Tuesday Tanlines

From Julie's Cafe, This Decades Old Tanning Hack Just Resurfaced on TikTok, and Dermatologists Are Not Thrilled 

A decades-old tanning practice mixing baby oil with iodine is trending again on TikTok, raising concerns about unprotected UV exposure and skin health.The baby oil and iodine tanning method is appearing under new hashtags as users film prolonged sunbathing. Dermatologists say the TikTok tanning trend leaves oil that can intensify UV absorption while iodine deepens color without protection.The practice traces to mid-20th-century sunbathing culture and is resurfacing among younger audiences. Yale pediatric dermatologist Richard Antaya told The Union Democrat that experts have long advised against it. Years of UV exposure increase skin cancer risk and accelerate aging. Dermatologists cite DHA-based self tanners as a non-UV alternative.

I vaguely remember hearing about the baby oil and iodine trick. Yes, elemental iodine imparts a nice brown color to skin, which dissipates fairly quickly. Having used iodine in chemistry a few times I noticed the staining. However, iodine is no fun, and it smells bad (although it doesn't leave much smell on the skin. However, iodine is better used in nitrogen triiodide. I independently discovered that a strong solution of potassium permanganate also gives skin a nice glow, without the smell, and lasts a bit longer. Ask me how I found out. It's also handy to have around in crystal form if you need to start a fire. Of course, neither of these chemical alternatives offer any real protection from sunburn the way a real suntan does.

The Wombat has Rule 5 Monday: Redhead in Denim up and garnering clicks at The Other McCain.

Get Ready for the PFAS Bill

 At the Virginia Mercury, Removing PFAS from public water will cost billions and take time

Chemists invented PFAS in the 1930s to make life easier: Nonstick pans, waterproof clothing, grease-resistant food packaging and stain-resistant carpet were all made possible by PFAS. But in recent years, the growing number of health risks found to be connected to these chemicals has become increasingly alarming.

PFAS — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances – are now either suspected or known to contribute to thyroid disease, elevated cholesterol, liver damage and cancer, among other health issues.

They can be found in the blood of most Americans and in many drinking water systems, which is why the Environmental Protection Agency in April 2024 finalized the first enforceable federal limits for six types of PFAS in drinking water systems. The limits – between 4 and 10 parts per trillion for PFOS, PFOA, PFHxS, PFNA and GenX – are less than a drop of water in a thousand Olympic-sized swimming pools, which speaks to the chemicals’ toxicity. The sixth type, PFBS, is regulated as a mixture using what’s known as a hazard index.

Meeting these new limits won’t be easy or cheap. And there’s another problem: While PFAS can be filtered out of water, these “forever chemicals” are hard to destroy.

My team at the University of Notre Dame works on solving problems involving contaminants in water systems, including PFAS. We explore new technologies to remove PFAS from drinking water and to handle the PFAS waste. Here’s a glimpse of the magnitude of the challenge and ways you can reduce PFAS in your own drinking water.
Removing PFAS will cost billions per year

Every five years, the EPA is required to choose 30 unregulated contaminants to monitor in public drinking water systems. Right now, 29 of those 30 contaminants are PFAS. The tests provide a sense of just how widespread PFAS are in water systems and where.

The EPA has taken over 22,500 samples from about 3,800 of the 154,000 public drinking water systems in the U.S. In 22% of those water systems, its testing found at least one of the six newly regulated PFAS, and about 16% of the systems exceeded the new standards. East Coast states had the largest percentage of systems with PFAS levels exceeding the new standards in EPA tests conducted so far.

Under the new EPA rules, public water systems have until 2027 to complete monitoring for PFAS and provide publicly available data. If they find PFAS at concentrations that exceed the new limits, then they must install a treatment system by 2029.

Our local water system had PFAS analysis done in the last year, and none was found, which is not surprising, since our water comes from deep underground (300-400 ft)

How much that will cost public water systems, and ultimately their customers, is still a big unknown, but it won’t be cheap.

The EPA estimated the cost to the nation’s public drinking water systems to comply with the news rules at about US$1.5 billion per year. But other estimates suggest the total costs of testing and cleaning up PFAS contamination will be much higher. The American Water Works Association put the cost at over $3.8 billion per year for PFOS and PFOA alone.

