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Originally Posted by BossChief:
So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.
A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.
This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.
This time was different.
He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"
I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.
Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?
The Mayan doomsday prophecy was just a government-concocted plan to hide the massacre they're engineering for us on December 21st, 2012. Just like the 9/11 disaster and the JFK assassination, it's all smoke and mirrors, bro. They're worried about the growing population problem and maintaining control so they're gonna exterminate us. The worst part about it is, with all this Mayan prophecy bs, no one will even suspect it was our own government that set the plan in motion to kill us all..
Originally Posted by BossChief:
I guess I've been thinking of it a lot because I think if there was nothing to it, he would have made a joke or answered quickly.
Him saying he didn't know was one thing out of the ordinary...looking away was totally not like him.
He probably had lots ofother stuff on his mind and I'm overthinking things...
This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can't breathe anymore. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children's Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient's veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.
Particles of fat and oxygen
The particles are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids, a natural molecule that usually stores energy or serves as a component to cell membranes. Lipids can be waxes, some vitamins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, phospholipids, or—as in this case—fats.
These fatty oxygen particles are about two to four micrometers in size. They are suspended in a liquid solution that can be easily carried and used by paramedics, emergency crews and intensive care personnel. This seemingly magic elixir carries "three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells."
Similar solutions have failed in the past because they caused gas embolism, rather than oxygenating the cells. According to John Kheir, MD at the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children's Hospital, they solved the problem by using deformable particles, rather than bubbles:
We have engineered around this problem by packaging the gas into small, deformable particles. They dramatically increase the surface area for gas exchange and are able to squeeze through capillaries where free gas would get stuck.
Kheir had the idea of an injected oxygen solution started after he had to treat a little girl in 2006. Because of a lung hemorrhage caused by pneumonia, the girl sustained severe brain injuries which, ultimately, lead to her death before the medical team could place her in a heart-lung machine.
Soon after, Kheir assembled a team of chemical engineers, particle scientists, and medical doctors to work on this idea, which had promising results from the very beginning:
Some of the most convincing experiments were the early ones. We drew each other's blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.
It sounds like magic, but it was just the start of what, after years of investigation, became this real life-giving liquid in a bottle.
This is what the future is about. And it's a beautiful one indeed, one that is arriving earlier than we ever could have expected. I wonder if this would find its way to other uses. I can see it as an emergency injection in a spaceship, for example. But what about getting a shot for diving? [Reply]
If you think your home Wi-Fi connection is fast, think again. Scientists have been working on a new way to transmit data wirelessly, and they can now transfer a scorching 2.5 terabits of information per second.
Let us put that another way: that's over 8,000 times faster than Verizon's fastest wired home internet connection, FiOS, that only manages a paltry 300Mbps. Or, to put it in real terms, it's the same as transmitting seven full Blu-ray movies per second. Basically, this shit is crazy fast.
But how the hello do they do it? Well, the team of American and Israeli researchers have used a neat new concept, where the electromagnetic waves that usually carry data are twisted into vortex beams. ExtremeTech describes the concept well:
These twisted signals use orbital angular momentum (OAM) to cram much more data into a single stream. In current state-of-the-art transmission protocols (WiFi, LTE, COFDM), we only modulate the spin angular momentum (SAM) of radio waves, not the OAM. If you picture the Earth, SAM is our planet spinning on its axis, while OAM is our movement around the Sun. Basically, the breakthrough here is that researchers have created a wireless network protocol that uses both OAM and SAM.
The combination of the two provides some amazing possibilities. So far, the researchers, from University of Southern California, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Tel Aviv University, have twisted together eight data streams, each operating at 300 Gbps, to achieve the new record of 2.5 terabits per second. At the moment, they've only transmitted signals as far as 1 meter. That should be scaled up before long—though the researchers admit 1 kilometer is probably an upper limit.
What's perhaps most interesting is that the technique can be used to twist together an awful lot of slower data connections. The researchers, who have published their findings in Nature, explain that in theory it should be possible to twist together hundreds or even thousands of conventional LTE signals into a single beam. That ought to help address the imprending bandwith crisis.
Of course, all that remains is for the team to develop the technology into something robust enough to use on a commercial scale—and there's no telling how long that might take. [Reply]
Originally Posted by BossChief:
So, I think this is kinda scary and thought I'd share in this thread rather than starting a new one.
