Tag: science

Stones Have Been Popping Out of People Who Ride Roller Coasters

terrible-tentacle-theatre:

the-real-seebs:

the-pie-initiative:

kristoffbjorgman:

kawuli:

kawuli:

kawuli:

1. Doctor finds anecdotal evidence that people are passing kidney stones after riding on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad at Disney World

2. Doctor makes 3-D model of kidney, complete with stones and urine (his own), takes it on Big Thunder Mountain Railroad 60 times

3. “The stones passed 63.89 percent of the time while the kidneys were in the back of the car. When they were in the front, the passage rate was only 16.67 percent. That’s based on only 60 rides on a single coaster, and Wartinger guards his excitement in the journal article: ‘Preliminary study findings support the anecdotal evidence that a ride on a moderate-intensity roller coaster could benefit some patients with small kidney stones.’”

4. “Some rides are going to be more advantageous for some patients than other rides. So I wouldn’t say that the only ride that helps you pass stones is Big Thunder Mountain. That’s grossly inaccurate.”

5. “His advice for now: If you know you have a stone that’s smaller than five millimeters, riding a series of roller coasters could help you pass that stone before it gets to an obstructive size and either causes debilitating colic or requires a $10,000 procedure to try and break it up. And even once a stone is broken up using shock waves, tiny fragments and “dust” remain that need to be passed. The coaster could help with that, too.”

SCIENCE: IT WORKS

Update: 

“In all, we used 174 kidney stones of varying shapes, sizes and weights to see if each model worked on the same ride and on two other roller coasters,” Wartinger said. “Big Thunder Mountain was the only one that worked. We tried Space Mountain and Aerosmith’s Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and both failed.”Wartinger went on to explain that these other rides are too fast and too violent with a G-force that pins the stone into the kidney and doesn’t allow it to pass.“The ideal coaster is rough and quick with some twists and turns, but no upside down or inverted movements,” he said.

MSU Today

I just love this because it’s HILARIOUS and yet also a perfect archetypal example of The Scientific Method:

1. Hypothesis

2. Experiment

3. Results

4. Discussion 

5. Conclusions

6. GOTO 1 (the scientific method is iterative, don’t forget that part)

was this like… done in cooperation with disney management or did some  random scientist go through bag check with a 3d printed kidney and a bottle of piss and start looking for big thunder mountain fastpasses

He asked first!

Of course, the researchers had to get permission from Disney World before bringing the model kidney onto the rides. “It was a little bit of luck,” Wartinger recalls. “We went to guest services, and we didn’t want them to wonder what was going on—two adult men riding the same ride again and again, carrying a backpack. We told them what our intent was, and it turned out that the manager that day was a guy who recently had a kidney stone. He called the ride manager and said, do whatever you can to help these guys, they’re trying to help people with kidney stones.”

that is beautiful.

I love this

Science makes your look really fucking weird sometimes, but by hell you’re helping

Stones Have Been Popping Out of People Who Ride Roller Coasters

grassangel:

leupagus:

othartryggvassen:

theolduvaigorge:

Extinct tree grows anew from ancient jar of seeds unearthed by archaeologists

“For thousands of years, Judean date palm trees were one of the most recognizable and welcome sights for people living in the Middle East — widely cultivated throughout the region for their sweet fruit, and for the cool shade they offered from the blazing desert sun.

From its founding some 3,000 years ago, to the dawn of the Common Era, the trees became a staple crop in the Kingdom of Judea, even garnering several shout-outs in the Old Testament. Judean palm trees would come to serve as one of the kingdom’s chief symbols of good fortune; King David named his daughter, Tamar, after the plant’s name in Hebrew.

By the time the Roman Empire sought to usurp control of the kingdom in 70 AD, broad forests of these trees flourished as a staple crop to the Judean economy — a fact that made them a prime resource for the invading army to destroy. Sadly, around the year 500 AD, the once plentiful palm had been completely wiped out, driven to extinction for the sake of conquest.

In the centuries that followed, first-hand knowledge of the tree slipped from memory to legend. Up until recently, that is.

During excavations at the site of Herod the Great’s palace in Israel in the early 1960’s, archeologists unearthed a small stockpile of seeds stowed in a clay jar dating back 2,000 years. For the next four decades, the ancient seeds were kept in a drawer at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University. But then, in 2005, botanical researcher Elaine Solowey decided to plant one and see what, if anything, would sprout.