There are more than 5,000 chemicals that are considered PFAS, yet only a few have been studied for their toxicity, and even fewer tested for in drinking water. The United States Geological Survey estimates that nearly half of all tap water is contaminated with PFAS.

An analytical chemists dream. So many compounds to be tested for, so much money! 

Some money for testing and cleanup will come from the federal government. Other funds will come from 3M and DuPont, the leading makers of PFAS. 3M agreed in a settlement to pay between $10.5 billion to $12.5 billion to help reimburse public water systems for some of their PFAS testing and treatment. But public water systems will still bear additional costs, and those costs will be passed on to residents. 

Another big question is how to dispose of the captured PFAS once they have been filtered out.

Landfills are being considered, but that just pushes the problem to the next generation. PFAS are known as “forever chemicals” for a reason – they are incredibly resilient and don’t break down naturally, so they are hard to destroy.

Studies have shown that PFAS can be broken down with energy-intensive technologies. But this comes with steep costs. Incinerators must reach over 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 Celsius) to destroy PFAS, and the possibility of creating potentially harmful byproducts is not yet well understood. Other suggested techniques, such as supercritical water oxidation or plasma reactors, have the same drawbacks.

So who is responsible for managing PFAS waste? Ultimately the responsibility will likely fall on public drinking water systems, but the EPA has no waste regulations for PFAS.
Steps to protect your home from PFAS

Your first instinct might be to use bottled water to try to avoid PFAS exposures, but a recent study found that even bottled water can contain these chemicals. And bottled water is regulated by a different federal agency, the Food and Drug Administration, which has no standards for PFAS.

I can see push for that coming. 

Your best option is to rely on the same technologies that treatment facilities will be using:

• Activated carbon is similar to charcoal. Like a sponge, it will capture the PFAS, removing it from the water. This is the same technology in refrigerator filters and in some water pitcher filters, like Brita or PUR. Note that many refrigerator manufacture’s filters are not certified for PFAS, so don’t assume they will remove PFAS to safe levels.
• Ion exchange resin is the same technology found in many home water softeners. Like activated carbon, it captures PFAS from the water, and you can find this technology in many pitcher filter products. If you opt for a whole house treatment system, which a plumber can attach where the water enters the house, ion exchange resin is probably the best choice. But it is expensive.
• Reverse osmosis is a membrane technology that only allows water and select compounds to pass through the membrane, while PFAS are blocked. This is commonly installed at the kitchen sink and has been found to be very effective at removing most PFAS in water. It is not practical for whole house treatment, but it is likely to remove a lot of other contaminants as well.

If you have a private well instead of a public drinking water system, that doesn’t mean you’re safe from PFAS exposure. Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources estimates that 71% of shallow private wells in that state have some level of PFAS contamination. Using a certified laboratory to test well water for PFAS can run $300-$600 per sample, a cost barrier that will leave many private well owners in the dark.

As I've said before, I consider the PFAS scare to be the next big push by the regulatory state. The costs will far exceed the benefits.

Science is Dead, Long Live Science

 From The College Fix, Ocean sciences must incorporate DEI, scholars argue

Ocean science researchers must work “towards equity and justice” in their field, according to a group of scholars. Their academic paper includes a call for scholars to “[a]dvocate for and actively create opportunities for your BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and female colleagues, even when this means personally stepping aside/turning down opportunities.” Nature’s open-access publication, npj ocean sustainability, published the paper.

Proposals focused on a variety of policies, including specifically promoting minority groups. These applied to funding, such as in the call for “More grants awarded to underrepresented researchers,” and to citations, such as in the calls to “Check whether your reference lists are gender-balanced.” They also suggest “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies and “anti-racist” training for research staff.

Ocean scientists should also educate themselves “on the work of minority scientists relevant to [their] study and consider proactively citing more work by minority scientists as an act of reparative justice and affirmative action in citational practices.”

Paper co-author Paris Stefanoudis at the University of Oxford provided The College Fix with a sampling of resources to incorporate the suggestions. “That is really hard to track since there are so many issues covered here,” Stefanoudis said, when asked about examples of the paper’s ideas being implemented. He pointed to the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Gender Citation Index Balance Tool as an example of “gender-balanced referencing.”

Stefanoudis also mentioned the publication Conservation Letters’ policy as an example of the paper’s proposal to “[m]andate that publications on the Global South by those in the Global North include authors from those geographies.”  The publication requires “manuscripts focused on conservation in Low and Middle Income Countries include authors from the relevant country/countries.” 

