Wouldn't that be potentially dangerous to drink, given that lots of these deuterium atoms now become part of your body and have slightly different chemical characteristics than hydrogen atoms?
But the most interesting part is when they tested it on mice. Mice are small and it doesn't take that much for heavy water to start having an effect. And what they noticed is that after some time, mice shunned the heavy water in favor of regular (light) water. Suggesting that mice are able to taste and recognize heavy water as harmful.
By the way, that video is excellent. Thunderf00t is a troll, but when he stops ranting and starts doing science, he makes really great content.
He has some strident opinions on things outside his field (for example he's got a big problem with Christianity) but does that actually make him a troll?
For a hard scientist, that's almost a given. He'd be a lousy hard scientist if he didn't have a big problem with it (both when it comes to internal contradictions and in the mismatch with the real world).
It is not his opinions, and in fact, I mostly tend to agree with these. It is more about if he disagrees with someone, he is going to lose all objectivity and attack him like a rabid dog, backed by all his fans. It is surprising considering that he looks like a competent scientist and promotes rationality.
For example, it looks like he has a grudge against Elon Musk for some reason. No problem with that, I am a bit of a hater myself. However, some (not all) of his argument are simply wrong, or at least incomplete, and he repeats them over and over, mixed with movie clips meant to ridicule, and he never backs down.
Even when it supports my ideas and I enjoy two minutes of hate as much as anyone, I think it is toxic. The only purpose I see to these videos is to reinforce ideas people already have and turn them into zealots instead of educating others. Not so different from the cults he denounces.
And it is a shame because SpaceX is awesome and I credit Tesla for making electric cars people actually want to drive, and PayPal served me well in the early days.
I also find those videos very grating and tiresome. That’s not entirely his fault though, some of the videos he excerpts from are themselves dreadful. Leaving that part aside, the mocking tone he adopts just isn’t necessary.
On the other hand, when he’s presenting an actual technical topic his videos are great.
There's a lot of cringey comments and statements in that video that are just hilariously wrong I thought it might be satire at first. Apparently you can't put steel in contact with concrete because a tiny whiff of surface corrosion is going to seriously risk the integrity of that 3/4" thick steel pipe... Not to mention claiming that clearly they didn't account for linear expansion of the pipe right after poking at the linear bearing material and saying it looks like they put it on some type of plywood.
That video is 20 minutes of him spouting off the same kind of nonsense and trivial mistakes that he spends every other video deriding other people for making. He even makes some mistakes that are basically just pure physics, which he of all people should know is suspicious on the face of it. He claimed that if a test vehicle failed to slow down and impacted the far end that it would rupture the test track. It's a 3/4" steel pipe with a massive thick door and the inside being at a weak vacuum, it's not coming off. Not to mention his differential heating claims which would not change with length given that the test track can obviously resist the bending with just the weight of the tube elastically deforming it to keep it straight.
His own zealotry on some subjects blinds him to his own obvious mistakes. If it was someone else making a video with so many errors he would be all over debunking it.
But also note your body already has to be robust against it to some degree, because water will normally have a certain amount of heavy water in it naturally, so it's not like it's a deadly deadly toxin. It's just something you shouldn't drink a lot of.
https://sciencenotes.org/can-you-drink-heavy-water-is-it-saf...
If you replace 20% of your cellular water with heavy,
you gain about 1.7% of your weight maybe (water being ~80% of you).
I see an angle here for a boxing thriller.
"Joe, this taste I dunno, sweet to you? No? Huh."
https://www.chemistryworld.com/opinion/the-last-retort/30055...
In the same paragraph they say "All research procedures were ethically approved by the Committee for the Use of Human Subjects in Research" at their university, so they probably had to provide a lot of evidence that it was safe beforehand.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-021-01964-y#Sec10
I think sinking ice cubes would be a fun party trick.
(Note, if you put too much dry ice the water in your drink will freeze and that can affect the taste quite negatively..)
For better sinking ice, mix deuterium and oxygen-18.
For the best sinking ice use super heavy water[1] (substitute tritium instead of deuterium) although it is toxic: “The median lethal dose (LD50) of tritium assimilated by the body is estimated to be 370 GBq (10 Ci). Higher doses can be tolerated with forced fluid intake to reduce the biological half life.”
One of the videos linked by other comments mentioned that they spend $1000 on a tiny amount of O18 to see if it would also taste sweet. Ice cubes made from that seem to be the kind of party trick best reserved for celebrating your first billion.
Some poisons for example help disease resistance because the disease pathogens are harmed even more by the poison than we are.