They’re not going to rat you out. They’re going to adjust your anesthesia dosage so you don’t WAKE UP IN THE MIDDLE OF SURGERY.
Some anesthesiologists will refuse to put you under if you’ve smoked cannabis within the past 24 hours – and let’s be clear, this is NOT because they’re morally against it – it’s because THC and anesthetic react in unpredictable ways and waking up in the middle of surgery is slightly less of a concern than SLIPPING INTO A COMA OR DYING.
So there’s that.
Yes, this too. Should have included this. It just wasn’t on my mind when I made the original post because my mind was full of NOPE NOPE NOPE after, you guessed it, one of my patients woke up in the middle of her surgery because she didn’t tell her anesthesia team she used marijuana.
But why are we more likely to wake up?
Data suggests that habitual use of marijuana increases your tolerance to a common induction and maintenance drug called propofol (citation), which means that a higher dose will be required for the same result we’d expect from someone who does not use it. Not many formal studies have been done to indicate how heavy the usage has to be to affect propofol tolerance, but now that medicinal use has become so widespread and so many states are legalizing it, hospitals are seeing more incidents. I imagine that if more studies aren’t currently underway, there will be more soon.
i always laugh whenever we have to centrifuge bacteria because imagine you’re just chilling in some broth with your buds and then someone comes along and puts you in a tube and spins you at fucking 14,000 rpm
Also, while this is on my mind. In my master’s-level food toxicology class today we discussed various genetically modified crops and watched part of a documentary about them, and as someone with a food science degree I would like to be clear about the following:
The only health risk that has been shown to us throughout twenty plus years of having genetically modified crops as part of the food system is that there is a possibility of introducing proteins that could cause allergic reactions. New strains are required to be tested for this, of course, but that is a practical risk that needs to be closely monitored.
The objection to GM in general should be the patenting of genes and other legal matters; there are a number of crops that have been saved from blight and overall extinction via modification in the past two decades, and much like putting up inaccessibly expensive paywalls to scientific journals, patenting of genes within crops limits our ability within universities, small research companies, etc to make significant breakthroughs to further the scientific progress of humanity.
Furthermore. People think of organic crops as the environmentally-friendly option. If you believe this, please pay attention to what I’m about to say. Current regulations dictate that to have a crop classified as organic the land on which the crop is grown has to have been pesticide-free for a significant amount of time. There is no interim label available to farmers. So what do they do? Do they use no pesticides and take the losses from disease and insects for a decade, waiting for a time in which they are allowed to reclassify their crops in such a way that they can sell them for more money?
Of course they don’t. It isn’t practical. You can say what you like about how the system is structured; I’d personally like to see an interim classification come into play. But what farmers actually do, and states like Montana are feeling the full effects of this–they clear-cut forests and plant their organic crops on entirely new land.
You want to tell me that clear-cutting forests is environmentally friendly? It’s not. Hell, for all that people make a big deal about saving the environment by limiting how much paper they use, paper production is done in a more sustainable manner (because the paper farms replant their trees in a regular cycle so as to not deplete their sources; they don’t just go out and cut down random trees).
There are objections to be had in regards to GM crops on a legal basis. On a scientific one, there isn’t much. Call them frankenfoods all you want; look up what most commercially-sold produce truly looks like in the wild with no modification and you will learn very quickly that all foods have been modified in some way over the years through conventional breeding. We just think of that differently.
Biotechnology is not the enemy. Pseudoscience tells us that this is the case. Pseudoscience also tells us that we should seek out natural supplements instead of medicine, and, well… that’s a rant for another day, but suffice to say it’s an even more dubious proposition.
A researcher in Russia has made more than 48 million journal articles – almost every single peer-reviewed paper every published – freely available online. And she’s now refusing to shut the site down, despite a court injunction and a lawsuit from Elsevier, one of the world’s biggest publishers.
For those of you who aren’t already using it, the site in question is Sci-Hub, and it’s sort of like a Pirate Bay of the science world. It was established in 2011 by neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan, who was frustrated that she couldn’t afford to access the articles needed for her research, and it’s since gone viral, with hundreds of thousands of papers being downloaded daily. But at the end of last year, the site was ordered to be taken down by a New York district court – a ruling that Elbakyan has decided to fight, triggering a debate over who really owns science.
“Payment of $32 is just insane when you need to skim or read tens or hundreds of these papers to do research. I obtained these papers by pirating them,”Elbakyan told Torrent Freak last year. “Everyone should have access to knowledge regardless of their income or affiliation. And that’s absolutely legal.”
If it sounds like a modern day Robin Hood struggle, that’s because it kinda is. But in this story, it’s not just the poor who don’t have access to scientific papers – journal subscriptions have become so expensive that leading universities such as Harvard and Cornell have admitted they can no longer afford them. Researchers have also taken a stand – with 15,000 scientists vowing to boycott publisher Elsevier in part for its excessive paywall fees.
