Daily Archives: January 8, 2023

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Soda drinkers, beware it looks like your favorite sugary drinks may be linked to hair loss.

A new study out of Tsinghua University in Beijing has found a new link between sugary drinks and male pattern hair loss, with beverages ranging from soft drinks to artificially-sweetened juices to energy drinks being some of the primary culprits.

In short,it's depressing news:all the stuff that tastes really great may make you lose your hair.

The paper, newly published in thejournal Nutrients, is hardly the first we've heard about the ill health effects of sugary drinks.And doctors have long suspected a link between excess sugar and hair loss.

But the study's wider-lens examination of the connection is intriguing. The researchers at Tsinghua's Vanke School of Public Health anonymously surveyed 1028 men online between the ages of 18 and 45 on the Chinese mainland last year, asking them their sweetened drink intake, any health issues they may be experiencing, whether they smoked or drank, and if they were experiencing hair issues, as well as psychological questions.

The results were striking. Respondents with male pattern baldness, they found, were drinking an average of 4,293 milliliters per week that's more than a gallon, or more than two of those two-liter bottles of Pepsi you can buy at the grocery stores while respondents with full heads of hair drinking just 2,513 milliliters.

More research is needed, but the Tsinghua researchers hypothesized that the root cause could be sugary drinks' propensity to heighten blood sugar. Diabetes studies have shown that heightened blood sugar levels appear to be associated with hair loss, and with sweet drinks being a major risk factor for developing or worsening diabetes, so the logic may hold up.

Given that this research linking sugary drinks and male pattern hair loss is so preliminary, the paper's authors noted that further study is needed.Nonetheless, it's an intriguing and disturbing new reason not to pound down too many sodas or Red Bulls.

More on hair loss:Doctors Say a Random Cheap Pill May Actually Reverse Balding

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Scientists Link Male Pattern Balding to Wildly Popular Beverage

A fireball in the supernova remnant W49B. with infrared data (red, green) with X-ray data (blue). [Caltech/J. Rho, T. Jarrett & NASA/CXC/SSC/J. Keohane et al.]QUESTION:

"I heard a star goes supernova after it has produced the element iron. Is this true? If so, how?"

Asked by: Taylor Sullivan

Supernovae have produced nearly every element occurring in nature. When a star is born, it is because it has enough mass to create enough heat, gravity and pressure to sustain nuclear fusion. Fusing hydrogen atoms to helium gives off enormous amounts of energy, and the star spends its life quietly fusing away. This process takes four hydrogen atoms to fuse into one helium atom. Hydrogen has only one proton, while helium has two protons along with two neutrons. This means that two protons are missing. Matter cannot be created or destroyedit can only be turned into something else.

In this case, the two missing protons have turned into two neutrons. This energy is what makes the star shine and give off heat. Well.. after a while, the star has built up quite a bit of helium. This helium has found its way to the stars center to create a helium core. Since hydrogen only has one proton, and helium has two protons and two neutrons, its heavier. That means the star has a little more mass in its core, which generates more heat. This heat builds up more and more, until its hot enough and has enough pressure to start fusing helium to carbon. This process generates a little less energy than fusing hydrogen to helium, but it still produces energy.

As a guideline, a star that has about one half the mass of the sun is too small and cool to fuse helium to carbon. So it will end up as a white dwarf made of helium. Stars between one half to four times the mass of the sun are massive and hot enough to fuse carbon to oxygen. Carbon and oxygen are fused more or less at the same time, and youll end up with a white dwarf made out of carbon and oxygen.I want to jump off topic here for a moment and ask a basic chemistry/physics question to all you readers. What happens when you introduce large amounts of heat and pressure to carbon? A girls best friend, diamonds!

The star has died and its a white dwarf made out of carbon: a giant diamond in the sky. Stars with masses greater than four times the mass of the sun are massive and hot enough to fuse oxygen to silicon. No, not the stuff they make implants out of, thats "silicone" (sometimes, one letter can make a big difference).

Stars that have earned the title of "supergiant"are so massive and so hot that they begin fusing silicon to a solid core of iron. Once the star starts fusing iron, thats it-- its doomed. Fusing silicon to iron takes more energy than it gives off. This means that the star is going to die soon; it is causing its own death by using more of its own energy than it is getting back from nuclear fusion.

When a star is fusing iron in its core, it's still giving off insane amounts of energy. The helium, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and silicon are still there in the star in different shells. Hydrogen is at the surface, still fusing to helium; a little further down, helium fusing to carbon and oxygen; further down we have silicon until the core, where silicon fuses to iron.This is why the star still exists and doesn't spontaneously explode the moment the first iron atom pops into existence.

At this point, the energy process is just no longer exothermic but endothermic. Iron cannot be fused into anything heavier because of the insane amounts of energy and force required to fuse iron atoms. The atomic structure of iron is very stable, more so than most other elements. I'm not saying all other elements are radioactive or unstable, just that iron is slightly more stable than the previous elements.

Stars this massive can turn into several things; it depends on how heavy it is. They can explode into supernova, collapse into various types of neutron stars, or even form a black hole.The iron in the stars core isnt the reason why the star went supernova, its overall mass made it explode. But, the iron in its core caused it to die.

