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The world depends on a collection of strange items. They're not cheap

Mar 11, 2024
- Part of this video was sponsored by Google Domains. This is a US government warehouse that sells almost anything you can imagine. Blueberries, steel, cigarettes, limestone, a standard bullet and even some things you don't want to imagine. I also see that you have domestic sludge there. (Dr. Place laughs) This is domestic sludge. - So when you flush the toilet and it goes down the sewer and into a wastewater treatment plant, the first step is to get rid of all the solid material. We take it, we dry it, so it's a nice fine powder. I wouldn't recommend smelling it. - What is the purpose of all this?
the world depends on a collection of strange items they re not cheap
Why do

they

sell it and why is it so expensive? Have you ever felt like you were living inside a science fiction story or something? - You know, I've been here a long time, so I don't think about it from that perspective, but I should say yes. - The science fiction element for me is like someone is thinking about that? - Yes. - Is there anyone collecting that? It seems so fictitious. Why should a place like this exist? There are apple and peach leaves, oyster tissue, bars of metallic zinc, and carbon dioxide in nitrogen. Samples of marine animals are found in these vats of liquid nitrogen. - Mussel samples, dolphin samples, whale samples.
the world depends on a collection of strange items they re not cheap

More Interesting Facts About,

the world depends on a collection of strange items they re not cheap...

Birds too, bird tissue and some human tissue too. -But perhaps the

strange

st thing

they

sell is something really mundane. Peanut butter. - It looks like peanut butter. It's peanut butter. It's creamy. - It's probably the most expensive jar of peanut butter in the

