Last time I left you with overweight/obesity data on a few world countries. For those who felt left out:

Mexico—around 70–75% of adults in Mexico are overweight or obes[CP1] e.

South America:

• Brazil: adult obesity prevalence is about 25%, while overweight adults are ~50%.

• Argentina: adult obesity is about 35–39%, but BMI-based data suggest roughly 70–75% of adults are overweight/obese.

• Chile: adult obesity is around 34–42% and about 80–83% of adults are overweight/obese.

Central America: Regional Latin America/Caribbean estimates about 44–68% adult excess weight depending on country.

Africa (continent-wide overview): Adult obesity in Africa was about 12.8% but overweight percentages are rising rapidly. So for “Africa” as a whole, a conservative statement is: “roughly 25–30% of adults are overweight (including obesity) with regional differences.

Russia: Around 60% of adults in Russia are overweight, with roughly 20% obese.

Japan: ~ 25–30% of Japanese adults are overweight or obese, with < 5% in the obese range.

Southeast Asia: Some of the lowest overweight/obesity prevalence globally, but rates are rising quickly! About one in five adults in the South-East Asia Region are currently overweight.

I think the U.S. is #1!

And let’s look at the consequences of all that extra weight …

Our bodies don’t store protein. Our bodies store only enough carbohydrates (in the form of glycogen in muscles and the liver) for ~36 hours. What our bodies store extremely well is fat.

Why? Evolutionarily, fat storage was a hedge for survival. The ability to store excess calories as a dense energy reserve ensured survival, supported our massive, energy-hungry brains, and fueled successful pregnancies and lactation.

Except it’s only been a few millennia since humans had to deal with “feast or famine” during their lifetimes, which is NOT enough time for our genetics to adapt to the “feast” and sedentary world we live in today—for most nations, anyway.

The problem is, carrying extra fat on the body is not just a matter of storage. It changes how many systems in the body work, and xanthine oxidoreductase (XOR), molybdenum, and uric acid are part of that story (see part 1). In people with obesity/metabolic syndrome, studies find that higher activity of XOR in the blood tends to parallel higher uric acid, abnormal levels of blood fats (triacylglycerides), insulin resistance, and lead to a greater risk of high blood pressure and heart disease.

In other words, when XOR is more active, you often see a full clusterfark of metabolic problems. Drugs that block XOR can lower uric acid and often improve signs of oxidative stress and blood vessel function more than you would expect from the uric acid change alone. This suggests that the reactive oxygen species produced by XOR itself are an important part of the damage caused by being overweight.

Body Positivity

Modern “body positivity” has brought something valuable. It pushes back against shame and stigma, and it reminds us that people of all sizes deserve respect and good medical care.

What it can sometimes blur, however, is the difference between accepting people and pretending that excess visceral fat is harmless.

Large, long‑term studies are very clear that carrying a lot of extra fat around the abdomen is linked with higher rates of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart attacks, strokes, and certain cancers, even when blood tests look okay. Metabolically, “fat is fine” is only true up to a point. Beyond that, fat tissue itself becomes an active, stressed organ that increases inflammation and sends out chemical signals that change how the rest of the body handles sugar and fats.

When fat tissue “grows,” especially deep belly fat, its tiny blood vessels can’t keep up. Parts of the depot slip into low‑oxygen hypoxia, and cells there switch into stress mode, making extra reactive oxygen species and inflammatory signals.

Over time, that stressed fat behaves like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In its Dr. Jekyll role, healthy fat stores extra calories safely, releases fuel between meals, and tells the brain and muscles how full the tank is (hungry or satisfied).

In its Mr. Hyde state—too big, poorly supplied with oxygen, and bathed in ROS and inflammatory chemicals—the depot leaks fatty acids into the blood, interferes with insulin, and keeps the rest of the body slightly inflamed. XOR and its molybdenum core sit inside that loop: higher XOR activity makes more uric acid and ROS → those further irritate fat tissue and blood vessels → irritated tissues send signals that keep metabolic stress switched on.

No single piece is the lone villain, but together they show why long‑term excess fat is not just cosmetic—it quietly reshapes body chemistry in ways that make chronic disease more likely.

If all of this sounds a little personal, it is. This is not a lecture aimed at “those people over there.” It is a biochemical mirror held up for anyone—this writer included—who is aging, carrying extra weight, battling high blood pressure and cholesterol, and wondering how much of this is inevitable.

The chemistry doesn’t care how we feel about it. But understanding how metals like molybdenum, enzymes like XOR, and tissues like fat fit together can make it easier to take our own risks seriously without shame.

Here are a few practical take‑home points to carry away:

• Healthy weight is not just about appearance. Extra visceral fat changes chemistry in ways that raise blood pressure, blood sugar, and long‑term disease risk.

• Uric acid is not only about gout. Chronically high levels can damage blood vessels, kidneys, and fat tissue, especially when XOR is very active.

• Oxidative stress and low‑grade inflammation are useful in short bursts, but when they stay switched on, they quietly wear down arteries and organs over time.

• What and how we eat matters. Excess calories, added sugars (especially fructose), and frequent purine‑heavy meals (large portions of red, game, or organ meat) give XOR more work to do.

• Regular physical activity improves blood flow, nitric oxide availability, and insulin sensitivity, and can lighten the load on fat tissue and XOR.

• Aging makes the system less forgiving—ugh. The older we get, the more important it becomes to nudge weight, blood pressure, and uric acid in the right direction instead of hoping they will behave on their own.

Wanting to change is often easier when it’s tied to someone we love. For many of us, that someone is a grandchild (or three). It’s one thing to read about uric acid, oxidative stress, and molybdenum in enzymes. It’s another to kneel on the floor to build a block tower, get back up without wincing, or take them to Disneyland for the day.

In that setting, strength and a little less weight aren’t abstract “health goals.” They’re what let you lift a sleepy child into a car seat, climb bleachers for a school band concert, or sit cross‑legged on the carpet for a board game.

Looking at the biochemistry is just one way of saying these choices matter—not only for blood vessels and joints, but for the ordinary, joyful moments with grandchildren that we want to be fully present for.

Shattered: A De-Extinct Zoo Mystery, Book 4 … SOON!

It’s BACK from my professional editor—and I was pleasantly surprised that everything she found was super easy to “fix”. The proofreader is next, then I will release it September 1, 2026!

BE SURE TO PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON

SHATTERED

If you prefer other retailers, I’ll have links for B&N, Kobo, and Draft2Digital at release time or before. There will also be a print edition.

I think I’ve shown you images of what I picture as Luther Nikolai and Milly Smith. I love the one of Luther. Milly at the gala, not as so much because her “living” dress is not quite like I pictured it in my head. It needs much more color and light—but it still works.

Here is an EXCITING excerpt of Shattered

This was a nice surprise.

Dear Carol Potenza-

I’m happily writing to let you know that Sacred Ghosts (Book 4 in the Nicky Matthews Mystery series) has been selected as a finalist for the 2026 Claymore Award for Best Literary.

That’s all for this newsletter. Thanks for getting down this far.

I’m heading toward the finish line with Shattered: A De-Extinct Zoo Mystery, Book 4. It’s currently with my professional editor, then off to the proofreader, with a release date of September 1, 2026.

BE SURE TO PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON

SHATTERED

If you prefer other retailers, I’ll have links for B&N, Kobo, and Draft2Digital soon. There will also be a print edition.

A quick background story about Shattered: last year, when I finally sat down to write it (my stories tend to brew in my head for a while), I needed a very specific answer—how would someone kidnap a rhino from a zoo? In this case, a woolly rhino.

AI was just starting to become widely available, so I naively typed the question into ChatGPT.

How would I kidnap a rhino from a zoo?

🤯 It did not go well.

Not only would it not answer the question, but it also made it very clear that the question itself was illegal, immoral, and ill-advised. I half expected the zoo police to show up at my door 🐼.

As it turned out, I didn’t need the answer. I had already set everything in motion in the earlier books—I just hadn’t realized it yet.

I already have the opening of the final book in Milly’s pentology in my head, along with the ending of Book 5: Hunted: A De-Extinct Zoo Mystery. FINALLY, woolly mammoths 🦣. Here are a few taglines that might work—maybe.

• When the prey becomes the predator…

• The hunters made one mistake: they chose a predator as their prey.

• They hunt her for sport. She’ll hunt them to extinction.

• De-extinction made her prey. Survival made her a predator.

I’m still brewing …

SHATTERED

Molybdenum

Molybdenum (Mo) is one of those elements that doesn’t draw much attention on the periodic table before it quietly sneaks up on you. It is a silvery transition metal, atomic number 42, with a relatively high atomic mass (~95.95) and an exceptionally high melting point around 2620–2625 °C (~4753 °F). It is not rare in Earth’s crust, but you will never find it as a free metal, because it tends to occur bound in minerals such as molybdenite (MoS₂) or molybdena (see below).

The element was first correctly identified as a new metal by Swedish chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele in 1778 (who also discovered oxygen and identified tungsten, barium, nitrogen, and chlorine). In 1781, Peter Jacob Hjelm first isolated molybdenum metal, firmly separating it from other heavy metals being studied at the time.

The name “molybdenum” comes from the Greek molybdos (μόλυβδος), meaning “lead” or “lead‑like.” Early miners and alchemists often confused molybdenite with lead minerals like galena because both are soft, dark, and streak easily, so the ore was lumped in with “lead” minerals. When chemists eventually realized it was a distinct element, they kept the historical root and Latinized it as molybdenum—essentially (I think this is hilarious), “this one used to be mistaken for lead.”

Molybdenum is valued because it forms hard, stable carbides—compounds where carbon atoms tuck into the metal’s crystal lattice and create hard, wear‑resistant spots that reinforce the metal and help it keep its shape under stress. In steel, molybdenum carbides act like microscopic rebar. They raise strength and improve resistance to high‑temperature softening, or “creep.” As a result, molybdenum‑strengthened steel and superalloys are used to make electrodes for high‑temperature glass furnaces and to improve the corrosion resistance of stainless steels and pipelines in “aggressive” (very acidic or very basic) chemical environments.

Historically, molybdenum‑alloyed steels were used in heavy artillery such as the World War I “Big Bertha” guns, whose barrels had to withstand extreme temperatures and pressures during rapid firing that could cause ordinary carbon steel to erode and deform.

An Essential Trace Mineral—Humans Need Molybdenum

In the body, molybdenum is buried at the heart of a tiny molecular “tool” called the molybdenum cofactor, or Moco. Several important enzymes depend on this cofactor to function. One of the most important for this story is xanthine oxidoreductase (XOR). XOR sits at the end of the pathway that breaks down purines—the building blocks in DNA and in many foods—and turns them into uric acid.

XOR can run in two modes. In one mode (xanthine dehydrogenase), it passes electrons safely to another important cofactor, NAD⁺. In a second mode (xanthine oxidase), it passes them to oxygen instead to make superoxide—an oxygen molecule carrying an extra electron. The molybdenum atom inside XOR is part of the machinery that produces uric acid and helps generate these reactive oxygen by‑products.

Generally, two electrons make up one molecular bond or connection between two atoms. Reactive oxygen species are dangerous because they steal electrons. They pull electrons away from the molecules that make up cells, and in doing so they damage those molecules in ways the cell cannot always repair. Superoxide often starts chains of reactions that generate other oxidants such as hydrogen peroxide (bad) and, in the presence of certain metals, hydroxyl radicals (really bad). That chain reaction is why superoxide matters. Even if it is not always the most aggressive oxidant, it is a key starting point for the chemical cascade that damages many different targets.

Inside cells, reactive oxygen species can attack DNA, fats, and proteins. When DNA is hit, its bases can be modified or broken, leading to mutations or strand breaks that, if not repaired, interfere with accurate copying of genetic information or trigger cell‑death programs.

When the fatty components of membranes are oxidized, they can become leaky or lose their flexibility, disrupting the careful control of what goes in and out of the cell and its internal compartments.

Proteins can have their side chains oxidized or cross‑linked, which can change their shape and disable their function, or make them clump together in ways the cell’s quality‑control systems struggle to manage.

Over time, if enough of these components are damaged at once or the damage happens repeatedly, the cell’s repair systems are overwhelmed, and the cell may either function poorly, enter a half‑alive or senescent state, or die. That cumulative, multi‑target cellular damage is why oxidative stress is a contributor to chronic disease.

Uric Acid: Defender and Trouble‑Maker

Uric acid—the other product of XOR—is a bit of a double‑agent. At normal levels, uric acid dissolves in the blood, travels to the kidneys, and is passed out in urine. Before it’s eliminated, uric acid can actually react with and “soak up” harmful reactive oxygen species in the blood, so it adds to the body’s overall antioxidant defenses. In that sense, the molybdenum in XOR helps create a modest defender.

When uric acid levels stay too high for too long, it doesn’t dissolve as well in water and can form sharp crystals in joints and tissues. The crystals irritate the joints and signal immune cells, which creates the painful swelling we know as gout. High uric acid concentrations are also linked with kidney stones and kidney damage. So, the same molybdenum‑containing enzyme (XOR) that quietly processed purines now sits upstream of a list of problems because …

HIGH Uric Acid –> HIGHER Reactive Oxygen Species –> Oxidative stress —> MORE Cellular Damage –> Metabolic disease

High uric acid inside cells usually means XOR is working overtime. XOR working overtime means more reactive oxygen species are created.

1. These reactive oxygen species can damage the lining of blood vessels, make them stiffer and less able to relax, and stir up ongoing, low‑grade inflammation. Chronically, that constant irritation can damage arteries, make blood pressure harder to control (high blood pressure), and make it harder for the body to handle sugar properly (diabetes).

Nitric oxide (NO) is a gas that blood vessels produce to signal the vessel wall to relax. It helps keep blood vessels healthy, and it is very sensitive to reactive oxygen species. When nitric oxide is available, blood vessels can open up when needed, blood flows more smoothly, and platelets are less likely to clump and form clots.

2. When oxidative stress is high and uric acid is elevated, nitric oxide is made in smaller amounts and gets destroyed faster. With less nitric oxide, vessels stay tighter, blood pressure tends to rise, and the inner surface of the arteries becomes more sticky and inflamed.

Remember, oxidative stress and inflammation are not always bad.