The rendering aboveillustrates the progression of a supernova blast. A starspends its life fusing hydrogen into helium. It then starts to fuse elements that are a bit heavier, leading up iron. Once iron comes into the equation, things get very bad very quickly. Suddenly, it's no longer able to sustain equilibrium, so its core collapses in on itselfand it castsoff its gaseous envelope in one fell swoop, sparking a supernova. Later on, the remainder of its gas gets energized by the core it leaves behind, either a pulsar or a neutron star (sometimes, if the star is massive enough, it leaves a stellarmass black hole behind instead), and it glows brilliantly for a time. We call theseamazing things supernova remnants.

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What Happens When Stars Produce Iron? - Futurism

"Only one could survive."Heartbreak at Sea

Twenty five years since its first release, James Cameron's swooning epic "Titanic" is still the third highest grossing movie of all time. Besides its storied legacy, it's also spawned an endless debate among fans on its ending: whether Jack, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, could have survived the freezing ocean if he'd climbed onto the floating door with Rose,played by Kate Winslet.

And now, Cameron renowned for his obsession with minute cinematic details says he's finally put an end to the debate with an actual scientific study.

"We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all," Cameron told The Toronto Sun while promoting his latest blockbuster sensation "Avatar: The Way of Water." "We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie and we're going to do a little special on it that comes out in February."

"We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo," the acclaimed director explained, "and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive."

For now, that's all the details we have on the study, but this isn't the first time Cameron has addressed the perennial, nagging question. In 2017, he debunked a theory posited on the TV show "Mythbusters" that Jack could have survived by tying Rose's life vest to the door for buoyancy.

"You're underwater tying this thing on in 28-degree water, and that's going to take you five to 10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you're already dead," Cameron told The Daily Beast at the time. "So that wouldn't work."

And science aside, Cameron thinks Jack's death was thematically integral to the story so there's no point getting hooked up on something he's not going to change his mind on anyway.

"No, he needed to die," Cameron explained during the recent press tour. "It's like Romeo and Juliet. It's a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality. The love is measured by the sacrifice."

We'll have to wait until the study and/or the special come out, but if there's anyone who'd do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of a thalassic mystery, it'd be Cameron.

More on the ocean: Divers Growing Veggies in Underwater Greenhouses

Continued here:
James Cameron Says He Commissioned a Scientific Study on Whether Jack ...

You have probably heard about a trend called breatharianism, a 'diet' claiming that humans can sustain themselves without food and water, surviving on only light and air. This is a potentially lethal practice and several practitioners have, quite obviously, died because of it. Animals and humans are heterotrophic organisms, unable to produce their own food, thus they depend on organic sources to provide it.

Plants, on the other hand, are autotrophic organismsthat are able to produce food out of inorganic matter. With photosynthesis, they convert water, minerals and sunlight into glucose and oxygen. Plants use glucose as their source of energy needed for growth and life. Their role in the life cycle is important, because they serve as a source of food and oxygen for other living organisms.

But nature never fails to surprise us, sometimes ''the laws'' can be broken. Scientists have found some animals that can, just like plants, survive on photosynthesis:

Sea Slug(Elysia chlorotica) is an extraordinarily beautiful slug living in the waters of the east coast of the United States and Canada. It's distinctive feature is green colored, leaf-shaped body. The slug eats algae (Vaucheria litorea), but it's not it's only source of energy!

It seems like this slug stole photosynthetic organelles (chloroplasts) and some genes from the algae, which enables them to live without eating! They can spend their days laying out in the sun and, just like plants and green algae, get their energy through photosynthesis. The symbiosis that enables algae's chloroplasts to work for slug is called kleptoplasty.

Pea Aphid (Acyrthospihon pisum) is an insect living worldwide that feeds on plants (legumes). Even though they may look like any other insect, unpleasant or even terrifying to some, they truly are amazing.

Pea Aphids are capable of producing carotenoids, pigments found in chloroplasts (photosynthetic organelles) and chromoplasts, giving them orange-reddish colour and helping chlorophyll with photosynthesis. In aphids, carotenoids are responsible for their colour, some of them don't have it and are white. It also seems like carotenoids serve not only as a beauty compound, but they can also be usedto convert sunlight into energy. However, these correlations are not yet clear and well researched.

Spotted Salamander (Ambystoma maculatum), just like the sea slug, it lives in symbiotic relationship with algae. They were found in embryos of the animal. The salamander's embryos are found in clear colored eggs, laid by the females on the underwater plants, close to the surface, so that the light can reach them.

It seems like green algae help embryos get much-needed energy for growth and development from sunlight, whileproviding anextra source of energy(this, in turn,increases theirchances ofsurvival). Spotted Salamanders are the highest developed animal species and the only ones among all vertebrae, that can directly benefit from photosynthesis. Usually, the immune system of highly developed organisms will prevent such symbiotic behavior.

These special animals just show how complex the living world is, and that the line between plants and animals may not be so well-defined. It makes us wonder where evolution will take us in the next few billions of years (if we last that long) Maybe one day, even humans could benefit from photosynthesis. Just imagine the possibilities that this kind of life opens.

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Incredible Creatures that Use Photosynthesis For Energy - Futurism