2026-07-22 03:24:40
Reference Reading
Background Information
In clinical settings, lithium is usually prescribed as lithium carbonate, and doses are given in milligrams (mg) of the compound. But lithium carbonate is only 18.8% elemental lithium (the rest is carbonate), so the dose of elemental lithium is much lower than the face amount. For example, if you are prescribed “600 mg 2 times a day”, that’s 1200 mg of lithium carbonate, which works out to about 225 mg of elemental lithium.
Remember that most numbers in this problem set are expressed as elemental lithium. Be careful to distinguish between elemental lithium and lithium carbonate when interpreting doses.
Part 1: Dose-Response Estimation
1. People often take several hundred milligrams of elemental lithium per day as a medication. Drawing on official lists of drug effects from sources such as MedlinePlus (U.S. National Library of Medicine), the FDA, the Mayo Clinic, the NIH, and the NHS (and any other sources you deem appropriate), and using your judgment, pick five effects you think are commonly observed at therapeutic doses, and briefly explain the evidence basis for classifying each effect as common at clinical doses rather than rare.
Keep in mind that accounts may seriously differ — for example, this paper says that “the prevalence of hypothyroidism during lithium treatment varies from 6% to 50%”, an extremely wide range.
2. Take the five effects you named in Question 1. To the best of your ability, which of these effects would you expect to occur in a reasonable number of patients (say, more than ~5%) at 300 mg/day elemental lithium? 100 mg/day? 50 mg/day? 20 mg/day? 1 mg/day? For each dose, explain your reasoning.
3. If an individual were exposed to 300 mg/day elemental lithium through food, would you expect them to experience the same effects as someone taking 300 mg/day elemental lithium as a clinical dose of lithium carbonate (approximately equivalent to 600 mg of lithium carbonate 3 times a day)? Why or why not?
Part 2: Analytical Comparison
4. Different studies report widely varying, even contradictory, lithium concentrations in food (see these literature reviews). One potential explanation is that some analytical techniques are more accurate than others. Studies that use HNO₃ digestion with ICP-MS generally find only trace levels (~0.1 mg/kg in most foods, with no foods above 0.5 mg/kg), while studies that use other analytical techniques like ICP-OES or AAS, sometimes with H₂SO₄ or HCl digestion, report higher concentrations (often >1 mg/kg, with some foods exceeding 10 mg/kg).
As part of an effort to test whether differences in analytical precision might explain these conflicting results, a recent head-to-head comparison of different analytical techniques on identical samples of food found that when samples were digested in HNO₃, both ICP-MS and ICP-OES registered very low concentrations of lithium, often below the limit of detection. In contrast, when samples were dry ashed, both ICP-MS and ICP-OES analysis detected lithium in all samples, up to 14.8 mg/kg in goji berries and 15.8 mg/kg in eggs. A follow-up study on eggs using dry ashing and ICP-OES found similar results.
Question: Which results (HNO₃ digestion or dry ashing) are more likely to reflect the true lithium content of these foods? Read the reports carefully to fully understand the methods used. Explain your reasoning, considering the possible effects of digestion method, analytical technique, and potential sources of error.
5. In the results mentioned in Question 4, there are two analytical protocols — HNO₃ digestion followed by ICP-MS / ICP-OES and dry ashing followed by ICP-MS / ICP-OES — giving two very different sets of results. They cannot both be correct. It’s possible that one is accurate and the other is not. But it’s also possible that both are wrong.
Considering the limitations and biases of each method, how likely is it that both analytical protocols are overestimating the true concentrations? (i.e. The real concentrations are lower.) How likely is it that both analytical protocols are underestimating the true concentrations? (i.e. The real concentrations are higher.) Explain your reasoning, taking into account the digestion methods, analytical techniques, and possible sources of error.
6. For the sake of argument, assume the higher concentrations from the dry ashing analysis are correct. In eggs, the dry ashing analysis found concentrations of up to 15.8 mg/kg lithium. Based on these data, estimate how common eggs with 20 mg/kg, 50 mg/kg, or 100 mg/kg lithium would be in the American food supply. Consider both the data from the original study and the followup study focusing on eggs alone. Try estimating the distribution, and compare results under the assumption of normal versus lognormal distributions. Show all calculations and reasoning.
