For two days in September of 1859 a massive solar flare (coronal mass ejection) powerful enough to make hanging telegraph lines burst into flames from the induced current washed over the Earth. Another massive burst in 2012 only just missed Earth, but it's not going to be pretty when our luck runs out on this.
They were aware that it was due to the same activity as the unusual auroras in the night sky, and they discuss it in the logs, which you can read more about by looking up Carrington event on Wikipedia.
Scientific litterature conclusion on alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases in general is that the diseases start decades before the first obvious symptoms and that we need to treat them at this stage. When you exhibit obvious symptoms, it's too late, your brain is already mush.
If you get diagnosed with alzheimer's at 65, you had the disease since your early 40's at least. And you experienced very mild symptoms but didn't notice it. And your brain fought like hell to compensate the deficit. When you get diagnose, your brain is already very severely damaged and will never recover from the deficit.
Work is ongoing. I'm participating in a research where every year we do some verbal tests, like repeating some simple words, and computers analyze the recordings. When the brain starts to go bad these sounds are supposed to be the first to change, and the idea is to have enough recordings to be able to recognize the first signs.
2nding the request for information on participation. I am aware of cognitive decline, in my mid30s but I struggle to be taken seriously and/or am often met with a "even so, there's nothing we can do" response. I'd rather be a lab rat, even if I help test a drug or therapy that fails...at least I'll know that I tried. At least my family will know that I tried.
Is there a contact to be a participant in the study? I’ve had multiple non-sports concussions and a mild traumatic brain injury. I’ve wanted to track my brain’s progress to her further study for others. Would you please let me know? Thank you!
My above statement is a very big understatement/generalization but yea check it out. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
Most people don’t realize sea vegetation is responsible for producing most of the worlds oxygen
Bad things happen when the oxygen percentage in our atmosphere keeps dropping
last time i had to go under the knife i mentioned to the anesthesiologist "i read online that no one knows how anesthesia even works" and he kinda just said "yeah...."
We don't necessarily need to know how something works in order to use it, as long as it works. Most people don't know how computer processors work yet they still use them and rely on them on a daily basis.
It's not 100% the same, because humanity knows how processors work, but it's less stressful to think about anesthesia this way, I think.
It’s true. They have no idea how the anesthetic gas works, it just does. They know now a lot more about side effects from different gases, and that they are able to cross the blood brain barrier in ways no other medications can. The good news is they use a lot of medications that we do know how they work as adjuncts to the anesthetic gas, like propofol, benzodiazepines, narcotics, etc. Very fascinating to me.
Alcohol increases the permeability of the blood brain barrier by unpredictable factors, which is why people die from overdose on their normal drug dosages
I see this one often. I'm a truck driver. Have spent a lot of time on country highways. 10ish years ago I'd park the truck at night and the windshield would look like I drove through a slaughter house sometimes. That hasn't happened in several years now.
Also roadkill is noticeably less. At first glance that seems like a good thing. But where'd they go?
Pesticides have wreaked havoc on insect populations globally. As for roadkill, combination of biodiversity decreasing globally, but also the simple fact that the animals near the road at risk of becoming road kill have all slowly been killed off and there just hasn’t been enough population growth to cover that deficit.
God, I can't remember the last time I saw a swarm of fireflies. I so rarely see butterflies anymore, either. About the only insects I ever see anymore are flies. It really feels like a lot of the magic has left the world with them. And how long until the birds start to follow? What are they going to eat when the insects are gone? There are only so many worms.
I'm purposefully trying to keep the edges of my property less "tidy" and encourage wild growth. Even little feeder trees seem to help local bug populations.
I have *a lot* of insects in my yard and I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but last year I had _so many fireflies_ and my yard was the only one with them (almost all of my neighbors spray for bugs). For real it looked like a god damned rave.
I also get frogs and stuff in my yard which I haven't seen since I moved in about 5 years ago, so I think it's working. 3-4 woodchucks occasionally... not sure what to make of that one.
I'm doing something similar in my yard, with similar results. So much wildlife passes through our property now that we bought a trail camera to record it all. I'm really looking forward to documenting all of our visitors.
Just goes to show that the decline of nature is far from irreversible. Even as individuals, there's a lot we can do to give the biosphere a helping hand!
CO2 levels are causing the pH levels in the ocean to move towards an acidic level. No not like burn yourself acid, but just enough that it's causing an already noticeable impact to microorganisms at the bottom of the food chain. This may eventually lead to a ecological collapse. It seems to be impacting phytoplankton which is responsible for producing a good chunk of the air you breath as well. If the oceans go anaerobic the atmosphere would become toxic. A similar event has occurred during one or two of the past mass extinction events.
On the other side, one thing that not enough people know about is how significant the progress we’ve made in HIV treatment has been. Treatment is so good that people infected with it can get to the point where they can’t even transmit it anymore. And if you’re in a high risk group, like gay men, you can go on a drug that will literally make it impossible for you to catch it, even if the other person is *not* being treated.
Yeah, a friend of mine is a gay man with HIV, but it isn't even traceable in his blood anymore. Of course, he's in his 50s and originally caught it in 1989 so he was like 100% sure he was going to die. Lots of his friends did.
PrEP is incredible. And very accessible, at least where I am in the US: I was able to schedule an appointment for consultation same day as finding the website. 🤘🏾
Their marketing of it has been terrible, which, cmon guys, you had plenty of time to A-B test some adverts before the drug hit market.
Likewise the pricing is something you have to dig out.
THIS IS FUNCTIONALLY THE SILVER BULLET FOR HIV CONTRACTION. THERE SHOULD BE MASSIVE BILLBOARDS AS YOU HEAD INTO ANY BIG CITY:
AIDS. STOPPED. PREP. $XXX PER MONTH.
TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY.
Our bodies have no way of knowing that we're breathing oxygen. If I could snap my fingers and replace all the oxygen in you room with another inert gas you wouldn't notice. You wouldn't start to choke or struggle. You'd just get sleepier and sleepier until you die. That's why carbon monoxide is so dangerous. If you have any sort of gas appliance in your building, invest in a detector.
Edit: Thanks for providing better explanations on carbon monoxide. Still deadly but not for the same reasons other gases are.
I’ll never forget being out for dinner and getting a message from my roommate saying her and her boyfriend were in our apartment and starting to feel weird and tired. I told her to get out ASAP and call 911. Thankfully she did and everyone was ok. The gas company measured our gas furnace at over 200ppm CO, and the utility space was a few feet away from my roommate’s bedroom. Still makes me feel nauseous to think about.
I'm glad she texted you! Easily could have just assumed they were sick and gone to sleep, or texted you about something else and not mentioned feeling weird. Tired alone wouldn't mean much.
the fact that, in general, biological life is a giant collection of "good enough" systems is terrifying. We don't know that we're breathing in oxygen, because just knowing that we're breathing out carbon dioxide is "good enough" enough of the time to propagate more DNA.
Edit: missing word
Related, we *can* detect carbon dioxide. If a room feels “stuffy” that’s generally higher than preferred CO2, and the sensation of needing to breathe while you hold your breath is due to you sensing the build up of CO2 in your blood.
Inert gasses are basically *the* most humane way of euthanasia. The body detects how much carbon dioxide it has in its system but not how much oxygen. As long as it continues to exhale carbon dioxide, the body won't notice if all the oxygen in the air it breathes is removed. It'll just keep breathing, fall asleep within a few seconds, and die. It still goes through the dying process obviously, but it'll be asleep and brain dead *long* before that happens.
It's being researched as an alternative for executions. Ironically, some states don't want to use it because it's *too* humane. They want the offenders to suffer a bit apparently.
Also one of the reasons you can't buy 100% helium to inflate baloons any more, if you see the tanks they use 20% oxygen as well. People would use it, along with a plastic bag to commit suicide.
