Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2015 June 17

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June 17

Mount Everest reportedly moved 3 cm in April earthquake -- how was the measurement done?

It was reported in the news that Mount Everest was moved by 3 cm in the April earthquake. How was that kind of measurement done? --173.49.9.102 (talk) 03:47, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Reports I've seen say it was using radar from a European satellite (see Talk:Mount Everest#Mount Everest Shrinkage for discussion of refs). DMacks (talk) 04:07, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

We have an overview article on satellite geodesy, the use of satellite radio data to accurately measure position. The most popular techniques use the GPS or GLONASS satellite constellations, but many other techniques exist (including RADAR altimetry, RADAR interferometry, LIDARs, and lots of other types of measurements and data analyses). In particular, because the recent "3 cm" measurement was conducted by Chinese researchers, it is not clear whether they would use GPS or some other satellite constellation (for example, 北斗卫星导航系统 satellite constellation). The institute where this research was conducted was the Institute of Geology, China Earthquake Administration, and the data was published in a press release on June 15, 2015: 珠峰地区10年位移40厘米上升3厘米 by the National Administration of Surveying, Mapping, and Geoinformation. The data was collected as part of the Crustal Movement Observation Network of China (CMONOC). The English language webpages of these organizations do not presently contain up-to-date information. It would be great if a fluent reader of Chinese can track down the complete report and provide a link. However, many English-language newspapers have provided summaries of this report, e.g. Mount Everest shifted 3 centimeters by Nepal earthquake.

NASA JPL hosts Crustal Movement Observation Network of China and its Phase II Project, and that suggests that the Chinese CMONOC researchers are using American GPS satellites and a network of ground stations in China, plus sophisticated data post-processing, to produce high-accuracy geodesy; but that report is nearly ten years old (and pre-dates BeiDou-2).

Contrast this to data and a news brief published by ESA: Nepal Earthquake on the RADAR (April, 2015). Those data and news stories are available from ESA in English; and they estimate a different vertical and lateral shift.

Nimur (talk) 05:06, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for the references. They make interesting reading. --173.49.9.102 (talk) 10:49, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

healthcare costs in the USA

Why do healthcare costs get so high in the USA without insurance? They don't get that high (over 40usd) in other countries especially in emergencies. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2001:268:D003:CD21:D39:C25C:721A:D94A (talk) 04:46, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

This should be moved to the humanities desk, but I'll give an answer first. In the US medicare/medicaid do not pay enough to cover the cost of treatment, so hospitals must bill everyone else more. Large insurance companies know that and negotiate them down, hospitals accept it since they at least make something. An individual has no bargaining power and hospitals bill as much as they can. That said, you don't have to actually pay that much, just don't pay for a month, then when you get a bill call and negotiate. They will accept a lower amount - they don't really expect anyone to pay the high amount it's just a number they use for negotiating with insurance companies, not a real figure. Ariel. (talk) 07:11, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Beware of edging into legal areas, especially as the insurance laws and regulations vary state by state. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:52, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Yea, it's like the suggested retail price. They don't seriously expect many to pay that much, but they give it a try anyway. There is the occasional exception, though, where they take people to court to try to collect some absurdly high bill, or at least report them to a credit agency and ruin their credit. StuRat (talk) 14:29, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Two relevant articles are Moral_hazard and Principal-agent_problem. OldTimeNESter (talk) 12:20, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Health_care_in_the_United_States and Health_care_finance_in_the_United_States are some additional relevant articles. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:27, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

The cost of healthcare in America is an exaggerated figure. It is primarily based on what healthcare asks for, not on what insurance companies or actual patients pay. My healthcare was practically free for as long as I can remember. I grew up very poor. My family had no insurance and we couldn't pay doctor's bills. So, the doctor would use a "sliding scale" and usually charge no more than $20-$30 for a family visit. I remember having free visits when we couldn't afford any payment at all. I have a job with insurance and now pay $40 copay. My brother was still uninsured and used a sliding scale until the Affordable Care Act shut that down. Now, he has to get insurance and pay a copay (which I doubt he has done). So, it is very possible that people are now paying more, but by increasing cheap insurance usage, the apparent "cost" is going down. 209.149.113.240 (talk) 15:21, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