“I assumed the food in the seed would be no good after all that time. How could it be?“ said Solowey. She was soon proven wrong.

Amazingly, the multi-millennial seed did indeed sprout — producing a sapling no one had seen in centuries, becoming the oldest known tree seed to germinate.

Today, the living archeological treasure continues to grow and thrive; In 2011, it even produced its first flower — a heartening sign that the ancient survivor was eager to reproduce. It has been proposed that the tree be cross-bred with closely related palm types, but it would likely take years for it to begin producing any of its famed fruits. Meanwhile, Solowey is working to revive other age-old trees from their long dormancy.”

***Does anyone in the know have any comments?

(Source: Tree Hugger)

HOLY FUCK

Apparently this tree is lookin’ for a lady

Here’s a ten year update. The scientist, Elaine Solowey, has germinated and grown other ancient date palm seeds and there are a couple of female plants that Methuselah could pollinate. 

Source: theolduvaigorge

iesika:

systlin:

annechen-melo:

quousque:

thevideowall:

kayabebe:

aawb:

Let’s say your matrilineal line is fairly consistent and everyone has their daughter at 25. So four women in your matrilineal line are born every hundred years. In a thousand years, that’s only 40 women. Like the math is so simple and yet ? You don’t think about it. So in 2000 years, 80 women. So basically, 0 AD started roughly about 80 mothers ago. That’s it.

I’m……… i’m a little drunk n cannot deal with this right now

Yep

The advent of agriculture around 9500BC was about 450 mothers ago

you can’t just say shit like that without a warning

Many, many mothers ago, when the world was new….

Many of the notes here are saying “But women used to have kids earlier”

Okay. So, assume every woman had her daughter at 20 instead. 

That’s five mothers in a century. 

Fifty mothers in a thousand years. 

One hundred mothers in two thousand years. 

That is five hundred and seventy five mothers since the dawn of agriculture. 

Less than six hundred women, between you and the dawn of civilization. 

You are never so far from your ancestors as you think. 

I love this method of making time comprehensible by humans.

The Science of Discworld breaks time down into “Grandfathers” of about 50 years.

On an even bigger scale, Richard Dawkins’s Ancestor’s Tale breaks evolution down in terms of when we split from which species to tell the history of life on earth in terms we can kind of understand. If you start counting evolutionary generations with the split of human ancestors from chimp/bonobo ancestors, there’s only 37 generations until the very first cell.

bisexual-bifurcations:

timeflow-x:

luna-aurora:

itscolossal:

4D-Printed Aquatic Plants Spring to Life in “Hydrophytes” by Nicole Hone

wait what do you mean “4D printed”

4d printing is not a thing we cannot access dimensions higher than the third

The 4th dimension is time. Here, an object is printed in 3 dimensions but is constructed so that the stresses and strains in the material that occur when interacting with some environment it is in (such as water), will cause it to move in a predicted way. So it is 4D printed. This isn’t the only research group studying this. It is what it has been called for a few years now.

Source: itscolossal

hectocotyli-everywhere:

recoil-operated:

themysticdreambouquet:

entethedragonduck:

cerastes:

When you hit your elbow against something, but that specific point of your elbow

it’s…called your funny bone…

that gif tho 

It’s not a bone actually- it’s a nerve that is exposed, specifically the ulnar nerve. The reason it feels so weird to hit it is that it’s not designed to deliver pain signals, so when you hit it it just wiggs out and sends Garbage signals to the brain, and the brain is just like “uh, dude- Ulnar, what the hell is this garbage?? You’re supposed to curl a finger and a half, and move some muscles in the forearm, why are you sending me this crap? How am I supposed to make this into sensory output?”
And the Ulnar nerve is just like “dude dude dude, brain- what the hell is going on?!?”
And the brain goes- “idiot. Fine. You’re on fire, freezing and being electrocuted. Happy?”
And the Ulnar goes “holy crap brain!! I’m on fire, freezing and being electrocuted! What am I going to do!!??!”
And the brain says “you’re an idiot ulnar. A damn idiot.”

This is how human anatomy should be taught

didyousaymaraudersormurder:

dovewithscales:

hyratel:

dovewithscales:

messy-scandinoodle:

dovewithscales:

virtuous-thing:

baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa:

heartgemsona:

erotic-yoddeling:

bemusedlybespectacled:

nonlinear-nonsubjective:

sonneillonv:

castiel-for-king:

maliwanhellfires:

just-shower-thoughts:

Mammals both produce milk and have hair. Ergo, a coconut is a mammal.