In small bursts, they are part of how the body fights infections and repairs damage. The problem comes when this response is turned on all the time, as can happen when uric acid and reactive oxygen species stay high and when enzymes like XOR are overactive. Then, instead of brief, useful spot reactions, you get a long, slow burn that gradually damages tissues, including blood vessels, kidneys, and fat tissue.

This is where molybdenum and XOR step out of the biochemistry textbook and into everyday health. The molybdenum in XOR allows the enzyme to do its job converting purines into uric acid—but when XOR shifts toward its oxidase mode and runs hot, the same metal center is part of a machine that produces both extra uric acid and extra reactive oxygen species. In that sense, molybdenum in XOR has its own Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde role: in a balanced system it helps clear out old molecules.

But in an overloaded, low‑oxygen, inflamed system, it helps feed the very oxidative stress that pushes the system further out of balance.

And when could that happen? In our well‑fed cultures, with plenty of high‑calorie food available and jobs that lack any type of physical work (like tapping on a keyboard for Periodic Table of Death and Mystery articles), it happens when you carry extra fat on the body. In other words: being overweight or obese.

In the U.S., about 72% of adults are considered overweight or obese. In Great Britain, it is roughly 64–70% and rising. In the European Union, nearly 60% of people are considered overweight or obese. Canada is around 68%. Australia, about 66% and New Zealand, about 64%. And while the U.S. “wins,” India and China are also in the top three.

So what is the prize for winning?

Extra body fat –> chronic reactive oxygen species –> chronic diseases. Ugh.

And we can link part of that to molybdenum and XOR.

Next Time: Molybdenum, the Quiet Chemistry of Obesity, and the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery, Part 2

That’s all for this newsletter. Thanks for getting down this far.

In January 1965, a Dutch medical student, Bart Huges, turned his bathroom into an operating room so he could operate on … himself. He used a hypodermic syringe full of a numbing agent on his own forehead, took a surgical knife, cut down to his own skull, then pressed an electric drill bit against the bone.

This reads like the start of a horror movie, but it’s true.

After a few minutes, he’d done what Stone Age healers, battlefield surgeons, and modern surgeons and medical specialists usually did on other subjects and patients. He’d performed a self‑trepanation (trephination), boring a five‑millimeter hole through his own head.

And get this. A few weeks later, when he had to go to the hospital, he was confined to the psychiatric ward, but they had to release him because none of the tests showed he had any mental illness. He had voluntarily and with purpose cut a literal hole in his head.

And, going forward, he convinced several other people to do the same thing. At the time (1960s), they called his followers a Trepanation Cult.

Glad there was no TikTok at the time. Forget Tide Pods—can you imagine?

Behind the horror‑movie facade, Huges believed he was doing precision work on human consciousness itself. His theory—“brainbloodvolume” (he wrote books about it)—argued that when humans stood upright, gravity stole blood from the brain, starving it of oxygen and glucose, and walling off the full, expansive awareness our ancestors once enjoyed.

He tried everything to reverse what he believed we’d lost. He:

• Stood on his head for hours.

• Experimented with LSD (That could explain A LOT).

• Chased any state that made his skull feel less like a clamp.

But he became convinced that only a permanent physical change would work. By drilling a hole in his skull, he thought he was reopening the “expansion possibilities” of the cranium so each heartbeat could fully pulse into the brain again—no restrictions. He would be restoring a lost Eden of “subjective experience”. He would create … Homo sapiens correctus.

Huges saw himself as a pioneer—one cranial borehole away from unlocking the true potential of the human mind. But instead of a Nobel prize, he got a psychiatric hold.

All kidding aside, a generation earlier, other men with shattered skulls had put their lives in the hands of surgeons who were doing something just as radical—but with very different goals.

During World War II, military neurosurgeons were overwhelmed by head wounds from bullets, blast fragments, and helmets driven into bone. Unlike Huges, their patients hadn’t volunteered for a consciousness experiment. They were just young soldiers missing hand‑sized pieces of their skulls.

Saving them was only the first hurdle. Protecting their exposed brains for the decades they might live afterward was sometimes harder.

They needed a material to cover the healed wound that could:

• be shaped quickly in an operating tent or a hospital surgical suite,

• hold its form once implanted,

• resist rust and corrosion in blood and cerebrospinal fluid,

• and sit inside a human skull for years without provoking the immune system.

Enter tantalum—a dense, blue‑gray metal that had spent most of its existence as more of a chemical curiosity than a medical material. Tantalum (Ta), atomic number 73, atomic weight 180.95, is a Group 5, Period 5 transition metal. It’s malleable enough to be hammered into thin curved plates, strong and tough enough to resist deformation, and covered in a stable oxide (Ta₂O₅) that makes it remarkably corrosion resistant and highly inert in the human body.

Let’s chat about that before we proceed.

If you’re going to put a metal inside someone’s skull and leave it there for decades, you want something that behaves itself. Enter tantalum, named after one of the worst sons of Zeus in Greek mythology—Tantalus. Ugh. This guy.

Tantalus made every bad choice available to him. A stole the gods’ food, ambrosia. He betrayed their secrets. In one of the ugliest versions of his story, he killed his own son and served him to the Olympians as a test.

When the other gods caught him, they locked Tantalus up in the creative way only Greek gods can. After they resurrected the boy, they sentenced Tantalus not to death, but to be hungry and thirsty forever. He had to stand in water that vanished when he tried to drink, and under trees hanging with ripe fruit that lifted away when he reached. Surrounded by what he needed, eternally unable to touch it. Tantalized.

When Swedish chemist Anders Gustaf Ekeberg (who obviously had a Classical Greek education) isolated a new metal in 1802, he noticed its oxide refused to dissolve in the standard acids of the day—they swirled around it, but nothing “bit.” The element just sat there in the beaker like Tantalus in his pool—immersed, but unreachable. Ekeberg named it tantalum in honor of that punishment.

That immersed but unreachable turned out to be a blessing in the operating room. The same oxide layer that made tantalum so hard to dissolve in a lab made it almost impossible to corrode inside a human body. In World War II, when surgeons needed something to replace missing skull and just remain—quiet, inert, unreactive. Tantalum seemed the perfect choice.

Besides the lack of corrosion and low probability of an immune response, Tantalum also shows up clearly on X‑rays (it’s radioactive but in a good way), which, at the time, counted as a feature. Its half-life is 45 million billion years. The estimated age of the universe is ~14 billion years.

Wartime surgeons began shaping tantalum sheets into custom skull plates right on the table. They’d debride the wound, clear away bone and shrapnel, then lay a thin, curved tantalum plate over the defect and wire or screw it to the remaining bone margins.

The technique allowed one operation—cosmetic and protective repair—to save a life and shield a pulsing, vulnerable brain. Tantalum quickly became the preferred material for cranioplasty in both military and civilian settings, with more than a thousand such procedures performed during the war alone.

For a decade or so, if you survived a catastrophic head wound in that era, there was a good chance you went home with Tantalus’s metal hidden under your scalp, which stayed chemically unchanged as the rest of your body aged.

Huges drilled a hole in his skull chasing a subjective “high.” Wartime neurosurgeons cut bone away and slid tantalum into place, chasing something far more practical.

The chance for a damaged brain to keep on doing the quiet work of staying alive.

Biology and the continuation of the horror theme … 🦂

In New Mexico, scorpions are a feature AND a bug. We have small, almost transparent ones—probably the Striped Bark Scorpion (Centruroides vittatus)—that sneak into the house. And they are easy to step on—that’s why I wear shoes at all times.

The sting is a weird electric buzz, and the delivery method of its toxin is via a scimitar-curved tail barb. And a recently published paper has given us more details about the stinger: they are reinforced by METAL.

Which sounds like something out of a science fiction nightmare. Weaponized bugs.

Stingers tend to layer high amounts of zinc (Z) in their needle-sharp, curved tips, followed by a layer of manganese (Mn). But don’t forget the pincers! In the movable portion known as the tarsus, the research team found either zinc or a combination of zinc and iron (Fe) along the claw’s cutting edge.

Oh, Periodic table of elements! Is there nothing you can’t do?

Now, Roman antiquity and a great artifact for a horror story: The Mouth of Truth

Rome’s Mouth of Truth or Bocca della Verità is a massive round marble disk carved with a bearded face whose eyes, nose, and mouth are cut through. Today it sits in the portico of the church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, not far from the ancient cattle market at the Forum Boarium.

The Mouth of Truth name and legend—put your hand in its mouth, and it’ll bite off the hand of a liar—show up in the late Middle Ages around 1485, when travelers started reporting it as a kind of public honesty test, especially for suspected adulterous wives. Why is it always wives? I know, but still.

Its origins probably date back to the 1st century AD or BC, where the 2,900-pound marble mask was used as a drain cover in the Temple of Hercules Victor (for sacrifices of cattle), or possibly a manhole. Or a ceremonial well or fountain cover tied to water or river deities like Oceanus. The open mouth would have let water—or air—pass through, which is less glamorous than magically exposing liars but more useful in a city obsessed with drainage.

Oh. It was also used in Roman Holiday (1953) because the Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck characters were lying to each other all the way through the movie. Click on the movie title to watch it. It’s a great scene.

No hidden blade, no divine judgment—which is too bad because THAT would make a great horror story.

Thanks for getting all the way down!

Poisons

About me …

I give a lot of presentations to writers on poison. Apparently, if you have a biochemistry background and a slightly unsettling enthusiasm for symptoms and cellular damage, people assume you’re the go‑to for how to add poison to your plots. As you might suspect, this side hustle grew out of the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery. I’ve already done a couple of talks this year for different writing groups and am always open to more.

One was about Mad Honey—made with nectar from rhododendron flowers loaded with grayanotoxins, a neurotoxin that can drop your blood pressure and scramble your brain in record time. There’s some great history tied to Mad Honey that nicely parallels the cliché If it looks too good to be true … Kind of the original definition of “Honey Trap.” (see: Roman Empire—What NOT to do).

I just did an “Ask the Expert” session for the Kiss of Death writing group, where the questions were disturbingly specific in a way that warmed my heart. I’m also putting together a talk for the Romance Writers of America conference this summer in Albuquerque about using poison in romance—because, if you actually peruse the genre, people are poisoning each other for love (or lack thereof) uncomfortably more than you’d think. Nothing says “happily ever after” like checking your coffee for arsenic.

Is it wrong of me to enjoy this subject so much? It is? Let’s go out for a cup of coffee and discuss ….

Word of Mouth: Ostracon (plural: ostraca)

Ostraca were pieces of broken pottery reused to write little notes or draw or paint pictures—kind of like the way we use the back of discarded printer paper. The interesting thing about these ostraca in ancient times is that they weren’t “formal.” It was the everyday writing about whatever—Simon was here, Vote for Prometheus, Bring home a quart of goat milk. It gives archaeologists insight into the lives of everyday people, not just the elites.

I found this word of mouth while researching the history behind the streaming show, House of David (Amazon Prime, I think). It brought up questions that let me rabbit-hole, one of my favorite forms of internet exercise. There is practically no archaeological evidence that the Biblical David existed (the Tel Dan stele?)—but check out this ostracon from Khirbet Qeiyafa.

Writing Updates:

Shattered

I am 53.74% through revision of Shattered: A De-Extinct Mystery, book 4—give or take. The second half of the manuscript is more difficult to revise because I have to knot the threads from the first half to a satisfying conclusion. It’s really shaping up, and the ending is SHOCKING! *shiver*

Sacred Ghosts

I’ve re-read and finished a fairly heavy revision on the first (of 4) act (24k words) of Sacred Ghosts: A Nick Matthews Mystery, also book 4 in its series. I wrote ~2/3rds of the book a few years ago and put it aside for other projects (Sting of Lies, Echo of Lies, Signs and Ambushed, Author Survival Guide).

Confession: I think I was reluctant to finish it because—at the time—this was the last book in this series, and it made me sad. Maybe that’s why some authors write TOO MANY books in certain series. They just don’t want to let their characters go when it’s time.

Like the Harvey Dent quote from Batman: The Dark Knight

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

Maybe not a villain exactly, but sometimes it feels like your hero ultimately ends up shaking their fist and yelling incoherently at the sky. Now that’s sad.

Then late last year, I came up with a fifth book plot and outlined it and LOVED it. So the sadness about SG turned happy, and I’m chugging along, changing complicated to complex, and highlighting themes and subplots.

For example:

The Pre-Columbian dogs subplot and Howard’s story (girlfriend for real): “They’re after the dogs—the real sacred ghosts of this mesa. I’m on guard. I’m supposed to protect them.”

Does Pep Katina betray and turn Nicky in because of a stolen artifact? (red herring?) Pep’s mouth pinched. “Leave it be, Sarge.”

Stay tuned for more possible hints and spoilers!

Iodine, Murder in a World War I Field Hospital, and the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery, Part II

Spring, 1920

London

III. Chemistry and Courage

‘The next afternoon, while he was in surgery, I examined Ward C’s tincture of iodine supplies. The bottles looked ordinary enough—amber glass, glass stopper, the usual military label: TINCT. IOD. 5% IN ALCOHOL.

‘I opened it. The iodine reek made my eyes sting. The color was dark, almost blood red, where it clung to the glass.

‘You gentlemen will know that our standard tincture is weaker than its label suggests—about two percent iodine with a little iodide in alcohol. Strong enough to kill bacteria, not so strong as to poison a man through intact skin.

‘I had learned to judge concentration by color and smell, by how a drop blooms in water. Every bottle I tested behaved as it should.

‘To be sure, I took a small, secret sample in a clean vial. Later that night, in the tiny dispensary room where we mix poultices and powders, I did what I could without a laboratory. I diluted it, compared its color against the standard bottle, and dabbed a drop on my own forearm. The sting and stain were ordinary. This iodine would sear germs, not souls.’

“Sister, what are you doing?” the night nurse asked, stepping in.

“Testing a batch from pharmacy,” I said lightly. “I was worried it may be too strong.”

“Too strong? Oh, not this.” She smiled. “The Major keeps the stronger batch in his quarters.”

“He does?” I said. “Why?”

“For the boys who come in with bad sepsis. You didn’t know? He keeps logs of the outcomes. I—I’ve seen them.” She then blushed very red. “You won’t … you won’t tell him I said so?”

