This is an alternative birth method called “lotus birth” or more formally “umbilical non-severance” in which babies are left tethered to the delivered placenta until their cord desiccates and detaches from their body on its own, usually in 3-10 days, while applying salt to the placenta to increase the speed at which it dries. It will eventually fall off, however, after its delivery the placenta is no longer being supplied with the oxygenated blood it needs to survive, and becomes necrotic (dead). This can act as an easy entry point for infectious organisms to enter the neonate, and can result in life-threatening infections. Neither the American College of Obstetrics or the American Academy of Pediatrics have explicit guidance statements as to whether this should be recommended against. AAP has published that there have been multiple case reports of severe infections with various bacteria secondary to this practice.
This should not be confused/conflated with Delayed Cord Clamping, which is waiting 30-60 seconds after the baby’s delivery for some of the residual fetal blood in the placenta to be delivered to the baby’s circulation to prevent anemia. This has good evidence for benefit to the baby, is recommended by ACOG, and is basically standard of care in the US.
Source: ACOG and AAP publications, also I’m a 4th year medical student that has completed OBGYN rotations
I personally wouldn’t recommend it, I’ve seen babies die miserable deaths of sepsis and it’s heartbreaking. But I’m not going into pediatrics or OBGYN so thankfully this isn’t gonna be a discussion I have to have.
Good luck on your match! I’m still in second year, but I’m already reaching out to programs about setting up auditions and whatnot because I’m attending a small/new DO school, so I don’t really have establishment or prestige on my side.
You joke, but there are literally people who eat their own placenta. I know someone who did. Crystals and essential oils and energy healing and all that, you know. I don’t talk about that kind of stuff with her because for some reason we just can’t seem to find common ground lol
There is an assumption that everyone surfing Lemmy are from developed countries. I’m not generalizing the western placenta eating experience to Somalia or Bangladesh
I don’t really understand why you wouldn’t though? Like it’s just an organ, people eat organs all the time. At least this one involved bringing life into the world instead of death.
The only reason not to is if your brain is fucked up enough that you think it’s icky or something.
I’ve heard of people getting placenta pills to deal with the anemia after birth. I don’t plan on having kids and thus have never been interested enough to research it.
The placenta is not pleasant to look at, so I can imagine pills make it more palatable. I don’t think a lot of study has been done on the effects of eating placenta after birth, but it’s technically a separate organ that belongs to the baby.
So no matter how you spin it, they’re eating baby organs.
Ive heard of people using the placenta pills to help reduce postpartum depression. Not sure if that works. But research has been done to show it reduces bleeding after birth if consumed immediately.
Terrible source but its late and im tired: “Postpartum hemorrhage has been controlled by using a small quarter-size piece of placenta placed in the mother’s cheek or chewed by the mother first and then held between her cheek and gum” www.midwiferytoday.com/…/the-power-of-placenta/
Bleeding stops when the uterus shrinks back down so the huge open wound left behind by the placenta becomes a small wound. Oxytocin makes that happen, and you get that by just holding your baby. I don’t know how eating the placenta would contribute.
My money is on it being the elemental power of bullshit. It’s likely the same ingredient that makes homeopathy actually ‘do’ anything: time i.e., it would have happened at that point regardless.
I’m not sure it’s the meat…I think it might be the chemicals in the meat. This isn’t my hill to die on, but you’re totally OK to stick to the modern Dr’s advice if you hemorrhage after childbirth. I can’t think anyone will ever forcefeed you placenta 🙃
I’m a vegan who smokes weed and I think that’s the extent of my woo (though Ron Swanson would certainly disagree, I’m very often struck by how much woo German medical doctors are allowed to push).
I’d want to do it, partly because the large quantity of bioavailable iron calls to me, but also because of the oxytocin and potential bonding effects (if it doesn’t have any, it doesn’t have any: no harm done). I don’t think I want it enough to really push back against a doctor/hospital that didn’t want to allow it, but I might look for one that is open to it.
I have a friend that became one of those people after high school. She made a killing for a few years from whacky people who wanted her to make the placenta into Christmas ornaments… She tried showing me photos of her stretching it over glass balls but I couldn’t stomach it.
To somewhat play devil’s advocate, what’s wrong with a minute? What benefit are you expecting from leaving it on longer?
The long and the short is Delayed Cord Clamping is really the only thing we have data for, and that’s what we should do without evidence something else is better.
I have no evidence, just a general thought that there are millions of years of evolution behind the umbilical cord staying intact for longer than a minute after birth. Some people want to leave it on for a week, why? Maybe that’s a useful instinct.
