How Elements Deceive

     If you hadn't caught on by now, I'll tell you again: elements are strange things and they continuously surprise scientists almost every day. Chemists know many physical features like melting point and boiling point, but when elements are study in biology, they baffle us beyond belief. Oxygen, for example, will cause flames to burn hotter and faster if it's pure. Regular air is diluted with atmospheric nitrogen. If it's not diluted, even the tiniest of sparks can ignite a terrible fire in pure oxygen. Nitrogen, however, "kills with kindness." You feel no panic, you just die, and the nitrogen shuts down your brain.
     Our immune system itself is quite amazing. Since it has to combat microbes and other living organisms, it "is more biologically sophisticated" than our respiratory system. Our body rejects any attempts to "integrate metal or wood into the body" to replace missing limbs. What Swedish doctor Per-Ingvar Branemark found is that blood cells surround foreign matter and "wrap it in a straight jacket of slick, fibrous collage." But the issue was that the body couldn't distinguish between good and bad foreign matter, even if the body metabolizes the metal. When he was testing metals he found that titanium triggered no immune response; it deceived the body for its own good. Ever since 1952, it has been used to replace fingers, teeth, and sockets.
     Even more advanced than our immune system is our 'sensory equipment' like touch, taste, and smell. The surprising thing, though, is that our sense are actually really gullible. Chili peppers in salsa irritate the same receptors that tell us to drop a spoon full of hot soup. the minty menthol in peppermint seizes up cold receptors. The tiniest bit of tellurium can leave one reeking like garlic for weeks. Beryllium tastes exactly like sugar, even though it looks nothing like it, and, with enough doses, it becomes toxic. Enrico Fermi found out that "exposure to beryllium powder can scar the lungs with the same chemical pneumonitis that inhaling fine silica causes." Fermi was using it while experimenting on radioactive uranium. He eventually ended up starting the first ever nuclear chain reaction with reacting beryllium powder and radioactive matter. But with all this exposure to the powder, he ended up with pneumonitis at age 53, stuck with an oxygen tank, and his lungs shredded.
     Beryllium tricks the taste buds for sweet and sour like miraculin, a special protein in berries. It "strips out the unpleasant sourness in foods without the overtones of their taste." It mutes the sour taste buds and puts sweet taste buds on hair-trigger alert for hydrogen ions produced by acids. Many of our taste buds, like for salty and sour, are affected by charges on certain elements. When we taste sodium, for example, our tongues detect the charge, not the element. Our mouths, in conclusion, are not very helpful for identifying elements.
     Basically, everything and every part of us is vulnerable to deception with the elements.

                            This is a picture of Beryllium...doesn't look too much like salt, does it?