world

. - Well, we basically pay a company to make generic peanut butter. We could have 2,000 jars of generic peanut butter. And what we do is we look at and measure the fats in these jars and determine the amount of various compounds that are in them. And in fact, we then put a label on it and provide a certificate at the end. - Have you ever had some of this peanut butter? - All of this stuff is not for human consumption because I don't know if I could really tell you how old it is, but it's old enough that you probably wouldn't want to eat it. - How much does it cost? - These are not sold at commercial quality prices.
the world depends on a collection of strange items they re not cheap
So this jar of peanut butter isn't $3.99 cents. This jar, I think, costs about a thousand dollars. This is not something you will find viable to make your peanut butter and jelly sandwich with. - A regular jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. And on the label you can see the ingredients and the amounts of different nutrients such as protein, fat, sugar and sodium. These values ​​have been measured by the manufacturer using different machines and analytical techniques. But how do you know those results are accurate? Well, this is where the government's standard peanut butter jar comes into play.
the world depends on a collection of strange items they re not cheap
It is mixed with such care and thoroughness that each bottle contains exactly the same substance. - We try very hard to homogenize these things. Make sure it's consistent. - It then takes scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, years to painstakingly identify the amounts of all the different compounds in peanut butter with specific uncertainties. This peanut butter is then known as standard reference material or SRM. They sell these perfectly characterized SRM peanut butter samples to researchers and manufacturers so they can calibrate their equipment. Basically, the buyer knows that his equipment is working correctly if, when he uses the standard peanut butter, he gets the values ​​that NIST provides in the certificate. - We've spent a lot of time making sure that we're confident and, you know, we can spend years studying how much fat is here and trying to figure out exactly what those numbers are. - So what you're paying for isn't really the peanut butter, it's the knowledge of exactly what's in the peanut butter. - And what really determines the cost of a standard reference material is our ability to state the truth.
We produce what I call truth in a bottle. - You might think, why does it matter that the label on my peanut butter is accurate? But what NIST measures is much more than what's on the label. Peanut butter actually contains natural aflatoxins. They are carcinogens that can cause liver cancer and are produced by fungi in peanuts. So if your peanut butter is made from a bad batch of peanuts, you want the factory to be able to accurately detect elevated levels of aflatoxins. And they can do this because standard peanut butter contains a known level of aflatoxin that can be used to calibrate your equipment.
Will the FDA like peanut butter samples and look for aflatoxins? - Many times there are commercial laboratories that measure it according to the FDA. The FDA can encourage them to use a reference material, standard reference material, to make sure they get the numbers right. The FDA may not be handling it itself. - There are different challenges in measuring the components of different foods. Fine powder, for example, is easier to characterize than sticky peanut butter. Therefore, it is useful to have a standard material that comes close to the target in composition and consistency, but it is also impossible for NIST to characterize every different type of food. - We are not going to make trout and perch and salmon material, all of these different ones, with the same numbers.
We take an average fish and treat it. So if you're measuring it in other fish, you can usually use it as a substitute. - So you have a standard trout? - Right, yes. - Tell me about the meat homogenate. (Dr. Place laughs) - It's a mixed meat product that has been mixed well, ground to a very fine particle, and packaged in a very nice can. - Why do you mix things like chicken and pork? Why not just have a reference to chicken or pork? - We never do this alone. We always work with these industry companies and say, "What kind of mixes do you need?" And then we request that that type of material be mixed.
For a reference material to be useful, it does not have to be the exact material that a manufacturer wants to characterize. You just have to be close enough. NIST sells about 30 different foods that are spread around its food triangle. In the corners of the triangle there are 100% carbohydrates, 100% fats and 100% proteins. So depending on the combination of these three macroingredients, all foods fall somewhere in this triangle. And to characterize each one, it is advisable to use the closest standard reference material. - If you're trying to do your measurements and tell, you know, a regulatory authority that I'm making, you know, a food that's a kibble, but I'm measuring it with peanut butter, they'll say, "Well, that peanut butter has a tremendously different fat content.
So what we want to give them is something, a matrix, that looks as close as possible to what they are used to dealing with. - They even have a standard diet combination. - This is called a typical diet. Through surveys, they identified what the average American eats, bought it all, mixed it together, and then freeze-dried it into a nice, fine powder. It is like a light gray powder and represents all the nutritional components that an average American would consume. It represents the sugar content, it represents the proteins you may have, the vitamins you may have, the fats you may have, all in a little jar that we puree. - In total, NIST has almost 1300 standard reference materials. - This is our warehouse.
It's about a 20,000 square foot warehouse where we store all of our inventory, our products, the SRMs. And so we are a business. So what excites me about this, on the technical side, is that I get to run a 20 million business within the federal government. We sell about 30,000 units a year. So each order is about three units. Half of them are sold domestically and the other half to an international audience. - You can see all the prices on our website. Shop.nist.gov is the e-commerce storefront for all of these materials. You can search for whatever you want.
You can look for peanut butter or meat homogenate. - If I had a thousand dollars, would you sell them to me? - There is some control over who we sell to. - I feel this is unfair since I am a scientist. If I had a thousand dollars. NIST doesn't sell to just anyone, but there are plenty of websites that do. And this part of the video is sponsored by Google Domains. The easiest way to set up an online business. I have a store where I sell a product I invented called Snatoms. It is a molecular modeling kit where atoms are joined together magnetically.
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But standards are not only needed for food. - At the beginning of the 19th century, like 1905, there was a big problem with the quality of the steel used in the wagons, both in the locomotives and on the tracks. It was that they knew what the alloys had to have for them to work. It's just that all the foundries that made them had no way of comparing the results of the material they were making with what any other chemist knew they should be making. And so Congress basically said to the National Bureau of Standards at that time, we need you to submit standard samples of steel so everyone can be on the same page.
