- AskScience AMA Series: I am a medicinal chemist and pharmaceutical scientist at the University of Florida who is an expert on Kratom, which is currently under investigation as treatment for opioid withdrawal syndrome. AMA!
- How do microbiologists know whether the virus they discovered is a novel virus or not?
- How are viruses, such as covid and flu, cleared from long-lived cells like nerve and brain cells?
- Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology
- Does the spin of atoms have any effect on the macro scale?
- Nitrogenated instead of carbonated water?
- Is there evidence that our brains are physically storing memories?
- Do natural endorphins act quicker than morphine does? Why or why not?
- How do scientists determine how many calories different activities burn? And how accurate are the estimates on exercise machines?
- Is it possible for a bacteria to have sections of a gram positive cell wall and a gram negative cell wall?
- Do Antibiotics Reduce Vaccine Efficacy (E.g. the Pfizer vaccine)?
- Is there any validity to the idea that light slows down in medium due to being absorbed and reemited by atoms in the medium?
- Can someone explain asymmetric organocatalysis in layman’s terms?
- Is there any data on side effects and the gap between first and second dose of mRNA vaccines?
- How did the 3.8 billion year old Isua Greenstone Belt in Greenland survive plate tectonics?
- If photons are quantum particle of electromagnetism, why are electric currents described as electrons flowing from one point to another?
- Does polypropylene contain phtalates? If they do, how are they released into the environment?
- What's the physical meaning of potential flow in fluid dynamics?
- How come particle accelerator experiments take so long?
- What is the most habitable celestial body besides Earth? If we had the technology, what would the best celestial body be to move to?
- Do Sequential Hermaphroditic Fish have 3 sex chromosomes?
- What is the timeline for forming B cells?
| Posted: 06 Oct 2021 04:00 AM PDT Hi Reddit! My name is Christopher McCurdy, and I am a broadly trained pharmaceutical scientist and pharmacist whose research focuses on the design, synthesis and development of drugs to treat pain and drug abuse. My work with novel sigma receptor ligands has led to possible medication development that could ease the effects of cocaine, methamphetamine and pain. I'll be answering your questions on how Kratom helps those with opioid withdrawal syndrome and anything about my career as a pharmaceutical scientist. My research interests at the University of Florida are:
More about me: I received my Ph.D. in Medicinal Chemistry in 1998 from the University of Georgia. Since then, I have served as President of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists and as a member the United States Pharmacopeial Convention. I also serve as an ad hoc member of the U.S. FDA Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee. Currently, I serve as director of the University of Florida's Clinical and Translational Science Institute Translational Drug Development Core that conducts bioanalysis, in vivo studies, human clinical trials, and more.
I will be on at 1 p.m. ET (17 UT) to answer your questions! Username: /u/UFExplore [link] [comments]  |
| How do microbiologists know whether the virus they discovered is a novel virus or not? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 01:34 AM PDT |
| How are viruses, such as covid and flu, cleared from long-lived cells like nerve and brain cells? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 03:22 AM PDT My understanding is that the main immune defence against viral infected cells is killing those cells, obviously that doesn't work so well with brain and nerve cells. Apparently many viruses can infect nerve cells, including flu, but only some such as herpesviruses seem to form long term infections in these cells. How are the rest cleared out of these cells? Why aren't they able to keep replicating in nerve cells indefinitely? [link] [comments]  |
| Ask Anything Wednesday - Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology Posted: 06 Oct 2021 07:00 AM PDT Welcome to our weekly feature, Ask Anything Wednesday - this week we are focusing on Economics, Political Science, Linguistics, Anthropology Do you have a question within these topics you weren't sure was worth submitting? Is something a bit too speculative for a typical /r/AskScience post? No question is too big or small for AAW. In this thread you can ask any science-related question! Things like: "What would happen if...", "How will the future...", "If all the rules for 'X' were different...", "Why does my...". Asking Questions: Please post your question as a top-level response to this, and our team of panellists will be here to answer and discuss your questions. The other topic areas will appear in future Ask Anything Wednesdays, so if you have other questions not covered by this weeks theme please either hold on to it until those topics come around, or go and post over in our sister subreddit /r/AskScienceDiscussion , where every day is Ask Anything Wednesday! Off-theme questions in this post will be removed to try and keep the thread a manageable size for both our readers and panellists. Answering Questions: Please only answer a posted question if you are an expert in the field. The full guidelines for posting responses in AskScience can be found here. In short, this is a moderated subreddit, and responses which do not meet our quality guidelines will be removed. Remember, peer reviewed sources are always appreciated, and anecdotes are absolutely not appropriate. In general if your answer begins with 'I think', or 'I've heard', then it's not suitable for /r/AskScience. If you would like to become a member of the AskScience panel, please refer to the information provided here. Past AskAnythingWednesday posts can be found here. Ask away! [link] [comments]  |