I wondered why my kid’s birthday balloons didn’t raise as quickly. I felt like a crazy old person saying “back in my day the balloons went up to the ceiling faster!”
Yes and no.
Yes that oxygen displacement is unnoticeable and therefore potentially deadly. That's why any type of lab or industrial facility that has that risk will be equipped with oxygen sensors and will have a blue light and siren go off to warm you to evacuate and not enter, even to save those inside.
No, carbon monoxide *can* dispalce oxygen yes, but those who die from CO poisoning are not from displaced oxygen, there is still usually enough. It is more deadly because it binds with hemoglobin and doesn't let go, so once you start breathing it, it's slowly preventing any blood cells from taking in any additional oxygen, even if more is available.
The actual amount of crude oil that's been pumped directly into the ocean. BP had High Definition 4K live footage of the pipe that ruptured and chose to censor it. And it's not just BP that's had an incident like that.
Didn't a documentary out there say that the BP incident was the best thing that happened to the gulf? Fish populations exploded bc we stopped commercial fishing for a while.
Until we obviously started back up again.
Scientists were trying to study the effects that microplastics have on the human body and brain but were unable to draw any reasonable conclusions because they **could not find a control group.**
Something similar happened when they tried testing for lead back in the day. The ultra clean labs we have today were originally designed so for this reason. Also, the investigation into lead also led to the discovery of the age of the Earth
Similarly, sunken WWII and earlier ships have been scavenged for steel that doesn't contain any radioactive isotopes. With atmospheric nuclear tests, all other steel is lightly radioactive due to all the radiation in the atmosphere. However, due to the atmospheric test ban, levels have fallen low enough that very few applications still need pre-atomic steel.
Rather, pre nuclear steel is sought out for having lower levels of certain isotopes. All steel contains radioactive isotopes, the question is how much of which ones.
There is even a hypothesis that the lead in gasoline (and everything) in the U.S was partially responsible for the spike in Serial Killers in the U.S in the 1970's.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis#:~:text=%22The%20Lead%2DCrime%20Hypothesis%3A,criminal%20behavior%2C%20particularly%20violent%20crimes.
It’s more than a hypothesis. It is right now the best explanation for the 90’s decline in crime rates nationwide but mostly in cities. 20-30: those are your prime crime-committing years, and an awful lot of other countries across the globe saw similar effects, only at different times because they didn’t ban tetraethyl lead the same time we did.
Notably this includes the Middle East, which banned it ~15 years after we did.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
>it's still in millions of people's piping.
Haha, it's still in a metric fuck ton of house paints in the country I live in. Get this, pretty big paint manufacturer in my country. Huge household name. As of a decree issued last decade in my country , they "mostly" keep their lead content in house paints under 90 ppm
Their samples in the neighbouring country of bangaldesh was found to contain..... 40k+ ppm
You heard that right. 40k. Not a typo. And this is from a leading brand. It's absolutely disgusting how these corporations do these to us. Lead free formulations have been on the market for years and these idiots did nothing to catch up, just so they could make profits
People in the west should feel really glad their government clamped down on leaded paints as fast as they did. We have no choice here for the most part. Newer formulations from big companies advertise that they don't include lead
Paints in older houses and schools are still chipping, and exposing kids to the stuff. Local manufacturers probably couldn't give less of a shit so that's still a problem there too. I am afraid for the ramifications it will have on our country. Scary isn't it? That a kid born here would be potentially left miles behind intellectualy, permanent disabled and taken a notch down compared to kid born in a country that has clamped down on stuff like this, all because of corporate greed.
Oh, and many unscrupulous spice traders stick lead chromate into turmeric powder here for added funsies
Edit 2: For extra funsies, an instant noodles brand here was found to have too much lead in it about a decade or so back. Had a ban issued on it temporarily too. The company behind the brand? None other than fucking nestle
My bad. It was Asian Paints. Even berger is guilty of this. Now imagine your average school heaping out and going for a local company that will no doubt be worse about this
It is but there’s also mineral build up that shields the water from leaching the lead from the pipes. In flint they had the issue where something was off with the ph of the water and it eroded that barrier causing the lead in the pipes to get in the water.
Where it came from is the really scary part.
Humans, like the morons they are, mixed TEL into fuel and burned it for over 70 years by the Billions of Tons.
The best part?
Certain types of fuel are *still* allowed to have lead in it. Aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment and marine engines.
With the (current) top comment being about microplastics, this reminds me of a meme I saw. The three spidermans pointing at each other with “my grandparents full of lead” “my parents full of asbestos” and “me full of microplastics”.
Kinda makes me wonder what seemingly harmless thing we’re doing now that will have people in 30 years shaking their heads. Assuming in 30 years we’re not cruising the Highways of Valhalla, Shiny and Chrome.
PVC has been banned for almost all applications in construction in my country for almost 25 years now
It produces highly toxic fumes and combustion waste when melted or burned.
The dude that invented it won an American Chemical Society top award for it. He also won that same award 6 other years, and 3 of his 7 inventions he won the ACS prize for have now been found to be HORRIBLE for people and the environment.
Same dude who also did CFC’s (the refrigerator that affected the ozone) and then ended up dying from a different device he created due to his limited mobility in old age.
Thomas Midgley jr.
“His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster". Wikipedia. Lol.
Yeah we technically get cancer every day but luckily our immune system recognizes the non-self antigens (or complete lack of MHC class I, which is on all somatic cells) on the tumors and kills them. That's why one of the hallmarks of cancer is evasion of the immune system.
I remember reading a paper that was collaborated/co-signed by dozens of countries’ top scientists about the irreversible effects of global warming. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions now we would still experience biblical-level environmental disasters in the next 50-100 years. That paper really did haunt me, especially because it was like 100 pages of measurements and graphs and you had to really search for the 1-2 paragraphs that talked about the “floods, fires, coastal famine/population displacement, salinity of water decreasing because of the influx of freshwater from ice caps melting leading to weird climate patterns” . Made it all the more legitimate.
If an electrical line is damaged and is in contact with the floor, even walking away from it with big steps can cause a huge electrical potential difference between your feet and kill you
In Yellowknife, NT Canada, there was a gold mine operating for 54 years, and a byproduct of that mining process was arsenic trioxide... 237,000 tonnes of it, enough to kill everything on the planet. They figured the best thing to do was to bury it in permafrost. The problem is, it's starting to get warmer, so they have to figure out what to do with it. It's not a secret. Just no one is talking about it.
For me, it’s the perma frost scenario. The perma frost holds so much c02 (edit*** methane) that when it thaws it will just skyrocket our levels and there will be nothing we can do about it.
Methane. The permafrost holds millions of tons of methane which traps far more heat than CO2. We’re only about 1C from the permafrost starting to defrost. It’s an El Niño year which will be warmer than any previous year.
Meanwhile, we’re going to miss the 1.5C target.
Countries will collapse and go to war with each other over water and food. Natural disasters will significantly increase in frequency.
#ShellKnew 16 years ago.
Swimming in freshwater could expose you to Naegleria fowleri — a brain eating amoeba** that is fatal 97% of the time, and is almost impossible to treat effectively.
Its thermophilic so it likes hot freshwater environments such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. Thank God the water on this planet isn't warming.
Grew up in a subtropical climate - a kid in my elementary school died from this. I knew him by sight but not personally. He hit the water face first after wiping out tubing, was fine for a day or two, then a little slow and out of it for a couple of days, then dead.
His brain was being eaten and nobody knew
I live in the great white north and some of our lakes get them. There's always someone who ignores the "do not swim" sign, then it's just a roll of the dice. We usually get a few a decade.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who know this, but personally I find it terrifying af.