7. Overall, what is your best estimate for the daily amount of lithium an average American gets from their food and water? For water concentrations, consider referring to these USGS sources from 1962 and 2021, but you are encouraged to consult additional sources as well.
Do you think Americans are exposed to appreciable amounts of lithium from any sources other than their food and water? If so, estimate the amount and explain your reasoning.
For each part, clearly justify your estimates, and cite the data or assumptions you use.
Part 3: Advanced Questions
8. The authors of the blog SLIME MOLD TIME MOLD think that chronic exposure to lithium contamination may cause weight gain, and think it’s plausible that lithium contamination may be responsible for some or all of the obesity epidemic. Correctness of the hypothesis aside, why do they think that? What pieces of evidence do they find most convincing? You can use their most recent summary as a starting point, but explain your understanding of their reasoning in your own words.
9. For the sake of argument, assume that lithium does not cause weight gain at less than clinical doses. Given this assumption, are there other reasons why lithium exposure might be a public health concern? Would lithium be a public health concern if people were exposed to 1 mg/day of elemental lithium? 5 mg/day? 10 mg/day? 50 mg/day? 100 mg/day? 300 mg/day? Again assuming no weight gain, at what point would lithium exposure become a public health concern, and for what reasons?
10. Some plants appear to concentrate lithium from their soil and/or water. For example, in the early 1970s, Sievers and Cannon found that in the Gila River Indian Reservation, where the average concentration of lithium in the water was only about 0.1 mg/L (0.1 ppm), the local wolfberries contained “an extraordinary 1,120 ppm lithium in the dry weight”.
Oilfield brines rich in lithium are sometimes used for irrigation of crops intended for human or livestock consumption. Based on available evidence, should the use of lithium-containing irrigation water be limited or avoided? Are there common plant- or animal-derived food products that appear especially likely to accumulate lithium? Explain your reasoning, considering potential public health implications and exposure pathways.
11. Drug effects often vary depending on factors like formulation, delivery method, interactions, and duration of exposure. Drugs can have interactions with other drugs, minerals, or even grapefruit juice. Acute exposure can produce different effects than chronic exposure. And some populations (e.g., children, the elderly, or people with kidney disease) may respond differently than others to an otherwise identical dose.
To the best of your ability, what factors make lithium more effective (stronger effects, lower effective doses, etc.)? What factors make lithium less effective? Answer however you like, but consider starting with: differences by formulation (e.g. lithium carbonate vs. lithium orotate), the influence of dietary sodium, or interactions with common medications (e.g., diuretics, NSAIDs).
Question 12 refers to the early-twenty-first-century tweet below by journalist Matthew Yglesias.
12. Given that increased thirst is a known side-effect of lithium, how much more would people drink and/or pee if they were exposed to 1 mg/day of elemental lithium? 5 mg/day? 10 mg/day? 50 mg/day? 100 mg/day? 300 mg/day? Could this explain modern American habits of hydration and urination? Why or why not? Justify your reasoning with reference to lithium’s known pharmacology, and typical dose-response relationships.
13. Given that “loss in sexual ability, desire, drive, and/or performance” is a known side-effect of lithium, estimate how much it would impact the birthrate if people were exposed to 1 mg/day of elemental lithium? 5 mg/day? 10 mg/day? 50 mg/day? 100 mg/day? 300 mg/day? Could lithium exposure plausibly contribute, in whole or in part, to the modern fertility crisis? If so, approximately what level of exposure would be needed to meaningfully affect the birthrate? Justify your reasoning using known dose-response effects, chronic-accumulation pharmacokinetics, and relevant demographic considerations.
14. For the sake of argument, assume that the obesity epidemic is entirely caused by one or more environmental contaminants. Conditional on this assumption, which contaminant(s) are the most likely contributors? How does lithium stack up compared to other candidates?
Please email completed answers to [email protected] or submit them on twitter at @mold_time. Or better yet, post them on your blog and let us know. 
2026-07-14 05:36:58
Humanity has mapped the earth, so you can’t discover any new continents, mountains, oceans, or rivers. We’ve mapped the stars, and though we haven’t named every single asteroid, the major planets and comets are already taken.
