The fact they spin and the bits interact gravitationally makes them symmetric. There are almost certainly some asymmetric galaxies as we know galaxies collide and they will be asymmetric for a bit afterwards, but the spinning and fiction of gravity will make them symmetric again fairly quickly on galactic time scales.
The Milwaukee Protocol is a treatment plan that is essentially a more advanced version of what you’re asking. The patient is put in a medically induced coma and then given antivirals and IV fluids, which avoids the issue of hydrophobia.
and didnt they use it on that girl that survived cause she didnt report the bite until it was too late, so it was either try something dangerously crazy like Mulwaukee Protocol, or just die miserably?
I guess whether this protocol should be abandoned, rather than iterated on to improve its chances of success, to me, depends on the effect the coma has on the patient's quality of life while the protocol is attempted. It's arguably more humane to put someone in a medically induced coma while they're still sane. If the protocol fails, the patient is at least not conscious while their brain is deteriorating.
Ignaz Semmelweis tried to convince the medical establishment that washing hand stop’the spread of disease in hospitals. His colleagues responded that doctors are gentlemen and gentlempdo not have dirty hands. Semmelweis was committed to a mental institution soon after and died from an infection as a result of a beoti’he received from institution workers. A few decades later the four humors school of medicine was replaced with diseases caused by microorganisms.
Imagine living at a time when the germ theory of disease wasn’t widely accepted. You might even need to convince people that microbes exist. If they already know about microbes, they might believe that microbes spawn out of thin air through abiogenesis. Previously that word was used when talking about microbes spoiling food whereas nowadays it’s applied to the early stages of the earth.
Standard gravity is 9.80665 m/s2. That the number defined by the metric people who set all the world’s units. In schools in the united states of america, we used 9.8. I don’t recal using any more precision than that. Gravity at the surface does vary, but you don’t need more presision than that for most academic purposes.
Is that so? I wonder what the story behind that is. Maybe it’s a surface average?
Most people would probably guess this, but meters and seconds are defined independently of Earth’s gravity, so it doesn’t have a true value, just apparently a standard nominal one.
Standard gravity was adopted as a standard in 1901. That was at the 3rd meeting of the General Conference on Weights and Measures. They redefined a litre as 1 kilogram of water, but the volume of water depends on the pressure, and the pressure depends on the local gravity, so they had to come up with standard values for both standard atmosphere and standard gravity. You also need a standard value for gravity to define a standard for weight measurements which was also done.
Standard gravity is the acceleration at sea level at 45 degrees latitude. The official number was based on measurements made by Gilbert Étienne Defforges in 1888. I can’t find details about his methodology without going to a library or something, and that’s not worth the effort for an internet comment.
No, it’s not worth it. Honestly that’s great all on it’s own. I guess they never had a reason to update it, then, since anybody that needs a more accurate value would just measure it themselves.
It looks like they went back to the original litre definition a few decades later. I’m not sure why they thought defining volume by mass rather than geometry was better in 1901, anyway. Some fun facts about the kilogram itself, since I never get to talk about this stuff:
Since 2019 the kilogram has been based on a “Kibble balance”, which is a contraption that precisely measures the force produced by electromagnetism. The necessary electricity is provided by circuit with a material that has quantised resistance near absolute zero, and a superconducting junction which produces oscillation exactly tied to the current flowing through, which is itself timed by atomic clock. This allows you to measure it out using just the new fixed value of Plank’s constant.
Before 2019 there was just a chunk of metal the was the kilogram, which is hilariously low-tech.
I think when people say it’s only predicting the next word, it’s a bit of an oversimplification to explain that the AI is not actually intelligent. It’s more or less stringing words together in a way that seems plausible.
Real life quantum physicist here. When you say you want the uncertainty principle to be bigger, what you are really saying is you want Planck’s constant to be a bigger number. This has much bigger consequences than you might expect, because if nothing else about the universe changes (for example Coulomb’s constant) then the energy levels of atomic transitions all get out of whack, you break chemistry and chemical bonding, and there is no such thing as a basketball because there are no such thing as rubber molecules.
A good way of exposing this idea to people is showing them the step by step of how to get the particle in the box energy equation and then generalizing it for 3d.
It becomes really obvious the issues that happen when you have degenerate states.
The short answer is that it’s ultimately down to the number 43 (the number of protons technetium has) and the number of neutrons that could potentially form stable isotopes being atomically weird numbers.
The picture below shows relative stabilities of isotopes of different elements. N represents the number of neutrons, Z represents the number of protons. As a starting rule, moving above or below the N=Z line (creating an excess of protons or an excess of neutrons) tends to decrease overall stability.
You can see for lower atomic numbers, the most stable isotopes closely follow N=Z because protons and neutrons “balance” each other in the nucleus. But as you increase the atomic number (and therefore the number of protons), the protons begin to repel each other more strongly, which means additional neutrons are needed to make the nucleus stable. This is why the “line of stability” (the line of dark red “stable” elements) increases above the N=Z line as you increase the atomic number. Deviation from this line means an atom is less “beta stable” (and therefore more likely to beta-decay).
There are certain “magic” numbers of protons and neutrons that are more stable than others because they comprise a full shell. These occur at 2, 8, 20, 28, 50, 82, and 126. This means nuclei that have (or are very close to) one of these numbers of protons, or neutrons, or protons + neutrons, are inherently more stable. If you look at the other stable isotopes on the graph, you would expect a stable isotope of technetium would need around 55 neutrons to follow the line of stability.
As it turns out, the combinations of 43 protons and 55 (± a few) neutrons just can’t form a stable enough configuration to not beta-decay.
