Slashdot Mirror
Radiation Protection: Caffeine
B.D.Mills writes "This article on the New Scientist web site claims that "drinking coffee could protect people from radioactivity, according to scientists in India who have found that mice given caffeine survive otherwise lethal doses of radiation."
" Hmm...so does this mean I don't need to worry about the background radiation from my monitor?
stop talking at your ass t4rd0
w3rd
b-d4wg ovah and out
The mice may have lived, but I bet they didn't get a wink of sleep.
Where do they come up with this stuff?! It's amazing!
Is there some sort of mad scientist consortium that we haven't heard about?
Maybe the scientists hang out at frat parties or something to get their ideas: "Hey! Let's feed coffee to my roomate's mice and stick 'em in the microwave!"
I can just see the worldwide shortage of coffee beans next time there's a missle crisis...
-
I am ODiV, hear me type.
And it is easily cured with antibiotics, and as long as you don't catch H. Pylori again, you'll never again get an ulcer.
H. Pylori is usually spread because of over-crowding or poor sanitation, but because it was discovered so recently (1979), most of the population are already carriers, and keep spreading it to their kids etc.
Well, since Krank2O claims to have 5 cups of coffee worth of caffeine in every bottle, I would only have to drink 20 of those a day? Kick a$$!!! No more worries about my monitor and my portable phone (or a missing Russian nuke turning up in Boston). And my parents were worried about my level of caffeine intake...Silly them!
G-Love,
Who once again forgot his login at work
http://www.healthcentral.com/mhc/top/002579.cfm
Found this page today, just after my morning
I was watching Discovery the other day and saw where they'd developed a special robot to go in and look around Chernobyl to see what areas need shoring up (Damn thing's gonna collapse unless they do something, spreading radioactive crap all over Russia and some other eastern european countries.) Why build a robot? I'll go do it myself. As much caffiene as I do a day, no problem. I bet someone could make an industry out of this...
Seriously though, even though my typical cuppa is strong enough to kill a caffiene virgin and has been used in the past to stun moose, the quantities they're talking about here should be a near leathal dose of caffiene. About the same as ingesting 50 vivarin tablets. Not something you want to do if you have a heart condition (I'm surprised the mice didn't have their hearts explode after the injection.) And my nose wants to bleed just thinking about it.
However, if they can figure out how caffiene protects your cells, they might be able to come up with something that would enable a person to wander around in chernobyl without worries. That would be cool. Hey, could you pick up that plutonium over there and put it in the lead box? I'll just be over here vaccuming up the last of the uranium. Cool.
They also mentioned that less caffiene might protect you from lower levels of radiation, too. Might be worth considering having a cuppa or two before going out in the sun, especially if you're in an ozone challanged country like Austrailia.
With that much caffiene, I bet they were just outrunning the alpha particles.
Reminds me of a study that showed a correlation between the sexual activities of senior citizians and the amount of coffie they drank. It wasn't clear however if the coffie was giving them a greater sex drive or if all the sex was just making them tired :)
>Don't forget, the problems with DoE security started on Herr Bush's watch...
And no one knew about it until recently, except that Clinton STILL FUCKING won't do anything about it. COWARDLY Clinton and his chronies seem to think it's OKAY and NO BIG DEAL for China to STEAL nuke secrets, but if you or I did it, our ASSES would be ROTTING in jail for 999 years.
Why hasn't Clinton yanked China's "most favored nation" status? The Tiennamen MASSACRE, and now 20 YEARS of NUCLEAR ESPIONAGE, HORRIFIC conditions in factories, CHILD LABOR. Nah, none of that stuff is important enough to interrupt the flow of CHEAP GOODS into the US produced by slave labor. We's gots to have our Nikes right? FUCK human rights. It's all about the money.
I'm not trying to flame here...but in all seriousness...
Do you REALLY have such a problem with spelling, or is this just part of some 'shtick' you do?
You won't get ulcers from coffee. Ulcers are caused by bacteria (Heliobacter pylori...). Coffee and other stuff can make them worse, but they don't create tem. And H. Pylori can be killed off by antibiotics. You won't get it again unless you are really sloppy with sanitation (you don't have to be sloppy to already have it, though, since most of the adult population has been carriers since they were kids).
Well, there haven't been a huge number of studies, but it's fairly clear that there's no major danger. The whole cell phone and monitor radiation thing is in the same class with the silicone breast implant myths.
There are very few negative side-effects of caffeine.
Actually, nuclear power plants are very well shielded. Coal power plants allow considerably more radiation to escape than nuclear--one of many reasons nuclear power is safer and cleaner than any of the feasible alternatives.
And unless you're a really filthy slob, chances are extremely high you'll never get H. Pylori again, and thus won't get an ulcer again either.
As I wrote: Most people who are carrying it got it as a kid, and most won't get infected again as adults, once they get rid of it.
Actually, I think the most common causes for concern from electronic devices (as opposed to power lines) are not the 60 HZ band, but the high frequency RF, in particular, the Hsync frequency of your monitor. CRTs also emit some X-rays, but mostly sideways, and most of them are pretty well shielded.