We’ve filled in the periodic table, so you can’t discover any new elements. No chance to name Nobelium or Curium after one of your heroes, no chance to get your name on the Wikipedia page for Ytterbium. But you can still discover the drives.
Being sleepy, hungry, and horny are all different from each other, different kinds of motivation that point towards different behaviors and are satisfied by different things. They are different drives. We have drives for food, water, sex, safety, status, and more.
Maybe a lot more. Because that’s the thing. We don’t know how many drives we have, and we certainly don’t know what each drive is for. Every single thing you do, from eating an omelette to renting a jetski, is backed by some kind of motivation. At minimum we should have a list, but we don’t, which seems like a glaring omission.
Worse, some of the drives that come to mind are probably more than one drive. Everyone agrees that hunger is distinct from other drives like fatigue or pain. But it’s hard to explain things like cravings for specific foods without admitting more than one kind of hunger. It’s hard to explain why you might crave chocolate one day and cheese the next, and ramen the day after that, if there aren’t separate drives for multiple different nutrients.
If you had just a single hunger drive for calories, you would just eat whatever the highest-calorie food available was, maybe literally handfuls of sugar. Instead, people eat and crave a wide variety of foods, suggesting a variety of distinct hunger drives for different nutrients. It’s hard to explain the “dessert stomach” — where, after a filling dinner, you unexpectedly find room for dessert — without accepting that you might satisfy your drive for savory foods and still have an unsatisfied drive for sweets.
At minimum, there’s a drive for salt. We like salty food, to the point where there’s a shaker of pure salt sitting on most kitchen tables around most of the world. No one remarks on this because it’s so common; but if hunger were just about calories, we wouldn’t prefer salty food, and we certainly wouldn’t sprinkle pure salt over our scrambled eggs. But we do, so it looks like we have a dedicated drive for salt.
So we probably have more than one kind of hunger drive, maybe dozens. The same is probably true for other drives. People clearly have a drive for safety, which is expressed as fear. But is the fear of social exclusion you feel when you worry about getting kicked out of your pickleball league the same as the fear you would feel if you were dropped into a cage with a hungry tiger? We know that people are motivated by status, but is there exactly one drive for one kind of status, or do you get different kinds of status from being a rock star vs. a reliable pillar of your community? Are these supported by different drives? No one knows.
This is basically the same situation we faced at the start of chemistry. Everyone agreed on the existence of some elements, usually earth, air, water, and fire. But closer inspection usually pushed people to accept there were more elements, like mercury or sulphur. Without these extra elements, it was hard to explain why some kinds of “earth” would melt when exposed to heat, and others would burn.
This came to a head when careful examination of combustion began to show that there were many different “airs” with totally different properties, leading Van Helmont to coin the term “gas”. It became hard not to suspect that maybe these different gases might themselves be different elements. Finally Lavoisier comes out and says, we clearly don’t know how many elements there are, but maybe there are a lot of them. Like, ten or more! And from that point, chemistry as we know it was born.
It would be hard to take care of yourself in a society that doesn’t distinguish between being hungry and being thirsty. You’d be pretty blind, sometimes you’d be like “what’s wrong with me” and have a hard time figuring it out. You might eke it out in day-to-day life, but you might also pack lots of granola bars and zero water for your three-day hike in the desert. Imagine if we didn’t know that being afraid was different from being tired, or that being too warm was different from being pissed off. Imagine how fucked you would be.
But that’s the situation we’re in right now. Right now! There are lots of drives that we haven’t discovered, and the distinctions we have are totally informal. There’s no process or set of criteria that helps us establish whether two drives are different, or link a drive to a behavior. The distinctions we use just cropped up in our language and culture and now we’re like, yeah fear and desire seem different. But we still have pointless debates about things like “is love different from lust”. This is because these distinctions are unexamined and unstudied — but this is something we can fix.
We agree that there’s a sex drive, but how much do we know about it? Is there just one sex drive, or might there be more than one? People don’t just fuck, they also cuddle. Sometimes a lot. Seems like there might be a separate cuddle drive.
