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Fanghur

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Everything posted by Fanghur

  1. As a science student with a large amount of chemistry training I almost feel foolish for even asking this, but do acids like those seen in movies such as Cube, the Alien franchise, or the new movie Prometheus actually exist outside of Hollywood? For those of you who haven't seen Cube, which I'm guessing is the vast majority of people, in one of the scenes a 'prisoner' is sprayed in the face with some sort of extremely corrosive liquid, presumably an acid, that literally results in his head being practically hollowed out it is so corrosive. Within the span of several seconds or maybe a minute, the acid had completely eaten into his brain and reduced his entire head to little more than a hollow skull. As for the Alien franchise, well I'm fairly certain that many of you will have seen at least one movie that has a xenomorph in it, and thus will know just how almost laughably potent their acidic 'blood' is. Now I'm 99.9% sure that an acid (or alkaline, as the case may be) as powerful as this is pure Hollywood, but is there any, and I mean ANY acid or chemical that could come anywhere close to having this sort of effect on a person? Namely being able to eat through limbs/flesh, stone/metal literally within seconds? Or is that just one more example of Hollywood's ignorance of science?
  2. Obviously. But then again, if they were going to take the gambit of hitting the iceberg head on rather than trying to avoid it, throwing the engines into reverse would by definition have lessened the impact, even if only by a very minuscule amount. I wasn't suggesting that the ship could reverse quickly, but in that situation ANY amount of deceleration is better than none at all.
  3. I recently got into a pretty big debate with somebody on YouTube after I watched an episode of 'I Shouldn't Be Alive', in which a father and his 12-year-old daughter had gone camping in the Australian desert and their car broke down out in the middle of nowhere. I had demonstrated my incredulity that they had both left the house wearing jeans and sweatshirts (or some other long-sleeve clothing) even though it was something like 45 degrees Celsius out. I understand that it would help to protect you from the sun, but I know from experience, having been in similar temperatures while on vacation in Cuba, where I was often in nothing but a bathing suit and no shirt, and sunblock seemed to protect me just fine, except the spots I accidentally missed. So, my question is this: In a situation such as the one described in the episode, where someone is lost in the desert with limited water, and assuming they did have several cans/bottles of strong sunblock, would they be better off dressing in shorts and t-shirts, or in jeans and sweatshirts? I'm talking with regards to surviving as long as they can. I would have said that wearing jeans and sweatshirts would make them lose a lot more water, and be a lot more miserable too, but I don't know for sure.
  4. OK, so I freely admit that I was misinformed about the dimensions of the iceberg that the ship hit. But still,that doesn't answer the question of whether the ship would have ultimately been better off with a head-on collision.
  5. On the other hand, though, and if I'm mistaken about this then someone please correct me, the Titanic's size, and by extension its mass would have dwarfed the iceberg that it hit (at least that is what I read), and that the only reason the iceberg was able to sink it was because of a jagged knife-like protruding section that literally ended up being dragged across the entire left side of the ship like a knife. So if that is true, and if the ship really was so much bigger and heavier than the iceberg, and that certainly appears to be the case in the film, than wouldn't the ship's much larger mass have simply demolished the iceberg like a steam engine plowing through a car unfortunate enough to have stalled on the tracks? If I've been hugely misinformed of the various measurement involved here, can someone please set me straight?
  6. Does anyone know whether the common claim that, had the Titanic have simply put the engines in full reverse and then hit the iceberg head on, that it either wouldn't have sank at all or else would have taken much longer to sink? At first glance, this seems like a fairly likely conclusion, considering that the iceberg essentially sliced open the entire side of the ship's hull, and I can't help but wonder whether it could have simply plowed right through that iceberg if it was going fast enough. But on the other hand, the kinetic energy behind the ship when it struck head on would likely have been gargantuan, so might this have in fact made the situation even worse rather than better?
  7. OK, guys, pretty much the only thing you've said to me is that it is a bad idea, but I still don't understand why? The bullet comes out of the end of the gun. Why in the world should it make a wits bit of difference to the bullet's trajectory how the gun barrel is oriented?
  8. Well then why can't you just use the side of the gun barrel to align with your target?
  9. Does anyone know why the traditional 'gangsta' shooting position, namely holding your pistol sideways, would make aiming the weapon more difficult? I just watched an episode of MythBusters where they were testing various shooting stances, and they found that holding the gun sideways actually rivaled shooting from the hip in its difficulty shoot accurately. This makes absolutely no sense to me, because the way I see it, whether the gun is upright or sideways, you can still use the sights just as well. Is there some kind of engineering reason behind this?
