*starts thinking about the bleach and muriatic acid sitting in the cupboard* No...must resist.
You don't want to be within 30 feet of the thing when they combine.
One breath of the gas and your lungs will be burnt trash. Prolly burn the retinas off the eyes off too if ya don't have 'em shut. All the grass in a substantial circle will be burnt off instantly, you can watch the gas propagate outward a lot like a blast ripple from high explosive.
Interesting way to go after an under ground wasps nest. Ya need a funnel and nerves of steel. And of course you must have first, filled out the application for a Darwin Award or ya might get passed by.
I'll reply in a moment I'm still trying to pick my jaw up off the floor.
That's amazing.
I wonder why the results on SST and Plastic were so different.
Maybe ( and I'm just guessing) at the molecular level a bond (Ionic?) between the lletheen (modified agar) with which which they pretreated the surfaces was the determining element. It might have held onto the metal better thus working to protect some number of organisims from the vinegar.
What really floored me was they DILUTED the vinegar~!!!
The dilution was 1 part vinegar to 4 parts water.
and one that suggests that vinegar outperforms bleach (doesn't specify bleach concentrations) at eliminating
certain bacteria from food products
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12380754
I suspect that if you pay the $37.00 for the article you'll get all those missing details such as dillution. I'd guess they had the chlorine somewhere between 50ppm and 100ppm and clearly they did not adjust the pH.
You can prolly just e-mail the author and ask. It's been my experience that researchers are often pretty easy going when it comes to answering questions. Doctor Wolf-Hall seems to take a certain joy from answering questions:
http://www.madsci.org/cgi-bin/search?query=Charlene+Wolf-Hall
Scanning that page you can see that most of those questions are from lay-folk.
About the chlorine -vs- vinegar thing they seemed to uncover:
If you listened to the whole (boring) interview with Chuck Talley he talks about the FDA insisting that bleach was a good sanitizer and says that the FDA is just plain wrong. That is in the part where he talks about the caustic adjustment of pH via hypoclorous acid and bleach being the real bona fide killer that you get from adding vinegar to the bleach/water solution.
Here, check this out
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/2010/01/qa-beer-safety-at-georgetown-brewing/
You can get beasties in your canned wort yeast starter.
But then canned starter is not a ferment, has no CO2 tension, no hops (isomerized alpha acids), no beneficial yeasts to make the wort hostile to other life forms. And you can always boil the canned starter before starting the yeast culture.