I know you’re being facetious, but this is an actual issue with morphology-based phylogeny.

*leans over and whispers to person beside me* what are they talking about

*leans over and whispers back*  Human ability to quantify and categorize natural phenomena is sketchy at best and wildly misleading at worst

consider the coconut

this reminds me of that time Plato defined humans as “featherless bipeds” and Diogenes ran in with a plucked chicken screaming “BEHOLD A MAN!”

i love how you say “it reminds me of that time” like you were there.

listen if an immortal feels brave and supported enough to come out we should respect them

This post is a journey

1 Reblog = 1 Respect

I maintain that humans started attempting classify animals, and some god or another made the platypus, and is still laughing.

Zeus: *hits joint* okay so like. It’s gonna have a duck bill right. But an otter body okay? And then a beaver tail. It’s a mammal. But. It lays eggs!

Hades: wait wait dude. Give it. Give it poison. Make it poisonous

Athena: You mean venomous, and make sure the eggs have both reptile and bird traits.

Hermes: *takes the joint* Give it extra senses.

Poseidon: It should be aquatic.

I MEAN where’s the lie

Demeter: … And where exactly do you expect me to put this?

Everyone: Australia.

WAIT A PLATYPUS IS VENOMOUS

bigscaryd:

prokopetz:

prokopetz:

aramis-dagaz:

prokopetz:

Concept: a robot who is very, very obviously a powerful wizard, but always has some complicated explanation for why what they just did wasn’t magic, and frankly they’re shocked that you would be so credulously superstitious as to believe that it was.

Off the top of my head, there are at least two routes here.

First is “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. Our robot wizard isn’t using magic, they’re using advanced nanotechnology, energy field manipulation, or some other utterly fantastic technology and scientific knowledge to perform feats that are nigh magical to the rest of the party. Either this is the result of advanced technology performing feats that are very similar to magic spells but are fundamentally different (manipulation of natural phenomena instead of supernatural forces), or superscience and magic ultimately do the same thing but approach it from a different angle. The natural philosopher class from the Northern Crown campaign setting of 3rd edition D&D is an example of this.

The other route is “any sufficiently studied magic is indistinguishable from science”. In this scenario, magic is not supernatural but just another type of natural phenomena. It has rules and laws that can be observed, understood, replicated, and harnessed. This is where you will find mass-produced magitech. In such a scenario, discussions of what is science and what is mere magic and superstition quickly becomes an exercise in pedantry.

Of course, this is more of a spectrum. The robot wizard insisting that they are using science and not superstitious nonsense might be just as close-mindedly stubborn regarding the true nature of the world as the character they are arguing with who is convinced that they’re using supernatural magic.

Two other possibilities you’ve overlooked:

1. The robot is using perfectly explicable technological tricks; they merely like to wave a wooden staff and chant in Latin while they’re at it for the Aesthetic.

2. The robot really is an old school bell-book-and-candle wizard, no “sufficiently advanced magic” about it, and they’re just insisting that there’s a perfectly mundane explanation for everything they do in order to screw with people, like:

“Okay, I’m pretty sure you just summoned a demon there.”

“Nonsense – it was clearly a trained animal in a fanciful costume. I’m surprised you didn’t know that I dabble in exotic animal husbandry, I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before.“

“And the part where it popped out of a spontaneously manifesting ring of green fire?“

“Aurora borealis.”

“Wait. You just turned that person into a newt. Don’t tell me that wasn’t magic.”

“Indeed it wasn’t. It was retrograde evolution, induced by a simple dose of reverse RNA transcriptase surreptitiously administered via hypodermic dart – any schoolchild could explain the underlying mechanism.”

“That’s… that’s not. How evolution. Works.”

“Well, listen to Mister Science Guy here! Which one of us is a walking marvel of modern technology, again? I think I know a thing or two about your primitive meatbag biology!”