Two additional benefits I haven't seen listed here: previous studies have indicated that caffeine reduces the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
And before I forget, it also reduces headaches (including migraines) due to the same improved blood flow in the brain that reduces the stroke risk.
Coffee doesn't cause ulcers, it only aggravate an ulcer if you already have one. And if you already have one, yes, then you should stay away from coffee while you get rid of it, and get treated with antibiotics to make sure you won't get any more ulcers.
But once the ulcer has healed and you are off antibiotics again, you can start drinking coffee again without any problems.
The only reason to be worried would be if you are so addicted to coffee that you'd get serious problems with withdrawal if you stay if you should happen to get an ulcer... And if you're concerned about that, then I'd say it's time to realize you have a worse problem than a potential ulcer :-)
I guess this guy needs to revert back to anonymous coward. he's too lame to have an account. just look at all his posting, most of them were crap. What a luser.
People freak out whenever the word radiation is used, but it is far too broad of a term. If more people understood the things explained in the post above, there would be alot less paranoia.
Let me add a couple things though:
First, neutron sources are indeed rare. If you're around them you probably know it already (i.e. missile submarine or something like that).
Electromagnetic fields are pretty much as he described. However, keep in mind that they are readily detectable and can be directed. Most monitor manufacturers know this. Sitting in front of a monitor gets you far less field exposure than sitting to the side or rear of it. And in fact, most of the field you are exposed to is underneath (hitting your legs) as opposed to your eyes.
Is it bad? I'm of the opinion that anything is bad in high doses. But there are probably worse things happening in your life. If you don't like it, you can always get a notebook or something without a cathode ray tube for the display.
- Speed
Oh yeah-- meltdowns, a rare, accidental occurrence that allows deadly exhaust to escape from the nuclear plant.
;-)
As opposed to coal fired plants, which exude deadly exhaust by DESIGN!
Maybe chocolate milk will protect from black lung disease
Isn't that what Belldandy drinks?
So long as you don't make it into foreign relations, we just might make it through this. It's bad enough that you might actually have the right to vote. :P
Now not having caffeine causes head aches, but ive never gotten one from having it. Its the only thing im addicted to, well that and pretty your brunettes with blue eyes, but im a willing participant in both. But as I said if I dont have my daily pepsis Im in pain, oh and MS products give them to me too. Thank Og for linux. BTW im posting this via QNX www.qnx.com and that nifty on floppy demo. Its fucking amazing, reminds me of the old amiga days were you could actually do something with a floppy drive and no hard drive.
Hmm, if this includes Mt Dew, then the rest of us are set as well!
If theres a nuclear war, hell I will drink 100 cups (or inject my self with pure nodos) to prevent my self from dying or at least living a few days/weeks more.
I've actually read that if you drink 100 cups of coffee in one day, you WILL die. There are quite a few foods/drinks that will kill you if you take it in these quantities. I have been people drink 20-30 in a day, before.
Coke (and other soft drinks in general) are not harmless though, especially if you consume such great quantities over long periods of time. The acid and sugar contained within can do some heavy damage to the enamel coating of your teeth. If you need that much caffeine, you should probably consider switching to coffee or tea (preferably without sugar). As a side benefit, tea also contains fluoride.
malloc() is the C function for memory allocation. Memory allocated by malloc() must be released by calling free().
Failing to free memory allocated by malloc() may cause a program to continue allocating more and more memory until it crashes. This is called a "memory leak".
Memory leaks are a common bug for programs written in C. They are also a constant source of annoyance and frustration for C coders who have to find them. Careful C coders do their best to insure that allocated memory is always released.
Maybe the high coffe consumption of geeks is the result of darwinian natural selection : If you dont drink enough coffe you get brain cancer and you get promoted or you begin to design silly benchmarks.
Is there any known positive effects of the regular consumption of Doritos ? (lower stress, ability to read directly hexa. opcodes,
Lemme know eh? I'll probably order a few cases...
So if they drop "da bomb" should I bolt for 7-11 and buy them out on Jolt Cola or should I go raid Starfucks for a dozen double espressos?
X was used for this too. I know the son of the Dallas shrink who basically introduced X into the Dallas nightclub scene and thence to the rest of the US. X worked pretty well for the same reasons that acid did for some people (30%, AFAKR): it seemed to dissociate them from their problems, allowing them to look at their alcoholism objectively for the first time and say "Boy is that dumb" and let them resist the addiction with more of a pain and less of a hunger (that was the way it was described to me).
That's okay because this so-called radiation protection will be balanced out by the results of the Duke study (released in late May) that shows that caffeine increases blood pressure, stress levels, and heart rates so much that it significantly increases the drinker's likelihood of getting heart disease.
So, when the bomb goes off, instead of dying from radiation poisoning, all us caffeine gulpers will die of a heart attack...
Sometimes The Scientist really makes me shake my head. This is not big news. There is a huge literature on caffeine and radiation/carcinogens (I've written some of it). Don't get all excited, this doesn't directly translate into what happens with lowdoses of radiation, or address the other negative side-effects (increased mutagenesis in many cases) that caffeine can have.
are you saying /. is trying to kill us all? :-)
;)
ok i need some sleep
---
I remember hearing somewhere that Gatorade is like the accecpted treatment for some Disease-found-in-Africa (dysentary or something- I forget). A relief agency wanted to contract with Gatorade to supply them with the stuff and they in turn would give gatorade good press.
