Recent comments in /f/askscience

CompleteNumpty t1_j9g9kb2 wrote

The calves actually work as secondary pumps for the cardiovascular system (specifically helping to return blood upwards towards the heart).

As such, the loss of one or more calves has a detrimental effect on your cardiovascular health, with many countries treating below knee amputees as if they have heart disease.

95

iayork t1_j9g8zkv wrote

It doesn’t change the original question much, but there are actually quite a few well documented cases of fertile mules. This page lists some older examples going back to the 19th century; some more recent (peer-reviewed) cases are listed in

With dozens of instances being documented in spite of farmers actively trying to prevent mules and hinnies from breeding, it's likely that a fairly significant percentage (though of course a minority) of them are fertile.

5

theubster t1_j9g756v wrote

No, you slow down.

If you're doing breath play right, there's minimal risk involved. Yes, some people have died when doing autoerotic asphyxiation, but it's not some wild threat to society. The actual number is .5 deaths per 1,000,000 people per year in your average western country (per wikipedia).

For perspective, you have approximately 334 million folks in the US. That makes about 167 people who die yearly. Driving a car is 1.33 deaths per million. So, choking yourself to get off is less than half as risky as driving a car all year. In 1970, it was 4.74 deaths per million per year from cars.

Start choking yourself, stop driving, and you'll make society safer, better, and kinkier.

−14

VT_Squire t1_j9g4hqs wrote

Recombination and uneven numbers of chromosomes as an impediment to viable offspring mostly makes sense in light of preventing chromosomal matching during the fertilization process. So yeah, fertilization occurs, but the resulting zygote is essentially informational garbage that fails to develop appropriately to thrive.

9

guitarhead t1_j9g1qa5 wrote

What you're describing is 'deconvolution' and there exists algorithms designed to do exactly this (see for example, Richardson-Lucy deconvolution). However, you need to either know or make some assumptions about the 'blur' for it to work.

There is software that Canon releases for high-end cameras and lenses that does something similar. Becuase they know exactly the type of blur that their lenses create at different points on the frame for different focal distances, they use this information to remove some of that lens blur from the digital image. Canon call this 'digital lens optimizer'. See here and here for more info.

2

Ituzzip t1_j9fz004 wrote

Right, and not only are those strains all different but even identical strains could produce different sorts of disease in different people, based on things like prior immunity (or cross-immunity from a similar strain), the amount of infectious material that was ingested, how fast the digestive system is moving etc.

1

dragonlhama t1_j9fyvz9 wrote

Yes.

Muscle cells have several nuclei.

Hepatocytes (liver cells) have usually one single nucleus, but, occasionally, we observe some of them with two nuclei in normal conditions.

When fighting some kinds of pathogens, usually large ones, such as helminth parasites, the "multinucleated giant cells" are formed, which are kind of a macrophage megazord.

29

Ituzzip t1_j9fydz4 wrote

Do we actually know for sure the virus infects and propagates in non-nerve cells in these individuals? Viral particles can stimulate an immune response without ever infecting a cell (as in the way vaccines with dead virus work) so it doesn’t require propagation to stimulate antibodies in theory.

As to whether the immune system can stop rabies once it enters a nerve: animal bites take varying lengths of time to progress to symptomatic disease based on where they occur, with bites around the neck and face progressing to symptomatic rabies infections in days or weeks, but bites on the feet taking up to a year to reach the brain.

However, vaccination for rabies is effective at any time before symptoms appear. So it would seem that the body has ways of clearing the infection from nerve tissue. It is less effective at detecting the virus there and mounting a response, but when a response is stimulated by a vaccine, it seems to work.

1