We are running out of cheap, easily available, high-purity commercial helium.

Helium mostly comes from natural gas / fracking. The US gas reserves are naturally rich in helium, which is why they are the largest global producer. It will be something like 1-4% of the gas in a given gas well, but can be up to 10% of the gas well by volume. Before they put it in the pipeline and send natural gas to your house, they separate out all the other gases such as carbon dioxide, oxygen, nitrogen, and helium.

What USA government used to do was require the few giant mega gas producers to separate the helium and send it to a central facility. Now that gas producing regions have relocated and split into multiple smaller units it is no longer financial sense to do the separation and transport.

Unfortunately, helium is still really cheap. It's only $7 cubic meter! It is not worth the cost of running the separator and a bottling plant just for helium. Instead, it gets released to the atmosphere.

Future developments include the price of helium increasing to the point it does make financial sense to separate helium from smaller gas wells. Also, potentially direct helium mining. There are some areas in the world where there are underground caverns full of concentrated helium that could be mined and captured.

Oh yeah, it's easy. If you have ever seen a gas BBQ bottle or carbonated drink cartridge, it's basically bigger versions of those.

Laughing gas is a potent greenhouse gas, but you can get a cylinder of it in your whipped cream can. A hospital can get a giant tank of it to disperse into regulators for pain relief.

However, if your question related to climate change the answer is no. The scale of the problem is mind boggling huge. You just have to picture every fuel station you see and replacing their storage tanks, but instead now they are filling a new one every few days and simply leaving it in some empty field to hold the gases, forever, with ongoing maintenance.

The new blood test is an old test that has been used for environmental monitoring, but not human blood. The neat part of the study was separating the plastics from the blood.

There is no useful measurement for microplastics inside the human body.

For instance, they are mostly inside your gut and lungs. Currently, to measure microplastic exposure involves taking your poop dissolving it and separating out the tiny pieces of plastic from all the food stuff. Not easy to do, but also not very useful information.

We think you have about 100,000 plastic microparticles enter your body everyday. The plastic particles are only about 4% of all the total microparticles per day you are exposed to, the rest mostly being "natural" particles of things like fine sand, dirt, biological materials etc.

When you die, we think about only 1000 will be inside your body. That is from autopsies, so not a lot of information but even order of magnitude it is <<< than your daily microparticle intake. They may be stuck in lesions in your lungs or little blister-things in your gut. Maybe some have crossed the gut to get stuck in some organs. But vast 99.999+% just pass through you like ghosts through a wall.

Everything else - we don't know. We don't know if they are neutral guests along for a ride and doing nothing, if they do anything "good" or anything "bad", if they are correlated with anything. That's an important question: the old prove it doesn't hurt me versus prove it is safe. There are lots of natural things we haven't proved are safe, but we also haven't found anything harmful either.

The conclusion of the linked article is keen to point out that they don't know if the particles are floating in your blood or carried inside cells. They don't know the fate of the particles. They have no way to link blood numbers to any sort of health outcomes or even to ongoing monitoring.

Good news: even without an appendix, your gut still recovers completely after massive diarrhea, antibiotics, etc. Your gut has other reservoirs for good bacteria.

The case against appendectomies is weak, but growing. We know the appendix does good stuff, but that good stuff is small and is significantly outweighed by risk.

Background: appendicitis is inflammation in one of your internal organs, usually resulting in catastrophic failure. The appendix is like a fragile balloon, the inflammation easily causes it to rupture, spilling bacteria and infection into your internal body cavity.

Pre-surgical intervention in ~1800 and something, it was close to 100% death.

Modern practice: three methods of treatment. (1) do nothing, observe, (2) strong dose of antibiotics, (3) surgical removal.

The timing for (2) is difficult and the consequences of failure are bad. There is a risk/reward calculation. Step (2) you avoid surgery, which has some small potential of things going wrong. But if it escalates, you are now starting stage (3) anyway but with slightly higher risk than earlier in the day. Roughly, 40% of antibiotic treatments need to progress to surgery. 10% of early patients have complications such as perforation (e.g. burst appendix, long recovery, more drugs), but 30% of late patients develop complications. If surgical resources are available, let's just do that now rather than let it get worse.

We evaluate all risks. Risk of early surgery, risk of later surgery, availability of resources, immediate and long term life style risks.

