I would not worry about burned rubber over much. HTPB is just low-molecular non-vulcanized synthetic rubber. Can't be incredibly more toxic than burned diesel.
Solid-rocket booster of schuttle use ammonium perchlorate/alumina powder as the main propellant components: we are talking hydrochloric acid and alumina dust - wonderful smog maker for asthma kids. They are lucky that there is breeze from the ocean. And did I mention the original Thiokol SRB design used huge quantities of asbestos too?
What is the big deal about 90% peroxide? People have been distilling it from comercial 50% or 30% stuff using a one-step, simple vacuum low-temp distillation. There are hazards with oxygen -fuelled fires and the system has to be super-clean to avoid catalytic decomposition. But nothing that unusual in industry.
Transport may be heavily regulated, so it is better to have the "peroxide distillery" close to the launching pad. I would not like to operate a large-scale peroxide still on my back-yard, but why is it so hard to get a lot of this material? Seems like much lesser problem than building the rocket.
N2O is great deal less effective than LOX: by factor 2-3. But if you subtract the complication with cold-resistant turbopumps handling LOX or high pressure cylinder storing non-cryogenic oxygen, N2O may come out just fine. Higher oxides, namely NO2 would be more effective (they have been used in Titan rockets), but the high toxicity/corrosivity of these is serious trouble.
The most thrust/weight ratio could be obtained with ozone/oxygen mix (which is spectacularily nasty and explosive), then the next best oxidant is oxygen difluoride. (Another nasty boy, potentialy useful as chemical warfare agent)
Viral protease inhibition: The giant protein chain synthetized for virus capside does not get cleaved into functional subunits as it is supposed to. So, since there are no functional viral proteins available - there is very little new viruses released and those released often are not infectious, because some important protens are missing from them.
There will be likelyhood of resistance development, but those resistant strains may be less infective - the viral protease has to be highly substrate specific (The giant protein chain has to be cleaved on certain specific spots and only there. So if it has to mutate, it may end-up to be less effective in doing its job.) This things has been already proven with HIV - except that HIV is too hard to eradicate completely and it is also an incredibly fast mutator, so some nasty mutant eventualy escapes. Hep C is nicer infection to treat.
Progeria is genetic disorder, patients have defective gene that messes up the nuclear membrane. Hence DNA deffects acumulate fast, cells apoptose and the whole picture is similar to accelerated aging. Understanding the problem will help with the affliction diagnosis, but the underlying mechanism of the damage will probably turn out to be something common, even banal - like oxidative stress that does not get repaired quickly enough.
This may emulate aging, but not explain how to prevent aging.
Urban kids will have higher lead levels and poorer schools - it may have to do more with economy of urban areas and property taxes/school financing than with lead poisonong. Rochester brighter kids live in suburbs, have affluen/more educated - motivated parents etc. Incidentaly, there is less lead in suburbs.
Europe is stil using leaded gasoline as frequently as unleaded - the catalysts did not realy caught on (it was poisoning the exhaust catalysts that was decisive in conversion from leaded to unleaded gas). I would like to see a similar study done in Europe - with different (more homegennnous) ethnic and social composition. *That* would be convincing argument.
If you try hard enough, you will find statistic correlation between colour of car and frequency of trafic accdents.
Lies, outrageous lies - and then there is statistics.
If the only basis is face surface temperature, taking substance causing periferal vasoconstriction will fool the test - the surface temperature will be lower.
The most common potent drug causing peripheral blood vessel constriction is nicotine. I have even seen thermal imaging pictures of extremities (hands, feet) before and after smoking a single cigarette. The "cooling effect" of nicotine is quite dramatic.
This chinamen-trait is a defect in enzyme that takes care of alcohol metabolism. Goes like this: Alcohol->acetaldehyde->acetic acid.
Acetaldehyde is toxic. If too much acetaldehyde accumulates, you get headache and red face. Then nausea.
There are drugs that are given to alcoholics to discourage them from drinking - they make them pretty sick when drinking. These drugs block the enzyme (acetaldehyde dehydrogenaze). There are some mushroom that have the same effect, so having mushroom with a lot of alcohol can make you sick.