A family member of mine is a high ranking official at the Ames research facility in northern California. He has always shared facinating things with me when I ask direct questions. I was out there last month I asked him at dinner if he thinks there is anything to this whole mayan calendar thing and if I should expect to prepare for anything out of the ordinary.
This is a full eye contact guy that is a total straight shooter. If I ask, he ALWAYS answers without beating around the bush.
This time was different.
He immediately looked down, wouldn't look at me at all and said "you know, Paul...I really don't know"
I'm going back out there in a few days and am contemplating asking again, thinking maybe it was due to the public setting that he didn't want to talk openly about it...but he got "shook" when I asked him.
Do you guys think it would be rude to ask again?
There is no "Mayan calendar thing." It's a media invention. [Reply]
Here are some interesting facts about fireworks you can impress your family and friends with as you watch the show.
Fireworks manufacturing
Manufactures all have their own recipes for creating their fireworks; but the basic chemistry behind is the same for any fireworks.
Manufacturers start by combining a mixture of metals and oxidizers such as chlorates, perchlorates, or nitrates. The type of metals used influences the fireworks colours while the oxidizers provide the oxygen needed to achieve the required temperature for the reaction. Water is also added to the mixture to bind the metals and oxidizers together. This damp mixture is then cut into smaller pieces known as “stars”.
The manufacturers then fill a fireworks shell with “stars” and black powder, a mixture of potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. A time-delay fuse is also inserted into the shell which ignites the black powder and stars causing the shell to burst open.
Firework colours
There are 5 basic colours for fireworks, and each colour is produced by a different metal:
Red—strontium
Green—barium
Yellow—sodium
Blue—copper
White—aluminum, magnesium, or titanium
Dr. Paul Worsey teaches commercial pyrotechnics operations at the University of Misouri-Rolla in the United States said in an issue of JOM that the art of fireworks lies in getting the right temperature for the reaction to occur.
“Some colours are pretty easy, and those colours would be red and green,” says Worsey, “but you can tell how good a firework manufacturer is by the quality of their blues.” Blue is such a difficult colour to produce because the reaction temperature has to be perfect.
In the same issue of JOM, Phil Grucci executive VP of the New York based fireworks manufacturing company Fireworks by Grucci explained that too much or too rich of an oxidizer that’s combined with the copper causes the mixture to burn at temperatures that are too high—causing a washed out powder blue colour. But burning the mixtures at temperatures that are too low may result in an orange-red colour, rather than blue—or the mixture may even fail to ignite.
Aside from the basic fireworks colours, other colours can be made by mixing the elements that create the primary colours. For example, purple explosions are created when a copper oxidizer (used to make blue fireworks) is combined with a certain amount of strontium (used to make red fireworks). Pastel explosions can be made by adding white-light generating elements such as aluminium, magnesium or titanium to the firework’s composition.
Fireworks effects
The metal used influences not just the colour but also the look of a firework. For example,
a “salute” firework is a quick burst of light with a loud sound and contains finely ground metal powders. The fine powder explodes in a burst of light and burns out quickly. The silver colour of a “salute” is made by combining an oxidizer and aluminum powder. Titanium is also added to the firework mixture to produce a sparkling effect.
In comparison, a waterfall (or willow) firework explodes in the air and leaves a trail of colour then as it slowly falls to the ground. This type of longer lasting firework uses charcoal and flakes of metal because they burn at a slower rate.
Fireworks shapes
Some fireworks create familiar shapes like as rings, stars, and hearts as they explode. The trick behind these fireworks is the plastic mold that’s placed inside the fireworks shell. The “star” is arranged inside the shell using a plastic mold of the same shape as the fireworks explosion (e.g. ring, star, heart). When the fireworks explode, the “star” will break out of the mold and form the desired shape. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Marco Polo:
The Mayans never accounted for leap days so the calendar actually ended months ago.
We correlate any date between the two calendar systems by matching a known dated event in the Mayan system to the Julian date, then adjust to the Gregorian. The Mayans did not need Leap Years, and they are automatically adjusted in the Western calendar, so they have absolutely no bearing on this problem. [Reply]
Where would Bruce Wayne be without the batsuit’s ubiquitous slick cape? Alive and well, according to physicists at the University of Leicester, who have revealed that the impact of the hero’s plunge back to Earth after a little lofty cape-gliding would be the equivalent of being hit by a car at 50 mph.
The tragic findings, published in the university’s Journal of Special Physics Topics by four final-year masters students, conclude: “Clearly gliding using a batcape is not a safe way to travel, unless a method to rapidly slow down is used, such as a parachute.”