We know appendectomy changes your gut microbiome. Not necessarily worse, just different.

For instance, regular population about 35 people in 100,000 develop colo-rectal cancer. After an appendix, that goes up to ~70 in 100,000. Note: still a 99.9+% nobody develops that type of cancer.

Competitive inhibition.

Both methanol and ethanol compete for access the limited amount of enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase.

Methanol is converted to a toxic compound formic acid or formate. That's nasty stuff and your body can't really clear it. It needs to effectively kill the affected tissue and remove that, which takes days to weeks.

Ethanol is slightly better at binding to the enzyme compared to methanol. So if you have 95% ethanol and 5% methanol, practically close to zero methanol is being converted by the enzyme.

Silly analgoy: myself and a really attractive woman are both trying to buy a drink at a bar from the same bartender. A long enough queue of attractive women and I'm never getting a drink. So I give up and go home.

Methanol and ethanol are both removed by urine (and breathing + sweating). So long as the methanol is still circulating and not reacting with the enzyme, you simply urinate it out.

First part of your theory is true. The natural defenses do generate heat via inflammation. Which usually does nothing good or bad, unless it sometimes gets really bad.

Beneficial part, mostly no. You aren't cooking virus or bacteria, and heat doesn't make the defenses work faster.

However, the really interesting fact of the day is body temperature does kill fungal infections. &gt;36.6°C will kill fungal infections. Majority of fungal infections are on the outside of your body where it's relatively cool, but if they get into your blood, travel up inside your urinary tract or reach some organs, they are incredibly difficult to treat.

Average human body temperature is dropping over time. Humans were constantly sick with some persistant virus or bacteria, an average body temperature was about 37°C (above the fungal limit). Then modern medicine started to fix those persistant infections, and average human body temps dropped to about 36°C (below the fungal limit). As a result, in modern times we find a lot more internal fungal infections that are difficult to treat.

Body temp is a secondary effect of your immune system doing it's job.

Increased body temperature is related to what is called a cytokine storm, most common in flu virus compared to the 200+ common cold viruses.

Some flu viruses cause your body to sound the emergency alarm too loud and the body overreacts. The fever is unwanted inflammation that can lead to organ failure.

My favourite coffee fact: all types of coffee are a laxative, both regular and decaf. However, we don't know what molecules in the coffee are responsible!

Caffeine isn't beneficial or negative in the long term.

• It stimulates the central nervous system.

• It releases free fatty acids from adipose (fatty) tissue.

• It affects the kidneys, increasing urination, which can lead to dehydration.

• Genetic variation for caffeine tolerance has an oversized effect on population studies.

Despite what popular press loves to talk about, any observable effect is minuscule, complicated and multivariable and you only have to wait a week to find a differing result.

For comparison, taking 1/4 of an aspirin tablet a day has been proven to extend the lives of a small group of humans (potential heart attack, age 40-65), but have zero effect on the majority.

> other stimulants like...

All stimulants, caffeine included, increase heart rate (HR) and blood pressure (BP).

Mostly your caffeine intake is low. A bottle of Coke only has 35ish mg of caffeine.

It is a very quick Google to find examples of sensitive people developing acute heart problems due to excessive caffeine intake.

Concentration is important too.

Take 30 tablets a day and you will overdose and your liver will die in days.

Lower doses: Studies have proven that there is no affect on lifespan or other medical conditions from healthy people taking aspirin every day.

If you have a family risk of heart disease, are between ages of 40-59, taking a daily low dose of aspirin can increase your lifespan.

Iron lungs are huge! You need a dedicated room.

Iron lungs still exist, but use massively declined after the 1960s. They are too cumbersome and restrict movement, compared to a significantly smaller and mobile positive pressure unit.

The stat was something like only 10 units still existed in USA in the 2010's. There were only two people in 2020's.

Only real use now is novel development post-Covid for patients who need limited assistance and can't tolerate a ventilator. An example may be a person who only needs the negative pressure unit at night.

Same idea as bricks and mortar for building a house - the bricks are the structural support and the mortar is the fluid stuff holding the bricks together.

Same idea as adding grog to your clay.

Microscale, clay particles shaped like little flat overlapping discs. Place your hands over each other and then imagine 10 people all overlapping hands to do a big Lets Go Team! cheer. They are also charged like magnets. The water in the clay is phsycially separating the clay particles so they can slide over each other and be worked.