“Of course not,” I said. “Go on. I’ll finish here.”

‘When she had gone, I put the bottles back as they were. There was nothing in pharmacy I could condemn. The dangerous tincture, if it existed, was in Major Haviland’s sleeping quarters.

‘I had no right to enter a senior officer’s quarters. And I had every belief that the nurse who adored him—whose patients kept dying on her watch—would warn him of any woman who tried.’

“This night nurse—” one of the majors on the dais began.

‘Sister Evans, sir.’

“She was … close to Major Haviland, you say?”

Two other officers exchanged the faint, knowing smiles of men who forgive each other outside marriage dalliances.

The presiding officer furrowed his brow. “Why is she not before us as a supporting witness?”

‘Because she’s dead, Colonel.’

The sly smiles vanished.

‘She was transferred to a casualty clearing station nearer the line two days after I spoke with her. That station took a direct hit from artillery. There were no survivors.’

They weighed my words as if I were the one in the dock. So be it.

‘In the Bible, King David sent Uriah to the front to tidy away an inconvenience. I cannot prove Major Haviland had the same clarity of purpose. I can only note that the one person who could have confirmed his stronger tincture and his private outcome logs was removed to the most dangerous post available and was killed almost at once.’

IV. The “Septic” Soldier

‘The man who forced my hand was Sergeant Hugo Brandt. You have his file, I believe. Shell fragment to the shoulder. Large but clean wound, debrided promptly, no foreign material left inside the body. No signs of gas gangrene, no foul smell.

‘His face—if one were inclined to see evil in features—was rough. Heavy jaw, big nose, brows that hung low over his eyes. He had been a dock worker before the war, and his hands looked like he could crack walnuts between his thumb and forefinger. He also wrote poetry, which he recited shyly when the ward was quiet.

‘Haviland did not like him.’

“Troublemaker,” I heard him say to Captain Marsh. “Look at the forehead. The jaw. And he doesn’t make eye contact. These types rarely do.”

“He writes poems about his mother,” I said before I could stop myself. “Hardly the stuff of a troublemaker.”

Haviland turned slowly toward me. “You are very free with your opinions, Sister.”

“Chemistry teaches one to distinguish between cause and coincidence, sir,” I said, cheeks hot. “Four unexplained deaths in your ward seem to lean toward … cause.”

The silence between us was heavy as a Black Maria.

“I would be very careful,” he said softly, “not to suggest impropriety where none exists.”

‘That night, Brandt’s dressing was due for a change. I arranged the schedule so that I would be present, not because I distrusted the other nurses, but because I needed to see exactly what was done.

‘Haviland arrived with his usual unhurried stride, carrying a “special” bottle.’

“Evening rounds, Nurse,” he said. “Let us see how our poet is faring.”

Brandt smiled weakly. “Evenin’, Major.”

“Any pain?” Haviland asked.

“Only when the shell remembers me, sir,” Brandt said. “Otherwise, I feel fine.”

“Good,” Haviland said. “We’ll keep it that way.”

He removed the dressing himself. The wound was pink, with a thin yellowish film of normal healing exudate. No redness, no swelling beyond the expected. No foul odor.

“Very clean,” I said, deliberately neutral.

“Ah. Thank you for your … opinion, Nurse,” he said. “One must never be complacent. Microbes are invisible. Character, however…” He tilted his head, studying Brandt’s face. “Character shows itself.”

Brandt flushed and looked away.

Haviland uncorked the special bottle. The iodine fumes rushed out, acrid and overpowering.

“Let me prepare a diluted solution, sir,” I said, taking a step forward. “This seems particularly—”

“That won’t be necessary,” he interrupted. “Deep wounds require a strong hand.”

He poured the tincture liberally over the wound. Brandt gasped, teeth gritted, knuckles white on the sheet.

I looked down at my hands, fighting the burn in my eyes, the thickness in my throat.

‘I should have stopped him.’

But I am determined to be clear-eyed and professional, not to give the men on the dais any reason to write off my testimony as that of a hysterical female. I lift my chin and continue.

“Breathe, Sergeant,” I said, taking his free hand. “In and out. It will pass.”

I watched the iodine soak into the wound—too much, far too much, a brown-black tide.

‘After Haviland left, I remained by Brandt’s bed longer than duty strictly required. I counted his pulse every half hour. Seventy-two. Seventy-eight. Eighty-five. A little elevated from pain, perhaps, but nothing alarming. I so hoped …

‘At midnight, I was with Private O’Mara at the far end of the ward when I heard the rattle.’

“Brandt,” I said under my breath.

By the time I reached him, his body was shaking violently, and his skin was filmed with sweat. His heart had doubled its pace.

“Not again,” one of the orderlies whispered. “God, not again.”

“Fetch Captain Marsh,” I said. “Now.”

We checked his temperature. Ninety-eight point eight. His wound—still clean. But his pupils were wide, his hands fluttering, his breath shallow.

“Feels like my heart will burst,” he panted. “Sister—please—”

I gripped his hand harder, though my own fingers shook. “You’re not going anywhere, Sergeant Brandt. Do you hear me? You stay right here.”

Marsh arrived, glance already wary.

“Septic—” he began.

“Sepsis without fever?” I said sharply. “Without a discolored wound? Look at him. Listen to his heart. It’s like a bird trapped in a box.”

“We’ve seen this before, Sister,” Marsh said. “We must accept—”

“This is iodine intoxication, Captain,” I snapped. “I read a case description years ago—a man drank tincture in a suicide attempt. The symptoms were the same. Tachycardia. Tremors. Delirium. Cardiac collapse.”

“How could iodine through the skin—”

“Through a compromised wound surface. Through an overdose.”

Brandt cried out. His back arched. For a moment, I thought his ribs would shatter under the force of his heart. Then, suddenly, he sagged.

I knew that sag.

“No,” I whispered. “No, no—”

‘He was dead before Marsh could respond.’

V. The Courtroom

‘And so we come to why I stand before you today.

‘I reported my suspicions first to the matron, who clucked her tongue and told me I had a vivid imagination. Then to Captain Marsh, who looked afraid. Then, finally, to Colonel Beecham, commanding officer of the medical unit.

“These are serious accusations, Sister. Do you have proof?”

“I have patterns, sir,” I said. “I have seen a bottle of tincture used only by Major Haviland on men whose skulls and faces fit his theory of criminality. I have charts that show no fever, no infection, and sudden cardiovascular collapse following heavy topical application.”

“Patterns are not proof,” he said. “But they may warrant investigation.”

‘You gentlemen are that investigation.’

They sit at the long table, uniforms neat, pens ready. They thank me. I am excused. I move to a smaller table, my hands folded to hide their trembling.

Next, a clerk reads out the pharmacy requisitions. It took some time to find a copy, but only the Romans were more pedantic than we Brits about documentation: a request signed by Haviland for “concentrated iodine tincture for deeply contaminated wounds,” filled by a supply depot in England that had not yet updated to the safer, diluted formula. They murmur over that. Some of them nod.

Haviland sits at the opposite table, composed and elegant, flanked by the officer assigned as his counsel. He watches me with mild interest, as if observing an insect.

When it is his turn, he rises smoothly.

“I am not ignorant of iodine toxicity, gentlemen,” he says. “I am not a barbarian. I requested stronger tincture because we deal with filthy shrapnel wounds. If we under-sterilize, men die of gas gangrene. If we over-sterilize … well, Sister O’Donnell has spun a fascinating tale about murder by antiseptic.”

There is a ripple of strained amusement.

“I will not deny that I have an interest in the emerging science of characterology,” he continues. “I have read Lombroso. I have spoken impolitic words about skull shapes and predispositions at mess tables. For that I apologize. But to leap from that to the accusation that I deliberately killed my own patients—our brave soldiers—is … extravagant.”

He spreads his hands. “What motive would I have? What benefit? These men were already under my care, already wounded. Why should I wish them dead?”

I could answer that. I could speak of the gleam in his eyes when he described preemptive justice, of the satisfaction of “pruning” the human tree. But that is speculation. And speculation is not enough.

“Sepsis presents in many ways,” he says. “The Sister herself admits we lack a full laboratory. We cannot culture organisms. We cannot see the invisible. To label these tragedies as ‘murder’ because they do not fit a textbook, and because a nurse with a chemistry hobby finds the smell of one tincture stronger than another …” He shakes his head. “I trust you will weigh her enthusiasm against my years of experience.”

You questioned me. Now, question him. Examine the requisitions, the sample bottle sent as evidence, the charts. Don’t take his word, I beg you.

Will you find Major Haviland guilty or not?

Read for The Verdict on my new website.

Iodine: The Verdict

This is a fictional story that uses history and iodine to narrate an elemental murder and mystery.

Thanks for reading down this far! I’d love comments and Questions.

Some of the best, most original books out there are independently published, so ...

1. They listen as scientists rather than as soldiers.

One of you, a colonel with a medical degree from Edinburgh, clears his throat.

“I have, in fact, read of iodine intoxication,” he says. “The Sister’s description is consistent. The lack of fever, the cardiovascular symptoms—it is not sepsis as we usually understand it.”

The panel of military judges examines the concentration more closely. A crude titration is performed using what chemicals their staff muster. The result confirms what I knew and testified to: the solution is indeed far stronger than standard tincture—strong enough that heavy application to open tissue could produce systemic effects.

When asked why he kept this bottle apart, Haviland’s answers fray.

“To ensure it was available when needed,” he says.

“Why only in Ward C?” they ask.

“Because that is where the worst cases—”

“Larkin and Brandt were not the worst cases,” I interject. “They were among the mildest. The worst cases were taken straight to surgery or to the gas gangrene tent.”

The judges go through the rosters again. They mark, perhaps because I put forward the suggestion, that the majority of the dead men in Ward C had been labeled “disciplinary problems” at some point in their service. Brawlers. Thieves. One man with a record of desertion. Others, like Brandt, had nothing worse than a rough appearance.

It fits neatly into my accusations.

“Major Haviland,” the presiding officer says, “did you at any point choose which patients would be assigned to Ward C?”

Haviland laughs, but no one joins him.

“I made recommendations,” he admits. “We try to keep the more … troublesome elements in one ward for ease of supervision.”

“So you admit you concentrated men you considered ‘troublesome’ in the same ward where you kept your strongest tincture.”

“A coincidence,” he says.

No one believes in coincidence any longer.

In the end, they find him guilty—not of premeditated murder, the word still tastes strange in a hospital—but of gross negligence and willful disregard for patient safety. They remove his rank and send him home in disgrace to face a civilian tribunal that will be far less forgiving.

When the verdict is read, I feel no triumph. Only a hollow weariness.

Outside the tent, Captain Marsh finds me.

“You were brave,” he says. “It cost you to stand up there.”

“My career,” I say. “Will any hospital take a nurse known for accusing surgeons?”

He smiles crookedly. “I hear there’s talk of opening medical colleges to women after the war. They won’t be able to deny you much longer, Sister O’Donnell. And when they do, I hope you’ll remember that your first diagnosis was stopping a killer.”

Years later, I stand in a small American Midwestern town, teaching local doctors about iodine deficiency and goiter, showing them how a pinch of iodized salt can prevent dull minds and misshapen throats. I remember Ward C. I remember Brandt’s wild, frightened eyes.

I protect these people from the lack of iodine. I once protected men from too much.

Justice was done.

2. They listen like soldiers and protect one of their own.

They are tired. They have seen too many men die to care, perhaps, about the finer distinctions between one kind of death and another. They look at Haviland and see a decorated officer with years of training. They look at me and see a woman in a nurse’s uniform, clever perhaps, earnest certainly, but unqualified in their minds to accuse.

“There is insufficient evidence,” the presiding officer announces. He won’t look at me. “We cannot prove intent. We cannot exclude atypical septic presentations or other unknown factors. Major Haviland will receive a formal reprimand for irregular procurement of supplies, but no further action will be taken.”

Haviland smiles that small, satisfied smile. He turns to me.

“No hard feelings, Nurse,” he says. “Your imagination outran your reason. War does that to all of us.”

I say nothing. If I open my mouth, I will scream.

Later, I pack my few belongings to move to another unit. Matron comes to see me.

“You’ve made it very difficult for yourself,” she says, not unkindly. “Surgeons talk. Your name will follow you.”

I have no reply because she is correct in her assessment.

She hesitates. “You were brave. And I think … not entirely wrong. But bravery is not always rewarded.”

“I know,” I say. “I have seen the cemeteries.”

After the war, as promised to no one but myself, I apply to every medical school that accepts women. Many reject me. One in Chicago does not.

In anatomy lectures, I run my fingers over real skulls. I trace brow ridges, occipital bumps. I listen as professors talk about Lombroso as a historical curiosity, a man wrong about nearly everything important. I raise my hand and ask whether any doctor who believes skulls predict criminality should be trusted with a scalpel.

They blink at me, then laugh. “No one believes that any longer, Miss O’Donnell,” they say. “Science has moved on.”

Science moves on. But some scientists—and people—do not.

In the Midwest of the United States, I encounter entire counties where children have goiters, where boys are dull and girls slow, where cretinism is called “the family curse.” I know, now, that it is not a curse at all but a simple lack. Iodine missing from soil and water, from salt and bread.

I help introduce iodized salt. I show local physicians how to recognize deficiency before it ruins a life. I watch as the next generation grows up straighter, sharper, their necks unburdened.

Sometimes, in the quiet of my own small house, I think of Ward C.

I imagine another brand of justice—not the formal kind with verdicts and courts, but the slow justice of lives saved. I could not convict Haviland. I could not stop him. But perhaps, because I failed there, I refused to fail here.

When I look into the bright eyes of a child whose neck is smooth and whose mind is keen, I think in some other world, some other ward, they would have been judged by the arbitrary shape of brow and chin.

In this world—my world—they will be judged by what they do. Perhaps this is a better ending than any verdict given in that tent.

THE END

Now it’s your turn. Which verdict do you think was the most historically plausible?

As an aside, this short story involving iodine, murder, and a tribunal of military officers as judges on a wooden dais is “based” on an outstanding trial movie, Breaker Morant (1980).

Spring, 1920

London

Testimony

“The first time I saw a man die from iodine overdose, he thanked the doctor with his last breath, gentlemen.