In case you don’t feel like going through the entire article, here are some important points:
Researcher in Russia thinks it’s stupid to pay so much for articles
makes own site with pirated articles
it really is hella expensive to read articles
Big publishers are rlly mad
they brought up a lawsuit
The researchers don’t actually get any of the money from the fees required to read the article
Also the publishers have questionable processes that promote rapid publication that could easily result in misinformation
It’s unlikely that the lawsuit will result in money even if the company wins
but the suit has implications for the accessibility of information and the role of large corporations in restricting access to articles
I find this fascinating! For every research project or hospital guideline I’ve worked on, I end up with a folder called ‘papers I can’t access’, even *with* my hospital group’s subscriptions. A truly thorough research project would require reading all the available research, which could mean paying €50 each to skim through dozens of articles that might not even be relevant.
In healthcare, it’s not just researchers who access research, it’s healthcare providers trying to make decisions for their patients. Just last week, I helped a colleague investigate a drug to treat a patient in our hospital with severe bone pain that didn’t respond to the usual treatments. We had to read about a dozen articles from different sources to try to figure out if the drug might work, and what dose we should recommend. If any of those articles had been inaccessible, it would have had direct consequences for our patient.
And one more thing before I finish ranting. I’m due to publish a paper in the next few months. There is a substantial fee to make it open access (even though it will not be in an especially widely read journal). Neither I nor my institution will be coughing up that cash. So an additional effect of paywalls is that the people with the most money get to throw their research and opinions front and centre where everyone can access it.
Also note that in science, the researcher pays to get published; i.e., the author is NOT paid for the paper but actually has to spend money to make their knowledge accessible.
On the other hand, the publishers are getting paid by both the authors AND the readers.
Planet 55 Cancri e is basically a giant diamond. like the planet is a diamond. and it would be worth $26.9 nonillion
Planet Gliese 436 b is an ice planet that is constantly on fire do to its close proximity to its parent star. the ice doesn’t melt bc the planet’s gravity is so strong it physically prevents the ice from melting
Planet HD 189733b rains sideways glass…. constantly
Planet J1407-B has planetary rings that are 200x the size of saturn. if saturn’s ring were as big as J1407-B’s we’d be able to see them with our naked eye from earth AND they would dominate our sky and look larger than a full moon
Planet Wasp-12b rotates so close to its parent star that its slowly being consumed by the it
Planet Gliese 581c is one of the candidates for a planet that can support life however it orbits a tiny dwarf star and is tidally locked so one side is constantly subject to immense sunlight while the other is constantly in darkness. there’s a small area of the planet however, that is just the right temp to support life. u just can’t step out of said area. the skies are red and the plants would have be a black color instead of a green bc they would use infrared light for photosynthesis. (a message was actually sent to the planet in 2008 in hopes that there’s life on the planet but the message wont reach the planet until 2029).
Planet GJ 1214b is a water planet nicknamed “water world” is has no land at all and the water is so deep it goes down miles all the way to the planet’s core.
Planet Wasp-17b is the largest planet discovered thus far. its so large its existence contradicts our understanding of how planets are formed. and it has a retrograde orbit, so it orbits in the opposite direction of its parent star.
Planet HD 188753 has 3 suns you should have triple shadows and there would be almost daily eclipses. and no matter which direction u face on the planet u would always see a sunset
Planet HD106906b is the loneliest planet discovered thus far. its known as “super jupiter” bc its 11x bigger than jupiter. it orbits its parent star at a distance of 60 billion miles (which is v strange) hence why its the loneliest planet.
Planet Tres 2b is the darkest planet known. it reflects less than 1% of light (it reflects less light than coal and black acrylic paint). the tiny part of the planet that does reflect light is red making the planet glow a dim red.
Scientists hope to hugely reduce the cost of wind energy by removing the blades from wind farms, instead taking advantage of a special phenomenon to cause the turbines to violently shake.
Vortex, a startup from Spain, has developed the tall sticks known as Bladeless — white poles jutting out of the ground, that are built so that they can oscillate. They do so as a result of the way that the wind is whipped up around them, using a phenomenon that architects avoid happening to buildings and encouraging it so that the sticks shake.
They do so using vortices, which is where the company gets its name from. The bladeless turbines use special magnets to ensure that the turbines are optimised to shake the most they can, whatever speed the wind is travelling at.
As the sticks vibrate, that movement is converted into electricity by an alternator.
Wiggling Poles of the Wasteland Harvest Electricity For Power Hungry Humans
These also look like they would cause fewer problems for birds and bats.
This is really cool.
They leave off the important note that when the wind rises, each pole makes a sound like a hundred vuvuzelas roaring at once. In the post-apocalyptic world of the future, villagers will speak in hushed tones about the Roaring Plains, and caution adventurous travelers to stay well away.
I appreciate how they essentially invented very useful yet alien-looking screaming pillars. Science continues to make some suspiciously sci-fi shit.
(ﾉ´ヮ´)ﾉ✧ 