The researchers also suggested the special recognition of “individuals from underrepresented groups through awards, invited talks, keynote lectures at conferences etc.”

Asha de Vos

 

One of the researchers, Asha de Vos of the Oceans Institute of University of Western Australia, spoke regarding the contents of the paper and a related op-ed she wrote in the New York Times at a British Ecological Society conference.

There she received an award in recognition of her research on blue whales, use of “storytelling as a tool to share the magic of our world’s oceans,” and desire to “empower the next generation of diverse ocean heroes to become custodians of their patch of ocean.” de Vos also stated that the award recognized her work of “ensuring that these spaces are more inclusive, diverse and equitable.”

The article also promotes the use and increased funding of open access journals rather than traditional publications that place most of their research behind a paywall, suggesting a “tiered structure of Open Access fees based on geography” as well as calling for funding agencies to “Mandate dissemination of results particularly to communities in study areas.”

How about everybody in marine sciences try to do the best they can? 

VodkaPundit at PJM, I Can't Believe This Is a Real Science Class at a Real University

Snacks provided? I'm in!

. . . I did a double-take on Professor Johnson's position at Rice. It took a minute to sink in, but despite Johnson's doctorate in chemistry, she doesn't work in Rice's renowned chemistry department. Johnson works in the university's DEI department.

In Chem 125, Johnson will instruct her undergrads — who are expected to pony up around $78,278 for the privilege of attending during the 2022-23 academic year — on how to "apply chemical tools and analysis to understand black life in the US," along with her "personal reflections and proposals for addressing inequities in chemistry and chemical education."

In other words, Tom Lehrer can teach you more about chemistry for free in 85 seconds than Professor Johnson can for thousands of dollars over an entire semester.

I Escaped in the Nick of Time

Chemist means something slightly different in England

Having ruined the humanities, with a lot of help with the diversity mongers, feminists have set their sights on the hard sciences: Academic Absurdity of the Week: Feminist Chemistry?

Did you know there is an International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry? Neither did I, but of course it exists, for there really is no crazy identity politics “intersection” that doesn’t have its own journal read by dozens.

The IJPC recently offered up a two-part article on “Gender in the Substance of Chemistry,” by Agnes Kovacs, who you will be unsurprised to learn is a professor of gender studies at Central European University in Hungary.

Part 1 considers “the ideal gas,” which will certainly prompt a number of obvious suggestions from our regular commenters:

Abstract: This two-part paper is about the possibility of analyzing the content of chemistry from a gender perspective. The first part provides an example of what such an analysis would look like. The second part is an outline of the theoretical perspective that makes the analysis possible. The example is the model of the ideal gas, the cornerstone of the theory of matter in chemical thermodynamics. I argue that this model is built on fundamental philosophical assumptions (Platonic idealism, hierarchy among states of matter, atomism/ individualism, and the negligence of interrelationships among parts and of their embodiment) that have been problematized by feminist scholarship. The same patterns are evident in the treatment of ideal and real solutions in chemical thermodynamics. I argue that it is possible to imagine a theory that utilizes different philosophical ideas and which therefore would be more compatible with feminist values.

And part 2, which is “an agenda for theory,” which leaves me a bit puzzled, since the agenda of all such enterprises (“smash the patriarchy!”) is pretty simple isn’t it? Who needs more theory? . . .

PDFs of the papers themselves can be found for free, here and here. I skipped around through the first, looking for something that made sense, aside from the initial introduction to ideal gas law and its modifications, without finding any. Powerline does offer one shred of hope however:

Now, I am wondering if Prof. Kovacs is engaged in one very long-running Sokal-style hoax, for the first installment in this series actually contains a lot of math about the “perfect gas equation,” culminating with some suggested new equations that would be more compatible with feminism, one supposes, though someone more current in math and chemistry would have to tell me.

I don't even see that much. As a student of physical chemistry back in grad school, what I see is a simple rewording of the text books, followed by some bullshit and gibberish. Somebody in Hungary paid for it, though.

There May Be Gold in Them Thar Hills, But . . .