There's also sickle cell anemia: IIRC it protects against something like the tse-tse fly or mosquito borne illnesses native to parts of the African continent
I believe that it offers a degree of protection against malaria. Or, enough protection that you live long enough to reproduce before dying a terrible, agonizing death.
Because you’re ears evolved to hear sound in air. It’s an interface problem, not a transmission problem. Same with speakers and microphones, they are designed to be used in air.
So if you want to actually hear the sound, stick with air.
If you just want to transmit some information via sound, a dense solid like a metal will give you the best speed and distance.
Greater availability and affordability of unhealthier, more processed foods filled with carbs and fats and devoid of other nutrients. Car culture that discourages natural amounts of walking in a daily routine. Sugar, caffeine and alcohol addictions with advertisers preying on people vulnerable to addiction of every kind.
I was with you until caffeine. How does caffeine addiction contribute to the obesity epidemic? Are you talking about addiction to caffeine leading to people consuming more sugary soft drinks?
I’m probably being naïve because 100% of my caffeine consumption comes from black coffee and tea.
Yeah I’m mostly talking about Sodas like pepsi, and but a big one is also colourful energy drinks like Redbull, Monster and Prime. Tons of ad money and sponsorships being thrown on these very unhealthy drinks.
On the coffee side, Tis the Pumpkin Spice Latte season from you-know-which chain. A 16oz cup of that has 9 grams(45% recommended DV) of saturated fats, and 50g of sugar. A 16oz Coca-Cola bottle contains a very similar amount of sugar at 52g.
Regular coffee and tea isn’t bad but caffeine has to still be taken in moderation.
This is a good summary however I believe part of the issue is that due to high intensity farming the mineral levels of the soil are way down thus mineral levels of the foods we eat are basically nonexistent. People are hungry all the time because they are, essentially, malnourished. The body needs many different trace minerals to function well and if it doesn’t get it will be hungry.
A fat man can be fat and malnourished at the same time. Truly a first world problem.
I remember watching a video where they added some liquid visible with UV to the water and flushed, there were droplets everywhere including the tester’s face.
It’s not a study but it’s enough to make me close the lid, especially when my toothbrush is in the same room.
Yes, toothbrushes live uncomfortably close to the loo in my house too.
A friend gave me some light banter about closing the lid = under my wife's thumb but it's absolutely about me attempting to keep the toilet business contained to the toilet!
Someone once tried to argue against it by saying it still got the droplets in the air with the lid closed so there’s no point. My counterargument was that it still contained a lot of the droplets by closing it and that it’s the most minor of inconveniences to close it so you should just do it anyways.
Yes, there are non-deterministic parts in physics. For example atomic decay. While we can measure and work with half-life times for large amounts of radioactive atoms, the decay of a single, individual atom is unpredictable. So in a way, you can get your desired dose of vagueness by controlling how many atoms you monitor. The less, the more.
Or another example from the same field: There are atoms for which we believe they are stable, although they theoretically could decay. But we never observed it. So maybe they are in fact stable, or maybe they decay just slower than we have time. Or only when we don’t look. Examples would be Helium-4 or Lead-208.
I also like the idea, inspired by Douglas Adams, that the universe itself could be a weird and random fluctuation, which just happens to behave as if it was a predictable, rationally conceivable thing. That actually, it’s all a random chain of junk events, and we’re fooled into spottings some patterns. This apparence could last forever or vanish the very next moment, who knows. Maybe it’s all just correlation and there is zero causation. As far as I know, we’ll never be able to tell. So fundamentally, all of it is a vague guess, supported by mountains of lucky evidence.
Good answer! Thanks for that. Also, good use of ‘apparence’ - not a word i see often.
Apparently Bismuth-209 has what is considered an “alpha decay” with a half life longer than the lifetime of the universe - whatever that means. So yeah, entered into some fuzzy physics there.
There are atoms for which we believe they are stable, although they theoretically could decay. But we never observed it.
Bismuth-209 was for a long time considered to be the heaviest stable primordial isotope, it had been theorized for a while that it might technically decay, but no one proved that until 2003, it has a half-life of over a billion times the current age of the universe, and so for all practical purposes can be treated as if it is stable.
I’m no physicist, so I very well be way out of my element, but I would personally not be the least bit surprised if it turned out every atom was technically unstable, but since the decay is so incredibly slow we may never be able to accurately detect it. Using the lead-209 example you gave, if it ever is proven to be unstable, the half life should be at least 10^25^ (10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000/ten septillion) times longer than the age of the universe. Smarter people than myself probably have some ideas, but I couldn’t imagine how you could possibly attempt to measure something like that.
Oh wow, thanks for the details! 10^25^ years … no, times … yeah, crazy. I mean, that’s beyond homeopathic. Since I learned about this topic as an interested layman, I somehow assumed everything can decay, and we simply call the things “stable” which do so very slowly. Which can mean as many atoms decay over the course of a billion years as there are medically effective molecules in homeopathic “medicine”; none.
The standard model predicts that hydrogen-1 is the only stable nuclide because electroweak instantons allow three baryons (such as nucleons: protons and neutrons) to decay into three antileptons (antineutrinos, positrons, antimuons, and antitauons), which imply the instability of any nuclide with a mass number of at least three; or for two baryons to decay into an antibaryon and three antileptons, which would imply that deuterium could decay into an antiproton and 3 antileptons.
This is very rarely discussed because the nuclides that can only decay through baryon anomalies would be predicted by the standard model to have ludicrously long half lives (to my memory, something roughly around 10^150 years, but I might be wrong).
Hydrogen-1 is stable in the standard model, as it lacks a mechanism for (single) proton decay.
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