“You ask for my account of the deaths in Ward C of the -X- Field Hospital, and why I believe they were not septic shock. I will tell you everything I know, and everything I can prove—and then you may decide whether to believe a nurse with a chemistry degree she is not allowed to use, or an esteemed surgeon with medals on his chest—the man who murdered them.”

The courtroom exploded as if I’d thrown a live grenade. The clerk fumbled his pen, and two officers on the dais shifted to mutter in each other’s ears. The defense officer blustered, “So, you have already judged the Major guilty before we begin, have you, Sister? This is what we get when we put hysterical women in the witness chair.” Over him, the presiding officer snapped, “Sister, you will refrain from such language in this court and will withdraw that accusation at once.”

Good. If they were offended, they were listening. I folded my hands and straightened. These men needed to understand that what I was presenting was not negligence, but premeditation.

When the murmurings died down, the presiding officer pinned me with his eye. “The word ‘murder’ will not be used again unless this court finds it proven. Until then, you will confine yourself to facts, Sister. Continue.”

And yet he’d just repeated the word: Murder. I was satisfied for now.

Nodding my head in acknowledgment. When the scratch of the clerk’s pen stopped, I said,

“My name is Sister Susanna O’Donnell, V.A.D. nurse, previously of the Royal College of Science, dismissed with honors and regret when my professors informed me there were no posts for women in the laboratory. My consolation, they said, was that my knowledge of chemistry would make me a very fine nurse.

“They were right about one thing. My chemistry knowledge was key.”

I. The First Death

“The first man was Private Henry Larkin. Shrapnel wound, right thigh, superficial. The metal had missed his femoral artery by a finger’s width. Clean entry, minimal dirt. We irrigated with sterile saline, then tincture of iodine—standard procedure. The flesh hissed faintly under the iodine, but the edges stayed pink and healthy. No necrosis, no spreading redness.”

“Ah, Sister. While many of us know that this tincture concoction is a necessary part of the treatment of battlefield wounds, could you explain to us why it is necessary, if you know? Scientifically, of course, as you are a … chemist.”

I slid my gaze to the defense officer.

“Certainly … Colonel.”

As he did, I paused a heartbeat longer than courteous. I refused to look directly at the defendant, Dr. Haviland.

“Iodine is what we call a broad antiseptic. When we apply the tincture to broken skin, the elemental iodine in the solution penetrates the surface and attacks the organisms that would otherwise fester there—germs. It does not do this by magic or prayer, but by chemistry. It reacts with the substances of these infecting germs, unraveling them—spoiling their structure so they can no longer live or multiply. In plain terms, it kills them before they can kill the patient.”

“We use it in alcohol because the spirit carries the iodine into the tiny crevices of the wound and helps dry the surface. In the proper strength, a few percent, it destroys germs on contact while the body tolerates it well enough. The skin may sting and stain, but it heals. That is why it is necessary—but an excess is dangerous, even deadly. The same property that lets it poison a bacterium will, in sufficient dose, poison a man.”

I paused, giving him time to recognize he’d gambled and lost. Then I lifted an eyebrow and said,

“Thank you for the examination question, Colonel. I trust I’ve passed?”

His cheeks turned puce, and he jerked his eyes away to shuffle the pages on his table.

“An artful and succinct explanation, Sister,” the presiding officer said. “Please continue.”

I had made an enemy with my answer. Had I also formed an ally?

“Private Larkin’s temperature that evening was normal. His pulse, a steady seventy-eight. His color, poor but no worse than any man who had bled a little and then lain still.

“I noted his chart myself. I am meticulous, gentlemen. I was taught to be.

“He died at dawn.

“The night sister woke me because he had begun to shake. She believed rigors—the chills of an oncoming infection. By the time I reached his bed, he was drenched in sweat, bedding twisted around him. His eyes—dear God—his eyes protruded from their sockets as if some invisible hand was pushing them from behind.”

“What’s his temp?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven point four,” Night Sister said. She was breathless. “Barely raised.”

Not septic, then. Septic patients burn with fever. They dry out from the inside. Larkin was drowning. His tongue was thick. He could not swallow. His pulse climbed past one hundred and fifty, pounding itself into failure while I held his wrist and counted just to be certain.

“The wound. Is it hot? Red?” I asked.

We pulled away the dressing. The wound was clean, edges neat, no festering, no angry flush creeping up the thigh. It looked like a textbook example of healing. It looked like he should live.

“Heart,” I remember saying. “Something’s wrong with his heart. We sent for the duty physician.

“It was not Dr. Haviland that first night. It was young Lieutenant Marsh, newly arrived, still unsure of his authority. He examined Larkin, listened to his chest, observed the sweat beaded on his brow, and said words that would echo in Ward C for the next three months.”

“Septic shock,” he pronounced. “We must accept that not all infections present typically. There may be occult contamination.”

“Occult contamination. A nice phrase to cover ignorance.

“Larkin died less than an hour later, his heart exhausted.

“I wrote in my own notebook—not the official chart: No fever. Clean wound. Dilated pupils. Eyes bulging. Pulse 160+ before arrest. Cause not sepsis.

“I underlined the last part twice.”

II. The Pattern

“The second death was Corporal Weissman, five days later. Bayonet slash to the chest, stitched, iodined, bandaged. He joked with us as we worked, told a story about stealing eggs from a French farmer and being chased by her geese. “Worse than the Gerrys, those geese,” he said. Men who tell jokes are meant to live.”

My throat tightened. I pulled in a breath.

“He died at four in the morning in the same manner—tremors, racing heart, bulging eyes, breath coming in shallow, desperate gasps. Again, the wound was clean. Again, the temperature was barely raised. Again, the verdict: septic shock.

“It happened again, a week later. Then again.

“By the fourth such death, even the orderlies were whispering.”

“Must be something in the air of Ward C,” one murmured as we changed sheets. “A curse.”

“A curse, bad air, the stew—anything but intent. If God had looked away from Ward C, then some man had stepped in to do the devil’s work. This was a pattern.

“When I do not understand a pattern, I do not blame variables. I look for constants.

“And one common factor among all four deaths was iodine.”

“The iodine’s poisoned, Sister?” Eyes wide, a young nurse pressed a hand to her throat. “Shall we stop using it?”

“If it were the tincture from pharmacy,” I said, “every man we touched with it would be dead, not four out of forty.”

She shivered. “Then what is it?”

“At that time, I did not yet know. But when these deaths occurred, they always followed a visit from one man. Major Edward Haviland, Regimental Surgeon, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, decorated at Ypres, known among the nurses as “The Saint of the Scalpel”—the second common factor.

“He was revered, the grey at his temples giving him a conveniently distinguished sheen. Soldiers trusted him. The young nurses and V.A.D.s received avuncular pats on the shoulder, the grave looks of concern, and a hand held at a deathbed. Always carefully composed, never visibly out of line.

“For all that, he never remembered a patient’s name—only ‘the fellow with the gangrenous foot,’ or ‘the man with the missing eye.’ Same with nurses. ‘The pretty one,’ ‘the dull one.’ For me, it was, ‘Miss—er—Nurse, the chemical one,’ or ‘the one with brains who frightens off potential husbands.’

“I had come to realize his careful façade hid …”

I stopped and let the gentlemen of the court supply their own word.

III. Slope of the Brow

“You will ask how I finally came to understand what he was doing. I will answer plainly. Because he could not resist talking about it.

“It was October, one month from Armistice, when he gave the lecture. The guns had been booming for three days without pause—the hospital tents shook from the concussion. Between cases, when the stretchers were momentarily less frequent, Haviland called the officers and senior staff together in the mess and spoke to them about ‘the future of medical science.’

“I was pouring tea. Invisible, as nurses often are.”

“You see,” he said, tapping a chalkboard where he had sketched a crude human profile, “the structure of the skull, the slope of the brow, the prominence of the jaw—these are not mere accidents. They are windows into character. The Italians have advanced this line of thinking admirably. Lombroso, for instance, demonstrated that criminals share certain common traits: asymmetrical faces, protruding jaws, small, shifty eyes, peculiar bumps and ridges.”

“Phrenology?” one captain scoffed. “Surely that’s out of fashion.”

“Out of favor with those who do not wish to face uncomfortable truths,” Haviland corrected. “Have you never looked at a man and known he was a bad seed before he spoke a word? The jaw tells. The temples. The occipital ridges at the back of the head. One day, we shall be able to identify potential criminals in childhood and intervene before they offend.”

Murmurs. Some skeptical, some intrigued.

“And what would you do with them, Major?” someone asked. “Lock them away forever?”

Haviland smiled—a little twist at the corner of his mouth I had not seen before. “Surely that is for the lawmakers to decide. We are merely the observers.”

He caught my eye then, purely by chance. I had paused with the teapot tilted, listening. For an instant, I saw something under the carefully cultivated veneer—impatience, perhaps, that I had overheard something not meant for me.

Then he smiled again, all warmth and gentility. “More tea, Nurse … Our little chemist, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I poured him more tea.

“Later that night, I found him at the far end of Ward C, studying a sleeping soldier’s face by lantern light.”

“The heavy brow,” he murmured to himself.

When he saw me, he pulled his hand from his pocket and straightened.

“You needn’t concern yourself, Sister,” he said. “Just checking on the patients.”

“Of course, sir,” I replied.

“Except I did concern myself.”

This is a fictional story that uses history and iodine to narrate an elemental murder and mystery.

Look for Part 2 in April 2026

The Verdict is posted on:

Carol Potenza

Author, writer, and recovering scientist. I write mysteries you want to read and that will stay with you long after THE END. Plus, if you love science blended with true stories, dark history, and twisted fiction, dive in. You're in the right place.

In part one of the beryllium (Be) story, you learned that four atomic cores were created for the Manhattan Project, but only three were detonated.

The fourth atomic bomb, made up of plutonium and gallium (Pu/Ga) and originally nicknamed Rufus, was moved back to Los Alamos, New Mexico, for further research. In short order, it acquired a new name—the Demon Core—when two scientists who used it to examine criticality would end up dead. The scientist linked to beryllium, Louis Slotin, exhibited a reckless carelessness that could have wiped out Los Alamos and its surrounds from an atomic explosion. Carelessness he rectified by sacrificing himself.

But first, a little about beryllium. With the atomic number 4, it’s the fourth element of the periodic table, group 2, period 2. In pure form, it’s a lightweight, brittle silvery metal with a high melting point (2468°C, 4474°F). Beryllium tastes sweet if licked, which is kind of a weird property, and its discoverer, Nicholas Louis Vauquelin (1763-1829), originally wanted to name it glaucinium (glykys is Greek for sweet). Instead, it was named for the gemstone, beryl, which contains beryllium.

Now that you know beryllium tastes sweet, you might be curious to lick it yourself. Don’t. Beryllium is toxic to humans in pure form if ingested or inhaled.

In criticality research on the atomic bomb cores, beryllium was used to create tampers—half dome-shaped bowls similar to those metal cloches that cover room-service food at fancy hotels. The tamper’s beryllium composition was very important because the element beryllium reflected neutrons back into the Pu/Ga core. They were used experimentally to assess the core’s neutron multiplication rate.

The caveat? If the core ever became completely surrounded by the beryllium tampers, too many neutrons would be reflected back to it, start a super-critical chain-reaction, and—nuclear detonation, which would be Bad.

A gap was left between the two encasing tampers so some of the neutrons could escape. During criticality experiments, the bottom half of the spherical Pu/Ga core was nestled inside the first tamper. The second tamper was used to cover the top half of the core and was manually controlled by the scientist conducting experiments.

You heard that right. Manually controlled.

The scientist raised and lowered the top beryllium tamper using a thumb hole. To maintain a gap for neutron escape, protocols dictated that shims be placed between the two beryllium tampers such that the core was NEVER completely covered.

Louis Slotin ignored protocol. Instead of shims, he used a flat-head screwdriver to control the size of the gap between the two tampers. He was known to be a bit of a show-off and photos of him at Los Alamos saw him dressed in blue jeans, cowboy boots, and aviator shades. The Cool Physicist.

He was adept at “tickling the Dragon’s Tail,” which these criticality experiments had been labeled because they were extremely dangerous.

Slotin and seven other lab personnel, from technicians to scientists, to a military guard, were present on May 21, 1946. Slotin was demonstrating his method of measuring criticality using the beryllium tamper and his screwdriver. This time, the screwdriver slipped. The beryllium tamper slammed down, completely covering the core.

Instantly, the room filled with a blinding flash of blue light and a wave of burning heat. The core turned supercritical, releasing a burst of radiation. A nuclear explosion was imminent.

With a twist of his wrist, Slotin flipped the beryllium tamper to the floor and stopped the chain-reaction build-up and blast.

But it was too late for Slotin. His position over the supercritical core shielded the other men in the room but caused him to receive a lethal dose of radiation. He died of acute radiation poisoning nine days later.

You know what the saddest part was? Louis Slotin was leaving Los Alamos for a teaching position at the University of Chicago. His last interaction with the Demon Core was atraining demonstration for his replacement. Knowing he would die, Louis called his parents, who were flown to his side to be with him in his final hours.

After Louis Slotin’s death, Los Alamos ended hands-on work with the nuclear bomb cores.

I’ve flipped the PToDM newsletter this month to start with the periodic table element. There’s a lot of good stuff after it, including the mating habits of Neanderthal men, a sneak peek at the new Shattered cover, and one of my books that complements Women’s History Month. —Carol

Iodine, Murder in a World War I Field Hospital, and the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery, Part I

Spring, 1920

London

Testimony

“The first time I saw a man die from iodine overdose, he thanked the doctor with his last breath, gentlemen.

“You ask for my account of the deaths in Ward C of the -X- Field Hospital, and why I believe they were not septic shock. I will tell you everything I know, and everything I can prove—and then you may decide whether to believe a nurse with a chemistry degree she is not allowed to use, or an esteemed surgeon with medals on his chest—the man who murdered them.”

The courtroom exploded as if I’d thrown a live grenade. The clerk fumbled his pen, and two officers on the dais shifted to mutter in each other’s ears. The defense officer blustered, “So, you have already judged the Major guilty before we begin, have you, Sister? This is what we get when we put hysterical women in the witness chair.” Over him, the presiding officer snapped, “Sister, you will refrain from such language in this court and will withdraw that accusation at once.”