Gatorade would not hear of it, and in fact did all they could to distance themselves from diseases.
I guess that could be an urban ledgend... oh well.
2^5
As an added benefit for the nuclear technitions is that they will be awake and alert, which is a good thing(TM) when you are working with nuclear reactors. :)
I read the internet for the articles.
Hey wouln't a mouse or rat hyped up on that much caffeine eat the cat? Or at least make Speadie Gonzales (sp?) look like a snail.
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Posted by Stephen "The Carp" Carpenter:
No way.
You can buy almost pure caffeine over the counter
in pill form as "NoDoz". If it was controlled
then they aould have to either make it prescription only or add other chemicals to it
(like acetominiphen or guifenison) which will
have very adverse side effects if you try
to take too much (and screw up the chemistry if
you had other ideas for extracting it)
I would bet that one of 2 things would happen if
you ordered it:
1) You would get it. No questions asked
(the catalog would say you need a DEA licence
to order it if it was controlled)
2) They would laugh at you and tell you that
they don't sell in small quantity to individuals
and that you need to find some retail outlet place.
Check out www.sigma.com and search for
lysergic acid dethylamide yup LSD...they
sell it. However only to licenced persons.
If you have no licence you don't get it
no matter how many 'reasons' you come up with.
if you have one...they sell it to you no
questions asked.
Anyway...I wouldn't pay more than $3/gram for it
(also remember...most caffeine is a byproduct
of decaffinated coffee production...simple
extraction and yeilds salable product on both
ends...)
Posted by Stephen "The Carp" Carpenter:
Many "illegal drugs" have had medical uses (and
some are just finding new ones)
THC was found to be a great antioxident...many
times better than vitiman E (mostly due to its
lower toxicity so more can be taken) - this
may be an explanation for why pot smokers
show the inital lung damage from smoking
but the damage generally doens't evolve into
a cancer
The legal drug melatonin also protects from
radiation exposure (ref: TiHKAL by Alexander
Shulgin).
Heroin was sold as a pain reliever and a cough
medication (so was codeine).
Cocaine still does have some medical uses (I forget what).
LSD and more recently ibogain have been used to
treat addictions (Ibogain was made illegal before
it could ever really be tested, however it is
still researched outside the USA).
(also neither LSD nor ibogain is addictive.
However some individuals can develop a dependance
on LSD...they are far and few between and in my
experiance already have extreme addictive
personailites to begin with)
Even MDMA (ecstacy) has been used by psycologists
during treatment sessions in some studies.
-Steve
If only this worked in reverse.... People like me who ingest near-lethal doses of caffeine each day could go to our nearest nucleur reactor core and be protected from the evils of coffee.
Werd.
Considering the state of the world (Thank you very much Mr. Clinton), especially in India and China, I'm stockpiling now. I wanna be good and wired when they bombs start dropping.
Misfit
- If you're not right, you're wrong.
One of the stories concerns mouse longevity. In the study, mice were irradiated to see if they would live longer or shorter than the control mice. Turns out they lived longer, so the first conclusion was that radiation could be beneficial.
After more work, they concluded that the mice they were using had a high rate of mortality when giving birth. What the study was seeing was that the irradiated mice were more often sterile, and hence living longer.
The second story was something like observing that mice drank water less while exposed to radiation. In this case, what happened was the water bottle used in the radiation cages was a different type of plastic (more resistent to radiation) than the normal cages. The mice didn't like the taste of the plastic, so didn't drink as often.
Moral: be wary of mice which glow in the dark :) (and yes, I know radioactive mice don't glow).
As someone with allergy to caffeine, I don't want to know how badly I would be after this quantity (if still alive, since more than 1 cup of coffee per day is really bad for me). Maybe it would be pretty bad for the heart. Any doctor reading slashdot could tell effects of cafeine in this quantity?
Or we will find out that Aspartme was unleashed on an unsuspecting public to cause behavioral problems and other mental/emotional disorders.
Well, if this is a true finding, then it would explain why computer geeks like us haven't contracted Eye Cancer or something
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
"...drinking coffee could protect people from radioactivity, according to scientists in India..."
looks like they could be looking into ways to protect their population from fallout? with the trouble in the Kashmir highlands, the timed release of reports like this do nothing to ease the possibility of nuclear sabre rattling.
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
First pumping them full of various drugs and then giving lethal doses of radiation. Uh.. pretty bad torture.
There was an article on CNN a few weeks ago that said drinking coffee lowered the risk of getting gall stones. Only coffee, not tea, or other sources of caffeine. There, add that to your list.
When I was trained for handling radiation sources for surveying oil wells, we had a big thing on safety and what radiation could do to a person. One case involved a technician at a poultry processing plant where the packaged chicken would pass through this room on conveyer. The doors had interlocks and the sources would close when a person would enter. Well, for some reason, the technician just had to check things out while it was running, so he defeated the interlocks, walked in, peered around the corner, and made it to the door where he collapsed. They did an autopsy on the guy to find that all his arteries had liquified. I bet if the guy snorted a few kilos of coffee, he might have made it out the door. Then again, maybe not!