To that point: another detail not commonly mentioned: in the United States, healthcare cost collection rate is astonishingly low. ACA reports only 15% of debt owed to hospitals, and 21% of debt owed to non-hospitals, is ever collected. Astonishingly lower statistics emerge if you track down payment rate within, say, the first 24 months; or if you require payment of the total amount. This means that on average, four of five dollars billed for healthcare are never paid in any form whatsoever in an American hospital: neither private nor public insurance, nor by way of direct payment. (The same statistic, by a different metric: almost 10% of gross hospital revenue is written off as a loss). The majority target of healthcare collection agencies is actually insurance companies, not individuals. Amazingly, American laws protecting privacy mean that hospital collections departments can not trivially access healthcare records, so billing is nearly impossible, and tracking delinquent bills (at a 15% success rate!) is usually more expensive than leaving the debt unclaimed.

A key takeaway is that in American healthcare, a dollar billed is a completely different entity than a dollar paid.

Nimur (talk) 15:26, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

US doctors earn a lot more per working hour per GDP per capita than doctors in other Western nations. Count Iblis (talk) 15:52, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Citation? I see a lot of health data and I don't see many rich doctors. I see a lot of rich insurance companies and a hell of a lot of rich medical lawsuit lawyers (and insanely rich politicians). 209.149.113.240 (talk) 17:46, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I'll dig up a few articles, but from what I remember, doctors earn more per capita per person in the US than doctors in other countries, but then in the US people with similar skills earn similarly higher wages as compared to the GDP per capita. So, the fundamental issue seems to be that in the US you have a larger difference between the higher and lower incomes compared to other Western nations. Count Iblis (talk) 17:55, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Mean tropical year

The Gregorian calendar's 97 leap years per 400 year cycle yields an average of 365.2425 days per year and comes close to matching the mean tropical year of 365.24219 days. Summer solstice#External links includes Table of dates/times from 1600-2400, and looking at 400 year intervals:

1600 Jun 21 Wed at 09:51:34 UTC

2000 Jun 21 Wed at 01:48:47 UTC

2400 Jun 20 Tue at 17:11:01 UTC

suggests that we are slipping about 8 hours per cycle, or 1 day every 1200 years. From this I would conclude that we are applying one leap year too many every 1200 years, and that 365.2417 days/year (365.2425 - 1/1200) would much more closely match the tropical year, but I seem to be off by a factor of two and a half. What am I doing wrong? -- ToE 14:47, 17 June 2015 (UTC) Prompted by WP:RDMA#What are the odds of summer starting on a Sunday?

The answer is in the table in Tropical_year#Mean_time_interval_between_equinoxes with explanation just before that section. The link you used computes the time between Northern solstices, which is a little shorter than the time between northward equinoxes (which defines or at least is close to the mean tropical year). --Wrongfilter (talk) 15:25, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Ah! So it is. Thank you. -- ToE 15:56, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

See the plan to eliminate all these discrepancies immediately above Talk:Tropical year#Standard method of verification. 5.150.92.20 (talk) 19:35, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Slicing a malt loaf

Can anyone recommend a good technique for slicing malt loaf? They tend to get very squashed towards the end. DuncanHill (talk) 15:47, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I use a serrated knife and saw through it slowly using very little pressure. If there's a better way I'd like to hear it too.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 15:51, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I'd try something like Cheese_knife#Cheese_cutter, or something like this [1]. You can easily test with a simple thin wire before getting a special tool. SemanticMantis (talk) 19:14, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Try a good ceramic knife. I use only ceramic knives to cut bread, they are not serrated and make almost no crumbs with a very clean smooth cut that does not squash the bread. If you are in the US Harbor Freight sells some very good, and inexpensive, ones. Ariel. (talk) 19:53, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Thank you all for the suggestions. Crumbs are not an issue with a malt loaf, it's the gooey consistency. A cheesewire is worth trying, but I suspect a serrated blade with very little pressure is the most likely of the current suggestions. I shall experiment upon my next malt loaf (it was the last couple of slices of my most recent one that inspired me to ask). I'm not in the USA - do you have malt loaves there? They have always struck me as very British. DuncanHill (talk) 21:18, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

