Kind: captions
Language: en
part of this video was sponsored by
Google domains
this is a U.S government Warehouse that
sells almost anything you can imagine
blueberries steel cigarettes limestone a
standard bullet and even some things you
don't want to imagine I also see you
have domestic sludge there this is
domestic sludge
so when you flush a toilet and it goes
through the sewer and it goes into a
wastewater treatment plant the first
step is to get rid of all the solid
material we took that we dried it down
so it's a nice fine powder I wouldn't
recommend smelling it
what is the purpose of all this stuff
why are they selling it and why is it so
expensive
does it ever feel like you're living
inside a Sci-Fi
story or something I've been here for a
long time so I I don't think it but from
that perspective but I should say yes
the science fiction element to me is
like there's someone thinking about that
there's someone collecting that it seems
so fictional like why should a place
like this exist there are Apple leaves
and Peach leaves oyster tissue bars of
zinc metal carbon dioxide and nitrogen
in these Vats of liquid nitrogen there
are samples of marine animals muscle
samples dolphin samples well samples
birds as well bird tissue and
um
and some human tissue as well
but perhaps the weirdest thing they sell
is something really mundane
peanut butter
it looks like a peanut butter it is
peanut butter that's creamy it's
probably the most expensive jar of
peanut butter in the whole world
we essentially pay for a company to make
generic peanut butter and we might have
2 000 jars of generic peanut butter and
what we do is we then go through and
measure the fats in these jars and
figure out how much of various compounds
are in there and we actually then slap
on a label and provide a certificate at
the end have you ever eaten some of this
peanut butter all of these things are
not for human consumption because I
don't know if I could actually tell you
how old it is
but it's old enough that you probably
don't want to eat it how much does it
cost these are not sold at commercial
grade prices so a this jar of peanut
butter is not 3.99 this jar I believe is
around a thousand dollars well this is
not something that would be viable for
you to make your peanut butter and jelly
sandwich with
an ordinary jar of peanut butter costs
less than five dollars and on the label
you can see the ingredients and the
amounts of different nutrients like
protein fats sugar and sodium those
values have been measured by the
manufacturer using different machines
and analytical techniques but how do you
know those results are accurate well
this is where the government's standard
jar of peanut butter comes in it is
mixed up so carefully and thoroughly
that each jar contains exactly the same
substance we take great pains at
homogenizing these things make sure it's
consistent then scientists at the
National Institute of Standards and
Technology nist take years to
painstakingly identify the quantities of
all the different compounds in the
peanut butter with specified
uncertainties this peanut butter is then
known as a standard reference material
or SRM they sell these perfectly
characterized SRM samples of peanut
butter to researchers and manufacturers
so they can calibrate their equipment
essentially the buyer knows that their
equipment is working properly if when
they run the standard peanut butter they
get the values nist supplies on the
certificate
we've spent a lot of time to make sure
that we're confident and you know we can
spend years studying the amount of fat
in here and trying to figure out exactly
what those numbers are so what you're
paying for is not really the peanut
butter it's the knowledge of exactly
what is in the peanut butter and so this
is what really drives the cost of a
standard reference material is our
ability to assert the truth we produce
what I call truth in a bottle
you might think why does it matter that
the label on my peanut butter is
accurate but it is way more than the
things on the label that nist measures
peanut butter actually contains
naturally occurring aflatoxins they're a
carcinogen which can cause liver cancer
and they're produced by fungi on the
peanuts so if your peanut butter is made
from a bad batch of peanuts you want the
factory to be able to accurately detect
elevated levels of aflatoxins and
they're able to do that because the
standard peanut butter contains a known
level of aflatoxin that can be used to
calibrate their equipment the FDA like
sample peanut butters and look for
aflatoxin a lot of times you actually
have commercial Laboratories that
measure it in accordance to the FDA the
FDA May encourage them to use the
reference material standard reference
material to make sure they're getting
the right numbers FDA may not be
handling it themselves
there are different challenges to
measuring the components of different
foods fine powder for example is easier
to characterize than goopy peanut butter
so it's helpful to have a standard
material that closely matches the Target
in composition and consistency
but it's also impossible for nist to
characterize every different type of
food we're not going to make a trout and
a perch and a salmon material all these
different with the same numbers we're
going to we're going to kind of grab an
average fish and kind of treat that so
if you're measuring it in other fish you
can usually use it as a surrogate so you
have a standard trout correct yes uh
tell me about meat homogenate
