# ethanol

[glitchmel]

I drew them with my skelesona hehe

Throws my ColorKiller shipchild out and runs/j

*cough* anyways meet Ethanol! :D

A tiny lil guy who just wants to run around and collect everything and anything shiny or related to dinosaurs <3

info time :3

(there’s lots of it sorry I love this goober a lot)

As stated Eth is selectively mute! They’re more or less capable of speech (however with trouble) but choose to stay mute and instead prefer using their speech tablet whenever available to them.

She usually carryies a dinosaur bag along with her which is usually carried by Killer or Color. It usually just contains her speech tablet, and dinosaur stuff but may contain other items on occasion.

Eth has to wear the grey suit basically 24/7 due to the fact that her entire body is made from/covered in flames; the suit is fire resistant and keeps her from burning/setting aflame other people or items she touches :)

The stuff leaking from her eyes and mouth are actually a combination of highly flammable liquids!! (Do not let that stuff touch her own fire/colors fire or any fire for that matter it will explode istg it has happened.)

He walks on all fours! He’s been doing this ever since he first learned how to walk and hasn’t stopped since. Killer and Color have tried to break this habit, but uh- haven’t had much success.. Which means yes he does it in public too and he couldn’t be care less! He’ll waddle to his hearts content.

Relative to the walking in all fours thing Eth has to wear a child harness in public due to how they tend to get distracted and want to run after things. There have been far too many instances from when they didn’t have a harness and caused his dads to go searching for him, only to find him in the weirdest places..

She has a hyperfixation on dinosaurs! She’ll immediately grab anything she has related to them and start letting out the flood of information she has on them as soon as you mention or ask her about it.

She has an odd love for drinking shit like gasoline and other flammable liquids, which in turn actually causes her flames to FUCKING EXPLODE. She’s okay ofc it doesn’t actually hurt them and if anything makes them laugh at the sensations but that’s not exactly the same for the stuff/prople around her (or her clothes for that matter)

Following the thing about her tears and spit being flammable liquids Color DID NOT have fun with that when she was a baby. That man is trying to nap and his baby keeps fucking exploding from the shit mixing with her flames.

Her Theriotypes are a Cladospecies of dinosaurs as well as canids!

Older Eth has Sickles as shown in the picture as her weaponry! She loves sickle weapons quite a lot and if anything treats them like Ink does for Broomie.

Color realized quite quickly that due to her bodily construct Eth burns any and all clothing that isn’t fire resistant.. So Color learned to make clothing just for her! Now all her clothing, so things like her suit and etc are hand made by Color himself <:3

Killer heavily encourages her to set things on fire (much to Colors disagreement) and has even purposely set her off on people just for shits and giggles.

Okay that’s all for now, feel free to ask anything abt them or anything else you want! :D

[mindblowingscience]

A team of behavioral ecologists, zoologists and crop protection specialists from Tel Aviv University reports that Oriental hornets have the highest-known tolerance to alcohol in the animal kingdom. In their study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group fed ethanol solutions to hornets. Prior research has shown that many plants produce fruits or nectar that ferment naturally as they rot, which results in the production of ethanol. Fermented foods are a source of both nutrients and energy for many animals due to their high caloric content, and most animals that consume ethanol in concentrations higher than 4% suffer adverse effects, such as difficulties moving or flying normally.

Continue Reading.

[burakku-jakku]

Astro Boy character encyclopedia, from Communication Robotics Weekly magazine. (2017)

(x)

[a-typical]

Probability figures in everyday decisions we make. Consider the public’s sentiment toward genetically modified organisms—GMOs. Reactions tend to be bimodal, depending on your politics, itself a warning flag. The truth and efficacy of science should never correlate with your political views.