In the US we have similar things. There's raisin bread, or for something a bit denser there is banana nut bread, date nut bread and the dreaded fruitcake (said to be regifted each year at Christmas because nobody wants to actually eat it). StuRat (talk) 21:25, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Malt loaf is a lot more malleable than fruit cake - it's difficult to describe exactly. Alansplodge (talk) 22:19, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Malleable is le mot juste. DuncanHill (talk) 22:29, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Hmmm, it seems Soreen, who probably know more about malt loaves than just about everyone else, use an ultrasonic system, which may be a little beyond my immediate budget. DuncanHill (talk) 21:23, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

As far as slicing the bread without crushing it, sawing the bread against a stationary blade instead of the blade into the stationary bread might help, although this also sound dangerous, and may require two people. StuRat (talk) 21:28, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Its the gooey consistency that courses the problem. It sticks to the knife so that the next stroke drags. Medias could probably help here, as what I can remember from the old days (when people made their own malt loaf instead of buying it from the supermarket) is that they first spread it with butter. Perhaps this was to lubricate the knife and stop the gooey stuff from sticking. A couple of hours in the fridge might also help with home made maltloaf but to my mind that's close to sacrilege. --Aspro (talk) 21:53, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Pulling the two sides apart, as a 2nd person cuts, might help there. StuRat (talk) 22:17, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

It is available through Amazon and we can learn about it here. Bus stop (talk) 23:16, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I would never have expected that listening to a German being baffled by a malt loaf could be so entertaining. Many thanks @Bus stop:. DuncanHill (talk) 23:43, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

While I can't speak from personal experience, I have been informed that dipping the knife in very hot water between each slice helps: conversely, freezing the malt loaf and slicing while frozen also helps. --TammyMoet (talk) 12:07, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Can we survive without oxygen for a while by injecting ourselves with D-Ribose?

Suppose that a plane suffers decompression and the plane does not descent then the oxygen will run out, killing the passengers. But since the body only uses oxygen to make D-Ribose, I was wondering if you could inject yourself with D-Ribose to survive hypoxic conditions. Count Iblis (talk) 17:28, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

• It seems unlikely, since what's essential for aerobic respiration is the production of ATP by the Mitochondria within cells using oxygen (Krebs Cycle). Injecting a sugar into the blood still requires that the sugar be transported to the heart and brain and be absorbed by the cells. Sugars themselves don't provide energy alone, they have to be broken down using O2 to form CO2 and water. μηδείς (talk) 18:39, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

There are many oxygen-consuming enzymes in the body, but I'd say one of the most important is cytochrome c oxidase, which sets at the end of the process of oxidative phosphorylation, a chain of reactions that consumes the NADH + H⁺ (removing H2 to generate NAD+) produced by the Krebs cycle to turn oxygen to water. So it is very hard to picture making up for that with ribose. But xenon has protective activity that can reduce the impact of hypoxia (see the article) Wnt (talk) 19:45, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

• These experiments with H2S are also interesting: Suspended_animation#Chemically_induced. μηδείς (talk) 03:08, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

The thing that prevents descent is unconscious pilots. Time of useful consciousness is altitude related. It's not something like "How long can you hold your breath at sea level?" At jetliner altitudes consciousness is in seconds after decompression and pilots have quick-donning masks that they train with. If it's not on in seconds, they are unconscious (your lungs can't support the pressure difference and they deflate - Scuba divers exhale on the ascent for the same reason). I don't see how an injection is faster than a positive pressure mask. Virtually all aircraft could descend to a safe altitude prior to death, though, if there is someone that commands a descent. Passenger aircraft type ratings for altitude have limits based on how long passengers will be exposed to various altitudes in the even of explosive decompression (many have a limit of FL400 because the standard is that in the even of explosive decompression, the cabin can't ever reach FL400 pressure and no aircraft can guarantee that). More insidious is a gradual hypoxia which causes confusion at lower altitudes but if it causes enough confusion about whether masks are necessary or descent is necessary, it's likely that "injection" will also be missed. Gradual decompression induced hypoxia as well as aircraft without compensated cabins all have hypoxia related confusion and fatalities. --DHeyward (talk) 22:45, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Energy question

