51–60 of 105 posts
"To illustrate that, the email points out that Coke can be used to clean a toilet, help remove a rusty bolt, or remove blood from a highway accident." Yeah well why would anybody believe that if a soda can be used in such ways that it is also bad for you? I mean I flush the toilet with water! With WATER! And it removes most traces of excrement... Arg, it must be bad for you!
I'd be interested to see if raw phosphoric acid has much effect on nails. I'd also be interested to see if it's at all possible to dissolve a nail in coke - perhaps by heating the coke, agitating it, and using vast quantities over a long time?
I'm guessing you would need to have a few controls - one plain "still" water and one carbonated water just to sort out the effects of those. I imagine it is possible so long as the nail is made of something prone to corrosion, but I'm not so sure it would be from the ingredients in the Coke as much as the exposure to water.
Prone to acidic corrosion. Freshly machined stainless steel will rust unless its passivated in an acidic dip, you couldda chrome plated it but dissolving off everything not chrome ends up in about the same place.
Another good one is aluminum as in aluminum nails, pre 1980s house siding was aluminum for decades before it switched to short life vinyl siding, and aluminum is mostly impervious to acids and reacts very strongly to alkali. Technically pure aluminum will melt away in either, but the oxide coating is stable in acids and dissolves in bases, so in practice aluminum is acid proof and alkali melts right thru it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coke is used to clean a toilet and not flush it. To clean a toilet, generally some acid or detergent is needed. Effectiveness of Coke being used for this purpose shows its acidic nature and its ability to dissolve the material on which it is applied.
Forget about coke and water! The real danger is dihydrogen monoxide.
I remember when my mom wanted to teach me not to drink soda when I was young, that it was bad. So to show it was bad for the tooth's she took one of my tooth I lost and put it in coca cola. And after a couple of weeks (don't remember the time exactly, but it was quite long time) it had dissolved to just some goo at the bottom of the glass :)
Gee, a simple metric might've been just to measure the mass of the nail before and after.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Coke is used to clean a toilet and not flush it. To clean a toilet, generally some acid or detergent is needed. Effectiveness of Coke being used for this purpose shows its acidic nature and its ability to dissolve the material on which it is applied.
It can also be used to clean battery terminals among other things. But then again, vinegar is a fairly common cleaning agent: Baking soda and salt are fairly effective as well. I've used salt and lemon juice to clean tarnish off of copper: Toothpaste to clean the tarnish off of silver jewelry or shine up gold. None of these are viewed as bad or unhealthy in the doses we tend to consume them in. Vegetable oils and wax…
Absolutely, but I'd be worried about someone who chugged any of those things in the same quantity peopole tend to drink coke.
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Still does not mean it is bad for you. Same holds for vinegar (it's acidic). Vinegar is not bad for you, at least when pored over your salad. In fact, only the dose determines the toxicity, it makes no sense to talk about toxicity with out discussing dose (or LD50 value or something.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dose_makes_the_poison
yeah, please drink half a litre, or even better 2 litre of vinegar and report back to us how that went. or to reverse it - do you know anybody drinking coke in same amounts as usage of vinegar when pouring over salad?
Edit: Ok, wanted to make a correction after thinking more about that day: My consumed amount was likely around half that. I was consuming various other oddities during this time as well (drinking hot sauce for example) and there couldn't have been room for 16oz of just vinegar. If you've not played around with those tablets, I recommend it even if you get some stomach upset from the things you consume.
Another variation is Can Fanta dissolve a piece of liver? In Russia it's commonly believed that it does. Have no idea if it's true, probably not. Yet another gem is Can Pepsi be used to de-calcify and clean toilets? This is actually more believable, but still quite a bit out there.