The proposed parachute would surely diminish the impact of Batman’s stylish flourish when he flicks the cape aside on landing — not to mention, detract from the terror it instills in enemies when he goes for the full wing span, narrow-eyed bat impersonation, pre-attack.
Nevertheless, the physics is undeniable.
After accounting for the drag and lift forces acting on Bruce Wayne in flight, the doomed trajectory was calculated. The 15.4-foot wingspan is just half that of an ordinary hang glider and, when launching off an 492-foot-high Gotham city skyscraper and gliding (successfully, the team predicted) for around 1,150 feet, Batman’s velocity would peak at 68 mph before levelling off at a life-threatening 50 mph descent.
The paper does admit that variations in the angle of the glide were not taken into account, and could contribute to a safe landing. However, Batman would need to slow significantly to avoid becoming a messy afterthought for Gotham city’s road sweepers.
When the “memory cloth” cape was revealed in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight — a flexible material that stiffens when Batman passes an electric current through it from microcircuits in his right-hand glove — the Leicester team knew it would be rigid enough to mimic the aerofoil shape successfully employed by amateur wing gliders. However, its limitations grew clear as the study progressed, and there is little hope the issues will have been remedied in time for Dark Night Rises.
“If Batman wanted to survive the flight, he would definitely need a bigger cape,” suggested co-author David Marshall. “Or if he preferred to keep his style he could opt for using active propulsion, such as jets to keep himself aloft.
“If he really wanted to stick with tradition he could follow the method of Gary Connery, who recently became the first person to glide to the ground from a helicopter using only a wingsuit — although he only made it down safely using a large number of cardboard boxes.”
We’re not sure what’s worse — Batman taking pause between attacks to clamber out of a pile of cardboard boxes, or Commissioner Gordon having to create a new bat signal that more accurately represents Batman’s descending shadow, parachute intact. Quite possibly, the fact that the hardy grappling hook may have to be hung up after 70 years trumps all the above — the drama of zipping up a skyscraper would be rendered pointless when bystanders have to then watch Batman, stranded atop the building, resorting to taking the stairs.
This may seem like something out of a science fiction movie: researchers have designed microparticles that can be injected directly into the bloodstream to quickly oxygenate your body, even if you can't breathe anymore. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in recent years, and one that could save millions of lives every year.
The invention, developed by a team at Boston Children's Hospital, will allow medical teams to keep patients alive and well for 15 to 30 minutes despite major respiratory failure. This is enough time for doctors and emergency personnel to act without risking a heart attack or permanent brain injuries in the patient.
The solution has already been successfully tested on animals under critical lung failure. When the doctors injected this liquid into the patient's veins, it restored oxygen in their blood to near-normal levels, granting them those precious additional minutes of life.
Particles of fat and oxygen
The particles are composed of oxygen gas pocketed in a layer of lipids, a natural molecule that usually stores energy or serves as a component to cell membranes. Lipids can be waxes, some vitamins, monoglycerides, diglycerides, triglycerides, phospholipids, or—as in this case—fats.
These fatty oxygen particles are about two to four micrometers in size. They are suspended in a liquid solution that can be easily carried and used by paramedics, emergency crews and intensive care personnel. This seemingly magic elixir carries "three to four times the oxygen content of our own red blood cells."
Similar solutions have failed in the past because they caused gas embolism, rather than oxygenating the cells. According to John Kheir, MD at the Department of Cardiology at Boston Children's Hospital, they solved the problem by using deformable particles, rather than bubbles:
We have engineered around this problem by packaging the gas into small, deformable particles. They dramatically increase the surface area for gas exchange and are able to squeeze through capillaries where free gas would get stuck.
Kheir had the idea of an injected oxygen solution started after he had to treat a little girl in 2006. Because of a lung hemorrhage caused by pneumonia, the girl sustained severe brain injuries which, ultimately, lead to her death before the medical team could place her in a heart-lung machine.
Soon after, Kheir assembled a team of chemical engineers, particle scientists, and medical doctors to work on this idea, which had promising results from the very beginning:
Some of the most convincing experiments were the early ones. We drew each other's blood, mixed it in a test tube with the microparticles, and watched blue blood turn immediately red, right before our eyes.
It sounds like magic, but it was just the start of what, after years of investigation, became this real life-giving liquid in a bottle.
