Ch 2.4: Tripping on Acids and Bases

Speaking of water, if you actually studied chemistry, you’d know that water is sometimes known as the universal solvent. Which means a lot if you know what it says but you probably don’t. Fortunately for you, this book exists. To understand that magical phrase, we first have to dive into the world of solutions. Life is nothing but a bunch of juices sloshing around together in sweet little juice sacks interacting with other juice sacks. Within those juice sacks, you have shit dissolved in water. That’s a solution. You can have a solution with other liquids but in biology, it's pretty much all dissolved in water. Water is the stuff in which the shit dissolves so water is known as a solvent. The shit, that’s known as a solute. You get a solution when you dissolve the solute in the solvent. So water is nicknamed the universal solvent because it can dissolve a whole bunch of shit and should always be the first try when you’re trying to make a solution.

Lots of stuff can be a solute but there are two special types of solutions that can form and those are your acids and bases. For the sake of me not caring and this being biology, we’re going to keep this part as short as possible. Sometimes when you dissolve stuff into solution, the solute breaks apart into charged little particles called ions. If those ions are positively charged hydrogen ions, you get an acid. If they’re negatively charged hydroxide (an oxygen hooked to a hydrogen) ions, you get a base. Using some weird ass math, we can measure how many H+ ions there are in a solution and when we do we get pH. I really hope you’re with me so far because this shit is boring and I’m not repeating myself. So once this pH is determined, we can create a scale from zero to fourteen (weird ass scale, I know). All you have to remember is seven is in the middle (basic counting skills) and the alphabet goes A then B. Start at zero, that’s an acid. When you hit seven (the middle) you change to B (for base). And just like on any scale with two options, the further away from the middle you get, the stronger that option gets. So zero is a strong acid and fourteen is a strong base. Something with a pH of 7.4 (like humans) is slightly basic. That’s right, ya basic. And we’re not going to get into any more detail than that because for life, if you get too far away from 7.4 (and by too far I mean like...7 or 7.9), you die. So there’s that….