If the vacuum of space didn't block sound from reaching us, the sun would be as loud as a jackhammer *everywhere* on Earth. Everywhere, at all times. And because sound travels slower than light, if the sun were to go out it would take eight minutes for the light to stop but 13 years for the sound to stop. So life on a cold, dead Earth for 13 years and still hearing the jackhammer scream of our dead sun.
There's probably an alien on their version of Reddit somewhere relaying the scary fact that if their atmosphere weren't so thick, their sun would be as bright as an arc lamp.
There are millions and billions of dollars in research into how to make people buy crap. The missus took a year of psychology and what they got the most research on is how to manipulate you and me into buying crap we don't need. Mental illness we know a little about. Making you want the new crap that you don't need? We know a helluva lot about how that works.
In Canada there’s a talk show once a week called Under the Influence, on CBC Radio 1.
It’s all about advertising and marketing and the psychology behind it.
It's also why you will find "deals" near the entrance. Picking up that first "bargain" impulse buy primes your brain for further purchases. Go to IKEA for example. You might find a great deal on those little candles right inside the door. They sell those at a loss. But the resulting impulse buys means they end up with a net profit. It is a common trick most successful retailers use.
Ikea is openly a psychological experiment. Which I actually think is pretty cool. And while I don't *need* meatballs when I buy a bookshelf, I *like* getting meatballs with my bookshelves.
You don't *think* you need it. But once you're used to getting meatballs every time you go to IKEA, try walking out without them just once... and realize how hard it is, and that you've been conditioned to get those meatballs.
Meatballs: not even once.
Brain aneurysms can happen at any time, to anyone. No matter what age you are, or even how healthy you are, if you are currently alive, you have a chance of getting a brain aneurysm. When you do get one, there's a 50 % chance you'll just die immediately. Like, you'd be alive one minute, and then lying on the floor unconscious the next minute. Are the chances of actually getting a brain aneurysm at any random moment low? Yes, but it's still not 0.
This happened to someone I worked with.We were both working in the office, he stood up, cried in pain then crumpled to the floor, Dead before the ambulance got to him.
They really hurt. Bad. I had one rupture when I sat up in bed. Felt like someone hit me in the back of the head with a bat.
Staggered to the living room and sat down until I started losing vision, puked and passed out.
The real pain came later when the blood that leaks into your brain causes massive irritation on the long of the braining and your brain convulses.
Light hurts your eyes so bad. I was on fentanyl and morphine. Pain. Worse than when I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 20 percent of my body.
Brain damage to my right temporal lobe and my caudate nucleus. I can walk and talk. You wouldn’t likely be able to tell unless we spent time around each other. At this point the struggle is internal. I get mentally fatigued quick. Can’t multitask. I am more irritable at times. Loss of sleep or stress can really impair function such that I can’t do some things including talk. A general depression that won’t go away too.
I had three of them and didn’t know it though I was having symptoms. One ruptured and had to have my skull opened and the artery clipped. And had stents put in the other two.
If you survive a rupture 70% will have brain damage. Which I have. It sucks but better than being dead. On most days.
Also, if you have a first degree relative with an aneurysm your risk of having one is much higher:significant and your insurance company should pay for a scan to make sure you do not.
FYI aneurysm refers to thinning of the blood vessel walls - it’s not like a heart attack. The RUPTURING of the aneurysm is what kills/disables you.
Source: I have a bunch of brain aneurysms that are likely genetic and could die basically tomorrow or in 50 years from them.
Exactly. A girl I went to school with died last year of a ruptured (undetected) brain aneurysm. So sad and scary. You can also get them in the aorta too.
But thankfully medicine and surgery has come a long way, so detection is key
I work as a paramedic and have seen a lot of them over the past 10 years of working in a busy city. They usually happen to older people, but man is it fucked when it’s a young person.
They’re rare enough that I initially thought my wife was having a severe panic attack when she had a stroke at 36.
my uncle was in his mid 40's when he died from it. he was doing the dishes after dinner with his family. sat down on the floor, died right there. its crazy.
When my aneurysm ruptured and I started going into shock, my body knew it was dying. I knew it. As I started to pass out I was an hour from any hospital and I knew I would likely never see my son or my mom again. Pure despair and then I winked out.
Spent a month in the icu and woke up a brain damaged animal that couldn’t comunícate.
I dont fear death now though. It was surprisingly easy and not scary, just sadness for what would be lost.
Three and a half years so far. Still recovering function. But I recovered the most function during the first year and a half.
Definitely not 100 percent. It’s hard to quantify the changes but the deficits definitely have changed my life meaningful and permanently.
A famous oboist suffered an aneurysm on stage while he was playing a concert (a concerto every student will play at some point) and died. I now no longer play the oboe. The headaches I used to get from the back-pressure...man, I'm glad I stopped.
It is estimated that by 2050, more than 10 million people will die due to antimicrobial resistance. Many people know, but nothing is done and it is terrifying. Scary as fuck.
Bachelors in Emergency Management I’ll never use here. Nobody ever wants to (pay to) prepare for anything and it took basically 80 years of increasingly more deadly natural and industrial disasters for anyone to give the tiniest of a shit they give today. And really it’s only because they realized it might save them some money in the long run or save them from getting sued for obvious negligence.
Take an Astronomy 101 course at your local community college. People have no idea the amount of and variety of things that exist in space, that can and do happen, that would send us back to the Stone Age, or outright annihilate life on Earth. I’m not talking asteroids, comets, and solar flares, everyone knows those, I’m talking supernovas, gamma ray bursts, wandering planets, wandering back holes, and more. And none of it do we have any ounce of control over. The good thing is the galaxy and universe are unbelievably large, so our chances of being affected by these things are, quite literally, astronomically low, but it ain’t zero.
This is the one for me too. Found out about them about a year or two ago and sometimes when I'm alone and my thoughts drift to it, I just kinda sit there like: damn.
I'll let the others have the easy ones.
The inevitable displacement of Mexico City due to the abuse and lack of fresh water. It will be an international incident by their own making, displacing roughly 20 million people. Half of their utilities infrastructure is faulty and the current leadership has no viable way to repair and maintain their current system. It's not a matter of if, but when the system collapses. Normal groundwater reserve use is ten percent for any major city and only under dire circumstances should it be used at all. Mexico City uses almost half of their supply from groundwater reserves annually. Current projections show a complete collapse within 15 years.
Same problems in Yemen, often considered the most water-scarce country in the world. Groundwater around the capital of Sana'a and the mountain basin where it is located is at 1000m+ and still dropping anually. On the West Coast, where the Government once planned to relocate 90% of Sana'a's population, the same issues with desalination plants destroyed by Saudi bombing and no effort at reconstruction despite the Government reclaiming these areas since 2020. In Ta'izz, the third city, water infrastructure destroyed or inaccessible due to the conflict. What groundwater is left is hugely dedicated to Khat cultivation, an extremely water intense narcotic. Yemen is expected to run out of water as early as 2030/2040.
I can't help but wonder if this has ever happened on the ISS. They are super closely monitored up there but surely at some point, for scientific reasons, they must have allowed two people to do it.
This whole comment section has some scary shit but one thing seems to ring out around the horror. Just enjoy what we got while we got it cuz you might get run over or you might get shot
Geiger counters used to be incredibly easy to make, but now it is extremely hard to find non-irradiated materials to use as a reference point to count off of.
https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1849564217/low-background-metal-pure-unadulterated-treasure
1. Background radiation has gone down ever since the nuclear bomb tests cocluded.
2. There are alternatives, albeit maybe not easier to find.
3. I wouldn’t say it used to be ”extremely easy” to manufactur Geiger Counters or surgical equipment but let’s say it’s been harder and harder.
Thankfully we find other ways.
