• kyonshi@piefed.social
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    4 hours ago

    Every single one of us is travelling through space on a tiny speck of dirt, circling a permanent explosion that doesn’t know how to stop itself at 30km/s.
    That explosion and multiple specks of dirt besides our own dance around the center of the galaxy in a complex ballet with 200 billion other permanently exploding balls of fire and plasma, many of which are sizeably larger than ours and also have collected pieces of dirt circling around them, at a speed of 200km/s. The center of this agglomeration of giant balls of fire and dirt is a… thing… that is in itself so massive it can’t help eating everything that comes near including suns, light, and the concept of time.

    And there, travelling around the center of the galaxy at 200km/s, spiraling around your sun at 30km/s, there is you. And somehow you have to work tomorrow.

  • village604@adultswim.fan
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    6 hours ago

    Bloodletting is still a legitimate medical treatment, now called therapeutic phlebotomy.

    Some medicines, like testosterone, can increase your hemoglobin or blood count, so giving blood is the fix for it.

    • stringere@sh.itjust.works
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      2 hours ago

      Hemochromatosis, too. Body doesn’t eliminate iron so it can build up in organs, notably liver and kidneys.

      The treatment is bloodletting. My wife wanted to get leeches. I settled for just donating 32 times in the first year after finding out. My ferritin count was 9 times the usual max for a man my age. My gallbladder fluid was carrying iron. I was Iron Man.

  • village604@adultswim.fan
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    6 hours ago

    Ethanol can help protect your liver from the damage an acetaminophen overdose causes.

    You’d think that doubling up on liver harming substances would have an additive effect, but nope.

    • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 hours ago

      Similarly, ethanol can help protect you from the poisonous effects of methanol (wood alcohol). Methanol by itself isn’t actually harmful, but it gets broken down into harmful byproducts that will make you go blind and then kill you.

      The enzyme responsible for breaking down methanol is also used to break down ethanol. And enzymes have a limited capacity for work. In other words, they can only break down a certain number of molecules at any given time. And the enzyme is more compatible with ethanol than methanol.

      So if you suspect someone drank methanol, (it is a common ingredient in antifreeze), you should have them start taking shots. Pump them full of as much liquor as possible, as quickly as possible. Get them absolutely shitfaced ASAP, and keep them wasted until they get to the hospital. It will prevent the vast majority of the methanol from being broken down, which will prevent the actual poisoning from happening.

      • village604@adultswim.fan
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        55 minutes ago

        It’s ethylene glycol that’s commonly in antifreeze, but ethanol protects against that too. I believe methanol is common in windshield wiper fluid, though.

    • Zacherybob@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      Bonus fact. A significant amount of sea level rise due to climate change is caused by thermal expansion of the water.

  • AnBee@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    15 hours ago

    If you get methanol poisoning for example from badly made liquor then the remedy for that is to drink ethanol (good liquor).

  • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
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    21 hours ago

    If you’re not familiar with the flavors of quarks, they probably seem fake.

    • Up
    • Down
    • Top
    • Bottom
    • Charm
    • Strange

    Of course they all have antimatter counterparts. But anti-up is not the same as a down quark, anti-top is not the same as a bottom quark, etc.

    • Barbecue Cowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      16 hours ago

      I do want to hear the story of the physicist when they got to making up the names for charm and just strange. I imagine many sleepless nights.

      • Deconceptualist@leminal.space
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        12 hours ago

        The quark flavors were given their names for several reasons. The up and down quarks are named after the up and down components of isospin, which they carry.[60] Strange quarks were given their name because they were discovered to be components of the strange particles discovered in cosmic rays years before the quark model was proposed; these particles were deemed “strange” because they had unusually long lifetimes.[61] Glashow, who co-proposed the charm quark with Bjorken, is quoted as saying, “We called our construct the ‘charmed quark’, for we were fascinated and pleased by the symmetry it brought to the subnuclear world.”[62] The names “top” and “bottom”, coined by Harari, were chosen because they are “logical partners for up and down quarks”.[41][42][61] Alternative names for top and bottom quarks are “truth” and “beauty”,[nb 4] but these names have somewhat fallen out of use.[66] While “truth” never did catch on, accelerator complexes devoted to massive production of bottom quarks are sometimes called “beauty factories”.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark

    • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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      20 hours ago

      dont they also have a different SPin too, im not a physics geek, but i did take some remedial astronomy/physics courses.