We come up with informal language around the psychological drives all the time — this is where we get terms like “touch starved” or “hangry”. It’s hard to live in a body and not notice some of this stuff, notice that it’s obviously true. But our ontology hasn’t caught up. Again, this is a lot like the situation we were in before we started looking for the elements. Imagine how far you could go in chemistry without knowing about oxygen. We want to discover the cuddle drive, and we want to document it rigorously. They say a double-blind cuddle puddle is impossible, but how can they be so sure? We want to know, what does it mean to be hangry?
The list of human psychological drives is just as fundamental as “how many continents are there on Earth” or “what is the genetic code made of, how many letters” or “how many chemical elements are there”. There are a finite list of drives, and with some work we can discover and name them all. But unlike the continents and the elements, which people already got to in the 19th century, the list of drives is basically undiscovered.
Like the 18th century chemists, we will have to invent new research methods for our new questions. But we already have a rough sense of how that would work.
As one example: in issue 1 of THE LOOP, Chandler Garret writes about how he craved “gimme®” brand roasted seaweed snacks, but noticed that they contained almost no nutritional value — just a tiny amount of salt, fiber, and fat, which he could equally well get from any other food. So why did he crave them?
Well, they do contain a pretty good dose of iodine, 55 mcg or 35% of the FDA daily value. He thought this might be good evidence for an iodine drive — without an iodine drive, it’s not clear why he would be interested in these snacks at all, since they barely contain anything else! To test this, he supplemented high doses of iodine solution for 27 days. The result? “I found that seaweed snacks now tasted like dry plastic,” he wrote on day 18. “Almost no appeal at all.”
This is a sample size of just one, but it’s already pretty strong evidence that at least this one person has a drive for iodine; and if one human has that drive, other humans probably have it too. It’s not clear why he would crave seaweed snacks if he didn’t have a drive for something in the snacks. Seaweed snacks contain very little nutrition, so it’s hard to imagine what that nutrient could be if it wasn’t iodine. And it’s hard to explain why supplementing iodine for a couple weeks would make the seaweed snacks repulsive, unless he finally satisfied his iodine drive and quieted the only part of his mind that wanted to put sheets of dried algae in his mouth in the first place. Who thought that was a good idea? Well, the iodine drive did.
We’ll level with you: this is a funding proposal, to do the first step in the work that we described in The Mind in the Wheel.
We think that the list of psychological drives is one of the most important open questions in science, and if we got a no-strings-attached budget, this is one of the main things we would work on. If you’re disappointed that you missed out on astronomy, physics, and chemistry, this is another bite at the apple.
People think about discovering chemistry and they imagine things like atomic number or isotopes or atomic weight. Those are all pretty important. But before you can discover this information for each element, you need a list of the elements in the first place!
Imagine it’s 1789 and you’re an early chemist. Starting from 1789, it will take 150 years and untold resources to discover the periodic table and fill it in. But you have no idea how long the whole process will take, let alone how long it will take to discover the next element, because no one has ever done this before.
It won’t take us as long to discover the drives as it did for chemists to discover the elements, because we have their example to guide us, and we also have computers. We think that some big discoveries might happen very, very fast. But it will still take a long time and it’s kind of hard to scope. This is a pretty big project.
But the fact that it’s such a huge fundamental question is part of the appeal. If you had the chance to go back and fund the discovery of Carbon and Oxygen, and maybe get them named after yourself — wouldn’t you?
2026-06-30 03:20:47
Vesuvius Challenge: An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
Prove You Are Worthy to Post About Diets:
People make a lot of claims about digestion, nutrition, and diet on the internet. … It is helpful, then, to have a heuristic to tell the iconoclastic geniuses apart from the grifters and bullshitters.
I end up with a pretty similar strategy to what I do when I see or hear random claims about finance (e.g. on Twitter.) I keep some questions in my head that test basic understanding, then either ask the person or, if I feel like I have enough data, imagine how they would answer. …
Some of these questions have objectively correct answers, others are more of an opportunity to say something stupid that hopefully, the person you’re talking to will pass up. “I don’t know” is a wonderful answer.
SovietRxiv — Translating forgotten Soviet research papers into English.
“Kevin Smith dropped a wild story on Joe Rogan: After his heart attack, he tried the extreme ‘just potatoes’ diet for two weeks, nothing but plain baked potatoes, no butter, no salt, no nothing. He lost 19 pounds (8.6 kg) in 14 days” – h/t @JamesMcDaniel
The Independent Science Society:
The Independent Science Society is testing if good science can be done the ol’ fashioned way — at home and in your free time.