There's platinum on them thar roads:

Chemists Get Four Shiny New Toys for Christmas

Discovery and Assignment of Elements with Atomic Numbers 113, 115, 117 and 118

The fourth IUPAC/IUPAP Joint Working Party (JWP) on the priority of claims to the discovery of new elements has reviewed the relevant literature for elements 113, 115, 117, and 118 and has determined that the claims for discovery of these elements have been fulfilled, in accordance with the criteria for the discovery of elements of the IUPAP/IUPAC Transfermium Working Group (TWG) 1991 discovery criteria. These elements complete the 7th row of the periodic table of the elements, and the discoverers from Japan, Russia and the USA will now be invited to suggest permanent names and symbols. The new elements and assigned priorities of discovery are as follows:

Element 113 (temporary working name and symbol: ununtrium, Uut)
The RIKEN collaboration team in Japan have fulfilled the criteria for elementZ=113 and will be invited to propose a permanent name and symbol.

Elements 115, 117, and 118 (temporary working names and symbols: ununpentium, Uup; ununseptium, Uus; and ununoctium, Uuo)

The collaboration between the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia; Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, USA; and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA have fulfilled the criteria for element Z=115, 117 and will be invited to propose permanent names and symbols.

But chemists and engineers won't be putting them to much use any time soon. They are all radioactive, of course. Wikipedia already has listings for their half-lives 113 - 19.6 seconds, 115 -  220 milliseconds, 117 - 78 milliseconds, and 118 - 890 microseconds.

Evidently, the Island of Stability has not yet been discovered.

High School Chem Lab Fire Sends Six to Hospital

Six injured in chemistry classroom fire at Woodson High School in Fairfax

An ordinary chemistry class erupted into chaos Friday morning as five students and a teacher were injured in a fire during a classroom activity at W.T. Woodson High, one of Fairfax County’s top-performing schools.

The students were injured seriously enough to be taken to the hospital, two of them flown by helicopter to hospitals in the District. They were in “serious condition” but did not have life-threatening injuries when they were hospitalized, according to Chief Richard Bowers of the Fairfax County Fire and Rescue Department.

But later Friday afternoon, one of the students was listed in critical condition and was in surgery at Children’s Hospital, according to Capt. Randy Bettinger, a fire department spokesman. A spokeswoman for Washington Hospital Center said that doctors there are treating one patient who was in fair condition.

Three others were taken to Inova Fairfax Hospital. The classroom teacher suffered minor burns, according to fire officials, and was treated at the scene and has been speaking to investigators.

So what the heck were they doing?

Details of the mishap were not yet clear, but several students who said they were in the class at the time of the fire described a regular chemistry experiment that went awry: They said the chemistry teacher was demonstrating how the color of fire can change when something suddenly went wrong. They said several students near the experiment were engulfed in flames.

I hear flames get really yellow and red when you throw gasoline into them. But I wouldn't know anything about that. . .

As paranoid as school administrators are in this day and age, I'm surprised that a chemistry class would have a lab involving open flames.

I remember in the good old days of junior high, we had a lab where we heated red mercuric oxide in a test tube to disassociate it, and produce elemental mercury (as a gas which condensed on the inside of the test tube as a silvery coat) and oxygen, which we tested for by taking a piece of wood, like a little Popsicle stick, setting it on fire, blowing it out, and sticking it in the test tube, where the extra oxygen would cause it to burst into flame again.

I can't imagine that being done today. And that's a shame.

Yes, The Brand of Kitty Litter Does Matter

Radioactive kitty litter may have ruined our best hope to store nuclear waste

Some of the most dangerous nuclear waste in the US is currently scattered between 77 locations all over the country, awaiting permanent storage. Until February, many experts suggested that the best place to put it was a facility about 40 miles east of Carlsbad, New Mexico, called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). For 15 years, WIPP has operated as the first and only permanent, deep geologic nuclear waste storage facility in the country, holding "low level" radioactive materials — mostly clothing and tools exposed to radiation from nuclear weapons production — in steel barrels more than 2,150 feet below the Earth’s surface.

But earlier this year two emergencies brought that suggestion — and WIPP’s future — into question. And now it seems kitty litter may be to blame.

WIPP is in a salt desert, and much of the work there involves burrowing through the salt and using huge elevators to deposit the stuff at surface level. The resulting underground caverns are then filled with radioactive waste and eventually closed shut, sealed forever.