The food chemical company Monsanto, now owned by Bayer, developed a genetically modified variant of corn that was completely resistant to glyphosate, a weed-killing herbicide marketed under the name Roundup, which they also developed. Monsanto scientists genetically removed their corn’s susceptibility to the chemical. This potent combo—Monsanto’s GMO corn coupled with Monsanto’s weed killer—enabled farmers to spray their entire crops and have the herbicide kill everything but the corn. The Vermont ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s uses corn syrup as a sweetener for some of their products. (Yes, I too was surprised to learn this.) News that some of their ice creams had trace amounts of glyphosate from the corn used in their syrup created a media dust-up. In response, Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop using GMO corn syrup altogether, even though the one-part-per-billion detection levels of glyphosate were far below US and European standards. Since many people who buy Ben & Jerry’s ice cream lean left—aligned with the company’s generally progressive views on all things—Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc. judged this ban to be a wise business decision.

Let’s look closer at what happened there. Every substance you could possibly ingest, food and otherwise, has a calculated lethal dose associated with it, measured by what’s called LD50. That’s the dose per kilogram of body weight where 50 percent of the people who consume that amount will die quickly. These data often come from tests on laboratory mammals such as mice. There’s another metric, called no-observed-adverse-effect level (NOAEL), which addresses the long-term influence of a substance on your health and is more sensible when thinking about food safety. LD50 helps to make a different point. The smaller its value for a substance, the more lethal it is. As such, tables of LD50s can be quite illuminating. Here’s a sampling:

Sucrose (table sugar) | 30 grams per kilogram

Ethanol (common alcohol) | 7 grams per kilogram

Glyphosate (Roundup) | 5 grams per kilogram

Table Salt | 3 grams per kilogram

Caffeine | 0.2 grams per kilogram

Nicotine | 0.0065 grams per kilogram

The most lethal substance on this hand-picked list is nicotine. Caffeine looks quite potent too. Just drink about eighty demitasse cups of espresso if you want to die from it. Next comes salt.

The least deadly on the list is sugar, as you might expect. Notice further that glyphosate is less lethal than table salt, but not by much. Actually none of this concerns us here. What matters is what happens to a 150 lb. (70 kg) person who eats Ben & Jerry’s ice cream—a fact I calculated but relegated to my Forbidden Twitter file, where it remains, simply for how disturbing it would be. In social media, I never intend to be disturbing:

You would need to consume four hundred million pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for its trace amounts of glyphosate to kill you. But after only 20 pints you will die from its sugar content.

Ben & Jerry’s made the right corporate decision if it protected their profits. Although they could have also used the occasion as a teaching moment—a mind-blowing lesson on comparative risk. But that works only if people are open to learning. In modern times, many of us don’t satisfy that criterion, perhaps because, according to the nineteenth-century British essayist Walter Bagehot,

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

It is, as common people say, so “upsetting;” it makes you think that, after all, your favourite notions may be wrong, your firmest beliefs ill-founded.… Naturally, therefore, common men hate a new idea, and are disposed more or less to ill-treat the original man who brings it.

— Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization - Neil deGrasse Tyson (2022)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Research by the U.S. Department of Energy has found that corn-based ethanol is at least 24% more carbon-intensive than gasoline, making ethanol worse for the climate than gasoline.

Food Systems Account For At Least 15% Of All Fossil Fuels

[realcleverscience]

The author of the linked piece makes a really good point: We use 30 million acres of farmland to grow corn for ethanol. Meanwhile, solar panels are 1,000x more efficient at harvesting energy. If we harvested energy from solar instead, we'd need only a fraction of the farmland.

yes, there's more to it than just that (e.g. electric vs chemical fuel), but a good illustration of how our status quo is inefficient, esp for farmland, and that an EV transition could free up MILLIONS of acres of farmland. (A good response, I believe, to some of the complaints about solar farms.)

Note also that according to CleanTechnica, "... the US needs solar panels on about 700,000 acres of land in order to meet the administration’s goal of transitioning the nation to 100% renewable energy by 2035."

