E2science

After three children, I have yet to give birth without feeling time pressure. When my oldest daughter, Rowan, was born, my mother was visiting from Germany, and I beat her return ticket by a week.

My ex-husband was scheduled to deploy to Egypt for 6 months around the time my son, Ian, was going to be born. His unit refused to let him stay back until after the birth. I was still in the Army myself, and we lived about 35 minutes from Fort Campbell. Rowan was 3 1/2 years old.

With Maya, my 80 year old dad misunderstood my due date and booked tickets to Germany (where he spends half the year) the week BEFORE I was due.

My last two labors have been induced by castor oil. While this method may not be for everyone, it has worked well for me. I'll never be able to use it again, and not only because alex would run screaming if I turned up pregnant again. Proving that our bodies are smarter than we give them credit for, I now have a taste aversion to castor oil (although it really doesn't have much of a taste) and vomit if it hits my taste buds. Interestingly enough, I discovered that Burt's Bees shimmer lip gloss contains castor oil when I became nauseated after applying it and looked at the ingredients.

I've found that the traditional way of taking castor oil, by mixing it with juice, a) doesn't work (water and oil don't mix) and b) is completely revolting. The only way I was able to get it down is by mixing it into a chocolate shake and chugging it. Don't mix it in a styrofoam cup though - I was a little alarmed when my concoction started eating through my cup.

Castor oil is a smooth muscle stimulant. This has the desired effect of causing uterine contractions, and the not so desired effect of causing bowel contractions. Since a normal dose of castor oil for constipation is 2 teaspoons, and the dose I took to induce labor was 2 doses of 4 ounces each (a total of 8 ounces, or roughly 24 times the usual dosage), it should come as no surprise that I thought I was turning inside out approximately an hour after taking the stuff.

Both times I used castor oil, I went in to labor within 24 hours, once within 6 hours. From my anecdotal experience, it is effective. The last time I tried, I managed to get the first dose down; when I drank the second dose, however, it didn't even hit bottom before it came back up. My body had obviously learned what happens when we drink castor oil (massive diarrhea), and had very wisely decided it was having no part of that. I therefore had to use senna, another stimulant laxative, to complete the process.

The nice thing about the unpleasant side effect of castor oil is that after a vaginal delivery when you've used it, you won't have to have a bowel movement for several days at least. Especially if you have torn, or if you've had an episiotomy, the last thing you want is pressure on your perineum.

A property of gases, which states:

The amount of any given gas that will dissolve in a liquid at a given temperature is a function of the partial pressure of the gas that is in contact with the liquid and the solubility coefficient of the gas in the particular liquid.

In other words, the amount of gas that can be dissolved into a liquid depends on the temperature, the pressure, and how well the particular liquid absorbs gases.

This is important in scuba diving because the air breathed is under pressure equal to the pressure of the surrounding water; hence, the deeper you go, the higher the air pressure, and the greater the amount of air that dissolves in the blood. A simple example of Henry's Law can be seen when a soft drink bottle is opened. When closed, the gas (carbon dioxide) in the bottle is under pressure and remains dissolved. When opened, the pressure is removed and the dissolved gas leaves the liquid rapidly in the form of bubbles. When a diver ascends too rapidly, this is what happens. The bubbles in the blood cause an extremely painful disorder known as decompression sickness.

The deeper a diver descends, the higher the pressure of the air he breathes. By Dalton's Law, the partial pressure of each of the gases mixed in the air also increases. Thus, the nitrogen being breathed is under higher pressure, and by Henry's Law more of it is absorbed into the blood than would be on the surface. Nitrogen acts as an anaesthetic in high concentrations, so when divers go deeper, they become subject to nitrogen narcosis.

The boiling point of water is the temperature at which its vapour pressure equals the ambient pressure. The result of this is that bubbles of water vapour are able to form within a body of liquid water. (This in no way distinguishes it from the boiling point of any other liquid.) Thus the boiling point depends on the ambient pressure, and is higher than normal near the Dead Sea, and lower than normal at high altitudes. It even varies slightly with the weather, for which reason eggs should be boiled for a little longer during a hurricane. (Tornadoes are unlikely to affect the cooking conditions for long enough to make an appreciable difference.)

