It was known long ago that lead (and other) water pipes develop a passivation layer due to minerals in the water, and the water is adjusted to do so if it doesn't naturally, but everyone knows about the case of Flint, Michigan where they didn't.

Yes, in Hamburg, Germany there are a lot of lead pipes still. When moving there I got to find this out by a letter from the government, that I should know that I have many times over the limit drinking water which I was consuming. I was always telling others to drink the safe tap water ...

I think it's ridiculous that landlords are able to rent properties that will give tenants lead poisoning as long as they provide a warning. I have a feeling that many people think tbe warning is just for legal liability and don't realize that their landlord is knowingly poisoning them.

Avgas still has lead in it unfortunately.

Chicago has so much lead pipe because “lead is so dangerous that only union pipe fitters can work with it”, and the pipe fitters union lobbied to put in more to create more work for themselves. Union leadership should’ve went to jail for that

Meaningful in-home water filtration increasingly seems pretty much mandatory.

The degree of water filtration often requires about having to learn about re-mineralizing.

Most likely leaded gasoline from the rise of cars is our bariatric les fascism.

Somewhat coincidentally I am reading "The Language Puzzle" and the author puts forward the theory that based on the tool evidence left behind that the language development of Neanderthals was as much as they could do with their brain physiology and environment, i.e. there was no improvement in stone tools over their entire history versus the other human population evidence we have at close to the same time and that the improvement in stone tools in other populations had to be verbally communicated. There of course is the bias in the evidence we have may not be fully representative and this theory is not mutually exclusive with the genetic argument in the article.

Agreed. Lead main source in nature is galena, which is relatively nontoxic. It rarely occurs in metallic form.

Your parents were correct about the advice, but wrong about the reasoning. Possibly hot water leaches out lead easier, but it’s more about water sitting in a hot water tank.

Hot water in a home usually sits in a metal tank that is full of scale/minerals. Once the sacrificial anode is used up (maybe 1% of people actually replace their anode when needed), the tank begins corroding.

Hot water is for washing things, cold water is for consumption.

That might have been true locally, but you need to know the actual lead levels (which can change with infrastructure changes) in cold and hot water to know for sure.

I replaced my hot water heater and supply pipes myself, so it has no more lead than the cold. They're currently tearing up my street to replace the lead in supply lines, so... everything will hopefully improve here.

It’s more that hot water will leech more lead from whatever lines do you have, including in the water heater itself. The biggest concern would generally be lead solder. There’s no reason you would have lead lines for hot water and copper lines for cold.

Also the hot water sits in a tank (in most homes) full of scale and may just taste worse.

I grew up doing this, though in our case the old heating system drew water from a tank in the roofspace where it could have been left sitting for a long time before being used.

We were also taught to run the cold tap until it got really cold (indicating that fresh water from the mains was coming out) before drinking from it.

Weirdly, I remember that we had our water pipes replaced with plastic and the heating system modernised when the house was renovated in the late 80s, but we still persisted with those habits afterwards...

Australian friends still get super upset with me for wasting so much water - they have water conservation drummed into them from an early age, so tend to see running the tap even for a second or two too long as being some sort of terrible sin.

> In the late 1950s through the 1970s Herbert Needleman and Clair Cameron Patterson did research trying to prove lead's toxicity to humans. In the 1980s Needleman was falsely accused of scientific misconduct by lead industry associates

> In 1991, together with Claire Ernhart, Scarr was involved as an expert witness on behalf of the lead industry in the lawsuit United States v. Sharon Steel Corp., on the opposite side of Herbert Needleman who was testifying for the U.S. Justice Department owing to his research on the relationship between lead exposure and IQ.[0]

> When the trial was declared open to the public, Scarr initially refused to come and later when she was persuaded she constantly refused to answer questions. Scarr received money from the lead industry for consulting services which creates a conflict of interest.

> Scarr retired to Hawaii in 1997, where she learned scuba diving, even obtaining a rescue diver certification. She also traveled "a lot, especially on cruise ships"

Jesus Christ.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandra_Scarr

I think Hacker news removes "filler" words from headlines, which is why it is so weirdly phrased. The original headline is different.

The completely pointless and oftentime confusing capitalization doesn't help, as usual.

Sorry for the grumpy comment y’all/OP. I’ve had a migraine for days during my vacation week and it’s getting to me.

I get your joke, but the thesis here isn't that Neanderthals were exposed to more lead. Instead, the claim is that we might have evolved a mutation that protects our brain against lead to some extent.

I really wanted to like Huel. I like the idea of their meals, like chilli, but I didn't like it. Their Soylent type drink wasn't good either. Soylent 1.5 was the best.

What, did they have a lead contamination issue?