Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2017 December 21

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December 21

Oddities of "entombed" toads

From William R. Corliss's Anomalies in Geology, on the phenomenon of entombed animals:

After reading through our collection of a hundred or so accounts of toads-in-holes, it becomes apparent that even though these tales were collected over a period of two centuries and come from several continents, there are several common elements—elements so unique or bizarre that one doubts that they were invented separately so many times. Some of these features are:

• Disinterred toads usually expire in only a few hours or days.
• Mouths are often nonexistent or sealed shut by a membrane.
• Exhumed toads frequently occupied a cavity roughly scuplted [sic] to their shape and size.
• Many reports remark on the "bright eyes of the toads.
• Freshly disinterred toads sometimes appear transparent.

Aside from the plausibility of the "entombed animal" story, are there any species of toads which are transparent, which would appear to have no mouth, or which develop some sort of membrane over their mouths during hibernation? (I would guess that the latter happens as a way of preserving moisture while hibernating, but I can't find any info on such mouth membranes.) 169.228.153.91 (talk) 01:49, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I would assume but don't actually know that "entombed toads" are based on the known estivation of amphibians like Cyclorana alboguttata for up to 3-5 years in cases of severe drought. [1] These frogs apparently form cocoons in layers while estivating, maybe a layer every three months? [2] I should look into this more later. It doesn't seem hard to picture that a dried-out toad near the end of its shelf life might suffer greatly if cracked rudely out of hardened sediment, but I don't have a ref for that. Wnt (talk) 11:56, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

And there's the "Legend of 'Old Rip'" -- article: Ol' Rip the Horned Toad (possible inspiration for One Froggy Evening). 2606:A000:4C0C:E200:B8D8:3FE9:323E:5312 (talk) 21:25, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Effects of water in the body on sleep

I claim that drinking quite the amount of water right before bed would make me sleep not as deeply as otherwise, thus I would not dream as readily, not solely because of the increased urge to urinate, but just from water flowing around in the body would serve as alleviation factor for sleep. Anyone else claims that? PlanetStar 04:57, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

You might be interested in what the National Sleep Foundation has to say about the subject:

• "The Connection Between Hydration and Sleep". sleepfoundation.org.

—2606:A000:4C0C:E200:B8D8:3FE9:323E:5312 (talk) 07:54, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Nutrition in mutton/chicken soup

It is widely believed in Punjab that soup made from the muscles nearest to the goat's hooves is far more nutritious than from soup made from any other of it's body part. Is that a scientific fact ? Is chicken soup less nutritious than mutton's any other part ? Or non-veg soups are no different than each other when it comes to nutrition ? Jon Ascton  (talk) 12:27, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Mutton is from sheep, at least in American usage. As to the alleged medicinal properties of chicken soup, check out Chicken soup. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 13:44, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I think folk beliefs about food, herbs etc. are often true, if they can be shown to have persisted for more than a few centuries, especially if they cannot be shown to have originated in single famous texts (e.g. Galen), because the only way for them to persist in that case is for multiple individual generations to think they were working. But of course, they are probably more often false, though still usually harmless. I know nothing about goats - I had to look up they don't have marbled meat, which takes one explanation away. I don't know if by "muscles" here you include Achilles tendon or not (which extends fairly far up the gastrocnemius adjacent to the soleus) -- clearly, the presence of tendon material, which would eventually gelatinize with lots of cooking, would change nutrients present. There are many sellers of glucosamine and chondroitin supplements in the U.S., and arguably, this might have some similarities. I wish I could give a real answer. Wnt (talk) 13:55, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

It's impossible to answer your second and third questions as the nutritional value of any "soup" will depend entirely on the recipe, which varies enormously. Bear in mind that even a leading brand like Heinz soup will only contain 2-3% meat.--Shantavira|^{feed me} 14:35, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Ingredients are definitely important. There's an old story about an old farmer's wife who had two chickens. One of the chickens got sick, so she killed the other one to make a high-grade chicken soup to cure the first one. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 16:43, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

• Folk remedies like this are often based on false analogies of similarity and proximity. See our article sympathetic magic. The notion is usually something like, since rhinos' horns are erect, they are a cure for impotence. Here, perhaps, the hooves are the strongest part of the leg, hence the muscles close to the hooves share their power, proximity to mother earth, or some other factor besides their protein content.

Wnt's supposition that such beliefs usually continue because they work is credulous and greatly underestimates humans' penchants for ignorance, magical thinking, confirmation bias, and spurious pattern recognition. Look at the silly patent nostrums like shark cartilage and jellyfish protein being sold for joint health and memory boosting power when, once they get to the gut, are nothing but run-of-the-mill ground gristle and simple polypeptides. μηδείς (talk) 17:44, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

This might be a good time to bring this up. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:34, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

A patent nostrum is defined by the patent, which may be an abuse of the literal definition, but should convey the idea of an individual profit motive. When an alleged remedy has been around for centuries, the enterprising chiseler is better off patenting something else than investing in a competitive marketplace. Especially when the only way to do so involves producing a whole goat!