But most animals don’t leave it intact. They chew through it shortly after birth. You can’t really have a tissue that is sturdy enough to survive tension during fetal development and vaginal delivery that then instantly falls apart, so it has to be manually severed after delivery. The vast majority of mammals don’t let it stay attached for long at all, because their offspring are pretty mobile immediately after birth. From my reading of some of the random websites that recommend this, apparently it was based on the observations of a single species of higher ape (a chimp I think) that doesn’t sever the umbilical cord quickly. But when we have been severing cords as a species for generations and the vast majority of other mammals sever the cord with their teeth, I think the evolutionary biology evidence points towards severing the cord quickly.
Now evolutionary biology isn’t a solid basis for medical practice, but we don’t really have much scientific data at all to base this on at this point. There have been reports of increased rates of serious infections from the practice, which has face validity with the fact that you’re leaving a devascularized piece of tissue attached to the vascular system of neonate with an immature immune system. Outside of infection, there has been some case reports of polycythemia (excessively high red blood cell count) and jaundice in these infants. This makes sense physiologically. While attached to the placenta there is a greater intravascular volume available to the infant, which is the entire basis behind delayed cord cutting. It stands to reason that continuing to allow that extra blood volume to enter the infant would result in polycythemia and jaundice.
I’m not intimately familiar with the foundational literature by which the standard DCC cutoffs of 1 minutes or cessation of umbilical pulsatility were founded upon. There could be a very real argument for saying, should the time be 2 minutes? 5 minutes instead of 1? Or should we at least study it if it hasn’t been already?
In summary, we have a piece of dead/dying tissue attached to a physiologically stressed neonate with an immature immune system. Leaving it attached for days is in contradiction to the vast majority of other mammalian labor behaviors, is inconsistent with the majority of human’s labor history, and has a clear pathological mechanism by which the commonly reported complications can be easily explained. Without some legitimate evidence to actually support benefits or disprove the risks, I think this practice should be discouraged by healthcare professionals.
I’m sorry you’re getting downvotes. I’m betting the bulk are because you’re in c/askscience saying you don’t have any evidence to support your question, but that’s kinda the whole reason to ask a question. You weren’t speculating in a top level comment so I think it’s rude to be downvoting. As far as I can tell you’re asking genuine questions which is kinda the whole point of this community. Fuck the haters, ask questions when you’re curious!
Well they don’t eat it to get it off of the baby. While I’m not a vet or a zoologist, my understanding is they eat it for the nutrients as well as to help remove the scent, and newborn animals are easy prey and targeted by predators.
I’m guessing it’s an aluminum oxide abrasive? The abrasive is flourescing due to the little bit of uv coming out of the LEDs.
You might find this interesting, if you are grinding iron or steel then the grinding surface may not flouresce due to the iron bonding with the aluminum oxide.
This seems like a perfectly reasonable answer. OP! You could probably test this by changing the type of light you’re using. Try a red laser pointer as a control, and a black light wand (the sort they use to detect counterfiet bills), and see what happens.
Complete tangent, but alumina, aka aluminum oxide, is usually considered the second hardest naturally occurring material. When it is found in nature, it is given the mineral name corundum and is clear. But if there are some impurities in it, you can get colours. Red corundum is called Ruby, and blue is called Sapphire. In the beauty industry, the same material (mixed with magnetite) is called emery, and lends its name to emery board, and is used in nail files. In the tech industry, it’s used to make the extremely scratch resistant coating on most modern phone screens (basically nothing but diamond will scratch it).
You have subscribed to alumina facts. I’m sorry, the cat facts guy was busy.
We also use emery paper to smooth out rough surface finishes on machined parts. None of my tools but some of the tools the other guys have in the shop use little Ruby beads as reference surfaces. Our wire EDM also uses Ruby for some critical parts.
You’ve been subscribed to machine facts, strap in it’s a bumpy ride
Is there a machining community active somewhere on lemmy (yet)? I only dabble, but I like to sneak peaks at real folks fucking up, err, showing off their projects.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !machinist
It also illustrates a funny bit of the logic of multicellular non-clonal creatures: the germ line is the species. The other 99.9…% of you is just a fancy delivery mechanism, so it makes sense to add something seemingly super impractical to the anatomy if it slightly helps the sex cells.
Excellent question. From first principles: mars is about 1.5 AU from the sun. Using the intensity equation (inverse square law), Mars should receive about 1/(1.5x1.5) the amount of solar radiation, or about 44% on average.
Earth gets about 1400 W/m² hitting the top of the atmosphere, but most places on earth only see about 1000 W/m² after the column of air absorbs a bunch of it. Martian air absorbs almost nothing (being very thin), so you’d expect to see about 44% of 1400W/m² – or about 600W/m².
A quick Google search for “mars solar intensity” shows a result of 590 W/m², so that is pretty close to accurate, from first principles.
So 60% as bright, if talking pure intensity. As you say, the human eye has a pretty responsive dynamic range, and this is quite an acceptable number.
