40 Fun Facts About Cyanide

Which part of an apple contains amygdalin, a compound that can release cyanide when crushed and digested?

Seeds hold only a tiny amount, and the US National Library of Medicine's hazardous substances database records no case of poisoning from eating them.

Hydrogen cyanide is often said to smell like which food, although some people cannot detect the odor at all?

Bitter almonds is the classic comparison, but the ability to smell hydrogen cyanide comes down to a genetic trait, so many people get no warning from their nose.

In 1910, finding the cyanide-related gas cyanogen in the tail of which comet led to sales of anti-comet pills?

Halley's Comet swept Earth through its tail that May, and despite astronomers' reassurances people panic-bought gas masks along with the quack pills.

Which painkiller was laced with potassium cyanide in the 1982 Chicago poisonings that reshaped medicine packaging?

Tylenol's maker recalled an estimated 31 million bottles, and tamper-resistant packaging followed. Nobody has ever been charged with the poisonings.

Which British crime writer poisoned her characters' champagne in the 1945 mystery novel Sparkling Cyanide?

Agatha Christie learned her poisons by working in hospital dispensaries during both world wars, and they turn up in more than half of her novels.

The cyanide process developed in Glasgow in 1887 transformed the mining of which metal from low-grade ore?

Gold dissolves in a weak cyanide solution. First used on South Africa's Rand in 1890, the method set off an investment boom as bigger mines opened.

Which household adhesive, discovered during a wartime search for clear gun-sight plastic, is made from cyanoacrylate?

Super glue was rejected in 1942 because it stuck to everything it touched, then reached the market in 1958. A spray version later slowed bleeding in soldiers wounded in Vietnam.

Which tropical root crop, the source of tapioca, must be carefully prepared because it can release cyanide?

Cassava roots, peels and leaves are dangerous raw, yet more than 500 million people depend on the crop, so it is soaked, fermented or cooked before eating.

Which British codebreaker died of cyanide poisoning in 1954, with a half-eaten apple found beside his bed?

Alan Turing's inquest ruled suicide, but the apple was never tested, and one philosopher argues he accidentally inhaled fumes from a home electroplating experiment.

Which kitchen staple often contains tiny amounts of ferrocyanide, a harmless cyanide compound added to stop clumping?

Table salt can carry ferrocyanides, labelled E535, E536 and E538, because the cyanide is bound so tightly to iron that the body cannot break it loose.

In 1978, more than 900 Peoples Temple members died at Jonestown, most from cyanide, in which South American country?

Guyana's remote commune served the poison in a tub of grape Flavor Aid, a drink widely misremembered as Kool-Aid, although both brands were on site.

Which Russian mystic, by his killer's account, seemed unaffected by cakes and wine laced with cyanide in 1916?

Grigori Rasputin was finally shot, and the autopsy recorded no poison at all. His daughter said he avoided sweet food and would never have eaten the cakes.

Which cyanide-based pesticide, invented in Germany in the 1920s, was used in Nazi extermination camp gas chambers?

Zyklon B, meaning Cyclone B, was sold in sealed canisters for delousing clothing and fumigating ships, warehouses and trains long before the Holocaust.

Which Nazi leader swallowed a cyanide capsule the night before his scheduled hanging at Nuremberg in 1946?

Hermann Göring had asked to be shot as a soldier and was refused. How he got the capsule is still debated; a second one turned up hidden in his hair cream.

Who died by biting a cyanide capsule in a Berlin bunker in April 1945, less than two days after marrying Adolf Hitler?

Eva Braun was 33. A day earlier, one of the capsules obtained for the couple had been tested on Blondi, Hitler's German Shepherd.

A cyanide ion is made of one carbon atom joined by a triple bond to one atom of which element?

Nitrogen completes the cyano group, written CN. The ion has the same number of electrons as carbon monoxide, another notorious poison.

Hydrogen cyanide was first isolated in the 18th century from which artists' pigment, used in Hokusai's Great Wave?

Prussian blue is believed to have been an accident, made in Berlin around 1706 when a paint maker used potash tainted with blood. German calls hydrogen cyanide 'blue acid' after it.

Which type of animal is the Madagascan bamboo-eater that takes in twelve times a normally lethal cyanide dose daily?

Lemur is the answer: one rare bamboo-eating species gets through about 500 g of cyanide-laced shoots a day, and nobody has worked out how it avoids being poisoned.

Cyanide stops cells using oxygen by blocking the enzyme cytochrome c oxidase, found in which part of the cell?

Mitochondria can no longer make ATP, the cell's energy supply, so the tissues that need the most energy, the brain and the heart, are hit hardest.

Motyxia, a glow-in-the-dark genus that makes cyanide as a chemical defense, belongs to which group of arthropods?

Millipedes of this genus are blind, and the ones that glow brightest tend to have the biggest cyanide glands, so the light works as a warning to predators.