The black on white fad that you are seeing might be the results of a Microsoft study on consumers what the desktop should look like. The white was intended to have the look and feel of a genuine sheet of paper with ink displayed on your word processor. I guess companies who want to sell computers are trying to make them look like common desktop materials, such as the paperclip, pen, etc... I seem to be an odd person that I never bought into this look and feel. I have always prefered a the soft luminescent glow of a blinking cursor on a dark phosphor screen. I can do without all the busy distractions. After all, a monitor is nothing but a low powered particle accellerator. Why turn the thing on full nuke all the time anyway?
Oh boy....I could see Kramer having a fun time with this one!
What a shame...
maybe this is why i don't have hairs on the front of my head, i take monitor radiation for almost 15 years
--
http://www.beroute.tzo.com
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Back in my school days, I remember researching a what would be considered a fatal dose of caffeine... I think it was 7400mg (about 37 Vivarin) was considered a fatal dose for the average person.
Sorry, but I don't recall what the source was on this.
--T
_____________________ This Space for rent.
Mallocs?
Stan "Myconid" Brinkerhoff
SB.
hrm... that's like 40 MegaJolts!
excellent! so if i usually drink 4 in 5 min. (gram o' vit. Caf)
that should (in theory) only take about 50 min. to ingest!
or of course, that would be about 50 extra-stength vivarin...
i knew a guy who took about 14 at once once.
knew...
Somebody get our flag back!
Man, as great as this news sounds, it's gonna take me a while to work my way up to 100 cups a day. *whew*
Gimme, say, a week.
[Notice how they didn't mention what _type_ of coffee contains 80-100 milligrams of caffeine. I'd say my normal morning cup is right around quadruple of that...so, 25 cups a day doesn't sound _too_ unrealistic, right??]
Did you ever see the season finale to third rock from the sun this year?
When William Shatner arrived from his plane trip, he was asked how it was and he responded with "It was horrible, there was this thing out on the wing!" and John Lithgow (sp?) responds back, "That's amazing, the samething happend to me too!"
Well, at least I thought it was funny. Maybe you just had to see it youself (I'm no comidian (sp?) or speller)
Wow, 30 cups/day is pretty impressive, but you need to more than triple that intake.
Must be nice not needing to sleep.
Cheers!
vic
That's a f'ing lot of caffeine. Wouldn't that be nearly fatal anyway? Also, is it possible that the increased metabolic rate produced by that level of caffeine might have been a contributor to the effect?
I just wanna see what mice injected with 50+ mg of caffeine look like. Put them sons of bitches on a wheel, goddamn it! You could light up a city!
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I read a while back that the cell phone companies funded research which answers one of your questions (and, IIRC, they found some dangers). Sorry I can't be of more help, but the info is out there.
if i remember correctly the vet forgot to take into account brain size in proportion to bodymass and measured out a dosage for bodymass, which put the elephant into seizures
Um... I thought I heard that caffeine (over a long period of time) causes cancer (breast cancer in women anyway). Can anyone confirm this?
This sig is false.
I regularly consume over a 12 pack of Diet Coke per day. I wonder how much caffine is actually in a 12 ounce Diet Coke.
DrWatt
Umm, could we have a vote against that?
"Jolt - for those really nasty tumors!"
"Melanomas just melt away with Nescafe."
"Drop in at Starbucks for a cup of cancer treatment."
Naa... honesty in advertising never works.
This is great ammo that I will gladdly use against all the health freaks here in Santa Cruz, Ca.
/. can the topic of caffeine lead to a debate about China and human rights :)
I'm feed-up with these folks that tell me that drinking coffee and eating meat is going to kill me - the funny part is that most of them are smoking cigs or pot while telling me this. Let me have my caffeine in peace!
Only on
\forall code \in C, \frac{\Delta readability(code)}{\Delta t} < 0
Now if only scientists would prove that caffiene increases sex appeal and promotes longevity...
Considering the amount of coffee the average programmer drinks, people can now say that the only things that will survive a nuclear war are cockroaches and computer geeks...
How do you think Micro$oft got windows?
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
Damn, and I thought one can of that shit was lethal. Diet soda = liquid suicide, that stuff is horrible! How do you do it?!?!?!?
Your Momma's so fat she makes emacs look like nano!
What a happy day.
The answer is yes, me.
All the more reason to drink Jolt.
:-)
Mom: Are we out of any groceries?
Me: Yes, milk, bread, butter, and Jolt.
Mom: OK, I'll pick that up then...
Now I don't have to sleep anymore
Who needs coffee when 3 Penguin Mints contain the same amount of caffine as a regular soda.
Not only will you be wired and able to withstand radiation, but your breath will smell good too.
-Jae
I was about to give up drinking Coke until I read this. I average about 5-10L a day and now I read its not just a waste of money but insurance into my coding future. I can now survive the radiation coming from my CRT. :)
:-)
... just be sure to have a good dentist, you'll need one with those amounts of Coke.
So, if you're working in a nuclear power plant, more caffeine is probably a good thing...
But if you're a cancer patient undergoing radiation-type treatments, will caffeine intake also limit the radiation's effect on the cancer?
