Lead is still bad for your brain

Image credit: Ionut Stefan Talking about lead is boring. I would know, I’ve spent quite a bit of time trudging through papers about lead while writing this post and the best opening I could come up with is just how mind-numbingly boring lead is. Sadly, boredom isn’t a good indicator for importance. While the days of enthusiastically throwing lead into whatever we could (from water pipes to gasoline to cosmetics to paints for houses and children’s toys) are over, the lead we’ve pumped into the environment doesn’t give up so easily. And if that wasn’t enough, we’ve still found some use cases to keep it hanging around (why yes, I’m talking about batteries). Ok, but how bad can it really be? The levels of lead are surely not as high anymore, so it’s not really that dangerous, right? Well… short answer: it’s a bit more complicated. The long answer is the rest of the article. What is lead? Lead is a heavy metal. (Little side note: until the writing of this article, I’ve taken the term “h ... Read full article.