When you are working the clay it is wet and all the little charged discs are pushing each other away. However, when you are drying the clay (biscuit phase) or firing, the water evaporates. All those little charged discs start to be attracted to each other and pull together.

Some types of clay have what's called a "vitreous component" or a "flux" - it's just naturally in the type of clay, although it can be an additive too. It's stuff inside the clay that melts during firing and turns into glass. Sounds great, but the solid->liquid phase change is smaller volume so it makes little bubbles inside the clay wall.

Overall, the clay shrinks and pressure starts to build up in the walls.

The grog or sand is an inert piece of material that slow down shrinkage and reduces internal pressure in the clay structure.

Now, with this grog additive, during firing some of the clay melts to form a fluid glass that moves to fill in the voids between the solid grog. Other clay melts to fill that hole, and so on. You end up with a much stronger piece of clay with less shrinkage and much less likely to shatter to relieve that internal pressure.

Practically, no, not even close.

Phytoremediation is the science word.

Lots of plants do pull "stuff" from the soil and water. They accumulate it in the plant tissue, then you can chop that tree or grass down, burn and collect the ashes to dispose of the hazardous material. It is usually targeted at removing heavy metals from soil or water.

Unfortunately, the Ohio train spill was not heavy metals. Phytoremediation won't work here.

Another reason it won't is the chemical spilled was burned. It resulted in a cloud of ash particles and some hydrochloric acid rain. The acid will have immediately reacted with any soil or substrate to form fairly ordinary salts, such as table salt. It is an acute problem, not a persistant problem.

Home experiment.

Hold you hand in front of your face. Open your mouth as wide as possible and breathe on your fingers. Does it feel hot, cold or neutral?

Repeat, but close your mouth as narrow as possible so breathing is a tightly focused flow. Does it feel hot, cold or netural?

Other important considerations. Your internal body temperature is ~37°C, but your outer skin temperature is closer to 20°C.

When standing still you have an insulating layer of air around you. Your body is wanting to push out excess heat to prevent cooking itself. It loses that heat by radiating it, or by convection where some carrier rubs over your skin and carries away "heat". If the air is not moving, you have transferred as much heat away as possible and the air in immediate contact with you is saturated with heat. Example: hiding under the bed covers or wearing clothes.

Wind moving over your skin is transferring heat by convection. It is picking up heat from your body and carrying it away, which makes your outer skin feel cooler.

Space based solar power.

Ideally, you would point it at Earth and sell solar energy. Or point it at a solar panel to convert it to microwave frequency as beam that at a receiver on Earth to sell electricity.

Probably not visible to people. Depends how you build it, but for maximum efficiency you will be using a very tightly focussed beam.

Just like your laser pointer is making light using a LED, you can also have a visible light laser. You can only see the laser pointer side on if it passes through some particular like smoke, that bounce the light towards your eyes.

The deepest mine in the world is AngloGold Ashanti's Mponeng gold mine, near Johannesburg in South Africa.

By 2012, the operating depth had already reached 3.9-km below the surface, and later expansions have resulted in digging below the 4-km mark.

The deepest man-made hole in the world is ~12 km called the Kola superdeep borehole in Russia.

Timeline of the history of elements

Only 15 elements were know before modern times. It's a short list.

Ancient times there were a whole lot of competing theories about what makes up stuff. Classical elements of fire, earth, wind, water + other, were slightly more complicated that just those words. Atomism was the idea that everything could be divided smaller and smaller into discrete but unknown particles; versus substance theory that things when divided were just smaller versions of themselves.

That was just enough philosophy to explain metals. You can take some "earth" and divide it (by smelting, etc) until you get to an undivisible particle. That's how we get gold, copper, iron, tin, etc. It was really obvious that a person could manipulate something to get a pure form of something without needing to invoke ghosts or the void or phlogisten.

The general idea is something is an elementary particle until proven otherwise. Lots of missteps and bad guesses along the way.

There was a really weird short lived theory called tria prima that every substance was composed of three elements: a combustible element, a fluid and changeable element, and a solid, permanent element. That was a weird side tangent for explaining how smelting could make a pure element, by burning off the combustible and mixing with the correct flux to remove the fluid. But we still have the idea that there are unique particles of matter.