Good. If they were offended, they were listening. I folded my hands and straightened. These men needed to understand that what I was presenting was not negligence, but premeditation.

When the murmurings died down, the presiding officer pinned me with his eye. “The word ‘murder’ will not be used again unless this court finds it proven. Until then, you will confine yourself to facts, Sister. Continue.”

And yet he’d just repeated the word: Murder. I was satisfied for now.

Nodding my head in acknowledgment. When the scratch of the clerk’s pen stopped, I said,

“My name is Sister Susanna O’Donnell, V.A.D. nurse, previously of the Royal College of Science, dismissed with honors and regret when my professors informed me there were no posts for women in the laboratory. My consolation, they said, was that my knowledge of chemistry would make me a very fine nurse.

“They were right about one thing. My chemistry knowledge was key.”

I. The First Death

“The first man was Private Henry Larkin. Shrapnel wound, right thigh, superficial. The metal had missed his femoral artery by a finger’s width. Clean entry, minimal dirt. We irrigated with sterile saline, then tincture of iodine—standard procedure. The flesh hissed faintly under the iodine, but the edges stayed pink and healthy. No necrosis, no spreading redness.”

“Ah, Sister. While many of us know that this tincture concoction is a necessary part of the treatment of battlefield wounds, could you explain to us why it is necessary, if you know? Scientifically, of course, as you are a … chemist.”

I slid my gaze to the defense officer.

“Certainly … Colonel.”

As he did, I paused a heartbeat longer than courteous. I refused to look directly at the defendant, Dr. Haviland.

“Iodine is what we call a broad antiseptic. When we apply the tincture to broken skin, the elemental iodine in the solution penetrates the surface and attacks the organisms that would otherwise fester there—germs. It does not do this by magic or prayer, but by chemistry. It reacts with the substances of these infecting germs, unraveling them—spoiling their structure so they can no longer live or multiply. In plain terms, it kills them before they can kill the patient.”

“We use it in alcohol because the spirit carries the iodine into the tiny crevices of the wound and helps dry the surface. In the proper strength, a few percent, it destroys germs on contact while the body tolerates it well enough. The skin may sting and stain, but it heals. That is why it is necessary—but an excess is dangerous, even deadly. The same property that lets it poison a bacterium will, in sufficient dose, poison a man.”

I paused, giving him time to recognize he’d gambled and lost. Then I lifted an eyebrow and said,

“Thank you for the examination question, Colonel. I trust I’ve passed?”

His cheeks turned puce, and he jerked his eyes away to shuffle the pages on his table.

“An artful and succinct explanation, Sister,” the presiding officer said. “Please continue.”

I had made an enemy with my answer. Had I also formed an ally?

“Private Larkin’s temperature that evening was normal. His pulse, a steady seventy-eight. His color, poor but no worse than any man who had bled a little and then lain still.

“I noted his chart myself. I am meticulous, gentlemen. I was taught to be.

“He died at dawn.

“The night sister woke me because he had begun to shake. She believed rigors—the chills of an oncoming infection. By the time I reached his bed, he was drenched in sweat, bedding twisted around him. His eyes—dear God—his eyes protruded from their sockets as if some invisible hand was pushing them from behind.”

“What’s his temp?” I asked.

“Thirty-seven point four,” Night Sister said. She was breathless. “Barely raised.”

Not septic, then. Septic patients burn with fever. They dry out from the inside. Larkin was drowning. His tongue was thick. He could not swallow. His pulse climbed past one hundred and fifty, pounding itself into failure while I held his wrist and counted just to be certain.

“The wound. Is it hot? Red?” I asked.

We pulled away the dressing. The wound was clean, edges neat, no festering, no angry flush creeping up the thigh. It looked like a textbook example of healing. It looked like he should live.

“Heart,” I remember saying. “Something’s wrong with his heart. We sent for the duty physician.

“It was not Dr. Haviland that first night. It was young Lieutenant Marsh, newly arrived, still unsure of his authority. He examined Larkin, listened to his chest, observed the sweat beaded on his brow, and said words that would echo in Ward C for the next three months.”

“Septic shock,” he pronounced. “We must accept that not all infections present typically. There may be occult contamination.”

“Occult contamination. A nice phrase to cover ignorance.

“Larkin died less than an hour later, his heart exhausted.

“I wrote in my own notebook—not the official chart: No fever. Clean wound. Dilated pupils. Eyes bulging. Pulse 160+ before arrest. Cause not sepsis.

“I underlined the last part twice.”

II. The Pattern

“The second death was Corporal Weissman, five days later. Bayonet slash to the chest, stitched, iodined, bandaged. He joked with us as we worked, told a story about stealing eggs from a French farmer and being chased by her geese. “Worse than the Gerrys, those geese,” he said. Men who tell jokes are meant to live.”

My throat tightened. I pulled in a breath.

“He died at four in the morning in the same manner—tremors, racing heart, bulging eyes, breath coming in shallow, desperate gasps. Again, the wound was clean. Again, the temperature was barely raised. Again, the verdict: septic shock.

“It happened again, a week later. Then again.

“By the fourth such death, even the orderlies were whispering.”

“Must be something in the air of Ward C,” one murmured as we changed sheets. “A curse.”

“A curse, bad air, the stew—anything but intent. If God had looked away from Ward C, then some man had stepped in to do the devil’s work. This was a pattern.

“When I do not understand a pattern, I do not blame variables. I look for constants.

“And one common factor among all four deaths was iodine.”

“The iodine’s poisoned, Sister?” Eyes wide, a young nurse pressed a hand to her throat. “Shall we stop using it?”

“If it were the tincture from pharmacy,” I said, “every man we touched with it would be dead, not four out of forty.”

She shivered. “Then what is it?”

“At that time, I did not yet know. But when these deaths occurred, they always followed a visit from one man. Major Edward Haviland, Regimental Surgeon, Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons, decorated at Ypres, known among the nurses as “The Saint of the Scalpel”—the second common factor.

“He was revered, the grey at his temples giving him a conveniently distinguished sheen. Soldiers trusted him. The young nurses and V.A.D.s received avuncular pats on the shoulder, the grave looks of concern, and a hand held at a deathbed. Always carefully composed, never visibly out of line.

“For all that, he never remembered a patient’s name—only ‘the fellow with the gangrenous foot,’ or ‘the man with the missing eye.’ Same with nurses. ‘The pretty one,’ ‘the dull one.’ For me, it was, ‘Miss—er—Nurse, the chemical one,’ or ‘the one with brains who frightens off potential husbands.’

“I had come to realize his careful façade hid …”

I stopped and let the gentlemen of the court supply their own word.

III. Slope of the Brow

“You will ask how I finally came to understand what he was doing. I will answer plainly. Because he could not resist talking about it.

“It was October, one month from Armistice, when he gave the lecture. The guns had been booming for three days without pause—the hospital tents shook from the concussion. Between cases, when the stretchers were momentarily less frequent, Haviland called the officers and senior staff together in the mess and spoke to them about ‘the future of medical science.’

“I was pouring tea. Invisible, as nurses often are.”

“You see,” he said, tapping a chalkboard where he had sketched a crude human profile, “the structure of the skull, the slope of the brow, the prominence of the jaw—these are not mere accidents. They are windows into character. The Italians have advanced this line of thinking admirably. Lombroso, for instance, demonstrated that criminals share certain common traits: asymmetrical faces, protruding jaws, small, shifty eyes, peculiar bumps and ridges.”

“Phrenology?” one captain scoffed. “Surely that’s out of fashion.”

“Out of favor with those who do not wish to face uncomfortable truths,” Haviland corrected. “Have you never looked at a man and known he was a bad seed before he spoke a word? The jaw tells. The temples. The occipital ridges at the back of the head. One day, we shall be able to identify potential criminals in childhood and intervene before they offend.”

Murmurs. Some skeptical, some intrigued.

“And what would you do with them, Major?” someone asked. “Lock them away forever?”

Haviland smiled—a little twist at the corner of his mouth I had not seen before. “Surely that is for the lawmakers to decide. We are merely the observers.”

He caught my eye then, purely by chance. I had paused with the teapot tilted, listening. For an instant, I saw something under the carefully cultivated veneer—impatience, perhaps, that I had overheard something not meant for me.

Then he smiled again, all warmth and gentility. “More tea, Nurse … Our little chemist, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I poured him more tea.

“Later that night, I found him at the far end of Ward C, studying a sleeping soldier’s face by lantern light.”

“The heavy brow,” he murmured to himself.

When he saw me, he pulled his hand from his pocket and straightened.

“You needn’t concern yourself, Sister,” he said. “Just checking on the patients.”

“Of course, sir,” I replied.

“Except I did concern myself.”

This is a fictional story that uses history and iodine to narrate an elemental murder and mystery.

Look for Part 2 in April 2026

Who’s Sleeping in My Bed? 🛌

If you are from a genetic population outside of Sub-Saharan Africa, 1-4% of your DNA could have originated from a Neanderthal ancestor. And those Neanderthal genes from this interspecies coupling were retained by natural selection because they helped Homo sapiens adapt better to their environment.

They include: immune system genes to help us fight off viral infection, skin and hair genes that protect us from UV light, genes regulating how fast calories are burned, which may have been beneficial for survival but are now linked to weight gain and obesity (I think I have a bunch of these).

These Neanderthal genes are scattered across our chromosomes but are noticeably absent from the human X chromosome, one of two sex chromosomes—X and Y. Why? Studies suggest this was caused by biased mating patterns between Neanderthal males and human females.

To commemorate this finding …

I’ve always wanted to create my own meme.

SNEAK PEEK COVER: Shattered: A De-Extinct Zoo Mystery, Book 4

Some monsters are engineered. Some are rich. Some share your DNA.

At the Pleistocene BioPark, woolly rhinos, mammoths, and Ice Age predators are back from extinction—and someone is weaponizing them. When a fatal incident shatters the opening gala, Dr. Milly Smith has to protect her animals, her friends, and a pop star who might be her sister.

And For Women’s History Month: Echo of Lies

Women’s History Month fiction with ray guns, quantum ciphers, and a young woman’s resilience.

Francie Cortez, who loves Einstein more than etiquette, becomes the key to stopping a time‑bending conspiracy that has already killed one woman in her family and threatens millions more. To solve it, Francie has to treat everyone as a suspect, including the man who might be her best chance at the truth.

A PG sci-fi mystery historical romance about a woman’s resolve, you’ll want to read and pass on to your daughters and granddaughters.

READ NOW

Thanks for reading down this far!

I posted a Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery about Iridium and dinosaur extinction, and googled the Larson comic because it’s hilarious. I got this straight from Google AI overview:

• The Cartoon: The iconic Far Side comic shows a smoking dinosaur pair, implying the long-term, self-destructive habit was the culprit.

• Scientific Reality: Geological evidence indicates a massive asteroid impact in the Yucatan Peninsula 66 million years ago caused widespread environmental change.

• While Gary Larson's humor provides a satirical take, the scientific consensus points to a catastrophic event, not smoking, as the cause of dinosaur extinction.

I haven’t checked Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Great Pumpkin, but I have a feeling the answers will be sad.

In the immortal words of Miss Mona Lisa Vito:

Imagine you’re a dee-ah. You’re prancin’ along, you get thirsty, you spot a little brook.

You put your little dee-ah lips down to the cool clear what-ah…

BAM!

Marisa Tomei received an Oscar for her role as Miss Vito in the movie My Cousin Vinny (1992). Click on this link to watch the whole scene, ‘cause it’s hilarious and hard to write her accent, but be warned. It’s NSFW.

Now, imagine 66 million years ago, a duck-billed hadrosaur, the dee-ah of the Cretaceous, was prancin’ along, got thirsty, spotted a little brook, and put her little duck-billed lips to the cool, clear what-ah, and…

BAM!!

An asteroid as large as 50 miles across hits what we now call the Yucatan, vaporizes in the 20,000-degree heat caused by the energy of the collision, catches pretty much everything on fire for 100s of miles, creates tsunamis as tall as the Eiffel tower, pitches the world into darkness for a year because of debris and dust thrown into the sky, and completely wipes out the dinosaurs. Well, almost completely.

Eventually, all that dust in the air had to drop to earth, and this is where Iridium (Ir) comes into play in the death of the dinosaurs and the rise of mammals (including us). Iridium is an extremely dense and brittle silver metallic element in the platinum group with an atomic number of 77. It is one of the rarest elements on earth, rarer than the rare-earth elements, which turn out to be not so rare, just hard to extract without really messing up the environment. It was found as a contaminant of platinum (Pt) and, when pure, it does not oxidize or corrode, thus it is used in products where that particular characteristic is important, like spark plugs and … fountain pen nibs? Seriously?

The name iridium comes from “iridescent” because of the multiple colors it turns when it becomes a salt. The discoverer of iridium, British chemist Smithson Tennant, actually named it after the Greek goddess Iris. Iris means rainbow in Latin and Greek, and Iris is the goddess of rainbows. Aww…

But when that asteroid hit our planet, it left behind more than just the Chicxulub crater. Everywhere we’ve looked on earth, we’ve found a thin layer of clay at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary that has 100 times more iridium in it than the surrounding soil. Below that boundary line are dinosaur fossils. Above it, not so much. We also see iridium at much higher concentrations in asteroids and meteorites. So, putting two and two together, the scientist Luis Alvarez came up with the Alvarez hypothesis that postulates an extra-terrestrial cause for dinosaur extinction … all because of the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery element iridium.

Of course, we all know what REALLY killed off the dinosaurs …

The potential discovery of “dark oxygen” is tangled up with manganese (Mn), the workhorse element in nature’s water-splitting machinery. In plants, a manganese cluster in photosystem II powers classic “light” oxygen—the oxygen-generating mechanism we’ve long treated as “settled science.” Briefly, sunlight boosts chlorophyll electrons into higher energy states. Those electrons then move through a chain of carriers so plants can combine carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and, as a bonus, release oxygen.

(6)Carbon dioxide + (6)water + light —> (1)glucose or carbohydrate + (6)oxygen molecules

6CO₂ + 6H₂O + photons —> C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

In the overall photosynthesis reaction, 24 electrons must move for each molecule of glucose made, and they must be replaced for the process to continue. Manganese in the water‑splitting complex raids water molecules for those replacement electrons, leaving behind hydrogen ions (H⁺) and O₂. Voila! The oxygen that helped ignite life as we know it.