Some Nanotubes are excellent conductors and some are poor conductors - depends on the tube type. So far it has proven difficult to grow only one kind of tube.
The way out may be a redundancy - several tubes doing the same function. Maybe they can use them in vertical connections - for stacking chips up - one onto another, with nanotubes connecting the layers. But the overheating of such compact assemblies would be problem.
1. Tabun, not Tabin. Tabun has a weak fruity and almondy odour. The almondy odor comes from cyanide impurity. 2. No warfare agent smells like mown hay, you got it confused with coumarine, which is a pipe tabbacoe flavour and perfume. Phosgene gas has obnoxious sweetish smell, often described as "rotting hay". I did smell phosgene many times, it is not very hay-like. At any rate, phosgene is a suffocating warfare gas. It causes lung edema, it is not neurotoxic-paralyzing agent like VX. 3. Sarin has a very weak fruity odour. VX is odorless in pure form, but it can have a garlic-like smelling stinky impurity. 4. VX lethal dose is about 1-2mg injected, about 2-5 mg absorbed through skin or inhaled as a mist. Sarin and Tabun are less potent, you can smell their odor and live to tell about it. (Especialy if you have antidotes).
Toxicity of Agent Orange: TCDD contamination. Blame Czech communists.
AO was a mix of 2 commonly used herbicides, 2,4D and 2,4,5T, both have fairly low toxicity. S,4,5-T manufacture uses 2,4,5-trichlorophenol. There is side-product, an impurity during trichlorophenol manufacture, tetrachlorodioxine (TCDD). TCDD is unbelievably genotoxic, it is the most toxic dioxine. Manufacture and purification of trichlorophenol has to be done carefuly, else this dioxine carries over into the final product.
The 2,4,5T used in AO was imported from communist Czechoslovakia. (manufacturer Spolana in town Neratovice). Czechs were selling the stuff increadibly cheap. It was cheap because they were making the key intermediate (trichlorophenol) from recycled waste from lindan (gammaHCH) manufacture. They were cutting corners and the content of vatious dioxines, especially TCDD, in the final product was very, very high.
2) injecting anything into brain through catheter would cause HUGE risk of infecion.
They just milk the brain. The system is closed (outlet into stomach) for the reason 2)
There is another disease where this approach works: hemochromatosis. Genetic defect in hemochromatosis patients causes iron overabsorbtion, which would gradualy kill them. Bleeding these patients regularly saves their lives.
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/hemochromatosis/
Now they even allow hemochromatosis patient blood to be donated to bloodbanks.
Weird company: do not invest
on
Anti-Radiation Drug
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hollis-Eden was trying to shut-up its own unhappy investors (that criticized them on internet) in a nice Scientologist way. Their 2 lawsuits were just thrown out and they have to pay the other party lawyers. http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/release .cfm?ID=87 6
Until very recently, they were running out of cash (less than 1 year on operating expences left in the bank) and nobody would lend them any more.
This is a very small company (50 people) in San Diego. They do not do discovery of their own drugs, they just licence them. Their clams to treat and even cure AIDS, malaria, lupus, cardiovascular ailments and radiation sickness!! And by using steroids, similar to common anabolics. Without knowing the exact mechanismus how their stuff work. No wonder a lot of people in the field does not want to deal with them!
Their self-promotion is aggresive, and until very recently they had not much to show for all their investors money. Their stock was hyped up and then collapsed several times, because of Barnum-like announcements.
But the strange thing is that their panacea drugs may actualy work. Their flagship drug candidate HE2200 - Androstenetriol (AET), metabolite of Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) - happens to protect animals if given before or immediately after radiation injury.
It seems like the wrong people got lucky. I hope they do not srew this up, because if they do, other companies may not take over their drugs, because of the patentability issues.
So this guy has been working on diamond-based semiconductors and got an unusual result. He is retired and does not have instrumentation to do more tests. So what does he do? He proclaims room emperature superconductivity on surface of the material to make his data fit.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and I do no see it here. Wishful thinking more likely.