When a body of water has been heated to the boiling point of same, the effect of any further heat energy being introduced into it is no longer an increase in its temperature, but an increase in the rate at which the water turns into water vapour. The extra energy goes into overcoming the force of attraction between the water molecules that tends to keep the water in the liquid phase, and it is referred to as 'latent heat of condensation', since it is the heat that will be given up by water vapour when it condenses. Thus the boiling point is the highest temperature at which liquid water can exist under normal circumstances.

The constancy and general predictability of the temperature of boiling water makes it a useful medium for cooking: immersing a particular kind of food in it for a given period of time will generally lead to similar results. If this period of time is such that given your schedule your guests are likely to have fainted from inanition before the food has reached the desired state, you may consider using a pressure cooker. This retains some of the water vapour produced by the water boiling inside it, leading to an increase in pressure within the pressure cooker, which leads to an increase in the boiling point of the remaining water. The food is cooked at a higher temperature and is therefore ready more quickly. An alternative use, once popular in England, is to ensure that no life or vitamins remain in vegetables intended for human consumption. Another possible use would be making a decent cup of tea at high altitudes, but mountaineers tend to object to the extra weight.

Since the creation of vapour bubbles requires a force to be exerted against the surface tension of the inner water surface of the new bubble, they, like the bubbles in champagne and Fanta, cannot form without a nucleation point – an imperfection in the container, or a particle floating in the liquid – and it is therefore possible for pure water in a perfectly smooth container to enter a 'supercritical state' in which its temperature rises above boiling point because the water is physically unable to start boiling. The addition of a teaspoon of salt to a sample of water in this state can be entertaining.¹ The addition of salt or another soluble material at an earlier stage can increase the boiling point of the water: substances dissolve because of the attraction of their molecules or ions to water molecules. This attraction increases the amount of energy required to remove water molecules from the solution.

Supercritical water can also be produced by heating it in a closed system under pressure and then allowing it to escape from that system. Doing this in the general direction of a turbine attached to a dynamo can be very useful. It is a more effective way of delivering energy than allowing the water to boil and then producing a jet of water vapour because the energy density by volume of the water is greater by far than that of the equivalent mass of steam.

1. Check your accident insurance and make your will before playing with supercritical water. Apparently microwave ovens have a tendency to produce it.

No more inspiration for interesting additions will be considered. Thank-you filoraene, rootbeer277, wetperch, and mkb, who got in quickly enough.

We tend to think of the weather as a completely atmospheric happening, all cloud and wind and storm flowing across the face of the planet, forming new patterns every day or hour. Kind of hard to believe how quickly we forget the oceans' part in this as well, with their coverage of area and fluidly dynamic nature so much resembling the sky and wind. Still, the oceans are a complete half of the equation, the batteries powering weather's churning engine, and the Great Ocean Conveyer Belt is their most important inner system.

Think of the conveyor as a transport loop that moves water, and with it heat and carbon dioxide, through all of the oceans. To describe it as simply as possible in text, we'll say it starts in the Pacific Ocean, where cold air is fed under Australia from closer to Antarctica, and then across the equator and around in a loop. It then crosses itself (possible because each stream travels at a height concordant with its temperature, hotter water closer to the surface) and goes over Australia, and eventually below Africa. From there it travels along the Western African coast, then crosses and passes over the North coast of South America. From there the stream travels back across the Atlantic toward Europe, then bounces off Greenland and begins going South again. Between the equator and the European turnaround the conveyor drops all of its heat and CO2, letting it sink to the ocean floor instead of floating toward the top. The cold water moves all the way south around Antarctica, and then back into the Pacific ocean as mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. There is also a subloop of water which starts near Antarctica and then moves through the Indian Ocean, warming up and finally merging with the stream which will then cross South of Africa.

