Com(m)a
The beginning of the word --com-- has a variety of possibilities, from today's world of dot-com to opening such words as "community" and "communication." In the past few months for some reason, I've become intrigued by a genre author Mark Kurlansky made famous, that of commodities. Ages ago, my parents used to dabble in commodities, investing in such things as pork bellies and wheat; my childhood ears didn't understand what any of that was, even as they tried to explain that they were "buying" railcars full of the stuff but not really (what the heck were pork bellies anyway). But commodities can be anything that we trade in bulk as in thousands or millions of tons bulk, from corn and wheat to silver and platinum...and yes, even salt. Ironically, author Kurlansky noted that he's written 30 other books but it's pretty much been only his books on commodities such as salt and paper (not pepper but paper, and his upcoming book on milk) that have brought him notoriety. What interests him about such subjects? As he said in an interview: The thing that was was fascinating about salt is that it was considered so valuable and people went to such lengths to get it, and then almost overnight everybody said, "Oh, that's no big deal." What is the true value of the things that we're valuing, and will it last? Of course, it takes a skilled author to write about such a generalized subject, some doing it with humor (as Bill Bryson does with subjects he titled A Short History of Nearly Everything, which sounds daunting but is actually quite entertaining and covers, well, nearly everything) and some with a flurry of factual essays (as Bill Streever did for the subjects of wind, cold, and heat which all proved fascinating considering that it was coming from a biologist; those of you who caught the total solar eclipse can join both Streever and many others in the scientific community who still can't resolve why the atmosphere of the sun is far hotter than its surface leading some to speculate that's is due to something totally new...nano-explosions). Now comes Sam Kean who writes about Caesar's Last Breath, or as we know it...air.
So it's all around us, air being essential to our lives and as it turns out is something composed of zillions of molecules. Okay, not zillions but actually sextillions of molecules. It's a large number, or as he says, take 80 billion multiplied by 80 billion and you'd still be four times short of the 25 sextillion molecules we inhale with each and every liter of air (a sextillion is a one followed by 21 zeros, or 36 zeros if you're British...what??). Truth is, we inhale over a hundred gases with each breath, and four out of every five molecules of those sextillion are nitrogen (which comprises 78% of our air). Adds author Kean: So getting it into our cells should be a snap, right? Nope. Despite this abundance, most creatures have to fight and scrape for every atom of nitrogen they can get. That's because the cells of most creatures, including humans, can't utilize nitrogen in its gaseous form. Nitrogen has to undergo conversion into another form first. And for the first few billion years of Earth's history. only a few special microbes had mastered the necessary sleight of hand. He throws in a section on something we all have and expel, methane or flatulence (about 3 pints per person daily, on average), as well as the mixed history of Alfred Nobel, creator of dynamite and so shunned by world in general that he went on to create...the Nobel Peace Prize (and that of Science and Literature for good measure). Gases expand from a resting state exponentially, as Nobel discovered with nitroglycerin which expands far faster than gunpowder. Adds the author: To put that in perspective, gunpowder explodes in a few thousandths of a second. Which means that if you stretched out the gunpowder explosion to a full hour, the nitro explosion would finish in four seconds. Same issue with steam and the often disastrous results when water suddenly hits fire (the gases in water expand to 1700 times their liquid volume). Blah, blah, blah...lots of interesting science stuff on helium, hydrogen, and strontium-90 (radiation) but still maybe interesting only to a crowd so interested.
What caught more of my attention was his section on nitrous oxide (as he notes, we inhale four quadrillion molecules of the stuff with each breath) and later, ether. See what you think as I extensively quote some of his paragraphs on anesthesia: Nowadays anesthesia usually consists of a cocktail of several drugs, each of which targets a different physiological function. Some of them slow breathing down, some paralyze muscles; others relieve anxiety or interfere with memory formation. So in one sense we know a lot about how these drugs work, since we can measure exactly how much they affect blood pressure and body temperature and a dozen other signs...In a larger sense, though, we know zilch about how these drugs work since we don't know how they affect the brain. That's a little scary. We do know that anesthetic compounds dissolve preferentially into fatty brain tissue, and they obviously interfere with neuron function somehow. Beyond that, umm...The problem is that anesthesia disrupts consciousness --hits pause on it, essentially-- and we have only a vague idea of how consciousness works in the first place...But several recent studies on anesthesia have peeled back some of the mystery. One surprise is that the brain doesn't just shut off under the influence of anesthesia. Consider a person lying on an operating table under heavy sedation. If a surgeon cuts something and says, "Whoops!," her eardrums still capture the noise and the auditory parts of her brain still crackle with activity. Same with smells: if the surgeon forgot to wear deodorant, the olfactory centers in her brain still register this. Even when sedated, we aren't oblivious to the world around us...That said, anesthesia does interfere with the next steps in cognition. In a wide-awake person, the sounds and smells would now zip off to other parts of the brain and stimulate a response -- uh-oh, or ewww. Under sedation, these signals never get the chance; they flat-line, and the rest of the brain never hears about them. (As a neuroscientist might say, her brain has received but not perceived these signals.) In other words, while anesthesia doesn't shut down the brain entirely, it does hush the chatter between different parts of it. Okay, still with me? Here's the part I found interesting after all of that; he continues: These studies also shed light on how people emerge from anesthesia. Intuitively, you might think that anesthesia simply "wears off" and that you emerge from the deep at a steady rate, but no. Rather. the brain seems to quantum-leap from one slightly-less-with-it stage to the next, with a half-dozen stages total and with each one lasting several minutes. Scientists know this because they can detect different brain waves at each stage. Under heavy anesthesia, basic sensory signals show up as short-lived, low-frequency pulses -- simple stuff. As the patient starts to surface, brain chatter picks up and higher-frequency waves emerge. Pretty soon you see a cascade of signals that instead of dying out quickly, ping back and forth between distant regions. These signals continue to grow in complexity until the patient wakes up fully and the entire brain is humming.