It is good to know because it is useful for the theory. If you do not test hard theory predictions with experimental data, or you cannot progress with the theory.
Understanding quarks is useful for learning about how world realy works on a very small scale, and about the origins of universe; do not expect antigravity machine and time travel discovery.
It just means that some current extensions of Standart model and/or some of its interpretations may not hold. Maybe there is no quantum foam at all - and everything is made of rubber (strings).
Standart model of quantum physics is known to be incomplete - there is no satisfying Grand unification with relativistic theory of gravity and while there are many modifications possible in quantum physics, we do not know which theory (if any) from the current extensions - or complete overhauls like String theory - are correct.
The search beyond the standart model is hampered by the available power of particle accelerators - it is simply hard to get on the level of energies where we could see the new physics. I hope this observation turns out to be a good piece of experimental data which can show the theorists the right direction.
"The electrodes that are inserted into the hippocampus are microscopic in size and delivered to their final place through a thin injection needle. The skull and cranium cavities are not opened, the entire procedure is performed under local anasthetics."
And what do you think is the difference between prune - cherry cola - and almond artificial flavour? All of it is benzaldehyde.
You have this almondy flavour naturaly present in these fruits - you can notice it especialy in compots and juices, where the whole fruit is heat-processed - from the almond-like seed in the pit.
You can smell HCN when you sniff at the bottle with cyanide or cyanoborohydride - it is a bitter, nasty, almnost pyridine-like stink. Sure, cyanide is in bitter almonds and peach inner seeds, it makes part of their flavour.
What you smell is the common almond-food flavor (Dr.Pepper flavor)- benzaldehyde, most likely. They add this stuff into some furniture polish, too. The other possible, very similar almond-smelling substances are nitrobenzene (poisonous) and benzonitrile.
I think it is some kind of solvent/paint additive which they use for printing the label on the CD, definitely not anything essential for the CD manufacture.
[And, cyanin is a non volatile dye and has nothing to do with cyanide - the name is similar because of the greek word cyanos=blue]
was that the manned space missions were always about politics/prestige stuff and military race with Soviets rather than about doing science. (I do not mean the space probes, and all the JPL good stuff)
There is not the political will to provide adequate funding. So NASA had to go into salesmanship stuff (bulshit - to get funds) and cost-cutting. This is not good for engineering.
They should have been honest to NASA: get the bloated agency cut down after the end of Apollo programm - to have the reduced money spend in more efficient way. NASA is now a hugely bureaucratised venue and aging fast, it does not attract talented young people anymore. Plans to save it are overdue and it is too bad that the radical reforms were resisted, after the Challenger disaster.
Food safety solution: Glue the chicken rectums
on
Antibody Food Spices
·
· Score: 1
There is a company in California - Rancho Cucamonga (no, I am not making this up) which makes glues and adhesives.
They were among the first companies to develop cyanoacrylate superglue, but they got scooped, somehow. And since everybody else is making profit from their superglue now, they were thinking very hard how to get a new patented use for superglue. So they came up with a pretty good idea - and have it patented, too - that they would dip-glue the behind hole of slaughtered poultry, so that the "intenstinal content" containing salmonella would be prevented from leaking out. Food safety agencies were intriqued by this idea. Things were looking good and the small company invested a lot of many into testing.
My friend was working for them at the time and tried not to laugh, when humorless business people at the company were very seriously discussing sale projections and the techniques of automated chicken rectum glueing.
The word got out, and there vere hilarious columns in press, like this one: http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Union/1 669/Db ird.html
The government did not want the redicule and backed off, and the Rectite research was dropped. Even now, the Rectite people at Pacer are upset about unfairness of the redicule.
this fungus produces mashrooms with spores from which a clone of the original mashroom would grow. This Petri Dish test proves nothing.
If you take a grapevine cuts and make a vineard on the opposite side of the valley - does it than follow that the Gallo vineries is the biggest living single organism in Napa?
Slashdot Mirror
I would not worry about burned rubber over much.
HTPB is just low-molecular non-vulcanized synthetic rubber. Can't be incredibly more toxic than burned diesel.