For point of comparison, this is the difference between the sun at high noon versus the sun at 4pm for most of the world. On Mars, high noon would have a solar intensity more like 4pm on earth. No where close to your darkness experience with the eclipse.
With regards to the eclipse it would depend on how much of the sun is covered though. I’d assume it’d about the same as you’d get during a partial eclipse when the sun is 40% covered?
Since you answered it, I figured I’d add that on the dark sides, Earth and Mars likely have similar light levels(ignoring the moon and light that’s bent through the atmosphere)
You make it sound like drinking salt water would solve all of our humanitarian problems or something. Lack of resources is not our problem, lack of fair and reasonable distribution of resources is. Never forget that five or six men own as much as the rest of the world combined.
There are several ways of approaching that particular question. And none are simple, actually.
First, just to frame why 0/0 is so weird, consider 1/0. Asking “what’s 1/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by 0 equals 1?” There’s no answer because any number multiplied by zero is zero and no number multiplied by zero is one.
So now on to 0/0. “What’s 0/0” is like asking “what number when multiplied by zero gives zero?” And the answer is “all of them.” 1 times 0 equals 0, so 1 is an answer. But also 2 times 0 is 0. And so is pi. And 8,675,309.
So, you could say that 0/0 doesn’t have a single answer, but rather an infinite number of answers. That’s one way to deal with 0/0.
Another way is with “limits”. They’re a concept usually first introduced in calculus. Speaking a bit vaguely (though it’s definitely worth learning about if you’re curious, and it seems you are), limits are about dealing with “holes” in equasions.
Consider the equasion y=x/x. With only one exception, x/x is always 1, right? (5/5=1, 1,000,000,000/1,000,000,000=1, 0.00001/0.00001=1, etc.) But of course 0/0 is a weird situation for the reasons above.
So limits were invented (by Isaac Newton and a guy named Leibniz) to ask the question “if we got x really close to zero but not exactly zero and kept getting closer and closer to zero, what number would we approach?” And the answer is 1. (The way we say that is “the limit as x approaches zero of x divided by x is one.”)
Sometimes there’s still weirdness, though. If we look at y=x/|x| (where “|x|” means “the absolute value of x” which basically means to remove any negative sign – so if x is -3, |x| is positive 3) when x is positive, x/|x| is positive 1. When x is negative, x/|x| is negative 1. When x is 0, x/|x| still simplifies to 0/0, so it’s still helpful to our original problem. But when we approach x=0 from the negative side, we get “the limit as x approaches 0 from the negative side of x/|x| is -1” and “the limit as x approaches 0 from the positive side is (positive) 1”. So what gives?
Well, the way mathematicians deal with that is just to acknowledge that math is complex and always keep in mind that limits can differ depending which direction you approach them from. They’ll generally consider for their particular application whether approaching from the left or right is more useful. (Or maybe it’s beneficial to keep track of how the equasion works out for both answers.)
I’m sure there are other ways of dealing with 0/0 that I’m not directly aware of and haven’t mentioned here.
So, to wrap up, there are some questions in mathematics (like “what’s 0/0?”) that don’t have a single simple answer. Mathematicians have come up with lots of clever ways to deal with a lot of these cases and which one helps you solve one particular problem may be different than which one helps you solve a different problem. And sometimes “there’s no right answer” is more helpful than using clever tricks. Sometimes the problem can also be restated or the solution worked out in a different way specifically to avoid running into a 0/0.
It’s definitely unfortunate that they don’t teach some of the weirdness of mathematics in school. But something I haven’t even mentioned yet is that all of what I’ve said above assumes a particular “formal system.” And the rules can be quite vastly different if you just tweak a rule here or there. There’s not technically a reason why you couldn’t work in a system which was just like Peano Arithmetic (conventional integer arithmetic) except that 0/0 was by definition (“axiomatically” – kindof “because I said so”) 1. (Or 42, or -10,000, or whatever.) That could have some weird implications for your formal system as a whole (and those implications might render that whole formal system in practice useless, maybe), or maybe not. Who knows! (Probably someone does, but I don’t.) (Edit: looks like howrar knows and it does indeed kindof fuck up the whole formal system. Good to know!)
One spot where mathematicians have just invented new axioms to deal with weirdness is for square roots of negative numbers. The square root of 1 is 1 (or -1), but there’s no number you can multiply by itself to get -1.
…right?
Well, mathematicians just invented something and called it “i” (which stands for “imagionary”) and said “this ‘i’ thing is a thing that exists in our formal system and it’s the answer to ‘what’s the square root of negative one’ just because we say so and let’s see if this lets us solve problems we couldn’t solve before.” And it totally did. The invention(/discovery?) of imagionary numbers was a huge step forwards in mathematics with applications in lots of practical fields. Physics comes to mind in particular.