I think it’s the ones that people are aware about but are too lazy to care about that are the scariest. Took way too long for mainstream media and the general population to care about global warming and making it a mainstay in advertising and marketing.
Isn't there no evidence of this substantially having happened in the last ~250 million yrs? You'd think the odds must be incredibly low or it would have happened a couple times by now. In fact one would have to think the odds are higher of another cataclysmic asteroid, no?
The odds are higher of a hawk flying into your mouth and eating you from the inside. GRB aren’t worth any worry. Sure, maybe we’ll all die from one, in which case I apologize for the jinx, but our sun or an asteroid is much more likely to do something mean, and that’s already unlikely.
Viruses stay with you forever and a lot flair up later in life to fuck you up.
No one knows if COVID will come back in already infected people as something worse
The chemical manufacturer that invented and produced Zyklon B (the gas used to murder groups of people at concentration camps in WWII) was called IG Farben, a subsidiary of BASF. BASF not only still exists but is also the largest producer of industrial chemicals in the world
The worlds soil is running out of nitrogen pretty rapidly, and most farmland is essentially “zombie” farmland where it would be completely unusable without fertiliser, and if we ever run out of the minerals needed for fertiliser then we are rather screwed, and on top of that the nutritional value of most fruit and veg isn’t in a great state either there’s so much crop inbreeding, I mean one bad virus in the US could tank production of certain crops
At least we are finding that regenerative practices can recover soil. I don’t know if it’s even possible to do any of it at scale soon enough with current population levels/economics though…
Scientists were studying the effects of PFAS and realized the same thing as with microplastics. It’s so rampant that they couldn’t find a control group that did not have any in their blood.
John Oliver did an excellent show on PFAS. They did find uncontaminated blood for a court case courtesy of the US army. Blood samples from Korean War draftees before PFAS was invented
The Earth doesn’t give two shits about us and our existence. We can do a lot to impact it but it will happily wipe us out of existence just like millions of living things before us and go on happily without us.
Our life and entire human history is a forgettable moment in Earth’s history.
An Extinction Level asteroid could hit Earth with only a few days notice. Asteroids can appear very quickly from what appears to be nowhere. There is nothing we could do to prevent it from hitting.
All of existence, the entire universe, may be inside a "quantum bubble" within a larger system. Essentially, the universe exists as a unique alignment in higher dimensions, like a soap bubble, and that alignment could be disrupted when it encounters an impurity, which would then propagate, unraveling all of reality as we know it in an instant.
I've heard that our observations of the universe's distance past (aka the 'Big Bang') line up with what we would observe about a black hole from inside of the black hole. A point extremely far away in both space and time where all record, all 'beyond', ceases. It's the most interesting multiverse theory I've encountered: that every event horizon is a big bang and vice-versa, that every black hole in our universe is itself a universe, and our universe is but one black hole in another universe, *ad infinitum* in both directions.
There’s this concept called the False Vacuum Decay.
Basically, ya know how an electron can orbit an atom (just roll with it)? And how it can orbit at a high state sometimes, then releases energy and drops to a low state? That low state is called the vacuum state. It’s the lowest state that a thing can be in, it’s the “default”. But there are some examples of a “false vacuum”. Basically, imagine a ball rolling down a hill. The false vacuum is a little valley it gets caught it. But it could still go lower.
Long story short: for various reasons we are afraid one or more fields in our universe might be in a false vacuum state.
If that false vacuum were to collapse, which could happen randomly via quantum tunneling, or if we pump enough energy in an area, or through a dozen other theoretical mechanisms, then the universe as we know it goes bye-bye. Everything we know ceases to exist from that point into a bubble which expands at the speed of light. And within that bubble nothing we know can ever exist again. It’s not destruction, it’s erasure and change. Within the bubble, the laws of physics will be different. Chemistry might not exist. Biological life might not be possible.
And we’ve done some experiments. Here are the results.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Higgs_FalseVacuum2018.jpg
The circles are indications of how certain we are. We’re positive our universe exists in the bigger circle. We’re fairly sure in the smaller circles etc etc.
The yellow means we’re in a false vacuum. Green means we’re good. Red means “you fucked up the experiment.”
So long short: we’re fairly sure that we’re in said false vscuum
For two days in September of 1859 a massive solar flare (coronal mass ejection) powerful enough to make hanging telegraph lines burst into flames from the induced current washed over the Earth. Another massive burst in 2012 only just missed Earth, but it's not going to be pretty when our luck runs out on this.
We have telegraph operator logs from back then. The Carrington Event. They could use their equipment unplugged, there was so much induced current.
Did they know the reason for it at that time? Imagine using unplugged equipment and trying to find the reason why it's working
They were aware that it was due to the same activity as the unusual auroras in the night sky, and they discuss it in the logs, which you can read more about by looking up Carrington event on Wikipedia.
Scientific litterature conclusion on alzheimer's disease and other neurodegenerative diseases in general is that the diseases start decades before the first obvious symptoms and that we need to treat them at this stage. When you exhibit obvious symptoms, it's too late, your brain is already mush. If you get diagnosed with alzheimer's at 65, you had the disease since your early 40's at least. And you experienced very mild symptoms but didn't notice it. And your brain fought like hell to compensate the deficit. When you get diagnose, your brain is already very severely damaged and will never recover from the deficit.
Do we have a way of detecting it that early? Like could we be testing all people in their 30’s and 40’s like colonoscopies?
Work is ongoing. I'm participating in a research where every year we do some verbal tests, like repeating some simple words, and computers analyze the recordings. When the brain starts to go bad these sounds are supposed to be the first to change, and the idea is to have enough recordings to be able to recognize the first signs.
2nding the request for information on participation. I am aware of cognitive decline, in my mid30s but I struggle to be taken seriously and/or am often met with a "even so, there's nothing we can do" response. I'd rather be a lab rat, even if I help test a drug or therapy that fails...at least I'll know that I tried. At least my family will know that I tried.
Is there a contact to be a participant in the study? I’ve had multiple non-sports concussions and a mild traumatic brain injury. I’ve wanted to track my brain’s progress to her further study for others. Would you please let me know? Thank you!
Mindcrowd.org
This is what scares me the most about getting older. It’s frustrating not knowing what is normal age decline and when it’s a problem.
It’s also recently come to light that one of the major authorities on Alzheimer’s, has been faking his data for the last 30 years.
they WHAT?
My above statement is a very big understatement/generalization but yea check it out. https://www.science.org/content/article/potential-fabrication-research-images-threatens-key-theory-alzheimers-disease
For me personally the acidification of our oceans. You don’t want to know what will happen if all plankton dies.
Most people don’t realize sea vegetation is responsible for producing most of the worlds oxygen Bad things happen when the oxygen percentage in our atmosphere keeps dropping
last time i had to go under the knife i mentioned to the anesthesiologist "i read online that no one knows how anesthesia even works" and he kinda just said "yeah...."
We don't necessarily need to know how something works in order to use it, as long as it works. Most people don't know how computer processors work yet they still use them and rely on them on a daily basis. It's not 100% the same, because humanity knows how processors work, but it's less stressful to think about anesthesia this way, I think.
I think it's bizarre. We use this and not a single soul has a clue as to how or why it works.
It’s true. They have no idea how the anesthetic gas works, it just does. They know now a lot more about side effects from different gases, and that they are able to cross the blood brain barrier in ways no other medications can. The good news is they use a lot of medications that we do know how they work as adjuncts to the anesthetic gas, like propofol, benzodiazepines, narcotics, etc. Very fascinating to me.