But can we move electrons without all the messy trappings of life? Yes—in batteries. Electron flow is how we generate electricity, and electron‑conducting metals from the periodic table—including manganese—make that possible. These metals are in short supply, so we’re hunting for untapped sources, like the polymetallic nodules scattered across the abyssal (what a great word) trenches of the oceans.

Manganese (Mn) is a silvery‑gray transition metal in group 7 with atomic number 25, best known today as a steel‑hardening workhorse (think Damascus‑style steels and swords) and a pillar of alkaline batteries. What makes manganese especially interesting is its willingness to vary oxidation states—most commonly +2, +3, +4, and +7—shuttling electrons in ways that anchor both industrial chemistry and biological energy flow.

Humans and manganese go back millennia. Some of the paint used in the 17,000‑year‑old Lascaux cave drawings of Ice Age animals was made from scarce manganese oxide minerals, including hausmannite. The closest known manganese‑rich source for Lascaux is in the central Pyrénées, about 150 miles (~250 km) away. Manganese oxides ground and mixed with animal fat produced a permanent black worth enough to those artists that they expended serious effort to get it.

Which is exactly what’s happening now with abyssal polymetallic nodules and the recent controversy over the Sweetman et al. Nat. Geosci. 17, 737–739 (2024) article. A mining group, The Metals Company (TMC), commissioned the Sweetman expedition to the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, where these nodules sit between about 9,800 and 19,700 feet (4,000–6,000 m) down. This is not trivial fieldwork.

Sweetman et al. reported that the nodules, acting like natural batteries, produce oxygen in the darkest regions of the ocean—“dark oxygen.” If true, this finding could completely upend our understanding of Earth’s oxygenation and the evolution of life. It could also mean that mining these nodules risks disrupting a key deep‑sea system that helps keep the oceans oxygenated and, by extension, could destabilize life‑supporting conditions for the entire planet(!)

For the authors, the benefits are immense: a high-visibility Nature paper, substantial new funding ($2.7 million over three years from the Nippon Foundation) to lead a dedicated “dark oxygen” project, leadership of multiple deep-sea expeditions, strong media attention, and a central role in a politically hot scientific question.

Except … there’s a problem.

TMC, which also has an enormous financial stake in nodule mining and the future of “clean” energy—the definition of a conflict of interest—had access to all the raw data and research notes from these experiments. They accuse Sweetman et al. of omitting data that didn’t support their results and repurposing data from another publication without citation. One major point: some of the experimental chambers that supposedly produced dark oxygen contained no nodules at all.

Is this fatal to the dark‑oxygen hypothesis? No. Let’s consider two paradigm‑shifting examples.

1. Gregor Mendel, a 19th‑century monk and the father of modern genetics. Two things. First, his pea‑crossing data might have been “cleaned up” because the results were almost too perfect. But scientific consensus has shifted away from calling him a conscious fraud toward seeing this as data grooming in service of a basically correct insight. Second, although Mendel mentions work on other species (e.g., Phaseolus beans, Mirabilis jalapa, Hawkweed/Hieracium), he doesn’t present detailed tables for them the way he does for peas—most likely because their trait sorting didn’t support his pea data. Later geneticists rediscovered Mendelian ratios independently, and Mendel’s model lined up beautifully with future genetics. No harm done.

2. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons’s cold fusion (1989). They claimed room‑temperature fusion from electrochemical cells, citing excess heat, neutrons, and tritium. If cold fusion were real, it could have revolutionized energy production. But no one could reliably replicate their results, and multiple papers were retracted. Cold fusion became another casualty of pathological science, where “people are tricked into false results... by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions.”

Replication is the key to good science, and Sweetman has been commissioned to do just that—but he has huge stakes and an obvious conflict of interest. So replication must also be external: another, non‑affiliated group has to reproduce the dark‑oxygen signal.

If they do, every science textbook will need an update. If not, dark oxygen will go the way of Percival Lowell’s Martian canals.

All references are linked in the article

You’ve seen the periodic table on a classroom wall, but you’ve never seen anything like this. The Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery strips the elements bare, blending true stories, dark history, and twisted fiction to reveal how they spark disasters, erase evidence, and power the world’s strangest mysteries. If your curiosity is stronger than your caution, dive in and discover just how dangerous the building blocks of the universe can be.

The Element Carbon

Memento Mori—remember you must die—is a reminder for the living that life is fleeting. It morphed into the practice of remembering the dead using architecture, paintings, photography, even jewelry featuring symbols of death, or locks of hair elaborately woven into brooches, bracelets, and rings—mourning art. The Victorians probably did it best, photographing their dead loved ones in artificial poses, standing up, playing with their favorite toys, or together with their living brothers and sisters—quite creepy.

The symbolism and art of memento mori are still around, for example, in the Día de los Muertos—Day of the Dead—celebrations found in Mexico, New Mexico, and other Latin Catholic cultures. We have Memorial Day in the U.S. to remember our soldiers lost in wars, but many families take the time during the holiday to visit cemeteries and lay wreaths on their loved ones’ graves. (I’m a huge fan of cemeteries and like to visit old ones for fun. Just ask my husband and kids, who now refuse to get out of the car. 😏)

And it’s not like we don’t collect hair and tissue for remembrance now, is it? That dried piece of umbilicus mashed into a baby album (I don’t know why I did that), the lock of baby hair from the first haircut. The Tooth Fairy exchanges teeth for cash under the pillow. And I’m pretty sure my wisdom teeth are tucked away somewhere at my dad’s house. But I wouldn’t wear them as jewelry.

Because, why, when there’s something MUCH better that you can do with your dead one’s remains. Or more specifically, cremains: Memory diamonds. That’s where carbon comes into play because diamonds are made of pure carbon.

The carbon in your body—about 18% by weight—as well as the rest of the chemicals that make you you are literally worth about a buck ($1) on the open market.

But die and get cremated, and there are lots and lots of companies out there (actually, it was kind of disturbing to find so many) who will take a cup of shorn hair or half a cup of ashes, extract the carbon, and create a diamond out of your dead loved one that will last forever. And that less than a dollar for the carbon contained in your body can be worth thousands of dollars as a memento mori set into a bracelet, a brooch, or a stunning solitaire ring, the gem cut to your specifications.

And for those of you who always liked the dog or cat more, don’t despair. You can make a diamond memento mori out of your beloved pet, too.

Reference links are embedded. Click on them and indulge your inner Alice Down the Rabbit Hole 🐇

I despaired of finding anything to write about beryllium (Be), and then I saw Oppenheimer (2023). It is a seriously fine movie, and I highly recommend it. It also exposed an embarrassing hole in my education of what was probably one of the most profound discoveries in the history of man*—unlocking the nuclear power of the elements that reside in the periodic table.

Not only that, but I live in New Mexico and have never visited the Trinity Site (only 150 m/250 km from my house) or truly understood what Los Alamos meant, even though I once worked in a lab with a scientist who was part of the Manhattan Project and who signed the Szilárd petition.

A little atomic bomb history before we get to beryllium. In the early 1940s, two different elements were used to create the cylindrical or spherical pit cores of four fissile nuclear weapons during the Manhattan Project, three of which were detonated during World War Two: The Trinity Site bomb core (nicknamed Gadget) was of plutonium (Pu) mixed with gallium (Ga) for stability, as was the Fat Man bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan. The core of Little Boy, which was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, was made up of uranium (U).

Because of enrichment issues, more uranium was needed for the detonation (64 kg/141 lbs.) than plutonium (core weight 6.2 kg/13.66 lbs.). The amount necessary for a sustainable fissile detonation was linked to something called criticality. It’s sort of a measurement of how close or far away fissile material is to detonation and depends on factors like amount of material, density, shape, and neutron reflectors (this is where beryllium will come in).

Fissile materials are those that split apart after incorporating a neutron and are capable of sustaining a nuclear reaction. A neutron is a neutrally charged particle that is part of the nucleus of every element in the periodic table except hydrogen (H). Each of these fissions or splits releases smaller elements, more neutrons, radiation, and energy that can be felt as heat.

But not all the neutrons released by the atomic splits are incorporated in other molecules—in this case, plutonium or uranium. Some are lost into the space surrounding the core. THIS IS KEY: So long as the incorporation of the neutrons and the number of splits is kept below a certain level (neutrons “lost” > neutrons released by fission/split reactions), the core material is considered subcritical for a chain reaction event and detonation.

However, once the rate of neutrons released by fission reactions becomes GREATER than neutrons lost to the surroundings, the core becomes supercritical, and a chain reaction of neutron incorporation, fission, radiation, and energy release starts the detonation. The 6.2 kg plutonium/gallium core of Fat Boy exploded with the force of 21 kilotons of TNT. That’s 21 thousand tons or 42 million lbs. I honestly can’t even comprehend what that means.

I mentioned that four atomic cores were created for the Manhattan Project, but only three were detonated. It’s the fourth one that I will link to beryllium. Nicknamed Rufus, it was to be dropped over Tokyo if Japan refused to surrender after Nagasaki. The Japanese surrendered, and the Rufus plutonium/gallium core was moved back into the realm of research at Los Alamos.

There, in short order, it acquired a new name: The Demon Core. Why? Because two of the scientists who used it to examine criticality would end up dead, one of them due to his fatal mistake while wielding a screwdriver and a simple beryllium tamper.

*I would place the discovery of DNA right up there, too. Oh. And fire. Not sure about AI yet.

Hannibal’s Elephants

Most of us have probably heard of Hannibal (247 to ~182 BC) because he had a platoon of elephants—historical accounts say around 37—as part of his war machine. He was the general who led the Carthaginians (North African Empire, 814 to 146 BC) in the Second Punic War against Rome.

Hannibal’s elephants, thought to be a North African forest elephants (now extinct), were a shock and awe “weapon.” A four-legged giant with two spears and a snake coming out of its face—a true monster. They made for a relatively easy conquest of Roman Iberian territory because everyone ran away in fear.

These elephants on European soil also had a profound effect on Western art, culture, and literature, but there was no direct physical evidence of their existence—until (possibly) now. It comes in the form of a single elephant’s wrist bone discovered in the Spanish city of Córdoba and was identified using modern and mammoth bones as comparisons.

The Córdoba bone is in poor shape, and no DNA or protein markers survived to strictly identify which species of elephant it came from. But it was found in the correct archaeological context layer—one that coincides with Hannibal’s march through Iberia on his way to Rome with his war elephants. Or …

Maybe it was a curiosity traded across the Mediterranean, or a souvenir someone dropped in the rubble. Or maybe it did belong to one of those monsters with spears for teeth and a snake for a nose. But until another elephant steps forward, this little wrist bone is the best eyewitness we’ve got.

An Ancient Mammoth Ivory Workshop in Alaska

Around 14,000 years ago (14 ka), the Holzman site at the Shaw Creek–Tanana River confluence shows hearths, mammoth remains, and quartz tools alongside evidence of cooking and ivory working—people here were turning mammoth tusks into Ice-Age gear.

By 13.7 ka, the same spot becomes an ivory workshop of mammoth-centered technology (trade? commissioned work?) Essentially, these ancient people crafted local stone and mammoth ivory into rods and unfinished preforms—perhaps for later use as awls, punches, or parts of weapons, and spears. Layer by layer, the Tanana Valley record slots these mammoth hunters and toolmakers into the Late Glacial window, coinciding with the southward movement into North America of ancestral Clovis groups between ~ 14–13 ka.

Maybe these mammoth craftsmen and craftswomen were the frontier hardware dealers at the very edge of the map—camped where the ice-free corridor opened up, and the “here be dragons” zone began.

They carved ivory rods and knapped stone tools for wide-eyed Clovis “First Peoples” looking for a new life in a continent no one they knew had ever seen, the Ice‑Age equivalent of gold‑rush outfitters selling picks, pans, and bacon to pioneers heading into their own unknown.

Echo of Lies is available EVERYWHERE February 10th

If you love determined heroines, haunted New Mexico landscapes, and historical mysteries brushed with a little science fiction, Echo of Lies will pull you into a world where the past is never as distant as it seems—and where courage in the present can rewrite what comes next.

ECHO OF LIES is HERE!

(Like the feel of a book in your hand? Paperback coming soon!)

Author reviews:

Carol Potenza, master of the mystery story, has done it again with this fast-paced, page-turning delight. The New Mexico setting layered in history added unique flair to the time-twisting story where nothing is as it seems, but everything makes perfect sense in the extremely satisfying ending. A must read! — Jordyn Kross, Author of the Dirty Daisy cozy mystery series

Echo of Lies is a meticulously crafted coming-of-age story that blends historical mystery and sci-fi intrigue. Carol Potenza brings 1940s New Mexico to life with vivid, haunting detail, but it’s Francie Cortez who truly steals the show. Her grit and intelligence, coupled with the novel’s slow-burning romantic tension, uncanny twists, and emotional depth, kept me turning the pages. Potenza delivers a story that’s both intimate and expansive (like its setting!); this novel is rich in atmosphere, full of heart, and a pleasure to read. — J.J. Cagney, Author of Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year: A Pilgrimage to Death

Manganese, Dark Oxygen, and the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery, Part 2

The potential discovery of “dark oxygen” is tangled up with manganese (Mn), the workhorse element in nature’s water-splitting machinery. In plants, a manganese cluster in photosystem II powers classic “light” oxygen—the oxygen-generating mechanism we’ve long treated as “settled science.” Briefly, sunlight boosts chlorophyll electrons into higher energy states. Those electrons then move through a chain of carriers so plants can combine carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and, as a bonus, release oxygen.

(6)Carbon dioxide + (6)water + light —> (1)glucose or carbohydrate + (6)oxygen molecules

6CO₂ + 6H₂O + photons —> C₆H₁₂O₆ + 6O₂

In the overall photosynthesis reaction, 24 electrons must move for each molecule of glucose made, and they must be replaced for the process to continue. Manganese in the water‑splitting complex raids water molecules for those replacement electrons, leaving behind hydrogen ions (H⁺) and O₂. Voila! The oxygen that helped ignite life as we know it.