I study circadian rhythms (the process that is responsible for getting us to sleep in the night). Specifically, how circadian rhythms influence how easily we catch diseases, but that part is less relevant to the question.
So since Earth rotates and has day/night cycles, life on Earth evolved to try to predict when the day and night comes. That’s what circadian rhythms do. This is really important, since day and night aren’t just associated with lightness/darkness. Day and night are associated with a ton of different environmental differences. For instance, it’s colder at night, so animals need a way of keeping warm at night. There’s more UV light at day, so animals need a way of resisting DNA damage in the day. There’s some evidence that the bacteria in the air are different at day vs. at night, so animals will need to have different levels of immune system alertness.
We as humans live in artificial houses with artificial lighting, so we can lose track of why this is really important. But if you’ve ever went camping or tried to stay out at night you’ll probably understand why it’s really important for animals to be able to predict the time.
Circadian rhythms end up getting reinforced on a community level, since if it’s easier to see in the day, an animal is more likely to forage in the day. Then predators will notice that prey is more plentiful in the day, so it will also be more likely for predators to hunt in the day as well.
Anyways, the end result of all of this is that animals have a huge evolutionary pressure to pick either the day or night to be their active period, which is the time where they look for food and in general just be awake. And whatever they don’t pick, that’s their rest period, the time where they sleep and recover.
But how do animals know that their circadian rhythms are predicting the correct time? Imagine a mouse in its burrow - it wouldn’t be able to tell what time it is just by looking at the sky. And even just stepping out for a second to check would be very dangerous if it ended up being the wrong time. Animals need a way of reading what time it is when their out and about and then correcting their circadian rhythms if the rhythm is inaccurate. There’s a lot of different measurements that animals use to read the time, but the key here is that the measurements that they pick must change significantly between day and night. In other words, it must be a very obvious signal, like “oh, I see this signal, so there is no doubt that the time is day.”
Vast majority of the time, the most obvious signal ends up behind light. And it makes sense - if you see bright light, that is the clearest indication that it is day outside. So for many animals, light is the primary measure that animals use to read the time.
So to wrap back around to your question, it’s not necessarily that light ruins sleep because evolution just decided to go “nae nae,” it’s because predicting time is incredibly important for keeping animals and humans alive, and up until very recently, light has simply been the easiest and best proxy for the time
And to answer your bonus question, yes, other animals have their sleep messed up by light too
Does this mean humans in far north climates have different methods of determinating sleep times? Because I’m originally from close to the equator and I’m the summer I’ll be awake until near midnight when at least we get some dusk, but the nightless days really screw me up
Ah, so this goes more into the nuance of what exactly determines the time of the circadian clock. It is very well documented that animals in the arctic circle still have circadian clocks even if it’s perpetual light or dark. I left out for simplicity that the level of light matters - that is to say, if there’s a time where it’s slightly dimmer and a time that’s slightly brighter, that is enough to adjust the circadian clock to the correct time. The adjustment process will be slower and weaker than usual, but it does happen.
Also, I hinted that animals do take in multiple measurements to determine the correct time, and that plays a role in this case. In general, light tends to be the measurement that animals will default to, but where light variation doesn’t exist, animals can and do utilize other measurements to determine the time. Eating (among other things) turns out to be a relatively strong signal, so circadian rhythms end up being somewhat self-reinforcing. After all, I would expect that you only eat when you’re awake.
But in general, circadian rhythms and the ways that animals adjust their rhythms to the correct time is a huge rabbithole
I live on a quite a northern latitude. Finland, but the very southern end of it. (The Arctic circle only starts about at the most northern 1/3 of Finland)
I’ll upload two pictures, taken from the same spot at different times.
Second one is pretty exactly dusk, yeah. Or 8 minutes after, technically.
The first one is dawn. Two hours apart and apparently in the same place, more or less.
And Uusimaa would fit, yeah, but I’m in Varsinais-Suomi. Same thing latitude wise though, but dawn and dusk are two minutes earlier in Helsinki than in Turku.
Due to being a “night owl” myself, I guess I’ve always been a little doubtful regarding circadian rhythms myself; but your explanation did a great job of boiling it all down to the most significant component parts. Thank you! I really liked your summary!
As a fellow night owl that gets pretty deep into the late night, I’ve had the idea that it is actually good to have a small percentage of the population awake while most of the others sleep to help keep watch. I don’t have any way to prove this, but it’s something that I feel makes sense.
I’m pretty sure that’s the general hypothesis in the field, but as you might imagine, it’ll be very difficult to prove. There was a study done sometime (I don’t fully remember when) where researchers collected data on when people go to sleep and when they wake up, and they found that there was a remarkably normal distribution in the population for when people wake up and sleep.