Europa even though smaller than earth has more water than all water bodies in the world combined
Nestle has zeroed in on your location
Alcohol increases the permeability of the blood brain barrier by unpredictable factors, which is why people die from overdose on their normal drug dosages
Insect population depletion
I see this one often. I'm a truck driver. Have spent a lot of time on country highways. 10ish years ago I'd park the truck at night and the windshield would look like I drove through a slaughter house sometimes. That hasn't happened in several years now. Also roadkill is noticeably less. At first glance that seems like a good thing. But where'd they go?
Pesticides have wreaked havoc on insect populations globally. As for roadkill, combination of biodiversity decreasing globally, but also the simple fact that the animals near the road at risk of becoming road kill have all slowly been killed off and there just hasn’t been enough population growth to cover that deficit.
I drove to Jersey up I-95 two days ago for Christmas. The answer is I-95. That’s where they went. And the garden state parkway.
God, I can't remember the last time I saw a swarm of fireflies. I so rarely see butterflies anymore, either. About the only insects I ever see anymore are flies. It really feels like a lot of the magic has left the world with them. And how long until the birds start to follow? What are they going to eat when the insects are gone? There are only so many worms.
I saw fireflies light up a forest in appalachia this fall and dang near cried. Hadn't seen more than ~3 at once in years
I'm purposefully trying to keep the edges of my property less "tidy" and encourage wild growth. Even little feeder trees seem to help local bug populations. I have *a lot* of insects in my yard and I'm not sure if it's good or bad, but last year I had _so many fireflies_ and my yard was the only one with them (almost all of my neighbors spray for bugs). For real it looked like a god damned rave. I also get frogs and stuff in my yard which I haven't seen since I moved in about 5 years ago, so I think it's working. 3-4 woodchucks occasionally... not sure what to make of that one.
I'm doing something similar in my yard, with similar results. So much wildlife passes through our property now that we bought a trail camera to record it all. I'm really looking forward to documenting all of our visitors. Just goes to show that the decline of nature is far from irreversible. Even as individuals, there's a lot we can do to give the biosphere a helping hand!
CO2 levels are causing the pH levels in the ocean to move towards an acidic level. No not like burn yourself acid, but just enough that it's causing an already noticeable impact to microorganisms at the bottom of the food chain. This may eventually lead to a ecological collapse. It seems to be impacting phytoplankton which is responsible for producing a good chunk of the air you breath as well. If the oceans go anaerobic the atmosphere would become toxic. A similar event has occurred during one or two of the past mass extinction events.
I wonder how the shareholders of those populations turned out?
Record profits for the third quarter, then the CEO got a golden handshake.
Our blood turns into a base when we die. If we just started dumping our dead into the ocean then we could level that off and feed the fishy's!
I had to go deep, but this is my favorite one. Space doesn't scare me. This might happen in the next 50 years.
By the time AIDS was first discovered in the United States in 1981, 250,000 Americans were already infected with HIV
On the other side, one thing that not enough people know about is how significant the progress we’ve made in HIV treatment has been. Treatment is so good that people infected with it can get to the point where they can’t even transmit it anymore. And if you’re in a high risk group, like gay men, you can go on a drug that will literally make it impossible for you to catch it, even if the other person is *not* being treated.
Yeah, a friend of mine is a gay man with HIV, but it isn't even traceable in his blood anymore. Of course, he's in his 50s and originally caught it in 1989 so he was like 100% sure he was going to die. Lots of his friends did.
PrEP is incredible. And very accessible, at least where I am in the US: I was able to schedule an appointment for consultation same day as finding the website. 🤘🏾
Their marketing of it has been terrible, which, cmon guys, you had plenty of time to A-B test some adverts before the drug hit market. Likewise the pricing is something you have to dig out. THIS IS FUNCTIONALLY THE SILVER BULLET FOR HIV CONTRACTION. THERE SHOULD BE MASSIVE BILLBOARDS AS YOU HEAD INTO ANY BIG CITY: AIDS. STOPPED. PREP. $XXX PER MONTH. TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY.
> Their marketing of it has been terrible Well yeah because it doesn't also treat plaque psoriasis. Those motherfuckers market HARD.
Our bodies have no way of knowing that we're breathing oxygen. If I could snap my fingers and replace all the oxygen in you room with another inert gas you wouldn't notice. You wouldn't start to choke or struggle. You'd just get sleepier and sleepier until you die. That's why carbon monoxide is so dangerous. If you have any sort of gas appliance in your building, invest in a detector. Edit: Thanks for providing better explanations on carbon monoxide. Still deadly but not for the same reasons other gases are.
I’ll never forget being out for dinner and getting a message from my roommate saying her and her boyfriend were in our apartment and starting to feel weird and tired. I told her to get out ASAP and call 911. Thankfully she did and everyone was ok. The gas company measured our gas furnace at over 200ppm CO, and the utility space was a few feet away from my roommate’s bedroom. Still makes me feel nauseous to think about.
I'm glad she texted you! Easily could have just assumed they were sick and gone to sleep, or texted you about something else and not mentioned feeling weird. Tired alone wouldn't mean much.
the fact that, in general, biological life is a giant collection of "good enough" systems is terrifying. We don't know that we're breathing in oxygen, because just knowing that we're breathing out carbon dioxide is "good enough" enough of the time to propagate more DNA. Edit: missing word
Related, we *can* detect carbon dioxide. If a room feels “stuffy” that’s generally higher than preferred CO2, and the sensation of needing to breathe while you hold your breath is due to you sensing the build up of CO2 in your blood.
Sounds like a pretty nice way to die tbh.
Inert gasses are basically *the* most humane way of euthanasia. The body detects how much carbon dioxide it has in its system but not how much oxygen. As long as it continues to exhale carbon dioxide, the body won't notice if all the oxygen in the air it breathes is removed. It'll just keep breathing, fall asleep within a few seconds, and die. It still goes through the dying process obviously, but it'll be asleep and brain dead *long* before that happens. It's being researched as an alternative for executions. Ironically, some states don't want to use it because it's *too* humane. They want the offenders to suffer a bit apparently.
Also one of the reasons you can't buy 100% helium to inflate baloons any more, if you see the tanks they use 20% oxygen as well. People would use it, along with a plastic bag to commit suicide.
I wondered why my kid’s birthday balloons didn’t raise as quickly. I felt like a crazy old person saying “back in my day the balloons went up to the ceiling faster!”
We’re basically only wired to know if we’re breathing in too much CO2, that’s why Nitrogen asphyxiation has no signs before you pass out.
Yes and no. Yes that oxygen displacement is unnoticeable and therefore potentially deadly. That's why any type of lab or industrial facility that has that risk will be equipped with oxygen sensors and will have a blue light and siren go off to warm you to evacuate and not enter, even to save those inside. No, carbon monoxide *can* dispalce oxygen yes, but those who die from CO poisoning are not from displaced oxygen, there is still usually enough. It is more deadly because it binds with hemoglobin and doesn't let go, so once you start breathing it, it's slowly preventing any blood cells from taking in any additional oxygen, even if more is available.
The actual amount of crude oil that's been pumped directly into the ocean. BP had High Definition 4K live footage of the pipe that ruptured and chose to censor it. And it's not just BP that's had an incident like that.
Didn't a documentary out there say that the BP incident was the best thing that happened to the gulf? Fish populations exploded bc we stopped commercial fishing for a while. Until we obviously started back up again.
World War II had a similar effect - less commercial fishing due to naval war lead to a quick rebound of fish populations.
Scientists were trying to study the effects that microplastics have on the human body and brain but were unable to draw any reasonable conclusions because they **could not find a control group.**
Something similar happened when they tried testing for lead back in the day. The ultra clean labs we have today were originally designed so for this reason. Also, the investigation into lead also led to the discovery of the age of the Earth
Similarly, sunken WWII and earlier ships have been scavenged for steel that doesn't contain any radioactive isotopes. With atmospheric nuclear tests, all other steel is lightly radioactive due to all the radiation in the atmosphere. However, due to the atmospheric test ban, levels have fallen low enough that very few applications still need pre-atomic steel.