Probably the most important part of this system is the Gulf Stream, the warm water which flows beside the East coast of North America and the West Coast of Europe. It carries the equivalent of 75 Amazon Rivers worth of water (or so I've read) and exchanges enough heat with the atmosphere to warm all of Europe. The gulf stream is what allows London to have warmer winters than New York, despite being more than 400 kilometers to its North. Actually, as far as I can tell, the Gulf Stream heat exchange is the only part of the system that affects land temperatures to a great degree -- actually, to roughly 5 degrees Celsius, which would be the negative difference in air temperature if it didn't exist.

The scary thing is, there's a possibility that it might in fact cease to exist in the near future. Because more fresh water is entering the ocean from melting glaciers and other ice, the salinity of the water is decreasing overall. When water becomes less salty, it also loses density, which means it will not sink as low when cold, as there is saltier, colder water beneath it. It follows that if the water cannot sink, the system of loops which cross each other will not be able to continue functioning -- the great ocean conveyor belt will come to a halt, and with it the Gulf Stream. This change, in theory, can happen in the span of five to ten years, as the system shifts more quickly with some added inertia. If you think El Niño has caused some global chaos and done some economic damage, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

While this almost certainly would be disastrous to Europe, it has happened in the past (though without the aid of the greenhouse effect), and won't drastically endanger the human species or anything. For instance, the last halt to the conveyor is theorized to have happened about 500 years ago. At that time, wine manufacture in Greenland (!) became impossible due to lessened temperatures, and some settlements there were abandoned. Famine also swept Ireland and France, due to harsh conditions stopping the growth of wheat and potatoes. That time the cycle restarted itself in a mere 200 or so years, but the North Atlantic cooling of 12800 years ago, known as the Ice Age, lasted 1300. If the shutdown happens in our lifetimes -- and that is certainly a possibility -- there is little doubt that our grandchildren and theirs will still be dealing with its effects.

Having read Noung's write-up on God, I have found it to be intelligent, well-written, thought provoking, and almost completely wrong. I don't want to spend too much of anyone's time getting wrapped up in a debate on the subject, but I feel the need to point out a few logical fallacies at the very least.

"Science and religion are not even by definition mutual antagonists or exclusive of one another."

Science is used to work out, a bit at a time, how the universe works. It has no pretense of doing anything more, or anything less, than merely helping us to understand the rules of the world in which we live.

I recently heard a good analogy by Neil deGrasse Tyson (although I don't know if he originally came up with it or not) in which he compares the universe to a game of chess. The more you observe the movements of pieces, and the more predictions you prove or disprove about where the pieces can and can't go, the greater your understanding of the rules will be. Eventually you will be able to work out the rules of the game merely by witnessing the events on the chessboard for long enough, forming hypotheses about what is and isn't allowed, predicting what will happen next, and seeing if the predictions come true or not.

The same is true of the world we live in. Although it's perfectly natural to pray for the sun to rise each morning, with just the tools of observation, hypothesising, prediction and experimentation, you can work out that it will rise of its own accord. By observing the shadow of a stick in the ground, you can even work out how long a day lasts, when noon is, and how long a year lasts. At noon, you can even work out your latitude position.

Even in ancient Greece, Eratosthenes was able to use these tools to work out a lot about the world. By measuring the shadows of tall obelisks placed very far apart, he was able to work out the Earth's circumference with impressive accuracy.

The more we discover about the real world, however, the less places there are for imaginary creatures to hide. Knowledge and superstition are very much mutually exclusive, and while you can be forgiven at first for praying to the gods to pull the sun along in their chariot, after observing the stick for a few years, it would be plain stubborn to keep up that peculiar habit.

"God is an idea, not a thing, whereas science deals in things."

While science does indeed only assert the rules of our universe, some people genuinely believe a god to be a tangible, physical entity that affects the world we live in, and this is what science is making all but impossible to still believe in. Of course science has no comment on whether we should have heroes and villains, sorcerers and witches, parables and mythology; it merely points out that they are the stuff of fantasies, not the creators of our planet, and certainly not the creators of the entire universe in which we are merely riding on a pale blue dot.