Hydroxocobalamin, an antidote for cyanide poisoning sold as Cyanokit, is a form of which nutrient?

Vitamin B12 in this form grabs cyanide to become cyanocobalamin, which the kidneys can safely flush out. The antidote kit won US approval in 2006.

Kernels of which fruit, sold as a cancer remedy despite being ineffective, can cause fatal cyanide poisoning?

Apricot kernels supply the compound behind laetrile, a supposed cure promoted since the 1950s and described in medical literature as a canonical example of quackery.

Cyanide fishing, which stuns reef fish for the aquarium trade, is believed to have begun in the 1950s in which country?

The Philippines is where an estimated 70% to 90% of exported aquarium fish are caught this way, and up to two thirds of the stunned fish die in transport.

The 2000 Baia Mare cyanide spill, which killed fish along the Tisza and Danube rivers, began at a mine in which country?

Romania's spill began when a dam holding contaminated water burst on a winter night. It has been called Europe's worst environmental disaster since Chernobyl.

M44 devices, spring-loaded traps that fire sodium cyanide into an animal's mouth, are set to kill which US predator?

Coyotes set off the charge by biting and pulling a scented bait. The M44 replaced a 1930s device that was actually called the Coyote Getter.

Which US state carried out the country's first lethal gas execution in 1924, using cyanide in a converted butcher shop?

Nevada's guards first tried pumping the gas into the prisoner's cell while he slept, but it leaked out, which is why a makeshift chamber had to be built.

Wallace Carothers, the DuPont chemist who died by drinking potassium cyanide in 1937, invented which fiber?

Nylon was not announced to the public until October 1938, about a year and a half after his death. Carothers had long carried a capsule of cyanide attached to his watch chain.

In which comedy play and 1944 Cary Grant film do two aunts serve lonely men elderberry wine spiked with cyanide?

Arsenic and Old Lace has the Brewster sisters spike their wine with three poisons at once. It was by far the most successful of Joseph Kesselring's twelve plays.

In which James Bond film does villain Raoul Silva reveal how a failed hydrogen cyanide capsule disfigured him?

Skyfall's Silva, played by Javier Bardem, is a former agent who wants M dead for betraying him to the Chinese government, which left him to be tortured.

Which country uses cyanide pellets to control possums, an introduced marsupial that spreads tuberculosis among cattle?

New Zealand requires a license to store or use the poison, and packs it into pellets because possums otherwise learn to shy away from bait.

Pure potassium cyanide, which dissolves easily in water, looks most like which common kitchen ingredient?

Sugar is the usual comparison for the colorless compound. Most of it goes into mining, chemical manufacturing and electroplating, and a little into fixing wet-plate photographs.

Hydrogen cyanide is one of the toxic gases found in the smoke of which widely sold consumer product?

Cigarettes give it off because hydrogen cyanide forms when certain materials burn without enough oxygen. Car exhaust and burning plastics release it too.

Hydrogen cyanide is a trace gas in the thick atmosphere of which moon, where the Huygens probe landed in 2005?

Titan is the only moon with an atmosphere denser than Earth's, and experiments that mimic its air under ultraviolet light produce hydrogen cyanide as a first step.

Around 1960, biochemist Joan Oró made which DNA base from hydrogen cyanide, a landmark in origin-of-life research?

Adenine can form from just hydrogen cyanide and ammonia in water, a result ranked beside the Miller-Urey experiment and a hint that a poison helped life begin.

Members of which guerrilla army, defeated in 2009 after a civil war begun in 1983, each carried a cyanide capsule?

Tamil Tigers carried the capsule so that they could die rather than be captured. Their founder led the Sri Lankan separatist group until he was killed in the war's final days.

In 2015, at least 700 tonnes of sodium cyanide sat in a warehouse that exploded in which Chinese port city?

Tianjin's warehouse held 70 times its legal limit of the chemical, and people living within 3 km were evacuated for fear of toxic leaks.

Which heavy metal band scored a number-one Mainstream Rock hit with Cyanide, from the 2008 album Death Magnetic?

Metallica debuted the song live at Ozzfest in Dallas in August 2008, and it became the band's seventh chart-topper on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart.

Cyanide & Happiness, running on explosm.net since 2005 and known for its shocking tone, is what kind of work?

A webcomic it is: by 2012 the site was drawing over a million views a day, and a Telegraph columnist had already ranked it among the ten best of its kind.

Which English astronomer invented the cyanotype, an early photographic print process using iron and cyanide compounds?

John Herschel's process let a family friend, Anna Atkins, hand-print albums of algae that count as the world's first photographically illustrated books.

Which German field marshal, known as the Desert Fox, took a cyanide pill in 1944 rather than face the People's Court?

Erwin Rommel was given the choice by two generals who came to his home with the capsule, and, as promised, he then received a state funeral.