| Does the spin of atoms have any effect on the macro scale? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 08:04 AM PDT If I had a ball and I aligned all of the ball's atoms' spins to point in the same direction then would I notice something different about the ball compared to an ordinary ball which has atoms with random spin directions? [link] [comments]  |
| Nitrogenated instead of carbonated water? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 05:09 AM PDT I know that CO2 is added to water to carbonate it, which also produced carbonated acid, that gives it slightly stingy and acidic taste. When N2O is used as a replacement for CO2, the bubbles should be much smaller and less prickly. I thought about the reaction that is happening when N2O is added to H2O and if I am correct, ammonium nitrate should form, since N2O + H2O = NH4NO3. If this is right, won't instantly that decompose into Nitrc Acid and Ammonium hydroxide? (beacuse NH4NO3 + H2O = HNO3 + NH4OH) But this reaction is apparently also possible if we flip everything around, so HNO3 + NH4OH = NH4NO3. So what will happen then if nitrous oxide is dissolved in water? [link] [comments]  |
| Is there evidence that our brains are physically storing memories? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 04:34 AM PDT The usual analogy seems to be that our brains are like hard drives — with thoughts and memories stored physically inside our heads. But is there any evidence that supports this view? How do we know that they are not more like radio and television sets — tuning into signals that exist outside of us? [link] [comments]  |
| Do natural endorphins act quicker than morphine does? Why or why not? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 06:52 AM PDT I am thinking that because morphine is a molecular mimic, it would not work as quickly as a natural endorphin, but I am unsure. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Oct 2021 12:23 PM PDT So I kind of understand how they determine calorie content of food. My understanding is that they burn it and measure the heat and duration, and that gives them the basic estimate. But how do they figure out how many calories the human body burns? [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 06 Oct 2021 06:18 AM PDT Like they pick up a bit of dna from somewhere else and start making the wrong one, would the cell just fall apart? [link] [comments]  |
| Do Antibiotics Reduce Vaccine Efficacy (E.g. the Pfizer vaccine)? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 11:16 PM PDT |
| Posted: 05 Oct 2021 10:44 AM PDT So I've been told several times that this common explanation of why light slows down in a medium is wrong because it implies that light should exit the medium in random directions which doesn't match observation. That's always made sense to me, but a few months ago I came across this article that uses a similar explanation but specifically makes the point that of course any model of light at a quantum level needs to reproduce classic effects when we'd expect to see them and claims that this version of the explanation does that. The main difference between his explanation and the common but erroneous one is that he makes the point that we should think of each photo taking every possible path through the medium (I think that's the Feinman path integral formulation, but please correct me if I'm mistaken) and every atom absorbing and reemitting each photon, but he then says that ever individual atom has only a very small chance of doing this, but we'd expect it to happen at least some of the time because there are just so many atoms. But he just said that we should think of ALL the atoms doing it, so which is it? Do they all do it, or is it random and it somehow works out the that paths still cancel out properly so we get the observed path? Or is this explanation simply incorrect? [link] [comments]  |
| Can someone explain asymmetric organocatalysis in layman’s terms? Posted: 06 Oct 2021 03:36 AM PDT A New York Times article about the Nobel prize in Chemistry being awarded to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan concludes with: "'This concept for catalysis is as simple as it is ingenious, and the fact is that many people have wondered why we didn't think of it earlier,' said Johan Aqvist, chairman of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry." What is the concept and why is it considered simple? [link] [comments]  |