My personal interpretation is that chronotypes (what you call early birds and night owls) are genetic in some way, but I don’t specialize in this area, so don’t take my word for it
No need to use quotation marks - it is scientifically confirmed that night owls and early birds exist (among a number of other, less-well-known circadian types). We call them chronotypes, and it’s an active field of study. Unfortunately it’s not something that I specialize in, so I can’t comment too much on it.
However, it is very well acknowledged in the field that modern society is built on an early bird schedule and that completely screws over night owls. (To my memory, night owls tend to score lower on tests, pursue higher education less than early birds, tend to be less promoted and generally less successful than early birds. Inversely, night owls tend to do better in evening classes than early birds.)
However, it is very well acknowledged in the field that modern society is built on an early bird schedule and that completely screws over night owls. (To my memory, night owls tend to score lower on tests, pursue higher education less than early birds, tend to be less promoted and generally less successful than early birds. Inversely, night owls tend to do better in evening classes than early birds.)
Makes sense. As a kid up until 4th grade I used to go to school in the afternoon and I used to have good grades, 5th grade onwards I started going to class very early in the morning, my grades plummeted immediately and I started to hate school.
Sorry to piggyback onto your comment, and I know you can’t give medical advice, but I wonder if you have any insight into a problem I have with sleep.
I’m early 40s now. One of my earliest memories, aged around 4, is not being able to fall asleep. I’ve tried EVERYTHING over the years. Sleeping pills are a guarantee if things are getting squirrelly, but give me severe rebound insomnia the next day. When I do fall asleep, it’s like I can sleep for way longer than is normal (so either cause of sleep debt or poor sleep quality).
I’ve always joked that maybe I should be on a planet with a 28 hour day. But I also know that my lack of normal sleep is potentially storing up huge problems like increasing my risk of cancer, heart disease etc.
Melatonin kind of helps. But no matter what I do… My sleep pattern goes out of synch.
I’ve gone through school, ‘normal’ 9 to 5 jobs, relationships, all a big struggle as I have to perform at a normal level despite not having slept for 24+ hours fairly regularly.
I can do everything ‘right’ (no light in the evening, exercise, healthy diet, no excitement in the evening, no caffeine, mild sleep supplements) and still find myself unable to sleep. What the frick is wrong with me… Am I doomed to continue like this? I just want to sleep like a normal human being!
You’re right, I can’t give medical advice. But having abnormally long or short circadian days is a known thing - called circadian diseases. It’s not really my specialty, so I can’t comment too much on it, but my understanding is that many of them are genetic. These genetic variations can cause the circadian clock to run slower or faster than normal (which happens to be adjacent to what I study, so I can talk about it in excruciating detail if desired)
The Familial Advanced Sleep Phase Syndrome (FASP) is one such genetic circadian disease that gets a lot of attention among the circadian field, but you almost certainly don’t have it, since FASP makes your clock run shorter than 24 hours, whereas you seem to imply that yours runs longer.
The key thing to remember is that the circadian clock is not psychological. There is an actual, physical, molecular clock running in your brain and in nearly all the cells in your body. If this clock has imperfections, then that will directly lead to consequences in your circadian rhythms and your sleep cycle. The circadian clock is a real thing that people with the right equipment can measure and read. It wouldn’t even be particularly hard - just a blood sample or a swab would be sufficient. To be honest, I myself would like to study your cells to see if there really is anything out of place, but that would probably break so many research and ethics rules.
Anyways, to answer your question, I would recommend getting a medical opinion - it might be worth specifically bringing up that you suspect you have a circadian disease. I’m not too sure about treatment options, since my impression has generally been that we kind of don’t have any treatments for circadian diseases. But it’s not really my specialty, so maybe there is. My memory is that melatonin is a masking cue, which basically means that it makes you sleep but it doesn’t actually affect your circadian clock (which probably explains your poor experience with melatonin).
Thank you so much for the detailed response, I really appreciate it. Over the years I’ve looked into this a lot but you’ve given me some really useful new information!
Health care in the UK, especially for lesser known genetic diseases, can be a bit of a lottery… I moved up the country 6 months ago, and within a month had been tested & diagnosed for a generic mutation called FMF (familial Mediterranean fever). My dad / sister both have it but despite nearly a decade of requests I was unable to get a doc to investigate it. So far up here the gp response has been a referral to a website for cognitive behavioural therapy.
I’ll push on though and see if there’s anything more they can investigate. Thanks again for the info :)
Thanks, I do suspect I have delayed phase sleep disorder. It’s good to know I’m not alone. Do you have any coping strategies?
My coping strategy is ‘modafinil to keep me from not being a zombie when particularly sleep deprived’, and ‘zopiclone for if I have been up longer than I should and it’s early enough to push me back into normal sleep pattern’. But of course I’m very wary about doing that more than twice in a row, so it’s never enough to establish ‘normality’.
