ultramarine" vs "yinmn") are pretty much equivalent to eme, personally.
Goes to show that naming things "properly" is difficult (I suspect it's impossible actually).
It provided the information that this is a foreign pigment that must be better than the lower-quality pigments produced locally (e.g. azurite).
Anyways, you're on HN, you know geeks shouldn't name things, but they do anyways. Think "XBox" as a perfect example.
I will continue to be amused because people call Intel "team blue" and AMD "team red", but in this case AMD's product is blue.
I think some HPC applications do actually have some aesthetics because the bean counters want to be able to look at their billion dollar datacenter and say "My datacenter is bigger/prettier than yours" rather than just having a black front panel.
I’m not sure if you’re joking here or something, but as it turns out, many people buy video cards to play video games, and many of them care about how their gaming device looks like. They install LEDs and stuff. It’s pretty cool.
I got a used one off eBay for my tower, mostly because I wanted something AMD for linux usage with as low heat emission as possible, but honestly I really like the look of that blue too :)
Even if I have a black boxy case with no fancy windows or anything else... Interesting to learn it's this neat pigment.
But straight up it would make no sense for a non professional workload. You could get a AMD 5500 XT 4GB GDDR6 (WX2100 is 2GB GDDR5) for a similar ball park in price with 5x the bandwidth and a lot more graphical horse power for a gaming workload. And if heat is the concern it would be trivial to underclock and undervolt to get it quite chilly.
You may have some special situation and have got a great deal but for the most part they should be of little interest to standard consumers.
And the 5500 XT has a TDP of 130 watts, vs 25 watts for the WX2100. The WX2100 is also smaller, and doesn't require additional power from the PSU, running entirely off the PCIe slot power.
Not that I'm saying it's great for gaming. But I'm running it on a IBM POWER processor which can't really play x86 games anyway, just open-source and java games (it can tank minecraft at 4k pretty nicely). It lacks an on-board accelerated GPU too, so going without isn't really an option.
I agree almost everyone should probably just get a better gaming card, but for the price this thing runs a 4k monitor great, has good video en/decoders, and a cool blue exterior ;)
>AMD announced in July 2016 that the pigment would be used on new Radeon Pro WX and Pro SSG professional GPUs for the energy efficiency that stems from its near-infrared reflecting property
The fact that it was said makes the amusement value even greater.
https://www.scotch-soda.com/fi/en/men/shirts/long-sleeve-100...
I am somewhat dubious though if that is genuinely yinmn, but interesting nevertheless that they are marketing it as such.