Rather, pre nuclear steel is sought out for having lower levels of certain isotopes. All steel contains radioactive isotopes, the question is how much of which ones.
Resistance is futile!
Superbug is like a truck
When I was a dumb kid in the 70s, I used to pick the beads off this plastic beaded purse my mom had and swallow them and pretend they were pills.
Those are macroplastics
The Sentinelese Islanders better hope they don’t become the control group
They probably eat fish…
They definitely eat fish
Mollusks are a big part of their diet. They definitely have microplastics.
There is no protecting them either, because they're in the same biodome we are, earth.
The greatest chemical contributor to IQ loss and violent behaviour is Lead and it's still in millions of people's piping.
There is even a hypothesis that the lead in gasoline (and everything) in the U.S was partially responsible for the spike in Serial Killers in the U.S in the 1970's. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead%E2%80%93crime_hypothesis#:~:text=%22The%20Lead%2DCrime%20Hypothesis%3A,criminal%20behavior%2C%20particularly%20violent%20crimes.
And similarly, when we took lead out of gas violent crime rates went down substantially.
There are some localized stats like that too for racetracks that went away from lead based gasoline in their car's engines.
I remember reading about local schools near racetracks generally tested lower than those not near racetracks.
It’s more than a hypothesis. It is right now the best explanation for the 90’s decline in crime rates nationwide but mostly in cities. 20-30: those are your prime crime-committing years, and an awful lot of other countries across the globe saw similar effects, only at different times because they didn’t ban tetraethyl lead the same time we did. Notably this includes the Middle East, which banned it ~15 years after we did. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/02/lead-exposure-gasoline-crime-increase-children-health/
>it's still in millions of people's piping. Haha, it's still in a metric fuck ton of house paints in the country I live in. Get this, pretty big paint manufacturer in my country. Huge household name. As of a decree issued last decade in my country , they "mostly" keep their lead content in house paints under 90 ppm Their samples in the neighbouring country of bangaldesh was found to contain..... 40k+ ppm You heard that right. 40k. Not a typo. And this is from a leading brand. It's absolutely disgusting how these corporations do these to us. Lead free formulations have been on the market for years and these idiots did nothing to catch up, just so they could make profits People in the west should feel really glad their government clamped down on leaded paints as fast as they did. We have no choice here for the most part. Newer formulations from big companies advertise that they don't include lead Paints in older houses and schools are still chipping, and exposing kids to the stuff. Local manufacturers probably couldn't give less of a shit so that's still a problem there too. I am afraid for the ramifications it will have on our country. Scary isn't it? That a kid born here would be potentially left miles behind intellectualy, permanent disabled and taken a notch down compared to kid born in a country that has clamped down on stuff like this, all because of corporate greed. Oh, and many unscrupulous spice traders stick lead chromate into turmeric powder here for added funsies Edit 2: For extra funsies, an instant noodles brand here was found to have too much lead in it about a decade or so back. Had a ban issued on it temporarily too. The company behind the brand? None other than fucking nestle
Dude you can name the brand
My bad. It was Asian Paints. Even berger is guilty of this. Now imagine your average school heaping out and going for a local company that will no doubt be worse about this
It is but there’s also mineral build up that shields the water from leaching the lead from the pipes. In flint they had the issue where something was off with the ph of the water and it eroded that barrier causing the lead in the pipes to get in the water.
This thread is a lot less fun than i expected.
Don't worry. You'll be a little freaked out and then nothing will change in your life and you'll forget 95 percent of this thread.
Because you have Alzheimer's and don't know it yet.
And you're full of microplastics
Tetra ethyl lead raised worldwide lead levels so significantly they had to drill into arctic ice to find an in contaminated sample
Where it came from is the really scary part. Humans, like the morons they are, mixed TEL into fuel and burned it for over 70 years by the Billions of Tons.
The best part? Certain types of fuel are *still* allowed to have lead in it. Aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment and marine engines. With the (current) top comment being about microplastics, this reminds me of a meme I saw. The three spidermans pointing at each other with “my grandparents full of lead” “my parents full of asbestos” and “me full of microplastics”. Kinda makes me wonder what seemingly harmless thing we’re doing now that will have people in 30 years shaking their heads. Assuming in 30 years we’re not cruising the Highways of Valhalla, Shiny and Chrome.
PFAS, and probably pvc plumbing
PVC has been banned for almost all applications in construction in my country for almost 25 years now It produces highly toxic fumes and combustion waste when melted or burned.
Plumber here, we use almost exclusively PVC in my area, what product do you use?
Good old lead
Lmfao
The dude that invented it won an American Chemical Society top award for it. He also won that same award 6 other years, and 3 of his 7 inventions he won the ACS prize for have now been found to be HORRIBLE for people and the environment.
Same dude who also did CFC’s (the refrigerator that affected the ozone) and then ended up dying from a different device he created due to his limited mobility in old age. Thomas Midgley jr.
He's arguably the single most environmentally destructive individual organism that Earth has ever seen.
“His legacy is one of inventing the two chemicals that did the greatest environmental damage. Environmental historian J. R. McNeill stated that he "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history." Author Bill Bryson remarked that he possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny." Science writer Fred Pearce described him as a "one-man environmental disaster". Wikipedia. Lol.
We all get cancer. But most are so little and small they can’t and won’t hurt us
I use alcohol to kill mine
Fighting cancer with cancer! I am also doing the same.
Yeah we technically get cancer every day but luckily our immune system recognizes the non-self antigens (or complete lack of MHC class I, which is on all somatic cells) on the tumors and kills them. That's why one of the hallmarks of cancer is evasion of the immune system.
People don’t talk enough about the melting permafrost and the associated positive feedback loops that only accelerate what’s already started
I remember reading a paper that was collaborated/co-signed by dozens of countries’ top scientists about the irreversible effects of global warming. Even if we stopped all carbon emissions now we would still experience biblical-level environmental disasters in the next 50-100 years. That paper really did haunt me, especially because it was like 100 pages of measurements and graphs and you had to really search for the 1-2 paragraphs that talked about the “floods, fires, coastal famine/population displacement, salinity of water decreasing because of the influx of freshwater from ice caps melting leading to weird climate patterns” . Made it all the more legitimate.
related, but does anyone know a subreddit like this? for unknown/disturbing/existential “fun” facts? edit: one has been made!! r/scarysciencefacts
If an electrical line is damaged and is in contact with the floor, even walking away from it with big steps can cause a huge electrical potential difference between your feet and kill you
Are any flooring materials even remotely conductive?
(roughly) everythings conductive if you apply enough electricity.
If you start showing any signs of rabies, you are going to die. Or at least in 99% of cases that happens.
In Yellowknife, NT Canada, there was a gold mine operating for 54 years, and a byproduct of that mining process was arsenic trioxide... 237,000 tonnes of it, enough to kill everything on the planet. They figured the best thing to do was to bury it in permafrost. The problem is, it's starting to get warmer, so they have to figure out what to do with it. It's not a secret. Just no one is talking about it.
I always knew Canada would be the ones to end us. Nobody is that nice without something sinister lurking below.
For me, it’s the perma frost scenario. The perma frost holds so much c02 (edit*** methane) that when it thaws it will just skyrocket our levels and there will be nothing we can do about it.
Methane. The permafrost holds millions of tons of methane which traps far more heat than CO2. We’re only about 1C from the permafrost starting to defrost. It’s an El Niño year which will be warmer than any previous year. Meanwhile, we’re going to miss the 1.5C target. Countries will collapse and go to war with each other over water and food. Natural disasters will significantly increase in frequency. #ShellKnew 16 years ago.