"[The idea of God or of gods has offered] inspiration to the most brilliant artists"

I believe Richard P. Feynman put it best when discussing the differences between how an artist sees a flower and how a scientist sees it. To paraphrase once more, the artist will naturally assume that he sees the most beauty in the flower, but the scientist argues that he sees much more beauty: not only does he see the same pretty colours and contours that the artist sees, and smell the same pleasing scent, but on top of that, he understands to some extent what the flower is made of; how it lives, eats and breathes; how it evolved into its particular niche amongst all the other lifeforms of our world; and how it looks not only to us, with our shamefully limited view of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also how it appears to its intended audience, the bees it attracts, who can see just as vividly its ultraviolet colours that we had until recently been blissfully unware of.

"...This ignores the vast questions on which science is not competent to answer, among which lie the most important facing us - how to construct a just society; how to live sustainably with nature; and what our societies should value and reward."

These are indeed important questions which we need to address, and I agree that science alone cannot answer them. It never claimed to. These are things that we are going to have to work out by ourselves. It must, however, seem evident to anyone who has even read even Genesis 19:7-8 or Judges 19:23-24 (quite why it's in there twice, I'm not sure) that such texts encouraging not only ignorance and submission, but also oppression and even rape are anything but a good foundation for a moral society.

"The environmentalists who are now trying to desperately convince us to seek values other than easy consumption and progress are finding it impossible because without God or a similar concept, they have no means by which to compel us."

This is the point of view I find hardest to understand, and the main reason I felt compelled to write this rebuttal. Despite the claims of texts such as Genesis, science has proved that our home planet is roughly 4.5 billion years old, and that the universe is roughly 14 billion years old. It has shown that we are on a tiny planet, orbiting a star in the outer reaches of the Milky Way, far away from the centre of anything. We now know that life is fragile and something to be cherished in all its forms.

If choosing between someone who believes we are the special children of an all-powerful father figure who is keeping a watchful eye on us, keeping us out of harm's way and preparing to end the world; and someone who believes we are but one of many species coexisting on an insignificant little planet adrift in the outer reaches of a galaxy, I'd put my trust in the latter individual to help guide us to a society that isn't dependent on fossil fuels composed partly of the previous dominant lifeforms on the planet, the dinosaurs.

While those of us who cling to the idea of a god may feel comforted, those who are aware of the conditions of Venus, a close neighbour with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere and a temperature of well over 400 degrees Celsius, will hopefully heed the warning signs and start spreading ideas about how we can be both enlightened and sustainable.

Just to set the record straight on a few things: The reason Venus is so hot is mostly due to factors other than its proximity to the sun. Read http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/seasons.html for an explanation of how little the distance to the sun affects a planet's temperature compared to other factors such as the planet's tilt. Then again, http://mc-computing.com/qs/Global_Warming/Venus.html seems to make good points that maybe it's not the CO₂ either. I'll have to look into this one more.

Science doesn't tell us which morals we should have, only which morals we do have and why we have them. Clearly, if we need to work out how to proceed with civilisation, science will only show us how to improve it, not why we should. However, I think it's showing a disturbing lack of faith in humanity to assume we need a crutch of any kind in order to distinguish between right and wrong or encourage altruism. We are moral because it gave us an evolutionary advantage to be so, and no rationalisation of this fact can make us otherwise. At the end of the day, we are more likely to help each other out because of our mirror neurons than because we read outdated texts listing countless rules of etiquette.

If you're convinced that it is necessary to articulate rules listing every possible thing that may be generally considered moral or immoral to do, then I suggest you breathe a sigh of relief at the existence of the law. It is arguably the successor to the moral spouting side of religions, and does a much better job too as it can be updated and amended as the society that agrees upon those laws progresses.

Again, I'm sorry for this rant. It's mostly just bad timing: I'm still somewhat annoyed at living in a society where someone becoming a Pope is an event considered worthy of being televised, but the good people of CERN (you know, where the web comes from) finding out all kinds of wonderful things about how the universe works using their new LHC is not.