  10. There's something that I have always wondered, and which has never made sense to me. Evolution is supposed to be based on adaptations and behaviours that are beneficial to the species. I know that this is a HUGE oversimplification to an extremely complicated subject, but since I don't have time to rewrite Darwin's original manuscript on here, just bear with me. Why us it that almost all higher organisms tend to make a lot of noise when they get injured, wounded or hurt? For example, human beings tend to, depending on their age, either yell loudly or start crying. Canines tend to whimper and/or yelp. Birds will chirp loudly and thrash on the ground. The list goes on. But it has never made sense to me for this behaviour to have evolved, because at first glance it seems completely unbeneficial to the organism, and indeed, in the wild it puts them in tremendous danger by attracting predators to them like a beacon attracts ships to it. Obviously the sensation of pain is a necessary adaptation, despite how much we all wish to be rid of it at at least some point in our lives. But the response of crying out, crying, wailing, whimpering, etc. appears to be a reflexive behaviour that occurs in response to pain, and every biologist knows that predators always attack prey which they deem to be sick or injured before attacking healthy prey. Due to this, it has never made any sense to me that we would have evolved a behaviour that seemingly has no benefit, and which endangers our lives. Does anyone have any thoughts?
  11. One of the episodes of a TV show I like to watch (Fringe, season 2) was about a oil drilling operation resulting in the release of a deadly (to put it mildly) virus which one of the characters hypothesizes might have been responsible for the eradication of the mega-fauna of the last ice age. While the idea of accidentally uncovering a dormant virus buried deep underground does sound at least somewhat plausible in principle, I strongly suspect that the 'cure' the Fringe team come up with is just a load of nonsense, but I wouldn't mind a second opinion. The scientist discovers that what ultimately rid the world of this doomsday virus 75 000 yeast ago was the last supervolcanic eruption (Mount Toba, I believe), or more specifically its spreading of sulfuric ash all around the world. He discovered that sulfur somehow "kills" this virus. Does anyone know if there is any plausibility whatsoever in this? I mean, if it were bacteria then it might be possible, given that the earliest antibiotics were sulfur-based (sulfonamides), but I don't see any way for the same to be said for a virus. I suspect that it's just one more thing the show pulled out of a hat, but like I said, I wouldn't mind a second opinion.
  12. I'm pretty sure that for the most part, this is pure nonsense. CPR can certainly keep a person alive until proper help arrives assuming it's done correctly, but it can't bring people back from the dead. If I'm wrong, somebody convince me.
  13. Alright, I pretty much figured as much, so basically the moral of the story is that if you ever run into a big cat of any kind, with the possible exception of a lynx, which I personally doubt would dare attack a human the absolute worst thing you can do is run away, as that will get you eaten. While I'm on this topic, I have another question. Me and some buddies of mine often go paintballing out in the forests, and cougars are known to live in those same forests. I once heard a story from another paintballer that he got attacked by a mountain lion, but managed to scare it away by unloading on it with his paintball gun. Now, personally I think his story was complete bunk and he was just bragging, but I can't help but wonder whether a paintball gun actually would be enough to scare off a mountain lion. Does anyone have an opinion?
  14. Whether we will have the technological capability to successfully transplant a brain, the point is moot. Organ transplants are meant to save a person's life. And everything a person is, their sentience, their mind, their soul, call it whatever you like, is located in THEIR brain. Transplanting another brain into a human will necessarily destroy the original 'soul'.
  15. Yesterday I got into a little debate with my uncle regarding the behaviour of ambush predators, specifically whether an ambush predator such as a cougar, leopard, jaguar, etc. will still attack a human that they have been stalking if the human spots them. Now, don't misunderstand the point of my question; I am fully aware that the predator will SOMETIMES continue the attack, but I'm just talking about probabilities here. If for example, a cougar or leopard has been stalking a human in the forest, and the human catches sight of it and makes it clear that they will hold their ground and put up a fight, maybe wielding a stick or something, is it LIKELY that the cougar will still attack them (we're assuming that the cougar is not starving)? Or will they most likely decide that it's not worth the trouble and just leave the person alone?
  16. I've heard in a lot of my classes that HIV is nearly impossible to make a vaccine for because of how rapidly it mutates (among other reasons), but I've been wondering something for a while. It's my understanding that HIV can only infect macrophages and T-lymphocytes, more specifically CD4+ T-helper cells. And I've also heard that HIV is also uncurable because there is always a small percentage of the virus that remains dormant inside its host cell, making it unaffected by antiviral drugs. That got me thinking though, because I've also heard that HIV is a very weak and labile virus when outside a host cell. So would it be possible to cure an HIV infection by literally starving the virus to death, so to speak? That is, could you somehow completely wipe out all of the person's macrophages and T-cells (or just irradiate their bone marrow) so that the virus no longer has any cells to infect. Then the doctors could administer aggressive anti-retroviral therapy to completely eradicate the virus from the person's body, and finally, allow their immune system to either heal itself, or do a bone marrow transplant to restart it for them? Now admittedly, this form of treatment would be ridiculously impractical, as well as dangerous and expensive. But I don't really see any reason why it wouldn't work in theory. In fact, I think I remember reading that they've done something similar to this in a person, and they actually cured him if HIV.
