The same deadly nerve agent used against a former Russian spy and his daughter could be linked to a second poisoning that killed a 44 year old woman in the UK.
Rat baits are widely used to keep rodent pests at bay. But many Australian reptiles are resistant to the poison, potentially spreading these deadly compounds up the food chain.
If one venomous snake bites a mouse and injects venom into it, you can then feed that same dead mouse to another snake. The second snake won’t die.
It was all the apple’s fault: we’ve been fascinated by poisoned fruit for a long time.
Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678), The Fall of Man, via Wikimedia Commons
The early use of poison is one more indicator of an advanced repertoire of behavioural and technological traits that have characterised our species from the earliest times.
Civilians in Iraq have reportedly been exposed to blister agents in fighting between Islamic State fighters and US-backed Iraqi forces.
Reuters/Azad Lashkari
The characteristics of chemical weapons also make them weapons of terror. They do not only injure the body. The threat of chemical weapons harms the minds of soldiers and civilians.
Polonium’s chemical properties made it the ideal secret weapon for the assassins of Alexander Litvinenko.
The national flower of Zimbabwe, the Glory Lily, is also found in Queensland where it’s more famously known as a noxious weed that’s highly poisonous to humans.
JohnSkewes/Flickr
Serious poisoning by plants is very rare in the UK so the death of a gardener in Hampshire after brushing against a deadly flower was extremely unusual. Despite the British countryside’s genteel reputation…
With the announcement of an inquiry into the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, talk of poisons is back in the news. There are many articles with lists of the most poisonous substances, which are often gathered…
You can still fish for fun in Sydney Harbour, but there are rules for how much fish your should eat because past tests have shown elevated levels of dioxins in fish and crustaceans.
Peter Hindmarsh/Flickr
The World Health Organization estimates that one in every 12 deaths worldwide is due to chemical exposure, sometimes acute but mostly chronic. This eclipses the annual death tolls from malaria, car crashes…