I’m a shell of a human, haven’t been properly employed for some years, never managed a “normal” schedule or any kind of routine really. I used to have a shift job, but then that became impossible to do as well. In the army I got myself a role that allowed me to shift my personal schedules quite a bit.
But yeah, no, it has ruined my life and ever since I told tve doctors I tried weed as a coping strategy (for sleeping and eating, it’s good), I can’t really get any help from the public doctors, since I live in such a backwards country that weed is still comparable to doing iv-opiates basically.
I take melatonin and zolpidem. Melatonin around midnight so it would always be the same but ambien when I go to bed.
Doesn’t really help.
If I lived ina country with less social secvurity, like the US, I probably would’ve ended up on the streets several years ago. I’d probably have killed myself or some other people by this point.
Now I’m just a wreck of a person waiting of some moronic bureaucratic bullshit while everyone else gets to have a life and I don’t.
Tbf mine might be “non-24 and not just a delayed sleep-phase”, but despite me now having actual sleep data from more than 6 months, I can’t even get the sleep studies place to accept my doctors referral there. Makes me so fking angry I’m gonna have a seizure again
I feel really lucky that I get some government support because I have autism / bipolar. It’s not much, but the specific benefit I receive also allows me to do some work… and I’m also very lucky to be self employed in a field I enjoy (writing music). So I’m certainly not rich or even that comfortable, but it does allow me to morph my days and nights to suit my unnatural rhythms.
One thing I find about lack of sleep… it makes me really emotional, grumpy, increases likelihood of a depressive state. For me, it’s SO important to almost literally inject happiness. If we have a condition that takes away our happiness, it’s really crucial to create happiness in any way possible. Binge funny TV shows, go for a walk, watch some standup comedy, call a friend (not at 2am unless they’re also a night owl haha), make some art (doesn’t matter if you’re good at it), try learning a new skill, play a game, join a volunteering group. Those are my go-to activities, probably different for you.
Also, and I know it’ll sound trite, but I got into a couple of things during lockdown that made a big difference to my overall happiness; Buddhist and Stoic philosophy. I’m not a Buddhist, probably never will be. I definitely have a long way to go in applying Stoic principles. But they have really improved my life. Meditation is very hard at first but incredibly beneficial. If I could recommend a couple of books (one is an audiobook and for me was more transformative than Buddhist principles)… if you’ve never used Audible, you can sign up for a month trial and keep the audiobook you select, no charge if you cancel within 28 days.
Derren Brown - Happy (not sure if you’re familiar with this guy, he’s a legit mind wizard, almost terrifyingly intelligent and has a long career as a ‘mentalist’ aka psychological magic)
Thich Nhat Thanh - The Heart Of The Buddha’s Teachings
Yeah, sure! This happens to be my field of research.
So I was referring to this particular paper, which unfortunately (to my knowledge) didn’t get much follow-up.
Tangentially, there is much other evidence that circadian rhythms have evolved in part to deal with differences in microbial pathogens at the day vs. at night. However, whether it’s because the composition of bacteria in the atmosphere is different, or because animals are more likely to get themselves exposed to pathogens when they’re foraging, or a mix of both, is unclear. My favorite paper that demonstrates this effect is this one, where the circadian clock affects how strongly the immune system responds to bacteria in the lungs. I’ll also include the seminal paper here that first kickstarted the idea that immunology is fundamentally circadian, although frankly I didn’t like how the paper was written. It looked at how mice responded to Salmonella infection at the day vs. at night and found a difference in immune response that then led to a difference in how severe the infection got.
To my knowledge, a similar study has never been repeated with other biomes. Which is a shame, since I can almost guarantee that a similar diel cycle exists in virtually every biome.
Yeah, crepuscular animals are weird. They have circadian rhythms (the circadian clock is incredibly well conserved across vertebrates and to a lesser extent, across invertebrates), but I’m not actually entirely sure how their circadian clock work to get them to wake up at dawn/dusk
Yes. It gathers up people from every field working on Artificial Light At Night (ALAN) every two years. It’s always very interesting and brings forth a lot on international and interdisciplinary collaborations.
When the stinger gets pulled out of the bee, the sac with the venom comes out too, still attached to the singer
Attempts to remove it injects more venom.
The life of the bee is worth less than the increased deterrent to animals attacking the hive.
The life of a handful of bees really isn’t worth much at all to the hive. So even when there’s no longer giant ass bears going after hives, there’s not a lot of pressure for the bee to lose the barb.
Edit:
It’s also important to remember that evolution isn’t just competing against predators/prey. It’s competing against competitors too.
If one hive of bees has barbs and worse stings than the one next to it, the one without barbs is gonna get attacked.
So the barbs don’t have to be enough to convince predators that honey is never worth the sting, just that this honey is more painful to get than that honey.