--The more you know, the less you know.
far too many posts thinking 25, 50, 100 cups a day isn't "that much".
for my 80mg/kg, i get around 6.5 GRAMS of caffeine.
do you have any idea what that would do to you?
LD 50 (lethal dose for 50% of the group) for my weight class is around 10g.
65% of that is NOT HEALTHY.
i've had as much as 1.5g in a 24 hour period,
and that was really, really bad.
amusing during,
but a bit sick after.
one last thing.
caffeine is a diurhettic (i KNOW that's not spelled right).
ever had a few too many cups of coffee,
and spent the next couple (or more) back and forth to from the bathroom?
you wouldn't be able to leave.
all that aside,
and our chance of sustaining lethal doses of radiation anyway,
the caffeine might help with the monitor radiation we all enjoy.
(and that healthy green glow).
just remember this article,
for any nuclear fallout we may have to deal with at some point.
-tk
-Tannin Kal
That "theory" about EMR from monitors and high tension power cable towers was largely scare talk. Some fool got his hands on some statistics, misread them (as fools will) and then wrote a book and scared lots of people with his findings. Cellphones are a different story though. They produce micrwave radiation, which can be harmful, but it isn't in the lethal range.
Moral: be wary of mice which glow in the dark
Funny you should mention that. Scientists have actually MADE mice that glow in the dark by giving them the jellyfish gene for the light-emitting protein. The mice that were used were hairless mice, so those that took up the gene glowed in the dark with an eerie green glow.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Woohoo!! First the study finding that men who drink coffee have a longer sex drive into their later years and now this!! With those levels of caffine, I'll be a sexual machine! YeAH, baby, YEAH!! :P
:)
p.s. Actually, I'm already a sexual machine
"Klaatu, verada, necktie!" -Ash
Actually, back in the late 60's early 70's low dose LSD was used as a treament for alchoholism - it appears acid breaks the physical addiction to alchohol. Amazing the Ying and Yang illicit drugs can have...
'Scuse me while I kiss the sky!
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Hmm.. And if the radiation doesn't kill you the:
a.)caffine overdose will
b.)water poising will
c.)thinking you are bird...
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Hmm..
Well Vitamin C has just been proven to lower lead in the system. 500mg a day is enough.. To much will cause the plasma to thicken.
But in the local news today it was stated that kid died from 10 hits of LSD 25. *LoL*
Pure LSD25 has never been link to the direct cause of a death or any cancer.
But wonders what it could protect you from. Any one want to be a guenni pig? Hehe.
THC has been know to prevent something, I don't remember what, but don't study the anti drug reports becuase they are total bs.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Tea has longer lasting anti oxidents in them. So you add orange juice and grape see extract to it, you would have the Anti radiation and Anti Oxident drink of the year!
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Now those silly caffinated penguin mints I bought from copyleft are health food. whooo hoooo
Well a guy can dream can't he
A wise man once said... nothing.
Well microwave radiation is a bit different, but as previously suggested you should try more in the line of 100mg and wait a good 30 minutes before using the microwave. That way you give the caffine time to spread throughout the body, so that when the cat is properly cooked, you can have a tasty caffinated meal.
are those of us who spend a lot of time in front of computers and around cell phones in a lot of trouble from all this radition? are there any definitive studies on this? cause i really don't want face cancer...but, if i have drink coffee to avoid it, i guess i'll have to...
It's been a while since I had any Darjeeling, but if memory serves it's not a particularly strong tea. I don't know whether strength of taste and caffeine content are connected though.
For the record, I prefer Assam or Kenyan tea. I couldn't make Darjeeling strong enough.
One December day, two years ago, I had eight shots of espresso. These were fairly big shots; I'd say almost a half-cup each. It was some _good stuff._
Lemme tell you, I was buzzed to no end. My mother and I had been shopping, and it was a 1 1/2 hour drive home.
When I was nearly there I hit a patch of nasty ice and gravel and rolled my car. Fortunately neither my mom nor I were hurt.
Caffeine?
Faulty driving of a 15-year-old?
Bad road conditions?
You decide.
I dunno, but if I could get another eight shots of that stuff, I would. It'd definitely be a plus. I can _see_ this monitor refreshing.
Can't sleep, the clowns will eat me...
We won't die from cancer. We will die from stomach ulcers.
hat I find most interesting is the fact that dosing the mice with caffeine after (assuming "immediately after") frying them didn't help. If the caffeine reacts with the hydroxyl radicals produced during irradiation, my gut tells me that it should be possible to get the protection if the caffeine is administered within a short (admittedly, the window could be very short, on the order of minutes at most) time of irradiation.
I suspect that the explanation is more along the lines of caffiene stimulating or repressing certain processes in the body. For example, maybe it`s repressing DNA replication or transcription, and this means there`s less of it going on while there`s nasty free radicals about to get incorporated into your DNA. Or maybe it activates certain enzymes that go round eating up free radicals (there are some). I don`t know that much about what caffeine does (it inhibits the breakdown of cyclic AMP, and once upon a time I knew what that did), but it seems to me that that`s far more likely than that the caffeine itself acts directly on the free radicals.
Whywouldyouthinktoomuchcaffeineisbad? It'sfine. Noproblems. Iwrotethisin3seconds!