...on Valentine’s Day, an alarm sounded, indicating that radioactivity was present in the air underground. No one was below ground at the time, but employees on the surface activated massive fans designed to ventilate the underground air. The next day, another monitor went off — this one on the surface — indicating airborne radiation. Employees who worked outside on the surface were told to take shelter inside buildings completely separated from storage operations. Valves allowing air to flow underground were sealed with high-density expanding foam. Everything came to a standstill, indefinitely.
. . .
Last month, DOE investigators went into the cavern. Pictures showed that the latter hypothesis was true; a waste container’s lid was unsealed, and dust around the lid had turned yellow from the unusual heat emanating from inside. Each barrel is labeled to track where it came from. The punctured barrel originated from Los Alamos National Labs.

Jim Conca, PhD, a geologist who worked for years at WIPP who now blogs at Forbesabout energy issues, believes he knows what blew the lid off at least one of WIPP’s radioactive barrels. The culprit, he wrote, was kitty litter.

As Conca explains it, inorganic cat litter has properties that make it ideal for stabilizing nitrates in radioactive material — for ensuring that it doesn’t dry out and become dangerously hot. So kitty litter is often mixed in barrels with the low-level waste that’s eventually sent to WIPP. What happened at WIPP, he believes, is that one of the radioactive shipments was mixed with organic instead of inorganic material. "‘Green’ cat litter," he writes, is "made with materials like wheat or corn. These organic litters do not have the silicate properties needed to chemically stabilize nitrate the correct way." The result: "solutions can ignite when they dry out."

Mixing organics with nitrates is one of the big no nos of  chemistry, unless you are deliberately trying to make something highly flammable, and possibly explosive. To think that this rooky error has shut down a multimillion dollar waste disposal site essential to national security verges on tragic, with highlights of comedy. But it shouldn't "ruin" our best hope to store nuclear waste.  Nothing can ever be absolutely fool proof, and we'll never run out of fools.

New Hope for Finding Life on Mars?

From behind the Science paywall: Search for Martian Life Clears Another Hurdle

Members of the Curiosity Mars rover's science team have announced a milestone in their search for signs of ancient life on Mars. After carefully checking recent results, the researchers said last week at the annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference here, they are now reasonably confident that contaminants brought from Earth cannot entirely explain certain carbon compounds Curiosity spotted in martian rock.

If so, these simple organic compounds—chlorine-carrying methane and the like—either came with the tons of never-alive cosmic debris that sifts onto every planetary body or are something far more exciting: remains of martian life from eons ago, when a habitable lake and a rushing stream graced the rover's now-dry landing site.

The big question is did Mars have enough surface, or near surface water for life to evolve, the way it did on earth? If so, traces are likely to remain somewhere; the question is where.  Even more tantalizingly, if it evolved on the surface, there's some chance that some of it adapted to life deep in the subsurface, the way it has on earth.

To reach that conclusion, scientists had to clear some daunting hurdles. First, they had to account for the effects of perchlorate, a corrosive, oxidizing compound that is pervasive on Mars and, when heated, can chew up any complex organic matter into little bits (Science, 12 April 2013, p. 138). They also had to reckon with known sources of contamination in Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument package (Science, 31 August 2012, p. 1032). A chemical reagent brought along for future analyses of organics had somehow leaked into the system, and gases driven off soil and rock samples were reacting with a polymer used to prepare compounds for identification by mass spectrometry. As a result, the rover was making its own organics, including the small chlorinated methanes and the sizable compound chlorobenzene.

As a practicing analytical chemist, looking at trace metals in some of the most dilute and difficult medium, seawater, I sympathize with the chemists who had to sort out the contributions of an inadvertent leak of the same chemicals that they were trying to measure using a special purpose machine built for the purpose located millions of miles from the workers.

To sort out which of the device's detections are truly martian, the team instructed SAM to run blanks: analyses made with empty sample vials. They flushed both blanks and real samples with inert gas and warmed them to drive off the contaminating reagent. On Earth, they ran samples containing known organics through a SAM apparatus under Mars-like conditions. And on the rover, they tried experiments such as analyzing samples three times as big as normal to see whether the yield of particular organics would triple as well.