Doing science means hypothesising and testing the natural world. This requires a lot less than people think. Most scientists in history worked independently. They worked outside of formal institutions, and often part-time. We think more people should be doing this.
Draft: Amos and the Alphabet Society
Deadlock in the Parliament of the Self
GitHub repo with data of 156 countries’ obesity rates measured from household surveys as often as it’s comparably available. You may ask, “why does this repo exist? I was unsatisfied with existing obesity-rate data. For example, the data at @OurWorldInData uses outputs from a model, so it’s *predictions* instead of real data.”
We’re All One Crisis Away From Taking Unlicensed Research Peptides
“Since time immemorial, man has sought to destroy Florida. But people may not realize how close the United States once came to severing that cursed peninsula from the mainland and liberating us all.” Visualizing the Past (Part Four)
2026-05-31 22:17:20
Para-academia is the future — Bold enough to use the word “sucks” in the first sentence.
Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us
“Potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner” diet
Leaking Abandoned Well in West Texas (h/t A. Weis)
2026-05-01 07:17:22
The big news in blogging this month is Inkhaven 2 (sponsored by WordPress dot com). The first Inkhaven happened back in November 2025, and this one is even more. Wow.
This time, about 55 residents (it’s hard to count exactly since some staff members are also ~residents) published one blog post of at least 500 words every day all 30 days of April, and only one person failed to publish each day before midnight! Some people even managed to consistently post more than once a day. Wow again. The organizers will likely be running another Inkhaven in autumn 2026, so if this has you feeling curious, you can express your interest here.
Below is a list of some of the Inkhaven blog posts we liked a lot. We can’t claim that these are the best, or even our favorite posts. Some of our favorite posts, we have almost certainly forgotten to list here. There are simply too many. And the list is biased towards posts that came out early in Inkhaven, because we are still working to catch up on the more than 1,500 posts and more than 800,000 words produced. But all that said, here’s a selection:
Other highlights from Inkhaven include Speedhaven, “a one-night speed-writing competition at Inkhaven Fair, 25 April 2026” where “writers raced the clock; the audience picked the winners.” You can read the entries on the archive, including a riff on one of the best memes of all time: Bottomless Pit Supervisor Performance Review.
Feeling anxious about all these blog posts you might be reading? Well then you are in luck. In collaboration with one of these very authors, we are looking for anxious people to participate in some research: What’s Up with Silexan? A Pilot Study on a Promising Anti-Anxiety Drug
We should also announce the third issue of our science zine THE LOOP. It is available here, and what’s more, this and all previous (and future) issues are now available on THE LOOP SITE at looploop.blog — enjoy! For commentary on one submission, you may also like conq’s piece In the Loop.
Finally, blogger and statistician Andrew Gelman weighs in on Inkhaven: Blogging and writing style. We are tickled by some of his descriptions, such as: “I started to read the very first post, Kill Yourself Cave, by Remy, but then halfway through some sort of ad popped up and I couldn’t read the rest–I guess I’d need to buy some sort of subscription?”
2026-03-31 05:29:01
My journey to the microwave alternate timeline
14-year-old running for governor is the first teen to get on Vermont’s general election ballot
I can’t stop yelling at Claude Code
“here is what i got from gemini 3.1 pro when i asked to do a simple coding task” says Flakon @f_demaku, posting a screenshot of a truly insane train of thought. “I sincerely apologize for that bizarre wall of text!” writes Gemini in response to a request for clarification. “My internal planning process glitched and leaked into the chat, resulting in an output loop.” But — “This is fucking sublime,” writes j⧉nus @repligate. “As I often say, with outputs like this, you need to make at least 5 (good) Suno songs with it before you can really begin to get what it’s about,” and proceeds to drop the first hit AI “Bright, syncopated percussion and playful synths introduce the catchy xenopop groove, Cheerful arpeggios twist into unexpected minor chords, adding an ominous undertone, Layered vocal chops and polyrhythms weave subtle complexity, while dynamic breaks keep the texture intriguing” song of the summer. (Full playlist here.)