So what we did was make these standard steels, analyze them for all of their constituent parts, all of the elements, the chromium, the iron, the hydrogen, and then distribute them to the interested parties, again the foundries, so that they can compare and compare their results with a known source of steel. And those were the first products we produced. - Steel remains one of NIST's most important SRMs. What is your best-selling product? - Ah, those are called Charpies. - Charpies? - Yes. Well, let's go see a Charpie. If you want to test how strong your steel is, what Professor Charpy, Mr.
Charpy, came up with was a test where he set up a pendulum and at the end of the pendulum is a weight. And if you move that pendulum a certain distance, you can calculate its potential energy. At the bottom of the swing of this pendulum, the arc, is a vise. And held in the vise is a standard piece of metal called a Charpy. And this has a little V notch in it. So the idea is that the pendulum goes through and breaks this thing and then comes up the other side. And from there you can calculate the amount of energy it took to break this piece of steel.
Every company in the United States and, frankly, internationally, now has to benchmark their materials against our Charpies annually because the type of steel they're making is used in pipelines or defense industries, you know, for tanks. for things that store nuclear waste. So I have a joke. I love things that break or burn and these things break and have to be broken and can't be reused. So we sell a lot. -How many would you sell in a year? - We sell those, all different types, we sell around 8,000. - Oh. - Yes. - NIST has been manufacturing these standard reference materials for more than a century. - This is what our first standard sample number one looks like.
It's real and it's gray dust, it's limestone. We have continued to manufacture number one limestone for 110 years. And it remains so popular that we sell 40 to 50 units a year. - Huh. - Isn't that wild? There are very few companies that still sell some of their original products and we do. - Most of the SRMs we have analyzed so far are used for calibration. But there is another class of SRMs that are used for validation. This means they are used directly in industry tests to ensure consistency. An example is cigarettes. - Obviously, smoking in bed was a real problem.
You know, people wereas if it caught fire. And so there was a lot of regulation about how the materials in your mattress or your sheets or bedding should react to a combustible source. And we produced some standard cigarettes that would essentially, along with ASTM testing, help a manufacturer determine how flammable their furniture or their bedding or their mattress was. - And for those tests to be consistent, fires must be started with a NIST standardized cigarette. (siren blaring) Fires started by smoking materials are the leading cause of home fire deaths in the US - Products like this, but also with the regulations in place and the educational campaigns that were carried out , have saved many, many lives. -But they also have standards for things you would never expect, like a standard bullet. - When a bullet is fired through a gun, you know, the rifling in the barrel imparts markings to the bullet. - Forensic laboratories then have to measure these grooves to match the crime scene bullet to others fired by the suspect weapon.
But how do you know they are measuring the slots accurately? - So this has standard markings. They replicated a bullet. Putting it, I think, essentially, nano-slits. Very, very fine markings and they mapped it onto this bullet. They weren't shot from a gun, they were manufactured. - So, to validate their equipment, forensic laboratories can process the standard bullet at the same time as a crime scene bullet, so they know their measurements are accurate. The goal of each standard is to quantify something about the world, something important that is usually quite difficult to measure (vacuum cleaner noise), like house dust. - In the early nineties we worked with cleaning services and got vacuum bags.
We went to hotels, we went to motels, we took all the vacuum cleaner bags that we got from all these hotels and houses and everything, we mixed them in a big pot, so that it's completely mixed, so that each little jar has the same amount of chemicals, It has the same amount of material. And then we measured everything that was there. And the reason I find dust interesting is because, from an environmental standpoint, dust is a very good way to know what you, I, and our home are exposed to. - Identifying hazardous contaminants is a big part of the purpose of these standard reference materials, so they have various types of lead paint or water from a glacier in Greenland. - They are so rare that we have to limit distribution to one unit per customer every three years. - Oh.
Or land from New Jersey and Montana. - We have many soil samples. They had permission to go into, essentially, a contaminated industrial site in Bozeman, Montana, and collect a bunch of rocks, you know, a five-gallon bucket, bring them back and crush them. And, again, these are certified for elements like toxic elements. - Now the best way to measure what contaminants we are exposed to is by what comes out of us. That's why NIST sells domestic sludge. This is a record of what has come out of our bodies and what has gone down our sewers. Researchers can examine it for traces of toxins or heavy metals.
Pollutants that many of us may be exposed to without knowing it. It's really about environmental monitoring. And next year they're launching a real human poop product. - It's been in the news quite a bit because, you know, health is related to your microbiome, right? And we're starting to understand that gut flora and what's in the stomach are very important for health, mental attitude, all kinds of things. Fecal matter is an incredibly difficult matrix to measure and extract all of its different components. And what this material will do is support metabolite measurements. And it will essentially be distributed in the form of a vial of powder. - Do you know how much they got? - A lot of shit. (Both laugh) - As our knowledge of the world evolves, so do the standard reference materials stored in this warehouse.
NIST is preparing to release its first reference material on living standards next year. The live cells will be hamster ovary cells that can produce monoclonal antibodies. Monoclonal antibodies now account for five of the top 10 best-selling drugs and more than $75 billion in annual sales worldwide. When monkeypox began spreading earlier this year, one problem with diagnosing the disease was that there were no clear laboratory tests to tell if someone was infected. NIST was able to create a positive control reference of monkeypox DNA in just 30 days. This warehouse is a very

strange

place to walk around. So many disparate pieces of our world carefully characterized, labeled and packaged.
It's a reminder that behind the scenes, invisible to most of us, there is a group of people who work tirelessly to ensure things are the way we think they are. When we eat peanut butter on toast, we can be sure that the peanut butter contains what the label says. When your blood test returns a cholesterol reading, you'll know it was calibrated to a standard. And when you walk into a steel-framed building, you know that steel has the right structural and mechanical properties to support that structure. Our world works because, unbeknownst to most of us, there is a small army of people who diligently check that what exists aligns with standards.
Even our poop. (techno music)

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