Part of this video was sponsored by Google Domains. This is a US 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. (Dr. Place laughs) This is domestic sludge.
So, when you flush your 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, 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?
[Dr. Choquette] You know, I’ve been here for a long time, so I don’t think it from that perspective, but I should say yes. [Derek] The science fiction element to me is like there’s someone thinking about that? Yeah. 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 in nitrogen. In these vats of liquid nitrogen, there are samples of marine animals: mussel samples, dolphin samples, whale samples. Birds as well, bird tissue 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. It’s creamy. [Derek] It’s probably the most expensive jar of peanut butter in the whole world.
Well, we essentially pay for a company to make generic peanut butter. We might have 2000 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, this jar of peanut butter is not $3.99 cents. This jar, I believe, is around a thousand dollars. This is not something that would be viable for you to make your peanut butter and jelly sandwich with.
[Derek] An ordinary jar of peanut butter costs less than $5. 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.
[Derek] 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.
[Derek] So what you’re paying for is not really the peanut butter, it’s the knowledge of exactly what is in the peanut butter. We have to make sure that we have the right amount of inventory on hand to meet the needs of our customers.
NIST’s ability to produce accurate reference materials is what drives the cost of these materials. This extends far beyond the labels of food products; it is important to be able to detect carcinogens such as aflatoxins that may be present in food. The FDA encourages the use of standard reference materials to ensure accuracy when measuring food components. NIST has a variety of different food reference materials, such as a standard trout and a meat homogenate. The “typical diet” mix is a freeze-dried powder that represents the average American diet. In total, NIST has nearly 1300 standard reference materials stored in their 20,000 square foot warehouse. And then you measure how much energy it took to break it.
Excitingly, I have the opportunity to run a 20 million dollar business within the federal government. We sell about 30,000 units a year, with each order being around three units. Half are sold domestically and the other half are sold internationally. Our prices can be found on our website, shop.nist.gov, where you can search for a variety of products.
However, NIST will not sell to just anyone, but there are plenty of other websites that do. This part of the video is sponsored by Google Domains, which makes it easy to set up an online business. I used Google Domains to set up my own website, snatoms.com, for a product I invented called Snatoms. It’s a molecular modeling kit with atoms that snap together magnetically.
Google Domains allows me to have a reliable website that runs on Google Cloud’s super fast DNS infrastructure. It also provides me with security features like built in privacy protection and two factor authentication. Plus, it connects to other tools like Google Workspace and Google Analytics to help me understand and build the business.
In the early 1900s, there was an issue with the quality of steel used in rail cars and locomotives. Congress asked the National Bureau of Standards to develop standard samples of steel, so that everyone could be on the same page. NIST created these samples, analyzed them for all their elements, and distributed them to the stakeholders. Steel is still one of the most important SRMs at NIST and their best selling product is called a Charpie. This is a standard piece of metal with a V-notch that is broken by a pendulum to measure the energy it took to break it.
Claim your own domain name with Google Domains starting at just $12 a year. Get 20% off your first year by visiting domains.google/veritasium. Thanks to Google Domains for sponsoring this part of the video. NIST has been making [Standard Reference Materials (SRMs)] for over a century, used for both calibration and validation. SRMs are used to quantify something important that’s usually hard to measure, like the energy required to break a piece of steel, or the flammability of a mattress. For example, NIST produces standard cigarettes to help manufacturers determine how flammable their furniture is. They also have standards for things like bullets, to ensure forensic labs accurately measure the grooves. Finally, NIST has SRMs for identifying dangerous contaminants, like lead paint or water from a glacier in Greenland. These SRMs are so rare that they limit distribution to one unit per customer per three years. We have a lot of soil samples from New Jersey and Montana that were collected from a contaminated industrial site in Bozeman, Montana. These samples are certified for things like toxic elements. The ultimate way to measure what contaminants we’re exposed to is by what comes out of us, which is why the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) sells domestic sludge. This sludge is a record of what has come out of our bodies and down our sewers, and researchers can examine it for traces of toxins or heavy metals.
Next year, NIST is coming out with an actual human poop product, as health is related to our microbiome and we are starting to understand the importance of our gut flora and stomach contents. Fecal matter is a difficult matrix to measure and extract components from, and this material will support measurements of the metabolites. It will be distributed as a vial of powder.
As our knowledge of the world evolves, NIST has been preparing to launch its first living standard reference material next year. This will be hamster ovary cells that can produce monoclonal antibodies, which now account for five of the top 10 selling drugs and over 75 billion dollars in annual sales worldwide.
When monkey pox started spreading earlier this year, NIST was able to create a positive control reference of the monkey pox DNA in just 30 days. This warehouse is a reminder that behind the scenes, there are a group of people working tirelessly to ensure that things are what we think they are. This allows us to trust what is on labels, know that our blood tests are calibrated correctly, and rely on the structural and mechanical properties of steel-framed buildings.