Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts

The damages of the heavy metal

by @ulaulaman via @verascienza about #heavymetal #chemistry #health
A heavy metal is any metal or metalloid of environmental concern. The term originated with reference to the harmful effects of cadmium, mercury and lead, all of which are denser than iron. It has since been applied to any other similarly toxic metal, or metalloid such as arsenic, regardless of density. Commonly encountered heavy metals are chromium, cobalt, nickel, copper, zinc, arsenic, selenium, silver, cadmium, antimony, mercury, thallium and lead.
Heavy metals have a lot of detrimental effects on our body:
Aluminum - Damage to the central nervous system, dementia, memory loss
Antimony - Damage to heart, diarrhea, vomiting, stomach ulcer
Arsenic - Lymphatic cancer, liver cancer, skin cancer
Barium - Increased blood pressure, paralysis
Bismuth - Dermatitis, stomatitis, colitis, diarrhea
Cadmium - Diarrhea, stomach pains, vomiting, bone fractures, damage to the immune, psychological disorders
Chrome - Damage to the kidneys and liver, respiratory problems, lung cancer, death
Copper - Irritation of the nose, mouth and eyes, liver cirrhosis, brain damage and kidney
Gallium - Irritation of the throat, difficulty 'breathing, pain in the chest
Hafnium - Irritation of eyes, skin and mucous membranes
Indium - Damage to the heart, kidneys and liver
Iridium - Irritation of the eyes and digestive tract
Lanthanum - Lung cancer, liver damage
Lead - Fruits, vegetables, meats, cereals, wine, cigarettes contain. Cause brain damage, dysfunction at birth, kidney damage, learning disabilities, destruction of the nervous system
Manganese - Blood clotting, glucose intolerance, disorders of the skeleton
Mercury - Destruction of the nervous system, brain damage, DNA damage
Nickel - Pulmonary embolism, breathing difficulties, asthma and chronic bronchitis, allergic skin reaction
Palladium - Very toxic and carcinogenic, irritant
Platinum - Alterations of DNA, cancer, and damage to intestine and kidney
Rhodium - Stains the skin, potentially toxic and carcinogenic
Ruthenium - Very toxic and carcinogenic, damage to the bones
Scandium - Pulmonary embolism, threatens the liver when accumulated in the body
Silver - Used as a coloring agent E174, headache, breathing difficulties, skin allergies, with extreme concentration it causes coma and death
Strontium - Lung cancer, in children difficulty of bone development
Tantalum - Irritation to the eyes and to the skin, upper respiratory tract lesion
Thallium - Used as a rat poison, stomach damage, nervous system, coma and death for those who survive the remain Thallium nerve damage and paralysis
Tin - Irritation of the eyes and skin, headaches, stomach aches, difficulty to urinate
Tungsten - Damage to the mucous membranes and membranes, eye irritation
Vanadium - heart and cardiovascular disorders, inflammation of the stomach and intestine
Yttrium - Very toxic, lung cancer, pulmonary embolism, liver damage
via verascienza

Friday the 13th in science

posted by @ulaulaman about #superstitions #friday13th #mathematics #economics #socialscience
Men would never be superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favoured by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune’s greedily coveted favours, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity.
Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, Preface Part 1.
In Italy 13 is considered a lucky number, so the unlucky day for us is Friday the 17th, but in the last decades also Friday the 13th becames an unlucky day. Following wiki.en, the origin of this superstition is unknown: the earliest evidence about it is referred in the biografy of Gioacchino Rossini written by Henry Sutherland Edwards in 1869: indeed Rossini died on a Friday 13th
He [Rossini] was surrounded to the last by admiring friends; and if it be true that, like so many Italians, he regarded Fridays as an unlucky day and thirteen as an unlucky number, it is remarkable that one Friday 13th of November he died.
Now, from an economical point of view, could be interesting the following abstract:
The Friday the 13th anomaly of Kolb and Rodriguez (1987) is revisited in an international context. Drawing on the philosophy of science approach of Lakatos (1978), the paper argues the importance of “anomalies” and the need for triangulation. Using the FTSE world indices over 1988–2000 for 19 countries, it is found that there is some evidence that returns on Friday the 13th are statistically different from, and generally greater than, returns on other Fridays.(1, 2)
Lucey's results seem a confirmation of the results of another work by Andrew Coutts:
In recent years much evidence has been documented of the existence of regularities in security price returns. However, one of the least investigated anomalies concerns the socalled ‘Friday the 13th’ effect, where returns on Fridays which fall on the 13th of the month display significantly lower returns than other Fridays. Employing daily logarithmic returns from the Financial Times Industrial Ordinary Shares Index (FT 30) for the period July 1935 through December 1994, we find no evidence of a Friday the 13th effect. Indeed, if anything, we find returns are higher on Friday the 13th than on other Fridays. We then partition the sample into six subsamples each of ten years, again concluding that there is no evidence of a Friday the 13th effect, and that once again returns on Friday the 13th tend to be higher than on other Fridays. Finally, we conclude that our results support the extremely limited evidence documented for the UK market concerning the Friday the 13th effect.
So the ancient superstitions could have an influence also in our advanced society:

A grave alarm

posted by @ulaulaman about an invention by #AugustLindquist
My invention relates to improvements in grave alarms, whereby persons who are prematurely buried before life is extinct, can sound an alarm, thus notifying the cemetery officials of the fact.
The object of my invention, is not only to provide means for sounding an alarm, but also to provide an improved construction whereby fresh air is supplied to the person prematurely buried, whereby life may be sustained until help arrives.
from the patent by August Lindquist
Read also: Grave Alarm, 10 medical and scientific discovery in weird history
via greatgrottu