Solid-rocket booster of schuttle use ammonium perchlorate/alumina powder as the main propellant components: we are talking hydrochloric acid and alumina dust - wonderful smog maker for asthma kids. They are lucky that there is breeze from the ocean. And did I mention the original Thiokol SRB design used huge quantities of asbestos too?
Question to John Carmack:
What is the big deal about 90% peroxide? People have been distilling it from comercial 50% or 30% stuff using a one-step, simple vacuum low-temp distillation. There are hazards with oxygen -fuelled fires and the system has to be super-clean to avoid catalytic decomposition. But nothing that unusual in industry.
Transport may be heavily regulated, so it is better to have the "peroxide distillery" close to the launching pad. I would not like to operate a large-scale peroxide still on my back-yard, but why is it so hard to get a lot of this material? Seems like much lesser problem than building the rocket.
N2O is great deal less effective than LOX: by factor 2-3. But if you subtract the complication with cold-resistant turbopumps handling LOX or high pressure cylinder storing non-cryogenic oxygen, N2O may come out just fine. Higher oxides, namely NO2
would be more effective (they have been used in Titan rockets), but the high toxicity/corrosivity of these is serious trouble.
The most thrust/weight ratio could be obtained with ozone/oxygen mix (which is spectacularily nasty and explosive), then the next best oxidant is oxygen difluoride. (Another nasty boy, potentialy useful as chemical warfare agent)
Viral protease inhibition: The giant protein chain synthetized for virus capside does not get cleaved into functional subunits as it is supposed to. So, since there are no functional viral proteins available - there is very little new viruses released and those released often are not infectious, because some important protens are missing from them.
There will be likelyhood of resistance development, but those resistant strains may be less infective - the viral protease has to be highly substrate specific (The giant protein chain has to be cleaved on certain specific spots and only there. So if it has to mutate, it may end-up to be less effective in doing its job.) This things has been already proven with HIV - except that HIV is too hard to eradicate completely and it is also an incredibly fast mutator, so some nasty mutant eventualy escapes. Hep C is nicer infection to treat.
Progeria is genetic disorder, patients have defective gene that messes up the nuclear membrane. Hence DNA deffects acumulate fast, cells apoptose and the whole picture is similar to accelerated aging. Understanding the problem will help with the affliction diagnosis, but the underlying mechanism of the damage will probably turn out to be something common, even banal - like oxidative stress that does not get repaired quickly enough.
This may emulate aging, but not explain how to prevent aging.
Urban kids will have higher lead levels and poorer schools - it may have to do more with economy of urban areas and property taxes/school financing than with lead poisonong. Rochester brighter kids live in suburbs, have affluen/more educated - motivated parents etc. Incidentaly, there is less lead in suburbs.
Europe is stil using leaded gasoline as frequently as unleaded - the catalysts did not realy caught on (it was poisoning the exhaust catalysts that was decisive in conversion from leaded to unleaded gas). I would like to see a similar study done in Europe - with different (more homegennnous) ethnic and social composition. *That* would be convincing argument.
If you try hard enough, you will find statistic correlation between colour of car and frequency of trafic accdents.
Lies, outrageous lies - and then there is statistics.
If the only basis is face surface temperature, taking substance causing periferal vasoconstriction will fool the test - the surface temperature will be lower.
The most common potent drug causing peripheral blood vessel constriction is nicotine. I have even seen thermal imaging pictures of extremities (hands, feet) before and after smoking a single cigarette. The "cooling effect" of nicotine is quite dramatic.
This chinamen-trait is a defect in enzyme that takes care of alcohol metabolism. Goes like this: Alcohol->acetaldehyde->acetic acid.
Acetaldehyde is toxic. If too much acetaldehyde accumulates, you get headache and red face. Then nausea.
There are drugs that are given to alcoholics to discourage them from drinking - they make them pretty sick when drinking. These drugs block the enzyme (acetaldehyde dehydrogenaze). There are some mushroom that have the same effect, so having mushroom with a lot of alcohol can make you sick.
Some Nanotubes are excellent conductors and some are poor conductors - depends on the tube type. So far it has proven difficult to grow only one kind of tube.