Overtime the less painful honey may be pushed out of the local ecosystem. At which point it’s just barbed bees, and the cycle might start over again with another way stings are more painful.
I just wanted to add that the worker bees with stingers are dead ends in the lifecycle anyhow. Only the queen will lay eggs and only the drones (stingerless) can mate with her. (Unless the years have really screwed up my memory!)
A young female when given royal jelly triggers it becoming a queen and reproductive organs instead of a stinger.
The males are drones. They have male reproductive organs instead of stingers, and they just hang out and try to bone the queen.
But the worker bees are the ones that actually, you know, do the work.
So that’s why European bees won’t “swarm” someone and all sting them. You get a few warning shots and a chance to retreat, just moving away is enough for it to stop.
Meanwhile, African bees had to deal with shit like honey badgers. And as we’re all aware, the honey badger gives very little fucks about anything.
So they don’t half ass defense, they send out a shit ton of bees that won’t stop until the threat is chased away and keeps running away. If they didn’t the honey badger wouldnt even notice.
Then some genius decided to cross breed the species, and we get “Africanized killer bee” that treat everything they come across as a honey badger.
I wonder if that would sometimes be a desirable trait in farmed bees in areas with a lot of predators or competitors.
Like, the human knows that protection will be required and will suit up accordingly, but the ants, wasps or bears that try to rob the hive will be much less successful.
But they forgot that life finds a way and the hybrids wouldn’t just stay where they put them.
They not only outcompete European hives, they’ll straight up raid and destroy other hives stealing their young.
Because their African half evolved in a resource scarce environment. If they run across other bees they view it as a direct threat on their resources. Pretty sure it also causes them to establish new hives much further away than European bees. Which is why they keep spreading so fast.
I’m just glad no one’s tried to crossbreed honey badgers with wolves to combat the hybrid bees yet.
The brighter spots are the nuclei of the Pr, Sc, and O atoms, which are reflecting the electrons of the scanning beams (because they’re comparatively much heavier).
The space in between the nuclei is where the electrons from all of the atoms are. Because the atoms are bound as PrScO3, the electrons are shared and not really part of any one particular atom or other.
Technically all of it is “the atoms” because the electrons are part of the structure as much as the protons and neutrons.
The drawing in the lower right shows how the atoms are arranged. The double spots are the nuclei of two Pr atoms very close together. The slightly fainter, elongated spots are actually ScO2 that is arranged as O-Sc-O. The fainter single spots are the other O nuclei that fill out the PrScO3 structure.
The yellow areas are the ‘shades’ of the nuclei, but do not reflect their actual size. The lattice constant of the crystal according to the figure is 59 pm = 59 e-12 m, which is the horizontal or vertical distance you see between two of the Pr couples. The actual size of a nucleus would be of order ~ 10 fm = ~ 10 e-15 m.
So, this image was made with a scanning electron microscope - actually several arranged in a grid somewhat similar to a digital camera sensor. Basically the way this works is that a beam of electrons (kind of like a laser, but electrons instead of photons) is fired at the material being scanned. The electrons bounce off of anything heavier than they are, such as the protons and neutrons in the nucleus (electrons are about 1/2000 of the mass of a proton). Some of the electrons bounce back into the detection grid of the microscope.
So the bright spots are where the electrons bounced off of the nuclei back into the detection grid. You can’t really get an image of an electron cloud with an electron microscope because electrons are all the same mass, so if you hit one with another one they both move away in random directions (hitting one billiard ball with another). Comparatively hitting a proton with an electron isn’t strong enough to move the proton very much (hitting a house with a billiard ball).
The upshot of all that is that the bright spots in the image show where the protons and neutrons of the atoms were most likely to be during the scanning (it’s really difficult to talk about anything absolute at this scale, everything is probabilistic).
Also yes, this image is a very tiny area, literally a few atoms across. It’s very impressive, and it basically amounts to visual proof that what we believe to be true about molecular bonding is true because the picture actually shows what the theory predicts.
This picture shows the influence of the nuclei, not the nuclei themselves. The nuclei are much smaller. If you throw an electron at an atom, the nucleus will change that electron’s direction even if it doesn’t hit it, just by being close.
That is only sort of true - this image is not made of electrons reflected by the nuclei. These are results from TEM imaging, so Transmission Electron Microscopy. The electron detector is placed behind the sample.
What you are describing is SEM - Scanning Electron Microscopy - in that case, the detector can be placed above the sample, for example (but not limited to) circularly around the beam to measure the backscattered electrons
In TEM the samples are cut into very thin slices (in the picture you posted it is said to be between 0.8nm - 30nm) and the crystal lattice acts as a diffraction grating for the electron beam. The diffraction pattern can be then used to reconstruct the crystal lattice structure.