700 thousand acres is just 2.3% of the 30 million acres of corn grown for ethanol. 2.3%!

~~~ "Around 30 million acres of prime US farmland is used to grow corn for ethanol production.... The US could get the equivalent amount of vehicle fuel from a mere 200,000 acres of solar panels...

It’s easy to understand: The sunlight-to-energy conversion of plants is 0.023% versus 20% for a solar panel. (That’s nearly 1000x better.)...

The biggest advantage of solar over ethanol is the millions of acres used to grow corn for ethanol could grow food for people and lower food prices..."

[foxgirlgenerator]

There are two compounds that are particularly bad for my emotional wellbeing. For most of this year I have cut back significantly on the amount of each present in my system.

I can confidently say that that is one of the best decisions I have ever made, resulting in feeling far more deeply than I have in years. That is: over the last few weeks I have almost entirely removed ethanol and testosterone from my biochemistry.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

Single drop of ethanol to revolutionize nanosensor manufacture

Macquarie University engineers have developed a new technique to make the manufacture of nanosensors far less carbon-intensive, much cheaper, more efficient, and more versatile, substantially improving a key process in this trillion-dollar global industry. The team has found a way to treat each sensor using a single drop of ethanol instead of the conventional process that involves heating materials to high temperatures. Their research, published in Advanced Functional Materials, is titled, 'Capillary-driven self-assembled microclusters for highly performing UV detectors.' "Nanosensors are usually made up of billions of nanoparticles deposited onto a small sensor surface—but most of these sensors don't work when first fabricated," says corresponding author Associate Professor Noushin Nasiri, head of the Nanotech Laboratory at Macquarie University's School of Engineering.

Read more.

[wachinyeya]

Inauguration of World's Largest 2nd Gen. Ethanol Plant Will Cut Emissions by 30% with Sugar Cane https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/inauguration-of-worlds-largest-2nd-gen-ethanol-plant-will-cut-emissions-by-30-with-sugar-cane/

[dr-archeville]

Corn: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) [source]

"John Oliver discusses the financial and environmental impact of corn in the U.S., and whether or not he really knows what Pearl Harbor is." [24 min 53 sec]

[memenewsdotcom]

BNSF train derails in Minnesota

[justkidneying]

Why You're Hungover on Monday Morning

So you know when you get drunk and feel like shit the next day? Have you ever wanted to be able to drink without getting a hangover? Well, I can't really help you there, but I can at least tell you why hair of the dog doesn't work.

Ethanol (CH3CH2OH): this is normal drinking alcohol. When you drink it, most of it gets dumped into your blood and into the liver. What does the liver do with it? It breaks it down into acetaldehyde (which is very toxic) and then breaks that down to acetate. The enzymes involved are Alcohol Dehydrogenase (in the cytosol) and Acetaldehyde Dehydrogenase (in the mitochondria). These both use NAD+ (which is needed for normal metabolism) to do their thing, which leaves us with NADH.

So why is drinking bad for you? Cause it inhibits gluconeogenesis, causes lactic acid build up, and damages your cells (yes, you can handle it and drinking in moderation is fine, but molecularly, it is bad).

Cell Damage: acetaldehyde damages pancreas, brain, liver, and GI tract. It also impairs memory and coordination (obviously, lol), and makes you tired (wow who could have guessed that??). Basically, this compound is the reason you feel like shit. Acetaldehyde is bad for you, but you have to make it to get rid of ethanol. Some people (especially those of Asian descent) don't have enough acetaldehyde dehydrogenase. This causes a build up, so they feel worse and get that nice red face when they drink.

Lactic Acid Build Up: okay so remember all that NADH we made to break down ethanol? It's making us have a bad NADH to NAD+ ratio. We really need that NAD+ to accept an electron and allow us to make ATP (energy). So how can we make more of that? We are going to convert pyruvate (made from breaking down glucose) to lactate. What does lactate cause? LACTIC ACIDOSIS! That is bad.

Inhibition of Gluconeogenesis: do you know what you do when you haven't eaten in a little while? You make glucose (gluconeogenesis). You can make glucose from all kinds of shit, isn't that cool? One of these things is called oxaloacetate. When you have no NAD+, you convert oxaloacetate to malate. You can't make glucose from that. The high NADH to NAD+ ratio also inhibits the gluconeogenesis dehydrogenases needed to make glucose. What I'm getting at here is hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) because you have no usable glucose and you can't make any.