But can we move electrons without all the messy trappings of life? Yes—in batteries. Electron flow is how we generate electricity, and electron‑conducting metals from the periodic table—including manganese—make that possible. These metals are in short supply, so we’re hunting for untapped sources, like the polymetallic nodules scattered across the abyssal (what a great word) trenches of the oceans.

Manganese (Mn) is a silvery‑gray transition metal in group 7 with atomic number 25, best known today as a steel‑hardening workhorse (think Damascus‑style steels and swords) and a pillar of alkaline batteries. What makes manganese especially interesting is its willingness to vary oxidation states—most commonly +2, +3, +4, and +7—shuttling electrons in ways that anchor both industrial chemistry and biological energy flow.

Humans and manganese go back millennia. Some of the paint used in the 17,000‑year‑old Lascaux cave drawings of Ice Age animals was made from scarce manganese oxide minerals, including hausmannite. The closest known manganese‑rich source for Lascaux is in the central Pyrénées, about 150 miles (~250 km) away. Manganese oxides ground and mixed with animal fat produced a permanent black worth enough to those artists that they expended serious effort to get it.

Which is exactly what’s happening now with abyssal polymetallic nodules and the recent controversy over the Sweetman et al. Nat. Geosci. 17, 737–739 (2024) article. A mining group, The Metals Company (TMC), commissioned the Sweetman expedition to the Clarion–Clipperton Zone, where these nodules sit between about 9,800 and 19,700 feet (4,000–6,000 m) down. This is not trivial fieldwork.

Sweetman et al. reported that the nodules, acting like natural batteries, produce oxygen in the darkest regions of the ocean—“dark oxygen.” If true, this finding could completely upend our understanding of Earth’s oxygenation and the evolution of life. It could also mean that mining these nodules risks disrupting a key deep‑sea system that helps keep the oceans oxygenated and, by extension, could destabilize life‑supporting conditions for the entire planet(!)

For the authors, the benefits are immense: a high-visibility Nature paper, substantial new funding ($2.7 million over three years from the Nippon Foundation) to lead a dedicated “dark oxygen” project, leadership of multiple deep-sea expeditions, strong media attention, and a central role in a politically hot scientific question.

Except … there’s a problem.

TMC, which also has an enormous financial stake in nodule mining and the future of “clean” energy—the definition of a conflict of interest—had access to all the raw data and research notes from these experiments. They accuse Sweetman et al. of omitting data that didn’t support their results and repurposing data from another publication without citation. One major point: some of the experimental chambers that supposedly produced dark oxygen contained no nodules at all.

Is this fatal to the dark‑oxygen hypothesis? No. Let’s consider two paradigm‑shifting examples.

1. Gregor Mendel, a 19th‑century monk and the father of modern genetics. Two things. First, his pea‑crossing data might have been “cleaned up” because the results were almost too perfect. But scientific consensus has shifted away from calling him a conscious fraud toward seeing this as data grooming in service of a basically correct insight. Second, although Mendel mentions work on other species (e.g., Phaseolus beans, Mirabilis jalapa, Hawkweed/Hieracium), he doesn’t present detailed tables for them the way he does for peas—most likely because their trait sorting didn’t support his pea data. Later geneticists rediscovered Mendelian ratios independently, and Mendel’s model lined up beautifully with future genetics. No harm done.

2. Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons’s cold fusion (1989). They claimed room‑temperature fusion from electrochemical cells, citing excess heat, neutrons, and tritium. If cold fusion were real, it could have revolutionized energy production. But no one could reliably replicate their results, and multiple papers were retracted. Cold fusion became another casualty of pathological science, where “people are tricked into false results... by subjective effects, wishful thinking, or threshold interactions.”

Replication is the key to good science, and Sweetman has been commissioned to do just that—but he has huge stakes and an obvious conflict of interest. So replication must also be external: another, non‑affiliated group has to reproduce the dark‑oxygen signal.

If they do, every science textbook will need an update. If not, dark oxygen will go the way of Percival Lowell’s Martian canals.

Thanks for getting this far!

The discovery of dark oxygen production has been so exciting and, well, revolutionary. I mean, biochemistry has long taught that photosynthesis—and its dependence on light—is the major generator of the oxygen that fills Earth’s atmosphere and therefore is directly linked to life on this planet. The claim that another major method of oxygen generation had been found in the depths of our oceans challenges a scientific dogma that is almost sacrosanct, and it was published Nature.

Nature Journal? Is that important?

Why, yes. Publication in Nature (UK) or Science (US) is a big deal. These journals are among the most selective and widely read in all of science, so publication signals that the work is both rigorous and broadly important. Their articles are highly cited and closely watched by other scientists, funding agencies, and the media, which can boost a researcher’s visibility and career opportunities. It’s like:

• The scientific equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize–level spotlight.

• The research equivalent of a best-picture nomination at the Oscars.

• Like your album going multi-platinum—among scientists.

After publication, the dark oxygen paper shot into the top tier of 2024 articles because the research is so “sexy.” There are online newspaper posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, excitement in the sci-fi writing community—

Total scientific clickbait.

But before we fall madly in love with this idea, let’s meet manganese

Manganese (Mn) is a silvery‑gray transition metal in group 7, period 4 of the periodic table with atomic number 25 and an atomic weight of about 54.94. One of its earliest uses was by prehistoric cave painters of the Lascaux region of France around 30,000 years ago. Isolated in 1774 by Swedish scientist Johan Gahn, it is moderately abundant in Earth’s crust (~0.1% by weight), occurring mainly in oxides (Mn_nO_m) and hydroxides (Mn_n(OH)_m)—you also might remember pinkish manganese chloride (MnCl₂) crystals in a chemistry set you got for Christmas or your birthday.

It’s especially concentrated in deep‑sea polymetallic nodules (we’ll come back to these in a sec). Manganese melts at ~1,245°C and boils at ~2,060 °C, so it’s great as a steel hardening alloy—the Romans used it in their weapons, and look how far they got. But a lot of its technical value is due to its multiple oxidation states, most commonly +2, +3, +4, and +7, which means a lot of electrons can flow through it. Electron flow means electrical generation and … batteries (like alkaline cells using MnO₂ as cathode material).

In biology, manganese is essential to life. It’s a cofactor for various enzymes and, critically, sits at the heart of the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II, where a manganese, calcium, and oxygen cluster (Mn₄CaO₅) helps split water into oxygen during photosynthesis or Light Oxygen Production (LOP). While trace manganese is a necessary micronutrient for human health, excessive exposure (especially airborne in “occupational” settings) can be neurotoxic, leading to manganism, a Parkinson‑like syndrome.​

Back to deep‑sea polymetallic nodules, manganese, and Dark Oxygen Production

Deep-sea polymetallic nodules are potato-sized lumps of rock that sit loose on the abyssal seafloor, typically 4,000–6,000 meters (~2.5–3.7 miles) down. They grow over millions of years as metals precipitate from seawater around a core. They’re unusually rich in nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese—all the elements needed for batteries (think energy generation for artificial intelligence), renewable energy tech (solar, wind), and electronics.

Because each field of these nodules (thousands and thousands of them) on the sea floor can contain very high concentrations of battery metals, countries, companies, and researchers see them as a key source for our energy transition from fossil fuels to “clean” energy. Harvesting these nodules could also decrease terrestrial mining in sensitive areas.

But these fields aren’t sterile. Nodules act as habitats for deep‑sea animals and microbes (another thing we’ll get back to), creating unique environmental communities that don’t exist on the surrounding soft mud—so nodule fields themselves could be considered “sensitive areas.”​

Studies on the impact of nodule mining are ongoing, and many are funded—surprise—by mining companies. One high-profile example is Sweetman, A.K., Smith, A.J., de Jonge, D.S.W. et al. Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor. Nat. Geosci. 17, 737–739 (2024).

Sweetman et al. used a common method to measure oxygen in their study: Benthic chambers. Briefly, imagine putting an upside-down mixing bowl on the seafloor, trapping a patch of water and sand—or polymetallic nodules—so you can watch how they “breathe” over time. The chamber is a sealed, usually clear dome or cylinder pushed into the seabed that encloses sediment, organisms, and the water above, so scientists can track how gases like oxygen change inside without disruption from waves or currents. Sensors inside constantly record oxygen levels, letting researchers see whether life in the sediment is using up oxygen (as expected) or whether something in that little patch is mysteriously making more.

To support such a bold claim as dark oxygen production, rigorous repetition and well-designed controls are essential. Doing that kind of work on the abyssal seafloor, miles beneath a research vessel, is anything but trivial or easy.

What Sweetman’s “dark oxygen” study claims

Sweetman’s team placed benthic chambers on nodule-rich abyssal seafloor in the Clarion‑Clipperton Zone, an area rich in polymetallic nodules. They expected to see oxygen slowly decrease inside the chambers as microbes respired. Instead, in several chambers, dissolved oxygen rose over two days, even though there was no sunlight and no photosynthesis at those depths.

Unexpected? Oh, yeah.

Since the seafloor in the CCZ is carpeted with polymetallic nodules containing the same manganese and other metals used in both electrical current generation AND photophysiologic light generation, the team proposed that these nodules act like tiny “geobatteries”, generating electrical currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen inside the chambers(!)

Sweetman et al. even tested the generation of electricity in polymetallic nodules in the lab and found one nodule that generated 0.95V. Not enough to split water to oxygen and hydrogen (~1.5V is needed for that), so they hypothesized that electrochemical reactions on and between nodules might be driving oxygen production.

And, because this oxygen would be produced in total darkness and potentially support seafloor life or even have implications for how early aerobic life could have started on Earth, they called it “dark oxygen,” suggesting it might be a previously unrecognized oxygen source in the deep ocean.

This finding is ground-breaking and is making scientists rethink everything from the start of life on Earth to the potential of life on dark moons and planets …

Until you read the rebuttals to the article. They are strong because they argue that Sweetman et al. did something researchers are not supposed to do: they discarded data that didn’t support their hypothesis.

Which we’ll hear about in the next episode of the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery. Oh. And those microbes on the deep-sea floor? Could they be the source of oxygen instead of the nodules? We’ll learn something about that, too.

Lithium (Li) is a relatively rare element on Earth, present in virtually all rocks—lithos is Greek for stone, after all. It’s been used by the medical community since the late 1940s to prevent and treat mental health issues like mania, bipolar disorders, and impulse control problems. But its calming effect on the brain has been known since antiquity. Water from Georgia’s Lithia Springs was used medicinally for centuries by Native Americans, and did you know the soda pop 7-Up was originally formulated with lithium citrate as an antidepressant, which was fortuitous since it was patented right around the time of the 1929 stock market crash.

Lithium treatment has also been shown to significantly reduce suicide risk in humans and prevents buildup of Alzheimer’s plaques and tangles in the brains of mice. Unfortunately, the potential for serious side effects had slowed studies of lithium and its effects on dementia in humans.

Until more drug trials are approved on humans, how might we study lithium’s effect on diseases like Alzheimer’s? Well, it turns out that a number of cities and municipalities in the U.S. and around the world have detectable amounts of lithium dissolved naturally in their water supplies. Not therapeutic levels, but enough that there may be a statistical difference in antisocial behavior and disease when compared to places with low or no lithium in drinking water.

Let’s see what kind of research our tax dollars are being used for, shall we?

In this first study, the authors compared crime statistics over a 9-year period in Texas counties with drinking water containing no lithium to counties with lithium levels ranging from 70-170 mg/L (Just FYI, the therapeutic dosage is in the range of 0.6-1.2 mg/L, about 10-fold higher). After crunching the data, they found significantly lower rates of suicide, homicide, rape (p < 0.01), and robbery, burglary, and theft (p < 0.05) in the counties with lithium drinking water(!) Wow.

How about Alzheimer’s and dementia? It’s not as clear cut once analysis considered variable demographics and health access disparities, but the authors point out the people in the highest lithium counties would have to drink 1000 liters of water a day to ingest therapeutic doses that work in animal models. So, Li in drinking water wasn’t much help, but definitely read the comments to this article. There’s still a lot of hope.

The last study I’ll leave you with is … scary because the authors—who see great potential for lithium in drinking water—propose to use it for social engineering. A quote from the article:

• “Next steps might include testing this hypothesis by randomised community trials of lithium supplementation of the water supply, particularly in communities (or settings) with demonstrated high prevalence of mental health conditions, violent criminal behaviour, chronic substance abuse and risk of suicide. This may provide further evidence to support the hypothesis that lithium could be used at the community level to reduce or combat the risk of these conditions.”

Cool. Let’s involuntarily drug everyone into compliance.

We’ve seen these types of proposals before: from fluoride in water (relatively benign), to eugenics and forced sterilization of those deemed ‘unfit,’ to China’s one-child policy (boy, are they regretting that one now), to the Final Solution. A question from me: Would you trust me to decide?

After all, I’m a scientist.

As always, these are my own opinions based on my biases, knowledge, and understanding, and the websites I’ve linked are in no way endorsements.

In 79 A.D., a catastrophic volcanic eruption rained ash, rocks, and death down on Roman cities in southern Italy. Pyroclastic flows, superheated gaseous clouds measuring 700°C (1300°F), swept down the sides of Mt. Vesuvius (1), vaporized everything in their paths, including the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and every living creature inhabiting them and the surrounding countryside. This area of Italy is where my people are from. In fact, right next to the region of Campania, where Mt. Vesuvius rests, is Basilicata and its capital city, Potenza.

One day, maybe I’ll go there and become their queen.

This article is not directly about the infamous eruption, but about the bones and teeth of its victims—and fluorine (F), atomic number 9, and a periodic table element that is extremely reactive, such that several people died when first trying to isolate it in the early 1800s. It also has the disconcerting characteristic of making everything it touches burst into flames (2).

Still, humans use fluorine every day as fluoride (3). You might brush your teeth with a toothpaste containing sodium fluoride (NaF) or live in a city that deliberately adds trace amounts of NaF to the drinking water. Why? Fluoride/Fluorine in minute quantities protects against tooth decay (4) by slowing demineralization, speeding up the process of remineralization, and providing antimicrobial protection (5). It also strengthens bone (6).

