I have an Astell & Kern SR25 MKII DAP (digital audio player) and I use it quite frequently. The sound quality far surpasses what my phone can produce when connected to any of my speakers or headphones.

It plays FLAC files and any other audio file type you can think of. And it acts as an offline music library when needed (64 GB of memory plus a 1TB microSD).

The better the headphones/speakers I use, the more it outshines anything coming out of my other electronic devices. I use it almost every day.

You are saying that sucralose (or a metabolite thereof) could alkylate DNA - and theoretically proteins too - correct? Like what sulfur mustard gas does?

I did a quick search and couldn’t find any papers demonstrating a mechanism of action for that, although I skimmed a few that postulated that a dichlorinated hydrolysis product might be the true carcinogenic agent. Do you know of any studies that demonstrate that the alkylation can happen, either in vitro or (ideally) in vivo? Or maybe some better search terms to use, that could be my issue…

I am truly curious about this, I never knew the chemical structure of sucralose until I read your comment and subsequently looked it up.

Nickel or iron would be a lot cheaper and could get the job done with some tweaking, good suggestion. I’ve done aromatizations of cyclohexene derivatives with sulfur in the past that have been pretty high yielding too (which is why I mentioned it), and bubbled the hydrogen sulfide gas through bleach and other aqueous oxidants to prevent stench. Sulfur is dirt cheap, but it was used stoichiometrically.

As you say though, the biggest step forward was already done by this group - switching feedstock to biomass. I hope to see more and more of this type of research to deliver on the promise of ‘green chemistry’, which in my past experience has been used as a label somewhat dubiously just to make a journal submission stand out.

Very interesting articles - both the phys.org one and journal submission it describes. I appreciate the research group’s use of solvent-free and one-pot reactions wherever possible, it really shows their commitment to finding the most sustainable overall process.

The aromatization steps using palladium (0) are of course standard processes used by the oil refining industry, but I wonder if there are other methods (maybe using sulfur?) that don’t involve the use of rare metals…probably wouldn’t have the same atom economy as using catalytic Pd though, I am just curious rather than criticizing their choice.

I haven’t see any measurable proof of one, or any experiment proposed that would render the idea of a soul falsifiable or not. Honestly, the current debate in philosophy/neuroscience on the existence (or non-existence) of free-will seems like a more important question, that if answered in the negative would have major implications on even the definition of the word ‘soul’.

Fun question though, I’ve enjoyed reading the diversity of thought on the matter in this thread. :)

Seems like I read this same headline a few times each year. Soon, rampant heat illness/stroke is going to make the recent pandemic look like a tiny blip when it comes to human mortality data.