it is a mixed meat product that has been
mixed thoroughly been ground into a very
fine particle and packed into a very
nice tin why do you mix like chicken and
pork why not just have like a chicken
reference support reference we'd never
do this by ourselves we always work with
these industry companies and say hey
what kind of mixes do you need and then
we request that kind of material to be
Blended
for a reference material to be useful it
doesn't have to be the exact material a
manufacturer wants to characterize it
just has to be close enough nist sells
around 30 different food items that are
spread around their food triangle at the
corners of the triangle are 100
carbohydrate 100 fat and 100 protein So
based on their mix of these three macro
ingredients all foods fall somewhere on
this triangle and to characterize each
one you would want to use the closest
standard reference material if you're
trying to do your measurements and tell
you know regulatory Authority that I'm
making you know a food that's a kibble
but I'm measuring it against peanut
butter they're going to be saying well
but peanut butter has a wildly different
fat content so what we want to give them
is something a matrix that looks as much
as possible is what they're used to
dealing with they even have a standard
diet mix this is called typical diet
through surveys they identified what the
average American eats
and they purchased it all and they
blended it all up and then they
freeze-dried it into a nice fine powder
it's a it's like a light gray powder and
this represents all the nutritional
components that an average American
would consume so it represents the sugar
content it represents the proteins that
you might have any vitamins you might
have any fats you might have is all in a
little jar that we puree up
in total nist has nearly 1300 standard
reference materials
this is our warehouse and so it's
approximately 20 000 square foot
Warehouse in which we store all of our
inventory our products the the srms and
so we are a business
um and so what excites me about this is
being on the technical side is that I
get to run a 20 million dollar business
within the federal government we sell
about 30 000 units a year so each order
is about three three units half of them
are sold domestically and half are sold
to an international audience you can see
all the prices on on our website so it's
shop.nist.gov is the e-commerce
storefront for all these materials you
can search for whatever you want you can
search for peanut butter you can search
for meat homogeneity if I like had a
thousand dollars would you sell that to
me there is some control to who we sell
to
um I feel like this is unfair like I'm a
scientist
if I got a thousand bucks nist won't
sell to just anyone but there are plenty
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video
but it's not just food you need
standards for
in the early 1900s like 1905 there was a
huge issue with the quality of Steel
that was being used in rail cars both
locomotives and on the tracks it was
that they knew what they had to have in
the Alloys to make it work it's just
that all the foundries that were making
them had no way to compare their results
of the material they were making to with
every all the chemists knew they should
be making and so Congress basically said
to National Bureau of Standards at the
time we need you to come up with
standard samples of seals that everyone
can be on the same page
and so what we did was we made these
standards deals analyze them for all
their constituent parts so all the
elements the Chrome the iron the
hydrogen carbon and then distributed
that to the stakeholders again the
foundries so that they can intercompare
and compare their results to a known
source of Steel and those were our very
first products that we produced steel is
still one of the most important srms at
nist
what's your best-selling product ah
those are called Sharpies
Sharpies yeah okay let's go look at a
Sharpie if you want to test how strong
your steel is what Professor Sharpie Mr
Sharpie came up with was a test where he
set up a pendulum and at the end of a
pendulum is a weight and if you pull
that pendulum up to a certain distance
you can calculate its potential energy
at the bottom of the swing of this
Pendulum The Arc is a vise and in the
vise
is held a standard piece of metal called
a chirpy and this has a little v-notch
in it so the idea is that the panel line
comes through and breaks this thing and
then it goes up on the other side and
from that you can then calculate the
amount of energy that it took to break
this piece of Steel every company in the
United States and frankly
internationally now has to check their
materials against our Sharpies annually
because the kind of Steels they're
making are used in pipelines or they're
used in defense Industries you know for
tanks for things that store nuclear
waste so I have a joke I love things
that break or burn and these things
break and they have to break and they
can't reuse them so we sell a lot how
many would you sell in a year we sell of
those of all the different kinds we sell
about 8 000. yeah nist has been making
these standard reference materials for
over a century this is what our very
first standard sample number one looks
like it is the real deal and it's gray
powder it's Limestone we are still
making Limestone number one for 110
years years and it is still so popular
that we sell 40 to 50 units a year of
this in that wild very few companies are
in existence that are still selling some
