"Mad as a Hatter"

If you watch or read "Alice in the wonderland" before, you might have notice the strange behaviour of our hatter(Johnny Depp in movies). This actually has its origins back into CHEMISTRY! Today, I will like to give credit to the chemist(or some disgusting hatter) who actually came up with this saying: "Mad as a hatter". Its going to be a super long post about chemistry, you can skip it if you're not interested. :P Oh right, why chemistry you asked? Cause i just had chemistry paper today. Next is.... Probability. -.- Good luck to me. yay. (not-enthu-at-all-yay)

Mercury as a vapour is something you need to be considerate about, Whether we know about mercury and its toxicity. Well, often mercury toxicity is associated with the term "mad as a hatter". Origins of mad as a hatter is from "Alice in the Wonderland". We have a picture of hatter here who is clearly mad who is written by Lewis Carol in Oxford. Who is a mathematician, all full of mathematics and symmetry and strange stories, but he wrote with the inclines of it.

The hatters themselves used to use felt, the camel felt to actually make hats. When they make hats, they shape the felt to give the hat of your design. They actually found, somebody found, i don't know how, but they found that if camel urinated on the felt, it actually makes it easier for the felt to be mould.The french hatters, decided that instead of using camel urine, they use their own urine. When they use their own urine, they really did get the felt easily to mould.

Now if i think about that, what is felt? It is hair, right? Its like hair, just like our hair. Our hair is keratin, it contains basically proteins in it. And proteins contains thiolate residue from cysteine. When your parents curl their hair, to give them a nice curl look with thongs, where they would heat their hair with curlers, the heating denatures the protein. And what you get is crosslinks of the cysteine residue to form disulphide bonds hence your hair goes all curly. So you're denaturing the protein. Nowadays when i work in a lab and i want to denature a protein, guess what i use? I use urea! Urea is very good at hydrogen bonding, it breaks up all the tertiary structure of proteins.

I suspect the french hatters were using urea in their urine and i dont know how they came across it, or whether we start using urea because they use urine in the first place. But, thats basically how i imagine that it worked. Then, there was one particular king hatter, he was the best hatter, and his urine was just the best! The felt where he urinated on, was everybody's felt of choice. It turn out, his felt was very good, but not only he was a good hatter, he also had syphillis. He was being treated for his syphillis with a mercury compound. So then they work out, they didn't have to use urine, just use mercury. And so hatters use mercuric salts, to weed into the felt, and the felt then would be easy to mould. What do u think is happening? What would mercury bind to in protein? What type of ligand did it bind to? "soft" ligand and what are we exactly talking about? the cysteines. The same as what we talked about in the hair. I reckon the mercury binds to the sulphur residue, hence denaturing the protein, so it doesn't have its own nature anymore. Don't have afro or straight hair, you can do what you like with it.

The hatters once they started using mercury, well they probably be better off using the frenchman urine. Because mercury is far toxic than urine, and they all developed madness, madness was associated with hatters disease, which was shaking and slurred speech. Mercury itself is a very potent neurotoxic and if we want to try and predict why it is toxic, its a complicated problem, but it leads us in the first principles. We would expect mercury 2+ to be soft metal ion to binds to any the thio group, we have lots of thio, cysteine, amino acids, thio ether from thionine are all sulphur containing ligands, that is where mercury will bind. :D (Donelly, 2011)

So, that is it about "Mad as a Hatter". As my updates about my life, lets just say.. Erm, parental control sucks. Now i can't post embed here for my beloved readers. -.-

Other than that, its all good. I need a hobby. Winter is here, need to keep my mind off the cold.

Ciaoz for now, probability needs me.