The way out may be a redundancy - several tubes doing the same function.
Maybe they can use them in vertical connections - for stacking chips up - one onto another, with nanotubes connecting the layers. But the overheating of such compact assemblies would be problem.
1. Tabun, not Tabin. Tabun has a weak fruity and almondy odour. The almondy odor comes from cyanide impurity.
2. No warfare agent smells like mown hay, you got it confused with coumarine, which is a pipe tabbacoe flavour and perfume.
Phosgene gas has obnoxious sweetish smell, often described as "rotting hay". I did smell phosgene many times, it is not very hay-like. At any rate, phosgene is a suffocating warfare gas. It causes lung edema, it is not neurotoxic-paralyzing agent like VX.
3. Sarin has a very weak fruity odour.
VX is odorless in pure form, but it can have a garlic-like smelling stinky impurity.
4. VX lethal dose is about 1-2mg injected, about 2-5 mg absorbed through skin or inhaled as a mist.
Sarin and Tabun are less potent, you can smell their odor and live to tell about it. (Especialy if you have antidotes).
Toxicity of Agent Orange: TCDD contamination. Blame Czech communists.
AO was a mix of 2 commonly used herbicides, 2,4D and 2,4,5T, both have fairly low toxicity. S,4,5-T manufacture uses 2,4,5-trichlorophenol. There is side-product, an impurity during trichlorophenol manufacture, tetrachlorodioxine (TCDD). TCDD is unbelievably genotoxic, it is the most toxic dioxine. Manufacture and purification of trichlorophenol has to be done carefuly, else this dioxine carries over into the final product.
The 2,4,5T used in AO was imported from communist Czechoslovakia. (manufacturer Spolana in town Neratovice). Czechs were selling the stuff increadibly cheap. It was cheap because they were making the key intermediate (trichlorophenol) from recycled waste from lindan (gammaHCH) manufacture. They were cutting corners and the content of vatious dioxines, especially TCDD, in the final product was very, very high.
And the dose of alcohol is small, the dose of caffein relatively large.
Alcohol alone makes the bain damage worse. Does not work as preventive measure.
1) cerebro-
/
2) injecting anything into brain through catheter would cause HUGE risk of infecion.
They just milk the brain. The system is closed (outlet into stomach) for the reason 2)
There is another disease where this approach works: hemochromatosis.
Genetic defect in hemochromatosis patients causes iron overabsorbtion, which would gradualy kill them. Bleeding these patients regularly saves their lives.
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/hemochromatosis
Now they even allow hemochromatosis patient blood to be donated to bloodbanks.
Hollis-Eden was trying to shut-up its own unhappy investors (that criticized them on internet) in a nice Scientologist way. Their 2 lawsuits were just thrown out and they have to pay the other party lawyers.e .cfm?ID=87 6
http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/releas
Until very recently, they were running out of cash (less than 1 year on operating expences left in the bank) and nobody would lend them any more.
This is a very small company (50 people) in San Diego. They do not do discovery of their own drugs, they just licence them. Their clams to treat and even cure AIDS, malaria, lupus, cardiovascular ailments and radiation sickness!! And by using steroids, similar to common anabolics. Without knowing the exact mechanismus how their stuff work. No wonder a lot of people in the field does not want to deal with them!
Their self-promotion is aggresive, and until very recently they had not much to show for all their investors money. Their stock was hyped up and then collapsed several times, because of Barnum-like announcements.
But the strange thing is that their panacea drugs may actualy work. Their flagship drug candidate HE2200 - Androstenetriol (AET), metabolite of Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) - happens to protect animals if given before or immediately after radiation injury.
It seems like the wrong people got lucky. I hope they do not srew this up, because if they do, other companies may not take over their drugs, because of the patentability issues.
So this guy has been working on diamond-based semiconductors and got an unusual result. He is retired and does not have instrumentation to do more tests. So what does he do? He proclaims room emperature superconductivity on surface of the material to make his data fit.
Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence and I do no see it here. Wishful thinking more likely.
It is good to know because it is useful for the theory. If you do not test hard theory predictions with experimental data, or you cannot progress with the theory.
