Astronomers Spy 288bn Mile Booze Cloud

netmucus writes to tell us that UK astronomers have spotted a giant cloud of methyl alcohol that spans approximately 288bn miles. From the article: "The booze cloud was spotted using the UK's MERLIN radio telescopes in an area of our own galaxy rather uninspiringly called W3(OH). According to the Royal Astronomical Society blurb, this is a region where 'stars are being formed by the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust.'"

Comments

Not in the US

[masterpenguin]

Here in the great US of A we're not allowed to touch booze until a full 3 years after we're allowed to shoot others in the name of the goverment, vote, and buy porn.

Re:Methanol != booze

[Tx]

Actually, while methanol is indeed poisonous, the treatment for methanol poisoning is ethanol. So I'd say you can indeed get wasted on methanol, so long as you mix your drinks right ;).

From Wikipedia:

If methanol has been ingested, a doctor should be contacted immediately. The usual fatal dose: 100-125 mL (4 fl oz). Toxic effects take hours to start, and effective antidotes can often prevent permanent damage. This is treated using ethanol or fomepizole[3]. Either of these drugs acts to slow down the action of alcohol dehydrogenase on methanol by means of competitive inhibition, so that it is excreted by the kidneys rather than being transformed into toxic metabolites.

No, I ain't tried it.

Re:MMMmmmm.. aspartame.

[AJWM]

The aspartame molecule as one, count 'em, one methyl group -- which ain't the same as methanol. (Other than that it's essentially a dipeptide, two amino acids). And there isn't much aspartame in a diet soda -- you'd have to drink many litres of the stuff to equal a spoonful of methanol.

The dose makes the poison. A little bit of methanol won't hurt you. A lot of water will kill you (and I don't mean by drowning -- drinking too much water can kill you).

By the way, know the antidote to drinking methanol? Get drunk. Yep, drinking sufficient ethanol to get you drunk also blocks the metabolic pathways in the liver that convert methanol to formaldehyde.

Re:MMMmmmm.. aspartame.

[AJWM]

Nope, not kidney failure. There are a couple of mechanisms -- really messed up blood chemistry is one, or severe generalized tissue swelling, which, in the case of the brain, causes trauma because there's nowhere for it to swell to. Happens if you're drinking water faster than your kidneys (and sweating) can get rid of it.

There was a teenage girl in these parts about a year ago that went into a coma and died from precisely that -- she'd taken ecstasy which made her incredibly thirsty, and downed several liters of water in the course of an hour or so before collapsing. Autopsy report determined that drinking too much water was indeed the cause of death. Kind of sad really, it was at the girl's 16th birthday party.