If energy can only be converted, never created nor destroyed, does that mean the universe has always existed? Or did the laws of physics not apply at the beginning? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 190.73.155.15 (talk) 19:57, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Read Big Bang for some theories. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:02, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Our article on the Planck epoch discusses the limits of current scientific understanding and how well the laws of physics (as they apply now) might have been different. But for the record, it's a noticeable over-simplification to say "energy can only be converted..." even in our current physics models (it's convertible to/from mass, for example). DMacks (talk) 20:05, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

E=mc² says that matter can (under extreme circumstances) be converted to energy - and vice-versa. Since stars are rather good at doing that, instead of talking about "conservation of energy" - you really need to talk about "conservation of mass/energy". However, with that small adjustment, your question is valid and interesting. SteveBaker (talk) 20:12, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

What's a case where energy is converted into matter ? StuRat (talk) 12:44, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Just to correct something you said there, because it is a common mistake, and I generally note that you usually don't make mistakes like this, is that mass is convertable to energy (or rather the two represent different aspects of the same property). Mass (and energy) are properties of matter, the sciency word for "stuff". When you say that matter can be converted to energy, you imply that energy is a different kind of stuff. It isn't. Energy is a property of that matter (or more properly it's a property of the universe, since energy can exist outside of matter proper). It isn't a type of stuff, it's a property of that stuff, like charge or angular momentum. We need to be careful and choose the correct words, energy and mass are equivalent, not energy and matter. --Jayron32 14:21, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

We have an article on the Zero-energy universe, though I'm not sure how this theory is currently received. -- ToE 22:38, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

The laws of physics always apply. We just don't know all the laws yet :). --DHeyward (talk) 12:34, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Recharging cellphone from waste radio energy.

My gut feel is that the claim to extend the battery life of a cellphone by 30% by capturing waste radio-frequency energy and using it to recharge the battery is exceedingly dubious. But I can't seem to get the numbers to be sure either way.

• https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nikolalabs/nikola-phone-case-power-your-phone-with-wasted-ene

Questions:

• What amount of battery power is typically used to drive the various radio transmitters in a cellphone?
• What fraction of THAT actually emerges as electromagnetic wave energy?
• What fraction of THAT can sensibly be captured without diminishing the frequencies needed in cell towers and WiFi receivers?
• What fraction of THAT can reasonably be converted into a 5 volt charging current?
• With what efficiency are the batteries going to be recharged? (I know they get hot while charging).

My gut feel is that when you multiply all of those together, you're not going to get anything remotely like 30% savings. But I'm finding it tough to get hard numbers for any of those things. I know that the battery capacity of one of the phones they are making these claims for has a 2550 mAh battery.

The manufacturer claims that 80% of the phone's energy is used in powering the radio...that alone seems very dubious - my phone reports 78% of the battery power being used to drive the screen alone...but I'm not typical.

I don't need all of those numbers - just enough to convince me that this is remotely plausible - or perhaps to debunk what seems like a very dubious claim.

SteveBaker (talk) 20:09, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I did this. I used a 12x12 array of cell phone antennas. I tried parallel, serial, and grid connections. While I could get enough voltage to indicate that I had a signal (the grid connection layout gave the highest voltage), there was not enough amperage to trigger the phone to go into charge mode. Now, the first question... Did I mess things up by using more than one antenna? Using one antenna doesn't provide enough electron movement to do anything. So, I tried to use a lot of them. What I found was that no matter how you do it, when you have a lot of antennas close to one another, none of them perform as well as they did when they were alone. However, by using 144 antennas, I could get a stronger "signal". Next question... What if I use a more powerful antenna? Because I had this all set up, I used a roof-mount UHF/VHF antenna. It was no better. I used a 25-foot whip antenna. No luck. I tried to use a radar to ensure that my rig worked - they produce a lot of electron movement when receiving radar signals. My phone did blink into charge a couple times, but it was just a quick blink in and out. Therefore, from my experiment, I found that this will not work: Get some sort of antenna array and connect the live wire into a phone's charger port. Avoiding discussion of voltage/amperage/wattage... there simply aren't enough electrons moving along the wire to trigger the charge mode for the phone. But, I didn't give up there...