So why is this bad? Well, because you don't have glucose, but your cells are still working (and getting damaged :() you need to give some energy to them to function. This comes in the form of ketone bodies. This is really only an issue for heavy drinkers, but over time and with increased frequency, drinking can lead to ketoacidosis.

But yeah, the reason you feel bad after drinking is mostly due to how toxic acetaldehyde is. That's what causes head ache, nausea, and memory problems (from all the damage it does to those cells). So no, drinking more won't get rid of a hangover, and hair of the dog does not work. Eating food helps though, so you can finally have some glucose to work with.

Now some more notes:

Fatty Liver: this is going to be more prevalent in heavy drinkers, but it happens because you convert DHAP to glycerol-3-phosphate. G3P can combine with fatty acids to make triglycerides, which can go live in the liver and cause hepatosteatosis (fatty liver). This is also bad.

Methanol (CH3OH): this is also called wood alcohol, and can most commonly be drunk via bootleg liquor. Your body uses the same enzymes to break it down, but this time it is making formaldehyde and fomic acid. Fomic acid causes ocular toxicity (aka going blind) and brain damage. So make sure you trust whoever you get your bootleg liquor from, okay?

Ethylene Glycol (OHCH2CH2OH): this is antifreeze. Same enzymes again, but you get glycoaldehyde. This then becomes oxalic acid and glyoxylic acid. These cause lactic acidosis and calcium oxalate formation, which crystalizes in the kidneys, causing renal failure.

Final note: your body can handle drinking, like 1-2 drinks per day. I'm not your mom, so do whatever you want, but at least now you know why you feel like shit as your friends hold your hair back so you can puke in the shitty bar toilet :)

[tezuka-brainrot]

Astro Boy has four dads not because of polyamory everyone just hates each other and is doing illegal shit.

[nightshadereaper66]

Ethanol and Mothballs

Word Count: 2.1k This short story is inspired by the museum collections that I visited during my January paleontology class. All of the pictures used are mine and were taken at the various museums we visited. I'm super excited to share this story with y'all, and hope you love it as much as I do!

The halls of the museum are quiet. The day has ended, night plunging the rooms into eerie darkness. Gone are the copious beams of sunlight flowing through the windows. They now show only the gray haze of the city's night sky, plunging the marble halls into obscurity. It's the end of the hustle and bustle of tourists, of the cheerful shouts and giggles of children, and more subdued conversations of adults. The darkness is broken only by the flashlight beams of security guards working the graveyard shift. 

Occasionally, their light settles on the bones of long-dead animals resting peacefully in their wire armatures, casting odd, distorted shadows across the walls. The umbral forms of prehistoric fossils dance with the shadows of the guards, brought halfway to life only briefly by their light. 

The silence is broken only by footsteps on carpet, the whirring of the climate systems, and the building's occasional creak and groan. All is still as it should be; quietly resting after the long day. It would seem that the museum dies at night.

I open my eyes, hearing the slosh of fluid around me as I shakily stretch, limbs hitting the hard edges of my tub. I groan, my voice gravelly from disuse. Finally, it's time to wake up. I sit up, my poorly adjusted eyes only seeing the occasional glint of light reflecting off the trails of ethanol crisscrossing the floor. My muscles are cramped; I barely see my pale limbs tremoring in front of me. I shake, struggling to find a grip on the sterile stainless steel until I manage to grab the edge of the tub. Slowly my eyes adjust to the welcoming darkness, a wonderful reprieve from bright fluorescent lights. The air is thick with the smell of ethanol. Always ethanol here, it clings to everything and everyone, a constant reminder of the place where we reside.

As my vision improves, I can make out the shapes of the shelves in the darkness. They stand in a puddle of ethanol, trails and prints radiating in all directions from it. My tremors slowly subside as my body fights the vestiges of the cold sleep.

I watch a snake slither out of its jar, landing in the ethanol puddle with a quiet plash. It's quickly followed by its jar-mates, then the frogs from the jar next door. 