It turns out Mt. Vesuvius was naturally charging the water in the surrounding towns with fluoride (and still is), and the people of Pompeii benefitted. As more work has been done on the bones of plaster-casted volcanic victims, anthropologists found that Pompeiians had seriously great teeth (7).

So, if a little’s good, more must be better, right? Wrong. Too much ingested fluoride weakens the structure of bone, pits and stains teeth, and causes linear hypoplastic furrows along the enamel (8). Which are exactly what scientists found when they analyzed over 70 human victims from the city of Herculaneum (9), a resort town for rich Romans that was also buried under the Vesuvian eruption. The level of fluoride was so high in these individuals that people as young as fifteen had the thinning fragile bones of someone closer in age to their grandparents.

And that’s why Italians drink so much bottle mineral water and wine.

Kidding.

Saluti!

Photos/image credits

Fluorine: CLP (create.vista.com)

Tooth demineralization: CLP (Microsoft Powerpoint)

Tooth: file ID 9979462

depositphotos.com

Map of Italy: file ID 659728914

Mount Vesuvius over Pompeii: file ID 788752402

In 1948 New Mexico, a disgraced physics student is hiding on her family ranch—until something not‑quite‑human crashes onto her land and blows her quiet exile to pieces. As Francie Cortez battles to save the only home she has left, she’s dragged into government secrets, the fallout from Roswell, and a buried family past that won’t stay dead. Caught between a menacing “spaceman” and a charming soldier with secrets of his own, Francie must decide what—and who—she’s willing to risk for the truth.

For readers who love smart, character‑driven historical fiction laced with Roswell‑era secrets, eerie SF twists, and a slow-burn romance that could rewrite one woman’s future.

ECHO OF LIES

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We may not be alone …

With all the Roswell stuff, you might think I mean “out there.” But I mean inside our bodies.

Hidden Guests by Lise Barnéoud (2025) dives into biology that makes logical sense but isn’t something I’ve ever really thought about. A lot of us are walking around with other people’s cells living inside us, a phenomenon called microchimerism.

Barnéoud follows the scientists who first found fetal cells in mothers and maternal cells in children, then realized these hitchhiking “hidden guests” can linger for decades, tuck themselves into different organs, and sometimes help with repair or tip the balance toward autoimmune disease. (It would explain a lot)

These microchimeric cells can speed wound healing, nudge the immune system to accept transplanted organs, and generally wreck the notion that our defenses simply sort everything into “self” and “non‑self.”

And because that’s not wild enough, Barnéoud dives straight into the melodramatic: if our bodies are mosaics built from relatives’ cells and pieces of us can go on living inside someone else, what does that do to our ideas of identity, individuality, and where life—and death—actually begin and end?

Manganese, Dark Oxygen Production, and the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery

The discovery of dark oxygen production has been so exciting and, well, revolutionary. I mean, biochemistry has long taught that photosynthesis—and its dependence on light—is the major generator of the oxygen that fills Earth’s atmosphere and therefore is directly linked to life on this planet. The claim that another major method of oxygen generation had been found in the depths of our oceans challenges a scientific dogma that is almost sacrosanct, and it was published Nature.

Nature Journal? Is that important?

Why, yes. Publication in Nature (UK) or Science (US) is a big deal. These journals are among the most selective and widely read in all of science, so publication signals that the work is both rigorous and broadly important. Their articles are highly cited and closely watched by other scientists, funding agencies, and the media, which can boost a researcher’s visibility and career opportunities. It’s like:

• The scientific equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize–level spotlight.

• The research equivalent of a best-picture nomination at the Oscars.

• Like your album going multi-platinum—among scientists.

After publication, the dark oxygen paper shot into the top tier of 2024 articles because the research is so “sexy.” There are online newspaper posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, excitement in the sci-fi writing community—

Total scientific clickbait.

But before we fall madly in love with this idea, let’s meet manganese

Manganese (Mn) is a silvery‑gray transition metal in group 7, period 4 of the periodic table with atomic number 25 and an atomic weight of about 54.94. One of its earliest uses was by prehistoric cave painters of the Lascaux region of France around 30,000 years ago. Isolated in 1774 by Swedish scientist Johan Gahn, it is moderately abundant in Earth’s crust (~0.1% by weight), occurring mainly in oxides (Mn_nO_m) and hydroxides (Mn_n(OH)_m)—you also might remember pinkish manganese chloride (MnCl₂) crystals in a chemistry set you got for Christmas or your birthday.

It’s especially concentrated in deep‑sea polymetallic nodules (we’ll come back to these in a sec). Manganese melts at ~1,245°C and boils at ~2,060 °C, so it’s great as a steel hardening alloy—the Romans used it in their weapons, and look how far they got. But a lot of its technical value is due to its multiple oxidation states, most commonly +2, +3, +4, and +7, which means a lot of electrons can flow through it. Electron flow means electrical generation and … batteries (like alkaline cells using MnO₂ as cathode material).

In biology, manganese is essential to life. It’s a cofactor for various enzymes and, critically, sits at the heart of the oxygen-evolving complex of photosystem II, where a manganese, calcium, and oxygen cluster (Mn₄CaO₅) helps split water into oxygen during photosynthesis or Light Oxygen Production (LOP). While trace manganese is a necessary micronutrient for human health, excessive exposure (especially airborne in “occupational” settings) can be neurotoxic, leading to manganism, a Parkinson‑like syndrome.​

Back to deep‑sea polymetallic nodules, manganese, and Dark Oxygen Production

Deep-sea polymetallic nodules are potato-sized lumps of rock that sit loose on the abyssal seafloor, typically 4,000–6,000 meters (~2.5–3.7 miles) down. They grow over millions of years as metals precipitate from seawater around a core. They’re unusually rich in nickel, cobalt, copper, and manganese—all the elements needed for batteries (think energy generation for artificial intelligence), renewable energy tech (solar, wind), and electronics.

Because each field of these nodules (thousands and thousands of them) on the sea floor can contain very high concentrations of battery metals, countries, companies, and researchers see them as a key source for our energy transition from fossil fuels to “clean” energy. Harvesting these nodules could also decrease terrestrial mining in sensitive areas.

But these fields aren’t sterile. Nodules act as habitats for deep‑sea animals and microbes (another thing we’ll get back to), creating unique environmental communities that don’t exist on the surrounding soft mud—so nodule fields themselves could be considered “sensitive areas.”​

Studies on the impact of nodule mining are ongoing, and many are funded—surprise—by mining companies. One high-profile example is Sweetman, A.K., Smith, A.J., de Jonge, D.S.W. et al. Evidence of dark oxygen production at the abyssal seafloor. Nat. Geosci. 17, 737–739 (2024).

Sweetman et al. used a common method to measure oxygen in their study: Benthic chambers. Briefly, imagine putting an upside-down mixing bowl on the seafloor, trapping a patch of water and sand—or polymetallic nodules—so you can watch how they “breathe” over time. The chamber is a sealed, usually clear dome or cylinder pushed into the seabed that encloses sediment, organisms, and the water above, so scientists can track how gases like oxygen change inside without disruption from waves or currents. Sensors inside constantly record oxygen levels, letting researchers see whether life in the sediment is using up oxygen (as expected) or whether something in that little patch is mysteriously making more.

To support such a bold claim as dark oxygen production, rigorous repetition and well-designed controls are essential. Doing that kind of work on the abyssal seafloor, miles beneath a research vessel, is anything but trivial or easy.

What Sweetman’s “dark oxygen” study claims

Sweetman’s team placed benthic chambers on nodule-rich abyssal seafloor in the Clarion‑Clipperton Zone, an area rich in polymetallic nodules. They expected to see oxygen slowly decrease inside the chambers as microbes respired. Instead, in several chambers, dissolved oxygen rose over two days, even though there was no sunlight and no photosynthesis at those depths.

Unexpected? Oh, yeah.

Since the seafloor in the CCZ is carpeted with polymetallic nodules containing the same manganese and other metals used in both electrical current generation AND photophysiologic light generation, the team proposed that these nodules act like tiny “geobatteries”, generating electrical currents that split seawater into hydrogen and oxygen inside the chambers(!)

Sweetman et al. even tested the generation of electricity in polymetallic nodules in the lab and found one nodule that generated 0.95V. Not enough to split water to oxygen and hydrogen (~1.5V is needed for that), so they hypothesized that electrochemical reactions on and between nodules might be driving oxygen production.

And, because this oxygen would be produced in total darkness and potentially support seafloor life or even have implications for how early aerobic life could have started on Earth, they called it “dark oxygen,” suggesting it might be a previously unrecognized oxygen source in the deep ocean.

This finding is ground-breaking and is making scientists rethink everything from the start of life on Earth to the potential of life on dark moons and planets …

Until you read the rebuttals to the article. They are strong because they argue that Sweetman et al. did something researchers are not supposed to do: they discarded data that didn’t support their hypothesis.

Which we’ll hear about in the next episode of the Periodic Table of DEATH and Mystery. Oh. And those microbes on the deep-sea floor? Could they be the source of oxygen instead of the nodules? We’ll learn something about that, too.

Thank you for getting ALL the way to the bottom! And as always, thanks for reading my books.

I’d like to relate a story from the relatively recent past (the 1960s). A little girl with her curly golden-brown hair caught up in two adorable doggie ears high on her head, spots a thumbnail-sized shiny brown disk at her feet. She drops to her haunches, peering with concentration at the ground. Lifting her head, a triumphant smile wreathing her face, she tells her father in her very first sentence ever, “I see bug,” at which time her older sister comes over and stomps it.

We’ll come back to that true story later because the point was to get bugs into the conversation without chasing you off, dear reader. Now I want to introduce 4-inch-long cockroaches (1), giant millipedes (up to eight feet long), and dragonflies (the size of pigeons) of the Carboniferous Era (323 to 299 million years ago) (2) and ask this question: Why were bugs so BIG 300 million years ago? The answer in no small part is because of oxygen (O), the eighth element of the periodic table and one that most life on earth can’t live without.

But why is O so important for life on this planet? Not to sound flippant, but life was built around oxidation (and reduction), and O is a great oxidizer, which means it easily extracts electrons from other atoms and molecules and holds onto them. If given the chance, O will take electrons and oxidize other molecules while it becomes reduced (adding a negative charge to its structure) (3). Most living organisms gain energy by stripping electrons from carbon-based molecules—carbohydrates (sugar), fats and fatty acids, amino acids, and protein. The stripped carbon is ultimately turned into carbon dioxide (CO₂), which is released during exhalations. In an elegant series of connected molecules in our cells, the electrons are transferred to the oxygen we breathe in, and both end up in water (H₂O), a byproduct of cellular fuel combustion (4—probably the BEST biochemistry movie ever).

Oxygen in the atmosphere

The air on Earth right now contains 20.95% O, 78.08% Nitrogen (N), 0.95% Argon (Ar), and 0.035% CO₂ (5), about 420 parts per million (ppm) (6). But back in the Carboniferous era, when giant bugs ruled the land, O made up ~35% of the atmosphere and CO₂ was at 1500 ppm (7). The high CO₂ was great for plants because plants use CO₂ to make the building blocks of their structure—carbohydrates, amino acids and proteins, and fats and fatty acids. High CO₂ resulted in more and larger plants covering the land, which then pumped out more oxygen into the atmosphere as a by-product of photosynthesis (8). FYI: Carboniferous levels of oxygen would be chronically toxic to humans (9), but bugs in the era evolutionarily adapted to the higher amounts of oxygen and used it to grow to enormous size.

The easiest explanation is that bugs (and by bugs I mean both insects and arachnids) used the higher concentration of oxygen and greater nutrient availability to process more carbon fuel, which allowed for greater growth over time. But of course, it’s more complex than that, and to explain that extra complexity, we will need to talk about insect anatomy.

This just keeps getting better and better, right?

All oxygen-breathing organisms MUST get enough O into their tissues and cells to process fuel and create energy. But O doesn’t dissolve or diffuse well in liquid, and between 55-60% of an adult human is water (10). So humans have developed a closed circulatory system that uses the heart to pump oxygen-rich blood deep into their bodies. In fact, the smallest of our circulatory vessels, capillaries, are literally the width of an oxygen-carrying red blood cell. Capillaries spiderweb over or very near every cell of our body to deliver oxygen picked up in our lungs.

Bugs have a completely different system for gas exchange (O₂ in, CO₂ out). Small tubes in the insect called spiracles allow air to penetrate the insect’s body. Spiracles then open into a body-wide system of more tubes called trachea, which branch into smaller tracheoles that transport oxygen to deeper tissues (11). This system allows insects to use the inefficient direct oxygen diffusion method, which can limit body size.

More than you ever wanted to know about bugs

With that in mind, here are a couple of facts about insects today that will help us understand the development of super-huge bugs in the past:

1. In highly active insects, the tracheal system can take up 50% of their body volume, leaving less room for other tissues to develop.

2. Tracheal cells are very sensitive to oxygen levels in the insect’s tissues. When low levels are detected in an insect’s tissues, tracheal cells respond by growing more branches.

Both a large tracheal system and oxygen-responsive growth require energy that could otherwise be used to grow overall BIGGER bugs. In fact, experiments have shown that dragonflies grown in decreased oxygen cause them to grow 20% smaller with a higher body volume of trachea than controls, while dragonflies grown in increased oxygen environments are 15% larger with a less extensive, lower body volume of trachea than controls (12). The conclusion? Bugs in the Carboniferous Era were probably more like the larger, oxygen-grown dragonflies.

Almost done, and there’s a Jurassic Park reference

But how can we prove that Carboniferous bugs had smaller trachea? The old Jurassic Park (1993) trick: Measure the tracheal anatomy of ancient insects trapped in amber! (13).

To be fair, increased size with higher oxygen is only one theory of huge bug growth. Others include less tracheal growth to decrease oxygen toxicity, leading to larger insect size with the energy savings AND/OR lack of predators for insects in the Carboniferous Era.

Back to the bug story

The older sister who stomped the “I see bug” bug heard that tale many times growing up, and once tearfully asked if she actually killed the bug. Her father gave her an understanding hug and told her no, the bug was already dead. Her mind and soul relieved, she grew up with a tender heart, makes sure spiders she finds in her home are transported outside alive, and writes mysteries where someone invariably dies, sometimes horribly. A very odd dichotomy.