  17. Oh, and by the by, to quote Adam Savage: "I reject your reality and substitute my own!" I've watched virtually every MythBusters episode (that's MythBusters, with an 's') and I would have absolutely no problem accepting their conclusions to most of the myths they take on. Granted there have been quite a few episodes that I think they probably could have done more on, but they've never made any claims or conclusions that are not backed by actual testing. And the few times that they have been proven wrong, they accept their fault with equanimity, which is more than I can say for many PhD scientists, I might add.
  18. OK, let me rephrase my question: Is it possible to get Herpes from a toilet seat in the absence of any sort of sexual activity occurring on said toilet seat?
  19. Does anyone know whether it is possible for someone to get Herpes from a toilet seat? I remember watching an episode of House once in which he tricked a guy into admitting he cheated on his wife and got HSV because of it by saying that he in fact could have gotten the virus off of a toilet seat. Now, obviously in the episode it was all a ploy, but I can't help but wonder whether it might be THEORETICALLY possible to acquire a productive HSV infection in that manner. My intuition says that if the MythBusters were ever to put this to the test they would most likely deem it something like 'Plausible but ridiculously unlikely', or something similar. Does anyone know?
  20. I have often wondered how it is that humans (and presumably other animals whose senses are more acute than ours) are able to sense either the presence of someone/something nearby even though your five senses do not consciously detect them, or when we are being watched. Now, psychic explanations aside, which as a good scientist I cannot flat out dismiss as the explanation, is there some other possibility that could explain this mysterious phenomenon? I know that of all the sensory information received by our brains from our five (or six?) senses, only a fraction of that information is consciously perceived. Is it possible that the explanation could reside in some of the sensory information that is subconsciously received and interpreted?
  21. What the heck is everyone smoking here? Calcium and Sodium are two completely different elements, you can't just convert calcium into sodium, at least not in any way that isn't impossible with current technology. If you have some sodium with you then you could quite easily make sodium hydroxide, as CaOH if I'm not mistaken is water soluble. But you can't just take CaOH and turn it into NaOH; that would be alchemy.
  22. As a science student I almost feel foolish for even asking this, but do acids like those seen in movies such as Cube or Aliens actually exist outside of Hollywood? For those of you who haven't seen Cube, in one of the scenes, a 'prisoner' is sprayed in the face with some sort of extremely corrosive liquid, presumably an acid, that literally results in his head being practically hollowed out it is so corrosive. Within the span of several seconds or maybe a minute, the acid had completely eaten into his brain and reduced his entire head to little more than a hollow skull. Now I'm 99.9% sure that an acid as powerful as this is a good example of Hollywood ludicrousy, but is there any, and I mean ANY chemical that could come anywhere close to having this sort of effect on a person? The blood of the Xenomorphs of the Alien series had the same general effect.
  23. I've wondered this for a long time: Why the heck is the famous Monty Hall Problem even to this day so controversial? I mean, I'll admit that when I first heard the problem I was like "Give me a break; two doors left means there's a 50/50 chance, so switching your choice is pointless," but once I grasped it fully I was quite frankly embarrassed that I didn't get it right away, because it's pure common sense. For those of you that don't know the Monty Hall Problem, this is it. A game show host presents a game show contestant with three closed doors and tells her that behind one of the doors is a new car (i.e. one out of three doors is a winner), and behind the other two doors are goats (i.e. two out of three doors are losers). He asks the contestant to pick any door, let's say they pick door number 1. The host, who knows what's behind each of the doors, then opens one of the remaining two doors and reveals a goat. He then asks the contestant whether they would like to switch their original choice to the remaining closed door. Now, at first glance this would seem to be pointless, as most people would think that two closed doors = 50/50 chance of picking the car. But because your original choice has a 2/3 chance of being a goat, and the host always eliminates the second goat, it means that is you stay with your first choice you have a 1/3 chance of picking the car, while if you switch your choice you have a 2/3 chance of winning the car. The average person would find this very counter-intuitive, but I refuse to believe that even people with degrees in mathematics and statistics couldn't see that switching your choice is best. So why the heck is it still such a hotly debated subject when it's just common sense, and high school level mathematics?
  24. I'm not talking about a sonic weapon. I'm talking about a THEORETICAL, even stretching the term theoretical to breaking point, weapon that is capable of firing a cohesive projectile or 'beam' of compressed air that is capable of going cleanly through a person as if it were a bullet. I'm not talking about some kind of focused shockwave.
  25. Why not? Wouldn't it in essence be like firing pellet-sized pieces of dry ice at extremely high velocity?
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