It was ~1730 that scientists started to get serious about observing the world. Antoine Laviosier proposed the new term of element to describe the basic undivisible particles we know and love today.

The killer discovery for finding elements was electrochemistry. It allowed someone to very carefully divide elements from each other, so long as you could dissolve the material and separate/capture what come off it.

My favourite is aluminium. It was predicted in 1756 because someone could see it was an oxide of something, but it wasn't isolated until 1824. In this example, a person found a new "earth" very early on, any every new it had to be smelted to isolate the atom inside. It just took a really really really long time to figure out how to dissolve it, such that electrolysis could remove the oxide or "earth" bits.

There is no evidence that long term use of nasal sprays cause significant systemic side effects. Some people do take Flonase for the rest of their lives...

The most mild reason is you may be wasting money on something no longer required.

A concern is it can be masking more serious underlying conditions or the reason you are using is has gotten worse, which should be evaluated.

For instance, Flonase can relieve some issues caused by nasal polyps (little bits of skin growing where they shouldn't be). A better long term option may be surgically removing those. Your family doctor will inspect and compare their number and size to previous observations.

It's always good to check if the reason using are using those long term medications has changed.

Pressure sensitive adhesive.

The glue material is "tacky" - that's a science word in this context.

Imagine an elastic band, maybe holding up your underwear. You can pull it to deform the shape, but it wants to snap back to the original shape.

The glues have lots of little hairs, sub-microscopic in size. When you push/pull them, the hairs move just a little and get fluid enough to move and flow into tiny little microscopic crevices on material. When you stop applying pressure, the hairs stiffen up and get hard - just like holding onto a cliff with your fingertips.

The amount of pressure required to make the glue into a fluid is one property that gets measured. How strong it is attached to a surface before it detaches is another.

tl;dr it's very much similar to Velcro hook-and-loop material

It still depends on the paper source.

Particularly as recycling is more popular, there are many types of paperstock available to suit all customer cost/needs.

Regular officepaper contains optical brightening agents to make it look very white and clean. That will not last more than 25 years due to residual acid stating to dissolve the paper. Pressure has little effect on that.

If you ever have to publish a thesis or a museum/archival print, they will specify certain grades of paper. In some cases, they won't even allow other grades into the same box to prevent them damaging the archival pieces.

Acid-free paper itself comes in two types: permanent and archival.

There is a whole history of cheap paperback novels that are lost to time because they were printed on cheap paper. Same issue affects museum pieces and historical libraries.

1867 is the magic year in history when paper became worse - it is when the first factory to build wood pulp paper was built and within a decade, 95% of all paper was wood pulp - it was just so cheap and plentiful. When you hear of super old documents being found in a desert or some old library cupboard, more often than not it was printed on animal hides or rag-fibre. Modern wood pulp paper has fundamental chemical differences that mean it is always slowly decaying. Additives are required to slow the decay, but eventually like fuel in a a car, the additives are exhausted.

In your lifetime the only printed material you have likely seen that isn't wood pulp paper is the US currency. That is still printed on rag paper.

Statistics are great fun!

About 20% of the lung cancer deaths in the USA are non-smokers, or ~7000 people a year.

While lots of people know about smoking=cancer, most don't know about smoking=COPD or heart disease. Cancer sure is up there as the scariest, but it's not the thing that will probably kill you.

Crudely, very roughly taking those numbers: smokers are ONLY 4X more likely to die from lung cancer than general population. That's, surprisingly not that much higher. There are way riskier activities such as SCUBA diving or living near a busy road.

The main cause of post-vaccination pain is the needle has physically damaged your body. You do have a new unplanned hole in your skin, muscle, fat layer, etc. It's very operator dependent.

Erythema is redness in the skin due to increased blood flow to the capillaries in your skin. Same as any skin injury.

Induration is your skin thickening/hardening after an injury. It is a result of inflammation response from a skin injury. Your body has only a handful of responses to an injury, and inflammation is an easy one.

Sub-cutaneous nodules, or little bumpy lumps under your skin. Usually from local inflammatory reactions or immune-mediated responses.

That is all dependent on how much volume was the dose, where it had to go, how quickly it diffuses away from the injection site.

Next is the adjuvant chemicals that are triggering the immune response.