of their original products and we do
most of the srms we've discussed so far
are used for calibration but there's
another class of srms used for
validation this means they're used
directly in Industry tests to ensure
consistency an example is cigarettes
evidently smoking in bed was a real
issue you know people were like catching
on fire and so there was a lot of
Regulation as to how materials in your
mattress or in your sheets or your bed
closed should react to to a combustible
source and we produced some standard
cigarettes that essentially along with
the ASTM tests would help a manufacturer
determine how flammable their Furniture
was or their bed closed or their
mattress
and for those tests to be consistent the
fires must be started with a
standardized Nest cigarette
fires started by smoking materials are
the leading cause of death by fire in
the home in the U.S products like this
but also with the regulations or in
place and just the the educational
campaigns that went on have saved many
many lives but they also have standards
for things you would never expect like a
standard bullet
when a bullet is fired through a gun you
know that the rifling in the barrel
imparts March to the bullet forensic
Labs then have to measure these grooves
to match the bullet from the crime scene
to others fired by the suspected weapon
but how do you know they are accurately
measuring the grooves so this has
standard marks on it they replicated a
bullet putting I believe essentially
Nano indentations on it so very very
fine marks and mapped it on this bullet
they weren't fired through a gun they
were manufactured so to validate their
equipment forensic Labs can run the
standard Bullet at the same time as a
bullet from a crime scene so they know
their measurements are accurate
the goal of every standard is to
quantify something about the world
something important that's usually
pretty hard to measure
like house dust
in the early 90s we worked with maid
services and we got vacuum bags we went
to hotels went to motels took all the
vacuum bags that we got from all of
these hotels and houses and everything
mixed it together in a big pot so it's
fully mixed so every little jar has the
same number of chemicals has the same
amount of material in it and then we
measured everything in there and the
reason why I find dust is interesting
because dust is from an environmental
point of view is a really good way to
tell what you and I in our house are
being exposed to identifying dangerous
contaminants is a big part of what these
standard reference materials are for
which is why they have several types of
lead paint or water from a glacier in
Greenland these are so rare that we have
to limit distribution of one unit per
customer per three years whoa or dirt
from New Jersey and Montana we have a
lot of soil samples they had the
permission to go into essentially a
contaminated industrial site in Bozeman
Montana and collect a bunch of rocks in
a five gallon pale and bring them back
and crunch them up and so these are
certified again for things like toxic
elements
now the ultimate way to measure what
contaminants were exposed to is by what
comes out of us
which is why nist sells domestic sludge
this is a record of what has come out of
our bodies and down our sewers
researchers can examine it for traces of
toxins or heavy metals contaminants that
many of us may be exposed to without
knowing it's really about environmental
monitoring and next year they're coming
out with an actual human poop product
it's been in the news quite a bit is you
know health is related to your
microbiome right and we're starting to
understand that you know that your gut
flora and your and what's in your in
your stomach is hugely important to your
health your mental attitude just all
sorts of things a fecal matter is an
incredibly difficult Matrix to measure
and extract all the different components
out of and what this material will do is
support measurements of the metabolites
and it will be distributed as a vial of
powder essentially do you know how much
they got uh a crap leg
as our knowledge of the world evolves so
too to the standard reference materials
stored in this Warehouse nist is
preparing to launch its first living
standard reference material next year
the living cells will be hamster ovary
cells that can produce monoclonal
antibodies monoclonal antibodies now
account for five of the 10 top selling
drugs and over 75 billion dollars in
annual sales worldwide when monkey pox
started spreading earlier this year one
issue with diagnosing the disease was
that there were no clear laboratory
tests to tell if someone was infected
nist was able to create a positive
control reference of the monkeypox DNA
in just 30 days
this Warehouse is a very strange place
to walk around so many disparate pieces
of our world carefully characterized
labeled and packaged up it's a reminder
that behind the scenes invisible to most
of us there are a group of people
working tirelessly to ensure that things
are what we think they are when we eat
peanut butter on toast we can be sure
the peanut butter contains what the
label says when your blood test comes
back with a cholesterol reading you know
it was calibrated with a standard and
when you walk into a steel framed
building you know the steel has the
appropriate structural and mechanical
properties to hold up that structure our
world works because unbeknownst to most
of us there is a small army of people
diligently checking that what is out
there aligns with the standards
even our poop