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
The only thing they're good at writing is...
(wait for it)
...mouse drivers.
(Ok. That was lame, but the original post was funny.)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
I wish I had known you could get published with this study. 12 years ago, some friends and I did a similar study at my Mom's house:
:) )
First, all of the scientists ingested at least 35% LD50 of grain alcohol.
We then administered several milligrams of caffeine to my sister's cat, "Muffin".
"Muffin" was placed in a General Electric model 3257A 60-watt microwave oven. The oven was set for high. "Muffin" was rotated in the oven for 3 minutes.
The results were inconclusive. Perhaps further study is warranted. I should seek additional funding (and a new cat).
(BTW -- Relax, I love cats and this story was totally made up.
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
well, lessee. What do coders get from caffeine?
:))
;)
1) a mental state conducive to coding
2) longer productive hours
3) protection from alcohol-related liver damage (read that in the NYT magazine, I even have that one in my desk at work, 3/14/99, pg. 20 (a very good page
4) my doctor says to take it with my migrane meds (silly cheap monitor, sometimes I can _see_ it refreshing if I look out the corner of my eye)
and now it protects me from the rads flying outta said monitor
I think Caffiene is proof that a) there is a God and b) God likes coders
Calmacil
I can't seem to face up to the facts, I'm tense and nervous and I can't relax... --Talking Heads
1979 if memory serves ^_^ I live in Pennsylvania (am Arsch die Welt) and can see the steam towers from still-operational portions ('meltdown' only affected one of the cores. The other(s) are still cranking along) from my kitchen window. Surreal, eh ?
--- "Komm liebes Kind, geh mit mir Ein ganz schoenes spiele, spiel ich mit dir" -- Goete
What are we waiting for?!?! Get these mice in front of a terminal and hacking the kernel while they're still buzzed!!!
They dont mention long term effects, maybe the mice get cancer and die 1 year later. besides, wouldnt that amount of caffeine if given by weight affect most humans pretty badly?
I read on www.caffeine.com that the LD50 (lethal dose 50% of the time for caffeine) in humans is 50mg/kg. The average dose required for caffeine intoxication (heart palpitations, etc.) is 200mg. (I haven't been able to get through to the web site recently, so it may be down).
If that's accurate, you have to drink a lethal dose of coffee to protect yourself from lethal levels of radiation. Great...
8) Makes you immune to subliminal suggestion: "Hey what's this on my TV? "Buy .... more ...." cmon! I haven't got all day! ".... stuff."
- - -
Who hasn't stayed in front of the computer for hours upon hours at a time? With all this radiation from monitors and such, we've adapted to using highly caffinated soft drinks as a resistence... Only now are scientists proving it officially....
Beware anything in New Scientist. Much of it is there because it would not pass the scrutiny of a thorough scientific examination. This is not to say it is not true, just that I wouldn't simply take their word for it.
Have you checked?
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
He won't be able to pull the lever without shaking the machine apart.
Guess we're safe for now.
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
Seriously,
if they pull China's trade status, what are we in the Pacific Northwest going to do when MSFT loses to Linux?
Figures you're anti-money.
Will in Seattle
Will in Seattle
90% of it goes out the back of the screen. Just aim the back at your boss' cube. Nothing you can do about the cell phone, except buy Nokia, where they actually test for radiation (Finland/Sweden/etc).
Will in Seattle
radiation is for distant squares
Will in Seattle
Then you need to call the Inca Monkey God back to translate.
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
I prefer Darjeeling. Does this make any difference? :-)
I hope so
Sven
There's no need for gatorade. For rehydration you can use some water with about 12 cents worth of salt/mineral tablets. The problem with relief efforts usually isn't obtaining the supplies, but is with the distribution. It's really easy to airlift in crates, but it's really hard to make sure that they get to where they should be going. The types of people who need relief the most are usually the last in line when things are given out.
For example: A while ago, when a North Korean sub ran aground in south korea, it turned out that the inside was filled with canned goods labelled as relief supplies from American churches.
30 cups? no no no, read the article, its said a human would have to drink 100+ cups of coffee to have the same effect that the mice had. And even then (after 100 cups of coffee) it is still only 70% effective. Doesnt sound like its worth it since 100 cups of coffee would probably make you go insane ;)
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
I wasnt flaming, i dont add the smiley on the end of flames. I was just saying that 100+ cups of coffee make people go insane. ;)
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
That my friend, is A LOT of coffee, how do you do it? Experience? If you cut back a little then you could sleep and work at the same time ;) Like the rest of us do.
;)
I use to be able to drink 6 cups in the morning, but i think it was speeding up my heart. Like a no-doze
- "My name is Legion, for we are many" -Mark 5:9
The preceding quote was taken from The Pharmocological Basis of Therapeutics, written by Louis S. Goodman and Alfred Gilman.
I also know this from personal experience. One day in the fine educational facility that I attend, I was wandering through the closet in the english room, when I happened upon about 900 grams of pure reagent grade 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine (caffiene).
In the recent past, I had grown accustomed to Penguins (caffienated peppermints).
Well, the local store was out of Penguins, so I decided to make my own. I went behind a partitioned wall with my ordinary peppermints and my big-ass bottle of pure reagent-grade caffiene and sprinkled about 3 grams of caffiene on the mints.