This is what the future is about. And it's a beautiful one indeed, one that is arriving earlier than we ever could have expected. I wonder if this would find its way to other uses. I can see it as an emergency injection in a spaceship, for example. But what about getting a shot for diving?
This has to be a hoax. Humans do not have blue blood. [Reply]
Did you know that no two farts are exactly alike? It’s true. Farts are sort of like snowflakes in that regard. Little, invisible, smelly, snowflakes.
While everybody past the age of 10 is well-versed in the manifold variety of farts and their associated sounds and smells and sensations and sobriquets, precious few of us know anything at all about the sources of their great diversity. Can you, for instance, explain the lingering piquancy of the "hot fart" in any greater scientific detail than "that one was spicy"?I can't. And that's sad. In order to rectify this egregious oversight by the American public school system and get the straight poop on the basics of butt-gas, I had a little sit down with Dr. Lester Gottesman, a proctologist from St. Luke's Roosevelt who bears an uncanny resemblance to Jerry Springer.
Vice: Hi Dr. Gottesman, so we’re here today to talk about farts.
Dr. Gottesman: Yes, I suppose we are.
What’s up with the wide variety of noises farts make? Why do some come out as squeakers and others like a diesel truck going up a mountain?
The kinds of flatulence are directly related to the amount of swallowed air and the ability of the intestine to degrade food stuff to gas. It also has to do with the shape of the sphincter when the gas is released. If the sphincter is tight, it will make a different noise than if it’s more relaxed.
Often times my farts feel physically hot. What causes that sensation?
The sensation of heat is when the internal sphincter opens a little to sample what’s in the rectum. That is a normal response. If there isn’t a great deal of gas, the body will expel it slower, allowing you to feel the fart’s heat. If there is a lot of gas, the gas comes out too quickly for the body to feel the heat.
Is the temperature of the slow, hot farts actually higher than the quick, cool ones?
The temperature should be the same. Again, it is a product of the amount and speed in which one expels gas.
What’s the reason behind the smell?
The smell has to do with the amount of absorbed products like methane, which is made by fermentation of what we eat, and that’s what causes the bad smell, basically. As a baby, when you’re born, passing through the vagina, you’re infected by the bacteria in your mother’s colon, and that’s the bacteria you’re dealt for your lifetime. Also, everybody is different in how they’ll digest wheat products, milk products, whatever. And if they are not digested properly there will be a lot of methane produced and a lot of acid, and that would tend to cause a stinkier bowl movement.
Wait, go back to that thing about the vagina.
A baby is born with a sterile intestinal track. During the delivery, there’s lots of fluid and stool and whatever, and it’s thought that at that exposure the baby’s colon is populated by the mother’s colon bacteria, thereby affecting the smell of the individual's farts for the rest of their lifetime. There’s also other theories claiming the colon is populated during the first few months of exposure to fecal material, but that probably doesn’t affect the smell as much as the initial intake of feces by the baby during delivery.
Wow. It's like original shit sin. Does what your mother ate prior to delivery effect the bacteria you get?
Yes. In fact, they now also think that the appendix keeps an arsenal of bacteria so that if, for whatever reason, the bacteria in your colon gets killed by antibiotics the appendix can repopulate your colon with the bacteria that you’ve had since birth. That’s the new thought as to why the appendix is around.
So the signature smell of your farts wholly depends on how much poop your mom had at the time…
It’s not the amount, just the type of bacteria.
OK, but that's really what determines your fart smell forever?
Well, there are also other components. Farts are made by two things. They are made by one, the amount of air you swallow--so people who drink a lot of soda, chew a lot of gum, suck on candies, they get a lot of air into their colon, and that air comes out in farts. The second component is gas production by the colon. The colon’s job is to break down the nutrients in food products, like proteins and fats and sugars, and in the process of breaking them down they produce either sulfur or methane, neither of which smell great. If, let’s say, the colon has stuff in it like grapes and beans, and if it’s just sitting there for a few days it’s just going to ferment more and more until it becomes very smelly, versus if what you eat goes through quickly--like if you had the same beans, but it came out eight hours later, you’ll tend not to have as much gas from those beans. So it has to do with what your intestinal transit is. For most people, it takes 32 hours from the time they eat something to the time they shit something. That’s the average, so that means there are people who move their bowels every three or four days, and they have more time for the beans to ferment in the colon, thereby producing larger amounts of gas and more frequent, smellier spasms of gas.
What’s the correlation between the increased level of farts and drinking beer or coffee?