My next experiment is still ongoing... I found from my experiment with the roof-mount antenna that there was a distinct difference between ground on the ground and ground on the roof. How high can I get an antenna? My biggest experiment on this has been to get a large helium balloon with a 3' whip antenna dangling below it. The "string" is actually a thin shielded wire. I measure voltage across the balloon line and a ground stake and compare to voltage across a 3' whip antenna laying on a plastic chair and a group stake. I have found that there is almost always a distinct voltage difference (almost no amperage). However, wires are heavy and I can't get the balloon very high. I want to use a much larger balloon to try and get much higher - but the higher it gets, the riskier it gets. If I were to accidentally induce a lightning strike, it could be deadly. But, why does this relate? I'm doing pretty much the same thing. I'm trying to pull electrons out of the air and put them to use. Or - if you prefer - I have a lot of electrons in the ground and I'm trying to fill electron holes in the drifting air. Either way, it simply isn't very effective because the radio (be it TV, radio, phone, etc) waves are designed to be somewhat efficient. I've also been told that the reason I see diminishing returns is that, regardless of if you see it as catching or releasing electrons, all of the antenna are trying to work in the same area. It is like putting 100 fishermen on a lake and expecting to catch 100x as many fish as using 1 fisherman.

I strongly suggest that you repeat my experiment and state how it works. Most people either say "won't work" and don't try or they say "it works but there's some sort of government conspiracy" and don't try. 209.149.113.240 (talk) 20:32, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I also doubt these claims, but even if their claims are completely accurate, I don't understand how this is even viable? The case costs $99 and gives you 30% better battery life? Am I missing something? Because that's rubbish, for a quarter of that price you can just get a phone case with a second battery in it, you can double or even triple your battery life. Vespine (talk) 23:27, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

See Wireless power for our article on the subject. Tevildo (talk) 23:44, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

You don't neccessarily need to generate enough power to trigger the charging cycle of the phone. You could use an intermediate battery which can charge at a lower voltage/current, charge that with the radio capture, and then once it's full, use it to charge the phone. Of course, that adds another source of inefficiency. MChesterMC (talk) 08:06, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Energy harvesting and Rectenna are relevant. --Mark viking (talk) 00:18, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Interestingly, this thing appears to be a net loss even if it's perfectly efficient. If the case attenuates the signal to a(Ω) (0 < a ≤ 1) in the direction Ω, and the antenna power output without the case is P₀, it has to put out P₀/a(Ω_tower) with the case to get an equivalent signal. The case absorbs (1−∫a) of that (omitting the normalization factor on the integrals), and if it's perfectly efficient, the overall battery drain is P₀ ∫a / a(Ω_tower). If the phone's orientation is independently uniformly random then the average battery drain is P₀ ∫a ∫(1/a). But for any a > 0, ∫a ∫(1/a) ≥ 1, with the equality being attained only when a is constant. So if the case is perfectly efficient and "omnidirectional" then it's a wash, and in every other case it makes the phone less efficient.

The most dubious assumption in that argument is that the phone's orientation is random. In reality it's probably pressed against your ear and the line to the cell tower is more likely to have some inclinations than others; you can't rule out the possibility of saving power on average by blocking less likely directions. However there's the meta-argument that if such savings were possible, phone manufacturers would design it into the antenna, since they have a huge financial incentive to improve battery life and could presumably save far more power with a better antenna than this circuitous kluge. -- BenRG (talk) 01:47, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

I don't think it makes sense for it to attenuate the frequencies that the cellphone is using to talk to the cell tower - because if the tower gets an inadequate signal, it'll tell the phone to push more power into its' transmitter. Since the transmitter isn't 100% efficient, that has to cost more energy than you can harvest.

So if this thing can work - it would have to be absorbing frequencies that are produced inadvertently outside of the 'useful band'.