The soft sloshes are interrupted by a loud series of splashes and thrashes coming from a large tub on the far side of the wet lab. The smell of ethanol intensifies as the massive alligator snapping turtle inside sends liquid everywhere in his energetic bid for freedom. I climb out of my tub, walking off the stiffness and the last of the tremors before pulling the turtle out by the back of his shell.

“Happy wake-up, Troy,” I say as he starts to wander around the room, leaving behind a broad, messy ethanol trail. He opens his mouth wide, looking straight at me. I’m never sure if that's his version of a smile or a death threat.

The shelves are alive, undocumented insects trundling among their more well-known friends. One jar spews hundreds of tiny snails as they crawl over each other and to the ground, trailing ethanol instead of mucus. I twist off the lid to another snail jar; this one is always particularly stubborn. As I pull off the lid, a giant African land snail creeps out onto my arm.

“Yeah, alright buddy, we can go for a walk. Stretch your, er, foot.”

Snail crawls up my torso and onto my shoulder. I gently pat them between their eyestalks and scratch their shell.

“Just give me a second to let the fish out,” I say, unscrewing the lids of the fish jars and letting them swim out into my large tub, “Have fun, guys. It's not much, but it's better than being stuck like sardines in a can. Or a jar, I guess.”

Troy the snapping turtle shuffles over to watch them schooling.

“You can't eat anymore, remember? None of us can. Don't try it, Troy.”

He opens his mouth, giving me another smile/death threat.

“Thank you.”

I slide Dr. MacMorgan's I.D. out from under a dusty, overlooked jar of rhino beetles on the top shelf. I'm grateful for the museum's leniency in issuing him a second I.D. after this one went missing. He claimed he lost the thing, after all, his eyes “aren't what they used to be,” and his memory “is full of cotton wool these days.” I think the curator also helped to fast-track the process. She definitely didn't ask many questions.

Anyway, I had a garden snail steal the I.D. so that I could walk around collections. What can I say, I got tired of only exploring when the man forgot it in the piles of paperwork on his desk. Feelings and federal laws don’t matter much when you’re dead. Besides, now I can go check out the new research posters they put on the walls. It's nice to know that they're still using us for something. 

I swipe the I.D. and step into the hall. The smell of ethanol fades as the door to the wet lab closes. Snail crawls onto my head for a better view as I step into the bathroom and look at our reflection. The light turns on automatically as I walk in, and I wince as my eyes struggle to adjust. I look at myself in the mirror; my cheeks are sallow, cloudy eyes sunk into yellowed skin. A little worse for wear, but not bad, I haven’t aged a day. I examine my arms, running my fingers over the relatively new needle-hole in one of them. It showed up a few months back, but it’ll never heal. Presumably, it was for a tissue sample; I wonder what they’re using it for. I have been dead and pickled in ethanol for a while, it was about time. Snail (who I seem to be wearing as a hat) looks a little better-preserved, but their body still has that yellowish color that all wet lab residents tend to get. My snail hat waves their eyestalks towards the door emphatically. 

“Okay, okay, I’m going!” I say, stepping back out of the bathroom and into the darkness of the halls. “Where to now?”

They crawl down to my forehead, waving their left eye stalk in front of my eye.

“Alright, fossils it is. I know you like the shark teeth.” They do a move resembling a one-snail wave in appreciation. I smile, heading through the maze of nearly identical corridors. I see the light of a flashlight ahead and duck into an empty office, narrowly avoiding someone. It's probably just a grad student returning from the vending machine with their energy drink. I wait until the light is gone and slip back into the halls.

“Hey look! They extracted my DNA and used it to do some stuff. That explains the needle hole in my arm,” I say, pointing out a poster on the wall. I step close so that Snail can read it. At least, I think they can read. Their eyestalks scan over the lines of text and appear to understand as they pull back. 

They settle back on my forehead and I set off once more, finally reaching the thick, heavy door to the fossil collections. I scan the I.D. and the light blinks green, letting me in beyond the large gray door. We are hit with the strong smell of mothballs and the crisp, strictly temperature and humidity-controlled air. The lights turn on automatically, illuminating the rows of open shelves and closed metal cabinets.