At the meeting, Caroline Freissinet and Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a score of fellow SAM team members reported that the latest results are persuasive. The new findings offer "compelling" evidence that some of the carbon-containing compounds SAM recently detected such as chlorinated methane, ethane, and propane came from organic matter in ancient martian rock, not from earthly contamination, Freissinet said. And Glavin said that other results are "a good indication" that some of the chlorobenzene is martian as well. Or as one of his slides pointedly put it: "The detection of reduced organic compounds in Martian near-surface samples is a significant step."

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Sounds promising; I'm a little curious why they chose the chlorinated organic compounds for study.  Chlorinated organic compounds aren't terribly common in terrestrial (in the planetary sense) organisms, though they certainly exist, but in a strong oxidizing environment with perchlorate present, they can be created from the perchlorate. Shouldn't they be looking for the kinds of compounds left by terrestrial organisms, the melange of compounds we call petroleum?

Some experts outside the 400-strong Curiosity team are more guarded. "The case for a martian source of carbon builds," responded meteoriticist Mark Sephton of Imperial College London by e-mail. He was not at the meeting but read the four pages of abstracts describing the results.

The case could build further if Curiosity strikes a richer vein of organic matter in future samples. Or SAM team members could try a more sophisticated technique to separate out the organic compounds in rock before the pervasive oxidizing agent chews them up. The next opportunity to drill a new sample will come within a few months when Curiosity is likely to pause on its way to its ultimate target, Mount Sharp.

Alas, we're probably not talking about finding Princess Thuvia's and John Carter's descendents.

Wombat-socho has the the long awaited, post tax day, triple stuffed  edition of "Rule 5 Sunday: Ricochet" up at The Other McCain.

I Thought We Did This Experiment Years Ago . . .

Back when we were kids and went to the public pool? How much pee in a pool would kill you?

On Wednesday, we wrote about a scientific study showing that pee in a pool's chlorinated water can yield a toxic chemical called cyanogen chloride. That substance has recommended exposure limits from the World Health Organization and is also considered a chemical warfare agent. The yields from the pool water in the study were not anywhere near deadly or even conclusively harmful. But the next question that bubbled up in Ars readers' minds was:

How much pee would it take to develop a deadly Olympic-sized swimming pool?

In case you needed another reason to not urinate in the pool. To figure that out, we extrapolated some figures cited in the paper (published in the American Chemical Society's Environmental Science and Technology) then cross-referenced those numbers with some real-world, commonly-accepted values. This yielded a ballpark answer… likely not quite the answer you'd expect. But, here we'll try to answer variations of the question in slightly more satisfying ways to provide a more comprehensive, academic understanding of urinating in pools.

First, a full rundown of how the experiment played out: a group of researchers added uric acid to chlorinated pool water. This combination resulted in the creation of cyanogen chloride, which can cause death in sufficiently high amounts. Again, the amount of cyanogen chloride generated in the experiment—roughly 20-30 micrograms per liter—is not considered immediately harmful and doesn't even meet the WHO's "danger zone" of 70 micrograms per liter or more. Nonetheless, it's there.

This is the same reaction, that occurs when you pee into a toilet that's been treated with bleach to kill the stains.  Sometimes I swear Georgia is trying to kill me.

It's Called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect...

...writes Ted after we talked about how this on vacation:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
― Michael Crichton

I recalled that when I read this article on acid rain and alkalinization in streams..,

Acid Rain Threatens Chemistry Of Rivers And Streams By Changing Alkalinity; 'Legacy Effect' From 5 Decades Of Pollution May Be Bad News For Aquatic Life

Warning: incredibly annoying autostart video ad on this page

...Alkalinity is a measurement of how well the water neutralizes invading acid. A higher alkalinity can lead to toxic ammonia and algae blooms, which are a big threat to wildlife..

The first is true, of course, and is the mechanism by which soils neutralize acids from rain and runoff.  However, alkalinity in and of itself does not lead to ammonia toxicity, higher pH does.  Increasing alkalinity is the process by which waters incompletely resist the effect of acids lowering the pH of water.

Acid rain and agricultural runoff are mostly to blame for this phenomenon, the harsh substances eat away at limestone and even cement, which "infects" the water with alkaline particles.

The word infects should never be used in such chemical discussions.  Infects applies a microorganism such as a bacteria or virus invading a larger organism and replicating itself.  This is quite the reverse of the neutralization reactions are self limiting.

It's too bad when journalists do not understand the science they are reporting, and then use hyper-emotive language to convey a false impression.  Unfortunately, it's all too common