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| 5 Everyday Science Facts (nearly Everybody Gets Wrong) by DaughterOfAllah: 10:57am On May 29, 2021 |
We all love science, sure. It's what makes things explode when we want them to, and keeps things from exploding the rest of the time. But science is hard, and there's lots of stuff we can't get our heads around. And we're not just talking about super complicated topics, we're talking about everyday stuff all around us, like ... 5) "You Are What You Eat" Not long after humans became self-aware and also realized we like eating, we figured out we're made out of the same stuff as those yummy bits of food. We eat, we break food down, and we build those food components into our body. Eat a lot, and you get big; eat nothing, and you wither and die. If you skip on eating some specific nutrient, you can't build that into your body, and you get sick. And if you eat a lot of a nutrient, you build a whole lot of it into your body. Right? That sounds reasonable enough. But that very last observation is kind of only true with fat, which is something your body likes to store away (and even fat storage is more complicated than that). With other stuff, you have to eat it, but if you eat extra, your body just kind of discards it. Take cholesterol. Doctors have long known that when patients have lots of cholesterol in their blood, that's bad for their heart, so doctors advised such patients to strike all cholesterol from their menus. These patients dutifully gave up eggs and quit Sausage McMuffins, and if their cholesterol stayed high, well, doctors assumed they were cheating on their new diets. But it turns out that there's no relationship between how much cholesterol you eat and how much cholesterol's in your blood. That's because you make your own cholesterol (which is an essential compound, part of every cell) in your liver. Eat less cholesterol, and your liver makes more; eat more, and your liver produces less. There are substances you eat that raise your cholesterol, true, but these substances aren't cholesterol themselves - they raise your cholesterol by breaking how your body works, not by pumping more cholesterol into your system. Likewise, eating salt won't raise your sodium levels, unless your body is already broken. Something similar goes on with good nutrients. Like calcium. Calcium's essential. Miss out on calcium (or on the vitamin that lets you use calcium), and you develop rickets, which gives you bendy bones and a sickly British accent. "That means," reasoned parents for decades, "if we give kids lots of calcium, their bones will be extra strong!" So they gave kids a big ol' glass of milk with every meal. But it turns out your kid's body will deposit some amount of calcium into their bones today, yet if they drink extra calcium beyond that, that doesn't help at all. Studies lasting decades have failed to find any benefit on people's bone health from drinking extra milk. There's even some evidence that drinking extra milk makes your bones lose calcium. The science on that last part is uncertain (it has to do with blood chemistry and how the body deals with acidity), but it's possible, because biology's more complicated than "I eat, therefore I am." Or take iron. Iron's another essential mineral, and if you don't eat enough, you get anemia, which means thin blood and another sickly British accent. So, what happens if you eat extra amounts of iron? Are you going to get a bunch of extra red blood cells, and also the ability to run marathons? Uh, no. You just kind of take in the iron without using it. For a long time, people believed spinach was a great source of iron -- this was why Popeye got his powers from spinach. Hilariously, this was a myth based on a typo that accidentally multiplied the amount of iron in spinach by 10. But what's possibly even more hilarious is that even if spinach did have 10 times the amount of iron it really has, that wouldn't do you any good. It would not coat your entire body in iron armor. Assuming you aren't starving, you almost certainly don't have an iron deficiency, so the extra iron wouldn't make any difference whatever. (Unless you really do eat a ridiculously high amount. Then you get iron poisoning.) 4) "Save The Rain Forest, It's The Earth's Lungs" Speaking of essential elements, oxygen is pretty important, and if you don't believe us, just try holding your breath a couple minutes and see how much you like it. Good thing then that we have trees gently farting that sweet stuff into the air. In particular, when people talk about fires in the Amazon, you'll hear about how important that rain forest is in providing a fifth of all our oxygen. Now, the next time someone with a clipboard stops you in the street with this line and tries to get you to donate to Greenpeace, there's a very simple well actually response you can give: Most oxygen doesn't come from trees at all. It comes from algae in the ocean. And you don't get many trendy charities for looking after algae, because no one had fun climbing algae as a kid. But we shouldn't really be quibbling over whether some particular rain forest provides 20 percent of our oxygen or 2 percent of it. Because overall, the rain forest doesn't produce oxygen at all. It consumes it. The forest consists of trees but also all the animals who live there (when fires or industry destroys the forest, we mourn the animals too). Tally up trees and beasts, and the forest takes in more oxygen than it produces, and destroying the forest reduces oxygen consumption. We're not talking about how tree loss has recently made the area overall worse at capturing carbon – we're talking about untouched parts of the forest, thanks to the sum total of everything living there. Trees aren't that great at producing oxygen, you see (or at absorbing carbon dioxide, which is the other side of the same equation). A tree produces oxygen as it splits CO2 apart to make biomass, but nearly all that biomass will eventually be consumed - partly by the plant itself - or will rot, which turns oxygen right back into carbon dioxide again. So when you hear businesses talking about searching for new carbon capture tech, don't snicker because we already have the perfect tech in the tree. We're looking to make something vastly more efficient than that. Okay, we seem to have digressed a little from trees producing oxygen to trees absorbing carbon dioxide. There's a reason for that. Because what if we tell you that, despite what we said a little while ago about oxygen being important, it's not actually at all important how much oxygen plants create? The reason: We have so much oxygen right now that it makes no difference. The atmosphere is about 22 percent oxygen, and we have a lot of atmosphere. For the last couple decades, we've been burning off eons' worth of captured carbon, and that raised the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (and reduced the level of oxygen) by just 0.005 percentage points...which is a lot when we're talking carbon dioxide, which we measure in parts per million, but it's nothing when we're talking oxygen. All of our oxygen consumption involves organisms breaking down organic matter, and even if all organic matter on Earth were instantly burned, that would only use up 1% of the reserve oxygen supply. Even if all oxygen production worldwide stopped today, we'd be perfectly fine (fine oxygen-wise; factors other than an oxygen shortage will wipe us out). We have enough oxygen to last for millions of years. Trees are still great for what they do for climate, biodiversity, water regulation, lumberjack roleplay, etc. But something about our psyche makes them feel most valuable when we falsely picture them as little factories constantly pumping out a gas we all need. Maybe because we're all industrialists at heart, or maybe it's because we play too many resource management video games. Both of which might also explain our next misconception: |
| Re: 5 Everyday Science Facts (nearly Everybody Gets Wrong) by DaughterOfAllah: 11:00am On May 29, 2021 |
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