There are different stimulants in different vaccines that force your body to recognize something has happened. It can induction of cytokines and chemokines (inflammation, hey, look over here), recruitment of immune cells (swelling, lets bring lots of workers to the site), enhancement of antigen uptake and presentation (swelling as it opens up your internal paths), and promoting antigen transport to drain stuff away into your lymph nodes (itching, got to physical push stuff into the lymph system).

The very best foaming products contain at least two surfactants.

The classic foaming surfactants are anionic such as sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) and sodium laureth sulfate (SLES). They form great foam heights but the bubbles collapse really quickly.

Foam stabilizer chemicals are added to consumer products, such as laureth-3 or 4, cocamide DEA. These usually don't make foam by themselves, but what they do is like iron rebar in concrete, they reinforce the bubble that has formed.

Baby shampoo is a nice example. It's usually the mixture of SLES and cocamido propyl betaine (an amphoteric surfactant). The previous stabilizer mentioned is fantastic, but it is a skin irritant and burns your eyes. The amphoteric cocamido is very mild but less effective, hence, you need a lot more of it (higher cost) or you get a lower foam height / short stability time.

The difference between two-product formulas and solid bar soap, is the bar soap is usually a single surfactant maybe with some glycerol added. The bar soap needs a shitload of mixing energy to make a stable foam. You need to use a foaming brush and lots of stirring to input enough energy so that the molecules align correctly and get the best ratio of air/water/surfactant. Even after all that energy is put in, it still doesn't last as long as a two-surfactant mixture.

The optimum temperature to store meat is the coldest it can get without freezing, usually -1.5°C - 7°C.

Fancy words below, but the reason low-pressure makes the bacteria stop growing is they run out of oxygen. The process sucks all the air out of the package, and the protective film is a barrier to oxygen. The residual bacteria eat up all the residual oxygen in the bag, aplus ny dissolved oxygen in the water or tissue. They release CO2 up to about 20%, which inhibits further growth of aerobic bacteria.

At that point, only anaerobic bacteria can grow. Typically, those are only in trace quantities compared to the aerobes, so it's sort of a defacto nice effect rather than some amazing sterilization technique. An example of those are the lactic acid bacteria.

> Soon after packaging, the population of lactic acid bacteria is generally below the limit of detection (10 CFU / g), but it increases during storage (40). Lactic acid bacteria ferment glucose and other substrates that are present in meat. When these substrates are depleted, growth stops, typically when the population reaches 8 log/cm2. The metabolic residues of most lactic acid bacteria are not eliminated, however, and can be identified as slightly acidic or milky tastes.

If you have ever opened a "blown" or even old vacuum pack, that first smell you get is the digestive gases such as H2S. Or maybe you smell a faint trace of vomit or rancid butter for second, that is butyric acid as a byproduct of the lactic acid bacteria that is also flavouring the meat.

Low or ultra low pressure won't change the bacterial growth rates of anaerobic bacteria.

If you somehow could make the package sterile, such as pressure canning or pasturization, you end up with tinned meat. That's an interesting route to explore with incredibly long shelf life. There are interesting Youtube videos of modern people eating WW2 old army ration packs with various amounts of subsequent illness.

Freeze-drying or low-pressure treatments do not sterilize food. It only puts the microbes/enzymes to sleep and stops them reproducing. Once water is reintroduced to the food, all the microbes start growing again.

You are describing a process called "wet aging". This is the cryovac products you maybe see at a butcher.

Under "mild" vacuum and while wet, there are a lot of natural enzymes in food that will start to break it down. It starts to break down connective tissue and make the meat more tender, without breaking open cells and changing flavour such as dry aging.

You need very specific conditions of pressure and temperature to retain liquid water.

Near-vacuum pressure and all the solid/liquid water will move from the meat into the atmosphere.

You could potentially change the water to solid ice at low-vacuum, but that is also problematic because ice forms big chunky crystals that tends to damage food when it re-heats.

Step 1: start a degree in chemical engineering. By about year 3 or 4 you should have enough knowledge to design something bad but functional. After that you learn how to make it less bad, but never good.

Your use of the word "fluid" is the challenge. Now we have to consider the phase (gas or liquid), any chemical hazards such as flammable gases, pressures, compatible and incompatible materials, if you need pumps or compressors.

Distance and height differential are very important. For instance, a stormwater pipe from your roof to the ground is easy; an oil pipeline that goes up mountains and down valleys is much harder to design.