UBC engineers develop all-in-one solution to catch and destroy forever chemicals | Hacker News Reader

UBC engineers develop all-in-one solution to catch and destroy forever chemicals

news.ubc.ca

24 pointsgivinguflac9 comments

The Roman Colosseum is still standing after nearly 2000 years, meanwhile our so called "forever chemicals" can't even last a few decades now.

Could this be applied to blood?

Might be easier to donate blood and let the body regenerate it.

Aren't you basically giving away your eternal polluting chemicals to a poor guy who just needed blood?

I understand it can happen unwillingly but doing that on purpose is... shady. Got to be an horrible person to willingly poison another.

I think someone bleeding out has more immediate issues

You don't give blood only to those who are dying, people that are treated for disease sometimes also require blood transfer. Even then it's no excuse to willingly give a polluted blood.

If you were dying of thirst I would give you water from tchernobil nuclear plant and you would thank me.

> I understand it can happen unwillingly but doing that on purpose is... shady. Got to be an horrible person to willingly poison another.

Well the thing is that at this point pretty much everyone has PFAS in their blood[0][1], except perhaps for some uncontacted tribes (although I'm not so sure[2]).

You'd be hard pressed to find any blood with no PFAS at all, if it even exists. So there is nothing wrong with donating it, as there is no alternative.

0. https://chemsec.org/wrappedinchemicals/facts/pfas-fact-1/

1. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/17/dark-w...

2. https://dce.au.dk/fileadmin/dce.au.dk/Udgivelser/Notater_202...

That's currently what I'm doing. Figure worst case I save a life, best case i do that plus get rid of some bad stuff too.

I’m guessing that you mean as a preservative?

If so, no: the article is about a technique for destroying long-lived PFAS molecules, which are extraordinarily stable and therefore long lived, and about which there are health concerns (they do very odd things to biological systems in very low concentrations).

Linked in the article is the research paper detailing the technique: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44172-024-00267-4

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