Well, suffice it to say that this is not advisable. But hey, you live and learn.
-redmist out...
-------------------------------------------------
I was about to give up drinking Coke until I read this. I average about 5-10L a day and now I read its not just a waste of money but insurance into my coding future. I can now survive the radiation coming from my CRT. :)
---- aut viam inveniam aut faciam
Reminds me of an old bit of nuke humor involving safety interlocks and high-level sources. I used to work at a research reactor, and a typical day's work often involved setting up an experiment in front of a "port" - essentially a shuttered hole in the reactor housing that was used to generate a neutron beam from the core. The experiments were set up in very well-shielded enclosed brick constructions around the reactor, each of which was very clearly marked with red warning light that was turned on whenever the beam port was open.
To set up an experiment, you and a buddy would verify that the beam port was shut (and test the warning light!), and then you'd enter the brick construction to place the thing-to-be-fried in the path of the beam. Your buddy would stay outside to make sure that nobody tried to open the port. As the beam was conveniently set at genital (er, waist) level, this led to the obvious gag of a third person bringing in a second red bulb and setting it up next to the real one while you were inside setting up your first experiment and your buddy grinned knowingly. The glare of the second bulb would obscure the warning bulb unless you knew what you were looking for. (Note that at no time was the real bulb ever touched, and a third person was required so that the second person could keep an eye on the beam port switch at all times. We were sick and twisted, not stupid!)
Your buddy and his accomplice would then then put on their best "white-as-a-ghost" faces as you emerged from the construction to see what appeared to be the red warning light. It only took about ten seconds to figure out you'd been had, but oh, the expression on your face during those seconds.
All involved would then collapse in peals of laughter and wait until someone else started working with the team to do it again. (Yes, they did it to me when I started there, yes, it was the funniest thing I'd ever experienced... after I noticed them cracking up while trying in vain to keep a straight face :)
Side note - a few years back, I had the pleasure of encountering someone who worked on the Real Thing - a nuclear power station. It turns out that the type of gallows humor enjoyed by grad students at research reactors isn't unique.
Umm... OK, I'm a little off topic. Maybe you just had to be there :-)
Back to the caffeine thing - while it'll do nothing for the non-ionizing radiation given off by a monitor or a cell phone, it appears from the New Scientist article that megadoses of caffeine may prevent of the effects of high doses of radiation received over short intervals of time.
What I find most interesting is the fact that dosing the mice with caffeine after (assuming "immediately after") frying them didn't help. If the caffeine reacts with the hydroxyl radicals produced during irradiation, my gut tells me that it should be possible to get the protection if the caffeine is administered within a short (admittedly, the window could be very short, on the order of minutes at most) time of irradiation.
Given that the main cause of death was (predictably) bone marrow failure, however, it's conceivable that the time it takes for caffeine to find its way into the marrow is too long to have a useful effect. Things to try (though not at home, kids!):
- Mice dosed "only 30 minutes before" irradiation survived. Find out how many minutes before irradiation a mouse needs to receive the caffeine before there's a protective effect.
- Mice dosed "after" (for an unreported value of "after" in the URL) irradiation died. Did they try dosing the mice immediately after irradiation? (One would presume "yes", but...)
- Attempt to correlate concentrations of caffeine in various tissues, e.g. marrow, at time of irradiation with survival rates.
and of course, if megadosing on caffiene immediately after exposure to radiation is shown to be helpful (or if one can find a way of perfusing bone marrow with caffeine within minutes of irradiation, which sounds unpleasant at best and unlikely at worst)...Still, if you're ever in a situation where you have a bottle of Vivarin handy and you know you'll soon be walking into a gamma source, it's useful information. About the only application I can think of would be for people onsite at a graphite-core reactor experiencing a catastrophic failure a'la Chernobyl, where you know you're gonna be exposed, but you at least have some say as to when the exposure takes place. (Troops facing imminent attack from enhanced-radiation weapons would be another candidate, but I doubt that a tank crew hopped up on borderline-fatal doses of caffeine would be militarily effective anyways :)
One more side note for non-nuke types: No, a Chernobyl-type disaster can't happen in North America. The vast majority of our reactors are moderated with water (which doesn't burn, but could boil in a worst-case scenario), and have vacuum containment buildings (for just such an emergency). Chernobyl was moderated with graphite (which is quite flammable at the temperatures we're talking about), and had no such containment building. Finally, and most significantly, the reactor operators at Chernobyl were doing something that rivalled "defeating the safety interlocks and walking into a gamma-sterilization plant" for Darwinian stupidity when things went kablooie.
All that said - I know there are some folks at a research reactor having a ball with this one. I can see little empty bottles of Vivarin sitting next to the beam port switch with a note that says "If you don't trust your co-workers, you should have taken these 20 minutes ago!"
A few cups of coffee put me on edge.
:-)
Imagine getting a shot equivlent to 100 cups of coffee. Do they give you anything to stop the convulsions?
Now imagine you and a couple hundred other people in a small underground bunker in the same condition waiting for 'The Big One' to hit.