I walk down the aisles, waiting for Snail to stop me and gesture to whatever cabinet they find interesting. When they do, I open the door. All of the drawers are labeled “glyptodon,” so I pull out a random one. Snail crawls off of me and onto the cabinet, eye stalks investigating the giant armadillo fossils. Mostly osteoderms, the bony bits right under the skin, but some teeth and small bones. When they’re satisfied, I close the cabinet and open a nearby one. 

We proceed in a similar fashion for a while, opening whatever cabinets strike our fancy and stopping to admire the fossils inside. Snail crawls back onto my head and we look at the skulls that rest on the open shelves. There are plenty of mammoths and mastodons, recognizable by their massive teeth. The mammoth teeth are more flat, while mastodons’ are more pointy unless they’ve been worn down a lot.

I run my hand along the glossier fossilized enamel, wondering what the fossils would get up to if they could move around at night. They’re just rock-ified bones (the fancy descriptor is permineralized), so they’d fall apart, assuming that they hadn’t already. The Earth is a blender, or so I hear. 

Snail prefers the smaller fossils, so they’re content to stay on my head as I trace the contours of huge tusks, dino bones, and skulls. It’s crazy to think that some of this stuff is still closer in age to spaghetti than to the beginning of life. It sure seems like it’s been fossilized for ages. And then some paleontologist dug it up and encased it in plaster and a volunteer put in thousands of hours to clean it up. 

“Having a nice wander?”

I jump, snapping abruptly out of my thoughts. The voice comes from behind me. Snail retreats into their shell, still on top of my head. Act like a normal person. One who hasn’t been dead and preserved in ethanol for fifty years.

“Hi! I uh, have a really bad skincare routine!”

She laughs. I turn around. It’s the museum curator. She’s wearing a headlamp; it’s still turned on. She raises a hand to turn it off since it’s not needed in the automatic lighting of the fossil collections.

“That tends to happen when you’re a wet lab specimen.”

“You know about that?” I ask as Snail peeks out of their shell, eyestalks fixed on her. The curator’s gaze tracks up at them, then back to my cloudy eyes.

“Yes. How do you think MacMorgan got a new I.D. so quickly?” Seeing my look of concern, she adds, “I don’t mind if you leave the wet lab, as long as you don’t make a mess.”

“Uhh… okay…” I say, still trying to process the new turn of events.

“Some people think that this building is haunted. I see why they would say that. I passed you in the hall earlier, you look very sinister,” she says, smiling.

“That was you, with the light? I thought it was a grad student! Dammit, I need to be more careful,” I reply, looking perturbed.

“You could, or you could keep letting the world believe that this building is haunted.” The curator seems to be enjoying this conversation. She reaches out a hand to pet Snail’s shell. After a few moments, she speaks again, “It can be our little secret.”

“You’re not scared by me? I’m literally dead and pickled, how are you fine with this?”

She laughs again. “I used to work in a wet lab, I’m quite accustomed to seeing preserved organisms. And if you want to have a little fun at night, I suppose I can continue to turn a blind eye.”

I nod awkwardly, surprised by her casual demeanor. The curator holds out her phone, the screen showing a clock that reads 4:13 a.m. 

“For now, it’s time to go back to bed,” she says as the screen turns off. I stare into my reflection in the black glass.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll get back to wet lab,” I say, realizing that I’m starting to feel the sluggish feeling that heralds in the morning.

She smiles, turning her headlamp back on as we leave the fossil collections. The curator walks off, disappearing into the shadows of the halls as Snail and I hurry back home. I swipe the I.D. and duck inside, stopping for a moment as I’m hit with the strong smell of ethanol. I help Troy back into his tub, coax Snail into their jar, and gather up the fish swimming in my tub. We’re all much more sluggish as the morning starts to roll in, seeing the sky start to lighten through the window. At last, I collapse back into my tub, trying not to splash too much as I let the ethanol settle back around me.

I drift off into the long day, holding on to the memories of the night. My cloudy eyes don’t close as my muscles stiffen, ready to stay motionless for the next day in the bright lights of the lab. I could run these halls forever, reveling in the shadows of forgotten, forever preserved lives, permeated in the scent of ethanol and mothballs.

[igcse-bioworld]

Happy new year!!

*Updated* We turn off the Bunsen burner in step 2

[sciencesolutions]