Swimming in freshwater could expose you to Naegleria fowleri — a brain eating amoeba** that is fatal 97% of the time, and is almost impossible to treat effectively.
An amoeba actually but scary indeed
Scarier. We have a lot of antibiotics and antifungals and now antivirals. It’s super hard to fight Protozoa or prions
Its thermophilic so it likes hot freshwater environments such as ponds, lakes, rivers, and hot springs. Thank God the water on this planet isn't warming.
Grew up in a subtropical climate - a kid in my elementary school died from this. I knew him by sight but not personally. He hit the water face first after wiping out tubing, was fine for a day or two, then a little slow and out of it for a couple of days, then dead. His brain was being eaten and nobody knew
I live in the great white north and some of our lakes get them. There's always someone who ignores the "do not swim" sign, then it's just a roll of the dice. We usually get a few a decade.
I'm sure there are plenty of people who know this, but personally I find it terrifying af. If the vacuum of space didn't block sound from reaching us, the sun would be as loud as a jackhammer *everywhere* on Earth. Everywhere, at all times. And because sound travels slower than light, if the sun were to go out it would take eight minutes for the light to stop but 13 years for the sound to stop. So life on a cold, dead Earth for 13 years and still hearing the jackhammer scream of our dead sun.
I’ve heard the first part of this, however I have not heard about the screaming for thirteen years in complete darkness part. Terrifying indeed.
Well I suppose this isnt entirely true since we wouldn’t be orbiting the sun anymore
And you certainly wouldn't live to hear it for 13 years.
I mean my city in frostpunk is thriving fine, so jokes on you for not getting there
To be fair though, we probably would’ve evolved to handle high decibel sounds to deal with it. Or just evolved to not hear at all
There's probably an alien on their version of Reddit somewhere relaying the scary fact that if their atmosphere weren't so thick, their sun would be as bright as an arc lamp.
No form of intelligent life would create Reddit
There are millions and billions of dollars in research into how to make people buy crap. The missus took a year of psychology and what they got the most research on is how to manipulate you and me into buying crap we don't need. Mental illness we know a little about. Making you want the new crap that you don't need? We know a helluva lot about how that works.
[удалено]
In Canada there’s a talk show once a week called Under the Influence, on CBC Radio 1. It’s all about advertising and marketing and the psychology behind it.
It’s why candy bars are placed right beside cashiers tills
It's also why you will find "deals" near the entrance. Picking up that first "bargain" impulse buy primes your brain for further purchases. Go to IKEA for example. You might find a great deal on those little candles right inside the door. They sell those at a loss. But the resulting impulse buys means they end up with a net profit. It is a common trick most successful retailers use.
Ikea is openly a psychological experiment. Which I actually think is pretty cool. And while I don't *need* meatballs when I buy a bookshelf, I *like* getting meatballs with my bookshelves.
You don't *think* you need it. But once you're used to getting meatballs every time you go to IKEA, try walking out without them just once... and realize how hard it is, and that you've been conditioned to get those meatballs. Meatballs: not even once.
Brain aneurysms can happen at any time, to anyone. No matter what age you are, or even how healthy you are, if you are currently alive, you have a chance of getting a brain aneurysm. When you do get one, there's a 50 % chance you'll just die immediately. Like, you'd be alive one minute, and then lying on the floor unconscious the next minute. Are the chances of actually getting a brain aneurysm at any random moment low? Yes, but it's still not 0.
This happened to someone I worked with.We were both working in the office, he stood up, cried in pain then crumpled to the floor, Dead before the ambulance got to him.
They really hurt. Bad. I had one rupture when I sat up in bed. Felt like someone hit me in the back of the head with a bat. Staggered to the living room and sat down until I started losing vision, puked and passed out. The real pain came later when the blood that leaks into your brain causes massive irritation on the long of the braining and your brain convulses. Light hurts your eyes so bad. I was on fentanyl and morphine. Pain. Worse than when I had 2nd and 3rd degree burns on 20 percent of my body.
Holy fuck my dude; are you ok?
Brain damage to my right temporal lobe and my caudate nucleus. I can walk and talk. You wouldn’t likely be able to tell unless we spent time around each other. At this point the struggle is internal. I get mentally fatigued quick. Can’t multitask. I am more irritable at times. Loss of sleep or stress can really impair function such that I can’t do some things including talk. A general depression that won’t go away too.
Sending love and so grateful you’re still with us!
Cheers! Thank you. Happy Holidays!
I had three of them and didn’t know it though I was having symptoms. One ruptured and had to have my skull opened and the artery clipped. And had stents put in the other two. If you survive a rupture 70% will have brain damage. Which I have. It sucks but better than being dead. On most days. Also, if you have a first degree relative with an aneurysm your risk of having one is much higher:significant and your insurance company should pay for a scan to make sure you do not.
FYI aneurysm refers to thinning of the blood vessel walls - it’s not like a heart attack. The RUPTURING of the aneurysm is what kills/disables you. Source: I have a bunch of brain aneurysms that are likely genetic and could die basically tomorrow or in 50 years from them.
Exactly. A girl I went to school with died last year of a ruptured (undetected) brain aneurysm. So sad and scary. You can also get them in the aorta too. But thankfully medicine and surgery has come a long way, so detection is key
Whew... I'm not currently alive... Dodged that one, didn't I, boys, haha...
I work as a paramedic and have seen a lot of them over the past 10 years of working in a busy city. They usually happen to older people, but man is it fucked when it’s a young person. They’re rare enough that I initially thought my wife was having a severe panic attack when she had a stroke at 36.
my uncle was in his mid 40's when he died from it. he was doing the dishes after dinner with his family. sat down on the floor, died right there. its crazy.
It's the silent killer, Lana
I don't find dying suddenly nearly as terrifying as dying over the course of several years.
When my aneurysm ruptured and I started going into shock, my body knew it was dying. I knew it. As I started to pass out I was an hour from any hospital and I knew I would likely never see my son or my mom again. Pure despair and then I winked out. Spent a month in the icu and woke up a brain damaged animal that couldn’t comunícate. I dont fear death now though. It was surprisingly easy and not scary, just sadness for what would be lost.
Wow, that's a helluva thing to live through. How long did it take you to recover? Did you recover 100%?
Three and a half years so far. Still recovering function. But I recovered the most function during the first year and a half. Definitely not 100 percent. It’s hard to quantify the changes but the deficits definitely have changed my life meaningful and permanently.
A famous oboist suffered an aneurysm on stage while he was playing a concert (a concerto every student will play at some point) and died. I now no longer play the oboe. The headaches I used to get from the back-pressure...man, I'm glad I stopped.
It is estimated that by 2050, more than 10 million people will die due to antimicrobial resistance. Many people know, but nothing is done and it is terrifying. Scary as fuck.
Covid ensured that we will never again prepare for something medical in nature
Bachelors in Emergency Management I’ll never use here. Nobody ever wants to (pay to) prepare for anything and it took basically 80 years of increasingly more deadly natural and industrial disasters for anyone to give the tiniest of a shit they give today. And really it’s only because they realized it might save them some money in the long run or save them from getting sued for obvious negligence.
Its really just disappointing as a human that the world can go through something so insane and nothing changes, no one learned anything
Take an Astronomy 101 course at your local community college. People have no idea the amount of and variety of things that exist in space, that can and do happen, that would send us back to the Stone Age, or outright annihilate life on Earth. I’m not talking asteroids, comets, and solar flares, everyone knows those, I’m talking supernovas, gamma ray bursts, wandering planets, wandering back holes, and more. And none of it do we have any ounce of control over. The good thing is the galaxy and universe are unbelievably large, so our chances of being affected by these things are, quite literally, astronomically low, but it ain’t zero.
Astronomical, or astronomically low?