Now imagine you're in charge of corordinating the nations defense.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Look at that! The "We love Linux and AMD because we love the underdogs" sissies are bitching because A) DaveO can't spell and B) He got the "wonderful" first post. Quit your fucking bitching and peurile AC posting about someone who's English is not quite up to par. I just hope Dave doesn't take the ramblings of fucking morons to heart.
Dan "flame me till I die" Turk
pleaese daveo be suer to stok up and coffees and bee okaY!
According to the article, "A person weighing 70 kilograms might therefore need to drink at least 100 cups to receive the same dose as the mice."
Wow! And that's hourly!
Ah well...guess I'd better get started now...
99 cups of coffee on the wall,
99 cups of coffee.
If one of those cups should happen to fall,
your radiated corpse will be a stain on the wall...
98 cups of coffee on the wall,
98 cups of coffee....
Green tea for maximum antioxidant effects. I prefer Irish breakfast from Twinings, though, for strength of taste.
Goddess help me seek the truth, but spare me the company of those who've found it.
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
1) Makes you totally irritable, annoying, on edge, and generally unpleasant. (So sue me for having a serious one. Get a life, people. It's just a TV show).
2) Gives you the magic power to type at 800 WPM in a language that not even you can understand later.
3) Makes the MicroMachines guy make perfect sense.
4) Makes your boss make perfect sense. Okay, not really.
5) Makes you think you're a good driver. Ha. See "Phones, Cell".
6) Gives you a reason to take insomnia pills at night. Makes you watch such quality 2 AM TV shows as TJ Hooker after the insomnia pills fail miserably.
7) The Gremlin on the wing is not real. The Gremlin on the wing is not real. The Gremlin on the wing is not real.
Looking back over this one, I become aware that a distinct William Shatner theme pervades this Top X list. The truly sad thing is that it wasn't intentional. I'm truly sorry, and I swear it'll never happen again.
-
Gatorade is pretty much exactly what you want for serious diarrhea sufferers. The stuff's designed to re-hydrate you & replenish those "essential Saltes" (see Lovecraft), which is the big danger with dysenterics (who get diarrhea in ways that you don't want to read descriptions of, trust me.)
Just bottle the crap into your local Sick Baby (young'uns don't have the fluid reserves bigger folk have, so are at more risk typically), and the survival odds pick up a lot.
I hate G-rade myself (nasty-tasting crap, no matter what the flavor), but there's no denying it's good for you if you're undergoing severe fluid loss, be it from pore or sphincter.
gomi
Oddly, I remember India taking a moral stand against such tests done on other animals, and prohibiting their export to the USA because of very similar experiments.
;-)
Perhaps now that they have their own nukes they've changed their mind some?
Oh, but this -does- open new doors for advertising! Imagine a Maxwellv House coffee ad featuring Slim Pickens riding that famous H-bomb through the hatchway, whooping and hooting all the way down, while the narrator intones in the background: "Maxwell House; Good to the last drop!"
Okay so this addictive substance stops radiation.
Shouldn't we run tests on opium to see if it counters the affects of alpha radiation for us smokers?
What about testing acid for the prevention of carpal tunel? (sorry folks, spell checks broke)
I'd gladly sign up for a THC / (name your death causing ailment here) study.
- P e g o With a wealth of knowledge around you, you start to feel like you're in intellectual welf
I have also noticed that a good desertspoon of coffee with some milo can help study time..... Like being able to do those damn equations without thinking in about 0.2 of a second and getting them right...
"I feel so cold, on hookers and gin... this mess we're in"
not too sure why but this comment made me laugh harder than I have in a long while. perhaps I'm giddy with caffeine.
----- this is my sig, do you like it?
Of course there is Coca-Cola et. al. too :)
I can't quote the definitive studies but I'm betting computers are way lower than cell-phones in terms of the number of "electomagnetic watts" that are actually transmitted through the either. Sure power consumption is higher but computers try to shield to prevent transmission instead of deliberately trying to gain extended range.
Also, try a light colored text over a dark background on your tube and see how much the radiation drops! I don't know exactly what move started all the black-on-white graphics apps, but my eyes hate screens with the luminance near max over 90% of the screen. Maybe it was some "official study" that said black on white is easier on the eyes... Bull - I'll bet this study failed to consider an active source (monitor) vs. a reflective pasive source (paper). More than likely folks got disgusted with glare screens and found they didn't need them if their desktops primarily used light colors.
So go reverse, and drop the lights in the room, your eyes might appreciate it. But be prepared to compromise on style cause you would not believe how many programs *and* app development packages hard code one OR the other color making it very difficult to select a pleasant light-on-dark scheme with a decent amount of contrast. Everyone needs to test with a reverse color scheme.
If you're a mouse, or a rat, you're all set. Don't worry about the radiation; look out for the cat!!!
Wow, That's a great find. Now I don't have to be so paranoid when the doctor x-rays my nads. schweet!
I've known (hoped) for years that something like this might be true!!!
Yeah, laugh at me now 'cause I can't hold my hands still from the caffeine... the cockroaches and I will be tapdancing on your grave after The Big One! Geeks Unite! Caffeine is The Way!!
At 30+ cups a day, I shouldn't have to worry about anything but ulcers, addiction and halitosis.