“I… you…“

Option 4: it’s magic and he’s incredibly embarrassed about it because he’s a robot and it feels like he’s letting down the team. This is closely related to 3, but he does not in ANY way try to explain it, and in fact desperately avoids any discussion about it. “It’s science, very scientific,” he insists as Prince Vassago fistbumps him and helps him find his keys.

dashingyounghero:

nerdgerhl:

lyinginbedmon:

lesbophobes:

paxamericana:

The epidemic began on September 13, 2005, when Blizzard introduced a new raid called Zul’Gurub into the game as part of a new update. Its end boss, Hakkar, could affect players by using a debuff called Corrupted Blood, a disease that damages players over time, this one specifically doing significant damage. The disease could be passed on between any nearby characters, and would kill characters with lower levels in a few seconds, while higher level characters could keep themselves alive. It would disappear as time passed or when the character died. Due to a programming error, players’ pets and minions carried the disease out of the raid.

Non-player characters could contract the disease but were asymptomatic to it and could spread it to others.[2] At least three of the game’s servers were affected. The difficulty in killing Hakkar may have limited the spread of the disease. Discussion forum posters described seeing hundreds of bodies lying in the streets of the towns and cities. Deaths in World of Warcraft are not permanent, as characters are resurrected shortly afterward.[3] However, dying in such a way is disadvantageous to the player’s character and incurs inconvenience.[4]

During the epidemic, normal gameplay was disrupted. Player responses varied but resembled real-world behaviors. Some characters with healing abilities volunteered their services, some lower-level characters who could not help would direct people away from infected areas, some characters would flee to uninfected areas, and some characters attempted to spread the disease to others.[2] Players in the game reacted to the disease as if there was real risk to their well-being.[5] Blizzard Entertainment attempted to institute a voluntary quarantine to stem the disease, but it failed, as some players didn’t take it seriously, while others took advantage of the pandemonium.[2] Despite certain security measures, players overcame them by giving the disease to summonable pets.[6] Blizzard was forced to fix the problem by instituting hard resets of the servers and applying quick fixes.[3]

The major towns and cities were abandoned by the population as panic set in and players rushed to evacuate to the relative safety of the countryside, leaving urban areas filled to the brim with corpses, and the city streets literally white with the bones of the dead.[7]

Orgrimmar during the incident.

This is legitimately one of the most fascinating events in online and/or gaming history to date.

This post leaves out the most incredible part, which is that the CDC straight up contacted Blizzard and asked for all the data they had on the Corrupted Blood Plague for the purposes of refining their models of epidemic behavior in real human populations. 

History.

govthookercoulson:

did-you-kno:

Marie Curie’s century-old notebooks
are still radioactive, so they’re kept in
lead-lined boxes for protection against
radiation exposure.  

Photo via: Wellcome Library, London

Anyone wishing to handle her notebooks, personal effects, or other items have to wear protective gear and sign a liability waiver, just in case. She basically walked around carrying radium and polonium in her pockets, so… yeah.

Photo via: Amanda Macias/Business Insider

Marie and her husband Pierre are buried in Paris’s Panthéon, a mausoleum in that contains the remains of distinguished French citizens — including philosophers Rousseau and Voltaire.

Source

Hi, my real job is radiation protection. Let’s talk about this.

Paper is basically impossible to decontaminate. That’s just it’s nature. Paper is a fragile material that absorbs everything, and when it absorbs moisture, it degrades. If it absorbs anything else, it’s not going to come out.

Marie Curie did her work in an era when there was no real knowledge of the hazards of radiation and radioactive contamination. She exposed herself to toxic materials with no protection. The isotopes that are radioactive also tend to be toxic heavy metals.

So she’d do her work while handling these materials and her hands, and her work tables, transferred those isotopes to the paper, where it’s now there permanently. These books can never be cleaned. And since she worked with some rather long-lived isotopes, that contamination is now fixed permanently.

It’s not just her book, either. Her entire workspace is radioactive. It still stands but it’s under lock and key. If you do get permission to enter with a dose rate meter, and survey the room, it’s actually very obvious what she touched. Her doorknobs, and the back of her chair, are more radioactive.

She suffered from still births and health problems not understood then, but understood now. We’ll likely never know just how much dose she saw, and how much toxic material she ingested. Her work was exemplary, and it is regrettable she did this in a time with no true safety equipment.

Like any major industry, the first researchers suffer, especially those that are far beyond their time. Only lion tamers get eaten by lions.

What should you take from this? That hazardous materials deserve respect, and you deserve proper safety equipment. And, of course, respect those that walked there ahead of you and their sacrifices.

Source: didyouknowblog.com