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Cake day: November 5th, 2023

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  • Be born with it, or seriously mess up your liver.

    As for the being born with it, it’s a super common thing in east asian populations.

    Two main processes that break down alcohol (specifically ethanol): alcohol dehydrogenase which does exactly what it says and removes a hydrogen atom from the end of the chain making it an aldehyde. This molecule, acetaldehyde, is to my understanding what actually causes the drunken effects. I don’t remember if this means it it entirely the drunken effects, or just is far more of one.

    What I do remember however is that there is a second enzyme called aldehyde dehydrogenase (guess what that does) that further processes it down to a carboxylic acid, which is then what is expelled. This is the enzyme that is occasionally found lacking due to a single base pair replacement (so it still folds normally, but is ineffective due to a single animo acid in a critical site messing the whole thing up).

    This is the common mutation found in those aforementioned east asian populations. It means you can get absolutely thrashed on a budget.

    Fun fact, too: there is something you can take to mitigate these effects if you know you have it, like how there’s lactaid for those that are lactose intolerant (lacking the lactase enzyme). So getting yourself wrecked in this fashion is at least partially a choice.

    One more fun fact: this is all from memory of a chemistry course I took some time back, in which I asked the instructor why it was that we only seem able to break down alcohols with two carbons. I don’t much remember why for the longer chains, but as for menthol? It also gets dehydrogenized but that aldehyde with one carbon is formaldehyde. Probably don’t need to expound on why that transition might be worse.













  • Kyuuketsuki@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzMultiverse
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    8 months ago

    It’s a common trend for people that don’t understand that infinite possibilities do not mean every possibility.

    The way I usually explain this to people is that the quantity of even number is also infinite, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever find a value of three in that infinite range.



  • Kyuuketsuki@lemmy.mltoScience Memes@mander.xyzMitochondria
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    9 months ago

    I’m not sure how you think critical thinking works. Do you have some sort of magical logic flow that doesn’t requiere some base understanding of facts?

    Guy trying to sell quartz as “energy enhancing crystals” -> no understanding as to how body energy works -> might be legit, let’s give it a try

    Guy trying to sell quartz as “energy enhancing crystals” -> knowing that available body energy is dictated by ATP and has nothing to do with crystals -> this smells like a scam

    Critical thinking is about being able to apply knowledge of what you know to what you are currently being told. You need some basis of real, provable facts for it, which is why if you had a bio course, you also likely had some lab component to it as well.

    Sure, I hear you cry, but all of that information isn’t something I need to know basically ever! Well, you’re correct, but a fun thing about learning is that the deeper you cut into a subject, the more you remember. You probably wouldn’t remember much if the entire unit only said “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell”.

    And doing these deep cuts to reinforce the basics of understanding work. There is a reason that “mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell” is a meme, and it’s because everyone remembers that part, not nessessarily the part that they have their DNA that is always inherented from your mother and is referred to as mDNA.

    I hope this helps you to think critically against the continued push against critical thinking, particularly to the claim that what you learned in school has nothing to do with doing it.