Glycine, not iodine or fluoride
1
philzucker wrote:
Joseph S Wisniewski wrote:
philzucker wrote:
Salt really comes in lots of shapes and patterns out of my shaker;
The weird thing is that it doesn’t.
Common table salt is sodium chloride (NaCl) aka "halite". It forms face centered cubic crystals that are very distinctive.
The most common "salt substitute" is potassium chloride (KCl) aka "sylvite", which also forms face centered cubic crystals.
Even the less common sodium malate (Na2(C2H4O(COO)2)) forms cubic crystals.
You’ve got a lot of cuboctahedrons. Nothing edible that I can think of forms those. Very pretty, but I'd be scared to eat it.
No need to be scared, I think.
I'll give you one, maybe.
It's table salt coming out of our salt shaker that is filled with standard issue salt bought at a standard supermarket. NaCl with 31mg fluoride and 2 mg of iodine per 100 grams of salt (just looked at the package). Nothing else.
Definitely something else.
Neither iodine nor fluoride can substantially alter the shape of salt crystals. But after a little research, I found that there's something commonly added to salt that does. Glycine is added to reduce "caking" by distorting the natural cubic crystals.
Glycine (NH2CH2COOH) affects salt crystal growth dramatically by causing edges not to form at all (near spherical "blobby" crystals) or having edges and corners spawn less acute edges, which is how you end up with cuboctehedrons. This eliminates large faces that can provide sufficient surface area for crystals to fuse.
Now, glycine supplements have been linked to anxiety, but that's in dosages measured in grams, so you probably don't have to worry about a mg or two in your 2000mg daily dose of salt.
It looks like that magnified - AFAIK it's ground, so that may explain the shapes it shows here.
It doesn't. You can see some grinding damage on some of the crystals, especially in the second shot, but it's not severe. You can't really grind crystals into spheres without controlled grinding of each crystal on a faceting machine, and even then, they tend to accumulate damage on natural cleavage planes.
You've got full-blown weird "grown" shapes.
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Stanley Joseph Wisniewski 1932-2019.
Dad, so much of you is in me.
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Christine Fleischer 1947-2014.
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Rahon Klavanian 1912-2008.
Armenian genocide survivor, amazing cook, scrabble master, and loving grandmother. You will be missed.
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Ciao! Joseph
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