The doctrine of signatures is indeed a source of bad ideas in ancient medicine; yet we should realize also that practitioners came up with it for a different reason, as a mnemonic! If you use an herb for kidney ailments and you can try to remember that that's the one with a leaf that looks a bit like a kidney, this is a good thing. If you really believe a kidney shaped leaf makes something good for kidneys, not so much. The example with the goat above though sounds like a really weak just-so story - if there was a doctrine of signatures explanation for it you certainly haven't convinced me. Wnt (talk) 15:18, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

To whom are you speaking, Wnt? No one besides yourself has brought up the doctrine of signatures, which seems odd, since you find it unconvincing. μηδείς (talk) 02:36, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Daily CNS adult apoptosis VS Daily CNS adult neurogensis

Approximately, and assuming there's any approximation on this, how many neurons die daily from apoptosis and how many created daily due to adult neurogenesis, in an adult human (usual age >=21) that does many non identical actions, at least like learning new environments, whether virtual or not, hearing new lectures, and smelling new smells, and also, what about reading new articles as well? ClinicalCosmologist (talk) 12:56, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

This question is almost unanswerable, as assessing both neurogenesis and apoptosis in the intact brain is impossible. However, we do have the classic work on carbon dating neurons in the post-mortem brain from Frisen et al (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4394608/), which suggests there is a fairly constant addition of approximately 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus, with a slow tailing off in the ageing population. This does not directly tell us anything about apoptosis, but we know from rodent work that the majority of the newly generated neurons do not survive, and we can indeed see this in Frisen's work as well, where they show the number of immature neurons (marked by expression of doublecortin) is a lot higher than the numbers of mature cells, indicating significant apoptosis is likely to be taking place. Now, you are correct that it is likely an enriched environment will increase these levels of neurogenesis, as has been shown in rodent work. However, this has not been shown yet in humans as far as I'm aware, and this would be very difficult to do, due to the aforementioned difficulties in assessing the rates of neurogenesis in humans. Fgf10 (talk) 14:44, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Outside the hippocampus neurogenesis is probably zero in adult humans. Ruslik_Zero 20:20, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

• Whilst the classic SVZ-RMS-OB niche has no functional reason to exist in humans, and doesn't appear to do, there is quite likely some neurogenesis in the striatum: http://www.cell.com/abstract/S0092-8674(14)00137-8. Fgf10 (talk) 20:43, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

What normally happen to micro foreign bodies that penetrates the skin?

Many times it happens that thorn or piece of glass penetrates the skin, it happened almost to anyone. Now my question is what happens when the it stays inside, under the skin. I've listened that the body react by making pus and by it it pushes the foreign body outside of the body. Is this pathopathology true? when can I read about that? 185.191.178.183 (talk) 15:31, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

According to this article "the clinician will try to create an opening to drain it". hydnjo (talk) 15:47, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

I think the article you want is Splinter. Henry^Flower 16:18, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Depends on the object material and shape and what place of your body. Usually it will simply get incorporated. Ask around about war veterans who still have shrapnel's of bombs and mines in them. If the object is to sharp and in a place that is stretched frequently or even mildly toxic it may cause pain and ongoing damage. Then there is a chance of infection or at least swelling and the person will get it cut out. In many cases it wont change anything and the person may even forget about it and live on without any urge to get it out. --Kharon (talk) 22:55, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

Shrapnel is prone to "migrate" over time, sometimes for the better [3] and sometimes for the worse [4]. Note that the body will tend to wall off almost any foreign body -- for example, macrophages tend to surround tattoo ink particles [5] - actually, that doesn't tell it the way I was expecting, and [6] disagrees, but also not in the way I was expecting. I was on the impression that multiple macrophages joined together to surround the ink particles and tried, long-term, to break them down without luck; the Atlantic reference makes it sound like one can surround multiple particles while the other ref makes it sound like the particles are free between collagen fibers. Something else I should look into further at some point... oh, but anyway, to get back to the point, the macrophages should be able to marshal cytokines and matrix metalloproteases; the latter are empowered to break down the physical structure that holds cells and tissues together, at least potentially allowing any foreign object a way to have tissue in its path be deconstructed (and, hopefully, regenerated afterward, or perhaps more likely replaced by scar tissue) Wnt (talk) 01:52, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

• Chronic irritation is a known cause of cancer. Horses and dogs can develop cancer from chronic irritation from restraints. Asbestosis results from the chronic irritation of the lungs by asbestos fibers. See these articles at google and the classic case in JAMA here.

Most foreign bodies, if not removed, are walled off by the body, forming a Foreign body granuloma. Klbrain (talk) 00:53, 28 December 2017 (UTC)

Trazodone#Priapism

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

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According to Trazodone#Priapism, it says that the "risk for this side effect appears to be greatest during the first month of treatment at low dosages (i.e. <150 mg/day).". Does this mean that this side effect goes away after a month or if higher dosages are taken? Pealarther (talk) 23:57, 21 December 2017 (UTC)

• More likely those that will experience the side effects will already have experienced them. Abductive (reasoning) 07:40, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

Acute untreated priapism doesn't repeat itself--it causes permanent impotence or worse. From our article

Because ischemic priapism causes the blood to remain in the penis for unusually long periods of time, the blood becomes deprived of oxygen and can cause damage to the penile tissue itself. Should the penile tissue become damaged, it can result in erectile dysfunction or disfigurement of the penis.[6] In extreme cases, if the penis develops severe vascular disease, the priapism can result in penile gangrene.

You definitely need to talk to your doctor or pharmacist, whether your concern is a symptom you have or want but don't have. μηδείς (talk) 17:24, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.