Well, beer is carbonated, so that’s why it makes you fart. Coffee causes the sphincter muscles to relax just a little bit, so you tend to have more farts by accident if you’re drinking something with caffeine than if you aren't.
A lot of times when I wake up really early I have worse gas than when I wake up later in the day. Does that happen to a lot of people or just me?
You have worse gas early in the morning?
Yeah, like, if I wake up at six for whatever reason, I’ll be a lot gassier for the first couple of hours I’m awake than if I wake up at nine or so.
When do you move your bowels?
First thing in the morning.
Do you have a lot of gas with the bowel movement?
I do, but what I'm trying to explain is if I wake up at my normal time I don’t have that much gas, but if I wake up really early, whether or not I take a crap, I’ll still have a ton of gas that goes along with it. Well, it's possible the gas is being metabolized more by your the later you sleep. If you get up at six and take a dump at that time, the colon hasn’t had as much time to metabolize, so what’s coming out is incomplete, metabolized gas. That may be your answer, but honestly I've never heard of this before.
Well, that's disconcerting. Now, I imagine that you’re familiar with “oops poops.”
No, what’s that?
It’s when you think you’re going to fart, but then a little bit of poop comes out.
Oh, OK, sure.
What I've noticed is, often when it happens it's not preceded by the urge to shit--it just feels like it's going to be a regular fart. Does that have anything to do with poop speed or it's position in the intestines or anything? No, it has to do with the muscles of the anus. There are two muscles of control. One muscle, the internal muscle which is active all the time, it’s the one that allows you to sit on that chair without shitting on the chair, then you also have the external muscle which is a voluntary muscle like your biceps. And when you need to hold stool in it will contract, and keep the stool on the inside. The passage that you are describing happens for one of several reasons. One is that the internal muscle has become very labile, meaning any little input inside the anus causes it to relax. Sometimes it relaxes too much, and that can cause stool to slip out. The other reason is you could have hemorrhoids--everybody has hemorrhoids, but people with bigger hemorrhoids sometimes experience gas slipping out between the hemorrhoids and taking with it mucus material produced by the hemorrhoids, which can cause staining of your underwear.
That is shockingly gross. How long is gas in our body before it comes out?
About 30 hours. It has to go through five feet of large intestine, and 25 feet of small intestine.
This is an anal probe. The whole black part of the rod goes in.
Where does the differentiation between burps and farts occur? Why does some gas come out of your mouth vs. your ass?
It has to do with the configuration and the tone of muscles in your stomach. If you drink a whole lot of liquid with bubbles quickly, if you take one of these [picks up a can of diet Pepsi] and down it quickly there will be so much gas produced that the gas will need to go someplace, and the best place to go is to come back up. If you’re drinking a small amount, then it has time to work its way through the small intestine and get to the large intestine, at which point the body starts fermenting it.
OK, while I've got you here, what’s the strangest thing that you’ve seen up a butt?
Oh, a little of everything--beer bottles, milk bottles, every can of vegetable known to man.
Have you ever seen a beer bottle that broke up there?
No, they tend to stay together, beer bottles are fairly strong. I’ve also seen balloons, condoms, toys with the batteries still working.
Do those people waddle in?
Well, they usually wait until the middle of the night because they don’t want to be seen, and occasionally we have to operate on them.
Do you see more girls or guys with stuff stuck up there?
More girls than I would have imagined, but mostly guys--mostly gay guys. I’ve also had people who want me to operate on their anuses to make their fart sounds a little more appealing.
Get the fuck out of here, what kind of a fart sound are they going for?
Generally they have a higher pitched sound, and they want something with a lower pitch.
Like a baritone versus a squeaker?
Basically. So I had to configure their anus skin so their fart sound would be more to their pleasing.
Oh shit, you actually did it? Someone paid you to make their farts sound better.
Well they tried to put it through with their insurance.
Which insurance company is willing to pay for that?
None, so far all the companies have denied it. But the people try and then they end up having to pay for it.
Any other weird stuff going on?
A lot of the gay guys I see do things like fisting and double fisting--you name it they do it. So you always have to be on your toes as to what they’ve potentially done to end up in the situation they’re in. I’ve had a patient, he was on crack, of course, but he put a pogo stick on the steps, and he shot it straight up his ass and messed up his colon and prostate.
Oh dear god please tell me you're joking.
Nope. Another case that comes to mind is a woman who took an egg whisk and put it up her husband’s butt, and that made a bad mess. Usually, for the majority of these accidents, people are on crack or coke. [Reply]