| Is there any data on side effects and the gap between first and second dose of mRNA vaccines? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 05:16 PM PDT I assume a larger gap would create more side effects if the immune response is greater right? But I would like to see the data if anyone knows of any. Thanks [link] [comments]  |
| How did the 3.8 billion year old Isua Greenstone Belt in Greenland survive plate tectonics? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 03:20 PM PDT I have been reading about earliest signs of life on the Isua rock formation and another formation in Australia that is 3 and a half billion years old. How do these formations survive subduction and continents moving around over the history of the earth? I asked Google and rephrased the question a couple of times, but didn't get any relevant answers. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Oct 2021 12:34 PM PDT I am curious why electric currents seem to be about electrons moving, when the photon is the force carrying quanta of electromagnetism. Why isn't an electric current a beam of light? Is lightening a stream of electrons shedding photons that we see, or is it a stream of pure photons? [link] [comments]  |
| Does polypropylene contain phtalates? If they do, how are they released into the environment? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 04:56 PM PDT Hi guys, I haven't been able to find this information anywhere. I am curious as to whether or not polypropylene contains any phtalates, which can cause all kinds of problems in humans. I am getting into farming and am alarmed by the enormous plastic use, not just because of the microplastic issue and fact that they are going to sit in landfills for hundreds of years, but that they may be leaching chemicals into our soils and into our foodchain. Landscape fabric, and other tarps I think are made of this material. Do they contain this stuff and if so, how exactly would they be released into the soil? [link] [comments]  |
| What's the physical meaning of potential flow in fluid dynamics? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 12:29 PM PDT So I'm actually taking an E&M class and learning the method of images. I was looking for YouTube videos on the topic and found this one which is actually about fluid dynamics. I didn't even know this method was also used in fluid dynamics and it's really neat seeing how the math of the E field is so similar to the math used to model fluid flow. However, they mention finding the velocity field of a fluid taking the gradient of the potential function. That's clearly analogous to finding the E field by taking the gradient of the voltage, but I have an idea for what voltage means physically -- it's the potential energy per unit charge w.r.t. some predefined reference. But what does this potential function mean physically in the context of fluid dynamics? I tried Googling it and found a bunch of stuff saying it's a flow with no rotation, but that's no help because that's just a mathematical property of gradient functions in general. [link] [comments]  |
| How come particle accelerator experiments take so long? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 12:14 PM PDT Sort of a weird question...let me see if I can phrase it coherently. I guess my question is how come experiments at colliders like the LHC take years to execute. As a naive amateur, I would think that you basically fire up the collider, shoot trillions and trillions and trillions of elementary particles at each other for a week, and that should give you enough data to analyze. But it seems like some experiments at the LHC are still ongoing, even 10 years later. Does it take 10 years to fire a sufficient number of elementary particles at each other? Again, as an amateur, it seems to me that if all a particle collider is doing is firing a sufficiently high number of them at each other at a sufficiently high energy, you'd run out of experiments to do within a month or two. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 05 Oct 2021 10:34 AM PDT This is obviously inspired by NASA and SpaceX wanting to get to Mars. SpaceX want to inhabit Mars but as it seems like a hellish place to live, what other celestial body's are out there that are closer to Earth. There are so many factors here like does the body have a thick atmosphere, magnetic sphere, water and breathable air. Has there been study's of the many celestial objects we've observed to find out which one is the most Earth-like? [link] [comments]  |
| Do Sequential Hermaphroditic Fish have 3 sex chromosomes? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 10:06 AM PDT Hermphrodism is common in the fish world, but what I don't understand is how their DNA is structured to account for this. Do the males always contribute a Y chromosome while females always contribute an X? Or is it so diverse there is no blanket answer? [link] [comments]  |
| What is the timeline for forming B cells? Posted: 05 Oct 2021 07:22 PM PDT I think it takes about 2 weeks for exposure to something novel and the development of B cells. What does on in between day 0 and day 14? [link] [comments]  |
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