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  • Hacker News
  • How does the water taste?
  • Slap the 'organic' label on it and sell it at restaurants for $150k/L. It will sell.
  • I hadn't put much thought into why it was called "Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water".

    My first hint should have been that Austria is landlocked.

  • A US gallon of deuterium water costs roughly $2,600 to $3,800, while a gallon of pure tritium water (super-heavy water) would cost about $44 million.
  • Reminds of me of the "most expensive peanut butter" at ~$2.44/g - sold by NIST, I assume for some sort of peanut butter factory process calibration: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387
    by sudb
  • Interesting article but left me wondering why they don't use ¹H₂¹⁶O as the "standard water"? Surely you can make that (relatively) easily in a centrifuge by spinning out the lightest fraction of water.
    by rwmj
  • most needs for such water are for calibration of instruments - many labs run stable isotopes measurements which has many applications from tracing how plants use water to measuring your metabolic base rate .. so the main use case it to calibrate instruments because it's really difficult to have an absolute measurement of stable isotope ratios from first principles - and the ratios are so small you typically express them in relation to standards like VSMOW
  • NIST Cigarettes are a mere $204 per carton.

    Depending on what state you live in, that's not bad these days.

    https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

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