Understanding quarks is useful for learning about how world realy works on a very small scale, and about the origins of universe; do not expect antigravity machine and time travel discovery.
I knew it! Only mutants could have designed some Chevy trucks.
It just means that some current extensions of Standart model and/or some of its interpretations may not hold. Maybe there is no quantum foam at all - and everything is made of rubber (strings).
Standart model of quantum physics is known to be incomplete - there is no satisfying Grand unification with relativistic theory of gravity and while there are many modifications possible in quantum physics, we do not know which theory (if any) from the current extensions - or complete overhauls like String theory - are correct.
The search beyond the standart model is hampered by the available power of particle accelerators - it is simply hard to get on the level of energies where we could see the new physics.
I hope this observation turns out to be a good piece of experimental data which can show the theorists the right direction.
"The electrodes that are inserted into the hippocampus are microscopic in size and delivered to their final place through a thin injection needle. The skull and cranium cavities are not opened, the entire procedure is performed under local anasthetics."
silly stuff (completely war-unrelated but gross nevertheless)can make me laugh:
n in crease.html
http://www.ironycentral.com/archives/ejaculatio
http://www.ironycentral.com/babymain.html
About the politic satire now: The chimpanzee stops being funny when he has all the bombs.
And what do you think is the difference between prune - cherry cola - and almond artificial flavour? All of it is benzaldehyde.
You have this almondy flavour naturaly present in these fruits - you can notice it especialy in compots and juices, where the whole fruit is heat-processed - from the almond-like seed in the pit.
You can smell HCN when you sniff at the bottle with cyanide or cyanoborohydride - it is a bitter, nasty, almnost pyridine-like stink. Sure, cyanide is in bitter almonds and peach inner seeds, it makes part of their flavour.
What you smell is the common almond-food flavor (Dr.Pepper flavor)- benzaldehyde, most likely. They add this stuff into some furniture polish, too.
The other possible, very similar almond-smelling substances are nitrobenzene (poisonous) and benzonitrile.
I think it is some kind of solvent/paint additive which they use for printing the label on the CD, definitely not anything essential for the CD manufacture.
[And, cyanin is a non volatile dye and has nothing to do with cyanide - the name is similar because of the greek word cyanos=blue]
was that the manned space missions were always about politics/prestige stuff and military race with Soviets rather than about doing science. (I do not mean the space probes, and all the JPL good stuff)
There is not the political will to provide adequate funding. So NASA had to go into salesmanship stuff (bulshit - to get funds) and cost-cutting. This is not good for engineering.
They should have been honest to NASA: get the bloated agency cut down after the end of Apollo programm - to have the reduced money spend in more efficient way. NASA is now a hugely bureaucratised venue and aging fast, it does not attract talented young people anymore. Plans to save it are overdue and it is too bad that the radical reforms were resisted, after the Challenger disaster.
There is a company in California - Rancho Cucamonga (no, I am not making this up) which makes glues and adhesives.
1 669/Db ird.html
They were among the first companies to develop cyanoacrylate superglue, but they got scooped, somehow. And since everybody else is making profit from their superglue now, they were thinking very hard how to get a new patented use for superglue. So they came up with a pretty good idea - and have it patented, too - that they would dip-glue the behind hole of slaughtered poultry, so that the "intenstinal content" containing salmonella would be prevented from leaking out. Food safety agencies were intriqued by this idea. Things were looking good and the small company invested a lot of many into testing.
My friend was working for them at the time and tried not to laugh, when humorless business people at the company were very seriously discussing sale projections and the techniques of automated chicken rectum glueing.
The word got out, and there vere hilarious columns in press, like this one:
http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/Union/
The government did not want the redicule and backed off, and the Rectite research was dropped.
Even now, the Rectite people at Pacer are upset about unfairness of the redicule.
this fungus produces mashrooms with spores from which a clone of the original mashroom would grow.
This Petri Dish test proves nothing.
If you take a grapevine cuts and make a vineard on the opposite side of the valley - does it than follow that the Gallo vineries is the biggest living single organism in Napa?