If we grow some crop with salt water, we will be literally salting the earth, so unless we are talking about hydroponics/aquaponics, that would be very damaging for the soil and environment. That needs to be consider as well.
It’s a good point, but desalination has the same issue. Whenever you use seawater to produce something with almost no salt in it (be it desalinated water or crops), that means the salt has to go somewhere else. Probably in concentrated form.
Desalination may not salt the earth, but brine can create dead zones in the water. There are solutions like diluting it, and there are cases of operators who don’t care. Either way, salt is an issue if you use salt water. Has to go somewhere.
If you’re growing salt-tolerant crops and only ever intend to use that land as farmland, that could arguably be a benefit, don’t have to use as many chemicals to control weeds and pests if the weeds and pests can’t tolerate the salt
Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I’d imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.
Probably need to make sure that the salt is being contained to the farm area, and I’d imagine you would need to periodically flush it with fresh water or something if too much salt begins to accumulate in the soil for even your salt tolerant crops.
That seems hard to manage. And there is also the risk of that salt to reach underground water. I would say that it’s feasible to do it right, but at a high cost.
There are some plants that already grow in seawater, perhaps one way to achieve that effect might be to go about it the other way round, and try to breed or engineer one of these plants into something that can be used as a staple crop? Some quick wiki searching suggests to me that a few species of such plants are edible, though most I could find are so as vegetable type plants and not used like corn or potatoes or such. I did find reference to a salt tolerant plant that can be grown for cooking oil though.
And start farming the seabed to devastate even more ecosystems? I don’t think so. The best solution is actually to have less people. Better use the CRISPR to create some fun viruses.
I wasn’t referring to seaweed on the seabed, I was referring to land plants that grow in seawater. I figure that these kind of plants could be relevant in places like coastal deserts, since seawater is more available than fresh in such places, or in areas that have suffered from severe saltwater intrusion or which become partially flooded by seawater due to sea level rise.
I coudn’t find a source for your statement, but I did find that it takes a tree 30-40 years to store a ton of CO2, so maybe that’s what they mean? A tree will store carbon as it grows, because it builds itself with carbon from the air. ecotree.green/en/how-much-co2-does-a-tree-absorb
I think there has to be a certain balance. We can’t just cover a massive field even in trees, that creates an unhealthy ecosystem.
Sometimes, as we try to fix things quickly, we miss or ignore the long-term consequences.
It is probably a statement related to the average tree. Also, I believe hemp and bamboo are not trees (but I’m also not a plant scientist) so not really relevant in a statement about trees.
Ehh, cannabis is a woody annual. At least that’s what I’d call it. It dies every season. In some places a stand can reseed itself or a mother plant or two may overwinter for a maximum of one season by being buried under it’s daughter plants after they collapse from senescence, essentially cellular death from old age, which varies by species.
Hi there! Can you please remove the word “retarded” in your first sentence? This word is now generally considered a slur, which runs afoul of rule 6 “Use appropriate language and tone. Communicate using suitable language and maintain a professional and respectful tone.”
Why be ashamed? You had an idea that's probably never occurred to the majority of the people on this planet, and you asked for validation. A) that's original thinking and b) that's the first steps in science: I have an idea, is it reasonable, how can I experiment with it? I think this is a fantastic post!
Yeah, OP didn’t even phrase it like nobody else could have thought of it, which is a frequent pitfall for these kinds of questions. The experts that can give the best answers hate that. It’s implicitly saying their years of study aren’t worth much.
If you have calories in your blood, you should leave them in there to get used instead of taking them out and back in. You wouldn’t be adding usable energy, you already had it.
You have energy stored in fat and muscle, but your body already is going to try and consume those without all that added stress of eating yourself from the outside.
There are two things making noise in the microwave when it’s running. There’s the transformer that’s making the high voltage for the magnetron, which is you 120 Hz noise you’re hearing.
The other noisy thing in the box is the fan. The fan is most likely a three blade metal fan running on a little shaded pole induction motor. That motor is very simple, just one moving part, and two poles. Two poles at 60 Hz gives us 3,600 RPM, which the motor can’t quite reach because as the RPM gets closer to that magic number of 3,600 rpm, the motor draws lesa current and makes less power. This difference between the speed the motor is trying to run (“syncronous speed”) and the actual speed is called the “slip” and is probably around 3%-5%. This gives us a fan speed between 3400 and 3500 rpm.
I don’t know if that is giving you the second noise you’re hearing, or if it’s mixing with the transformer noise to make it. But now you’ve caused a situation where I’m going to be caught holding a guitar tuner to my microwave.
Imagine you are with a friend on the beach., side by side on the water and a big wave comes. Do you fell less pressure because your friends is by your side?
whether you feel less pressure, or whether there is less pressures, are two completely different things. the question was about 100% reception, and it's fair to ask, so far, no one's answered it, you know, scientifically.
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