Does that make sense? SteveBaker (talk) 02:10, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

From the site it self: The maximum mW output of this device is 36mW for a typical duration of 56 milliseconds on the WiFi connection during active downloading. It is a pulse charge that repeats roughly every 120 milliseconds. I could be off here but, 56ms every 120ms is roughly 50% charging cycle, so that's an average of 18mW? at 3.7v, that's roughly 5mA? Am I right so far? so to charge 30% of a 2000mAh battery, would take 120 hours? Please tell me I've made a mistake somewhere.. Vespine (talk) 06:07, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes...and that assumes that you'd be doing "active downloading" all the time you're using your phone. SteveBaker (talk) 16:14, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Wired magazine took a pretty dim view of this recently: [2] shoy (reactions) 13:58, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Yes - but this is a bit different. They aren't talking about picking up energy from remote radio transmitters - they're collecting "waste" radio energy emitted by the phone itself. The thing harvesting the power in this product is the case of the cellphone. So the distance to the transmitter is just a few millimeters and not a meter or more as Wired assume - and the case covers more than half of the surface area around the phone, so it can (in principle) capture half of the transmitted energy. Wired is concerned about the inverse-square law here. So while I have concerns - that isn't one of them. SteveBaker (talk) 16:14, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

So, you have a phone that has a transmitter on it. You place a device to absorb the radiation right next to the transmitter (in a silly perpetual energy machine style). My first question is: How does this affect the transmitter? Will my phone lose contact with the tower? Will it reduce my wifi strength? I wouldn't be interested in extending battery life if my phone became rather useless. 199.15.144.250 (talk) 13:56, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Head transplants and souls

lets say then that a head is cut from the body, he lose conciousness but he doesn't die as brain dead takes several minutes. during those minutes his head is put inside another body, now he has blood again. is the head now alive, or only "alive" in the scientific sense but his soul is gone? 20:11, 17 June 2015 (UTC) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 5.56.12.10 (talk)

You cannot legitimately mix discussions of science and soul. The soul is part of a belief system, not part of science. 209.149.113.240 (talk) 20:16, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Science doesn't admit the existence of "souls" - so we can say that this question doesn't make much "scientific sense". There wasn't such a thing as a 'soul' to start with, and there won't be one at the end.

We have a really good article about Head transplants that explains that this has in fact been done with dogs, monkeys and rats with varying degrees of success - so it's more than just a theoretical possibility.

Doing a human head transplant seems quite do-able...ethical considerations and general 'weirdness' aside. As far as we know, if the operation can be done without causing significant brain damage, the patient who'se head was transplanted would awake and pretty much feel to be themselves...but severing the spinal cord would result in a total loss of feeling or movement below the neck - so this isn't such a great outcome. An Italian Neurosurgeon claims that he'll be performing the procedure sometime in the next two years - so we may not have to wait too long to find out. SteveBaker (talk) 20:21, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

Here's some news about that guy who says he can/will do it, along with some critical commentary from another surgeon [3]. Of note, that monkey only lived 10 days after the procedure. SemanticMantis (talk) 21:06, 17 June 2015 (UTC)

I hope it doesn't end like hand transplants. Majority of hand recipients choose amputation of the strange hand attached to their body. --DHeyward (talk) 05:01, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Supposing it could be done successfully, with full functionality of the new body, forget the "soul" stuff and restrict the discussion to the consciousness of the person. You can replace any number of internal organs, and it's still the same person, albeit with some adjustments needed by that person. I don't see why a complete below-the-neck "transplant" wouldn't be the same. But there could be major psychological issues to deal with, as it could be exponentially more traumatic than the situation described by DHeyward just above. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 08:49, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Well, expanding further on this tact, while consciousness and emotion are broadly seen as the product of the brain (which surely is the most essential component), they are also significantly influenced by many physiological factor that originate in the broader body, so, even controlling for the psychological toll of such a procedure and adjusting to a new body, I don't think it's accurate to say you could ever end up with someone who was entirely the same person. Their temperament and behaviour would surely by influenced, as surely as a person who has a huge fluctuation in body mass, or one who undergoes hormone therapy, or any other of a number of analogous situations which do not employ the radical circumstances of a full cephalic transplant but do entail a great deal of change in biofeedback between the head and the rest of one's physiology. Snow ^{let's rap} 22:42, 18 June 2015 (UTC)

Bleeding head good, healed head bad.[4] Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 03:29, 19 June 2015 (UTC)