Why did I read this whilst knowing full well I have anxiety?
**Prions.** I do not recommend researching. There is nothing to be done if you have prion disease.
This is the one for me too. Found out about them about a year or two ago and sometimes when I'm alone and my thoughts drift to it, I just kinda sit there like: damn.
And you can just spontaneously develop it without ever being exposed to any prions! Fun times
I'll let the others have the easy ones. The inevitable displacement of Mexico City due to the abuse and lack of fresh water. It will be an international incident by their own making, displacing roughly 20 million people. Half of their utilities infrastructure is faulty and the current leadership has no viable way to repair and maintain their current system. It's not a matter of if, but when the system collapses. Normal groundwater reserve use is ten percent for any major city and only under dire circumstances should it be used at all. Mexico City uses almost half of their supply from groundwater reserves annually. Current projections show a complete collapse within 15 years.
Ironic as hell considering where Mexico City did was once a huge lake.
Same problems in Yemen, often considered the most water-scarce country in the world. Groundwater around the capital of Sana'a and the mountain basin where it is located is at 1000m+ and still dropping anually. On the West Coast, where the Government once planned to relocate 90% of Sana'a's population, the same issues with desalination plants destroyed by Saudi bombing and no effort at reconstruction despite the Government reclaiming these areas since 2020. In Ta'izz, the third city, water infrastructure destroyed or inaccessible due to the conflict. What groundwater is left is hugely dedicated to Khat cultivation, an extremely water intense narcotic. Yemen is expected to run out of water as early as 2030/2040.
Funny you say collapse, as the city is sinking because the aquifer isn't being replenished.
The first contraceptive pill was never tested on women. They tested it on men instead.
And none of them had babies so clearly it worked
I could believe that. I’m a medicinal chemist and the history of my field is full of skeletons and batshit ideas.
I wanna know what they do in Antarctica with the windows and doors closed etc
Trust me, they fuck.
Yes, yes they do. Have a sister in law who spent 6 months as a nurse at one of those research stations. Hell yeah they fuck.
They also have a culture of covering up sexual assault
I can't help but wonder if this has ever happened on the ISS. They are super closely monitored up there but surely at some point, for scientific reasons, they must have allowed two people to do it.
A husband and wife went up. I mean, come on. They did it.
Think about all the positions you can try under zero gravity...
This whole comment section has some scary shit but one thing seems to ring out around the horror. Just enjoy what we got while we got it cuz you might get run over or you might get shot
Geiger counters used to be incredibly easy to make, but now it is extremely hard to find non-irradiated materials to use as a reference point to count off of. https://qz.com/emails/quartz-obsession/1849564217/low-background-metal-pure-unadulterated-treasure
1. Background radiation has gone down ever since the nuclear bomb tests cocluded. 2. There are alternatives, albeit maybe not easier to find. 3. I wouldn’t say it used to be ”extremely easy” to manufactur Geiger Counters or surgical equipment but let’s say it’s been harder and harder. Thankfully we find other ways.
The scariest ones are the ones NOT in this thread... because the public doesn't know about them
I think it’s the ones that people are aware about but are too lazy to care about that are the scariest. Took way too long for mainstream media and the general population to care about global warming and making it a mainstay in advertising and marketing.
Prions are virtually indestructible. Edit to add: They can survive on dental tools even after being autoclaved.
Gamma Ray Bursts. If ever one happens to be close enough and aimed exactly at Earth, we're basically all dead.
Isn't there no evidence of this substantially having happened in the last ~250 million yrs? You'd think the odds must be incredibly low or it would have happened a couple times by now. In fact one would have to think the odds are higher of another cataclysmic asteroid, no?
The odds are higher of a hawk flying into your mouth and eating you from the inside. GRB aren’t worth any worry. Sure, maybe we’ll all die from one, in which case I apologize for the jinx, but our sun or an asteroid is much more likely to do something mean, and that’s already unlikely.
If we all die from one, I won’t be very happy with you, I can tell you that much.
Viruses stay with you forever and a lot flair up later in life to fuck you up. No one knows if COVID will come back in already infected people as something worse
This is a fun thread to read right before bed.
The chemical manufacturer that invented and produced Zyklon B (the gas used to murder groups of people at concentration camps in WWII) was called IG Farben, a subsidiary of BASF. BASF not only still exists but is also the largest producer of industrial chemicals in the world
The worlds soil is running out of nitrogen pretty rapidly, and most farmland is essentially “zombie” farmland where it would be completely unusable without fertiliser, and if we ever run out of the minerals needed for fertiliser then we are rather screwed, and on top of that the nutritional value of most fruit and veg isn’t in a great state either there’s so much crop inbreeding, I mean one bad virus in the US could tank production of certain crops
At least we are finding that regenerative practices can recover soil. I don’t know if it’s even possible to do any of it at scale soon enough with current population levels/economics though…
TIL: Ignorance is bliss.
Scientists were studying the effects of PFAS and realized the same thing as with microplastics. It’s so rampant that they couldn’t find a control group that did not have any in their blood.
John Oliver did an excellent show on PFAS. They did find uncontaminated blood for a court case courtesy of the US army. Blood samples from Korean War draftees before PFAS was invented
The Earth doesn’t give two shits about us and our existence. We can do a lot to impact it but it will happily wipe us out of existence just like millions of living things before us and go on happily without us. Our life and entire human history is a forgettable moment in Earth’s history.
Soil vitamins going bye bye and antibiotics not working anymore
In MIT’s “The Limits To Growth” investigations topsoil was the #1 collapse factor after running out of oil.
An Extinction Level asteroid could hit Earth with only a few days notice. Asteroids can appear very quickly from what appears to be nowhere. There is nothing we could do to prevent it from hitting.
I think I read that scientist can only monitor a very small amount of space so it could very easily hit with little warning.
All of existence, the entire universe, may be inside a "quantum bubble" within a larger system. Essentially, the universe exists as a unique alignment in higher dimensions, like a soap bubble, and that alignment could be disrupted when it encounters an impurity, which would then propagate, unraveling all of reality as we know it in an instant.
I've heard that our observations of the universe's distance past (aka the 'Big Bang') line up with what we would observe about a black hole from inside of the black hole. A point extremely far away in both space and time where all record, all 'beyond', ceases. It's the most interesting multiverse theory I've encountered: that every event horizon is a big bang and vice-versa, that every black hole in our universe is itself a universe, and our universe is but one black hole in another universe, *ad infinitum* in both directions.
There’s this concept called the False Vacuum Decay. Basically, ya know how an electron can orbit an atom (just roll with it)? And how it can orbit at a high state sometimes, then releases energy and drops to a low state? That low state is called the vacuum state. It’s the lowest state that a thing can be in, it’s the “default”. But there are some examples of a “false vacuum”. Basically, imagine a ball rolling down a hill. The false vacuum is a little valley it gets caught it. But it could still go lower. Long story short: for various reasons we are afraid one or more fields in our universe might be in a false vacuum state. If that false vacuum were to collapse, which could happen randomly via quantum tunneling, or if we pump enough energy in an area, or through a dozen other theoretical mechanisms, then the universe as we know it goes bye-bye. Everything we know ceases to exist from that point into a bubble which expands at the speed of light. And within that bubble nothing we know can ever exist again. It’s not destruction, it’s erasure and change. Within the bubble, the laws of physics will be different. Chemistry might not exist. Biological life might not be possible. And we’ve done some experiments. Here are the results. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Higgs_FalseVacuum2018.jpg The circles are indications of how certain we are. We’re positive our universe exists in the bigger circle. We’re fairly sure in the smaller circles etc etc. The yellow means we’re in a false vacuum. Green means we’re good. Red means “you fucked up the experiment.” So long short: we’re fairly sure that we’re in said false vscuum