Phew, that was a lot to take in. But it made we wonder about patients entering or remaining in a coma. Are their brains, despite our sophisticated monitors, still pinging away searching for a connection somewhere? We use the word comma to define a pause in grammar, to slow down our reading for a moment to reveal a slightly related but different thought or explanation coming up. Could a "coma" be something close to the same definition, our brain pausing while it searches for a new path or seeks to repair an old one? Either way, a hats off to yet another author tackling a rather simple subject --the air we breathe-- and revealing how none of it could work without our complex bodies sorting and converting and utilizing that which is jumbled all around us. We could do far worse, as plants (which also utilize oxygen despite being told during all of our growing up years that they thrive on carbon dioxide) and fish and microbes all show us. Just as with our air, we should perhaps simply wonder at the everyday complexity around us. It all seems so simple, so natural, so always-has-been there...but it hasn't, it isn't. Our earth rotates and adjusts its own "lungs" as forces above and below change, or so our geological history has shown. We're lucky the world around us works and the world within us works...now if only we wouldn't take all of it so lightly.
Addendum: In my last post on bullies, I forgot to include a rather scary tale of a true bully. Way beyond the playground bully, this tale about a real-life bully was podcast on Criminal, a bully who could stop a school bus and pull a 13-year old girl out of it because he liked her (her parents said nothing, even after he got her pregnant); who could shoot and kill a man in broad daylight with a shotgun and so intimidate the jury that he would be acquitted; who could watch a new sheriff arrive in town to "clean up the mess" only to have the sheriff discover that neighboring police were so scared that they refused to help (the new sheriff turned in his badge in disgust). This was no mob boss, no armed militant, no dictator, and no megalomaniacal billionaire...this was a small-time farmer in the middle of the rural midwest of the U.S. Discover how this could happen, why this could happen, and what finally did happen...this true story of a bully will send chills down your back.
So it's all around us, air being essential to our lives and as it turns out is something composed of zillions of molecules. Okay, not zillions but actually sextillions of molecules. It's a large number, or as he says, take 80 billion multiplied by 80 billion and you'd still be four times short of the 25 sextillion molecules we inhale with each and every liter of air (a sextillion is a one followed by 21 zeros, or 36 zeros if you're British...what??). Truth is, we inhale over a hundred gases with each breath, and four out of every five molecules of those sextillion are nitrogen (which comprises 78% of our air). Adds author Kean: So getting it into our cells should be a snap, right? Nope. Despite this abundance, most creatures have to fight and scrape for every atom of nitrogen they can get. That's because the cells of most creatures, including humans, can't utilize nitrogen in its gaseous form. Nitrogen has to undergo conversion into another form first. And for the first few billion years of Earth's history. only a few special microbes had mastered the necessary sleight of hand. He throws in a section on something we all have and expel, methane or flatulence (about 3 pints per person daily, on average), as well as the mixed history of Alfred Nobel, creator of dynamite and so shunned by world in general that he went on to create...the Nobel Peace Prize (and that of Science and Literature for good measure). Gases expand from a resting state exponentially, as Nobel discovered with nitroglycerin which expands far faster than gunpowder. Adds the author: To put that in perspective, gunpowder explodes in a few thousandths of a second. Which means that if you stretched out the gunpowder explosion to a full hour, the nitro explosion would finish in four seconds. Same issue with steam and the often disastrous results when water suddenly hits fire (the gases in water expand to 1700 times their liquid volume). Blah, blah, blah...lots of interesting science stuff on helium, hydrogen, and strontium-90 (radiation) but still maybe interesting only to a crowd so interested.
What caught more of my attention was his section on nitrous oxide (as he notes, we inhale four quadrillion molecules of the stuff with each breath) and later, ether. See what you think as I extensively quote some of his paragraphs on anesthesia: Nowadays anesthesia usually consists of a cocktail of several drugs, each of which targets a different physiological function. Some of them slow breathing down, some paralyze muscles; others relieve anxiety or interfere with memory formation. So in one sense we know a lot about how these drugs work, since we can measure exactly how much they affect blood pressure and body temperature and a dozen other signs...In a larger sense, though, we know zilch about how these drugs work since we don't know how they affect the brain. That's a little scary. We do know that anesthetic compounds dissolve preferentially into fatty brain tissue, and they obviously interfere with neuron function somehow. Beyond that, umm...The problem is that anesthesia disrupts consciousness --hits pause on it, essentially-- and we have only a vague idea of how consciousness works in the first place...But several recent studies on anesthesia have peeled back some of the mystery. One surprise is that the brain doesn't just shut off under the influence of anesthesia. Consider a person lying on an operating table under heavy sedation. If a surgeon cuts something and says, "Whoops!," her eardrums still capture the noise and the auditory parts of her brain still crackle with activity. Same with smells: if the surgeon forgot to wear deodorant, the olfactory centers in her brain still register this. Even when sedated, we aren't oblivious to the world around us...That said, anesthesia does interfere with the next steps in cognition. In a wide-awake person, the sounds and smells would now zip off to other parts of the brain and stimulate a response -- uh-oh, or ewww. Under sedation, these signals never get the chance; they flat-line, and the rest of the brain never hears about them. (As a neuroscientist might say, her brain has received but not perceived these signals.) In other words, while anesthesia doesn't shut down the brain entirely, it does hush the chatter between different parts of it. Okay, still with me? Here's the part I found interesting after all of that; he continues: These studies also shed light on how people emerge from anesthesia. Intuitively, you might think that anesthesia simply "wears off" and that you emerge from the deep at a steady rate, but no. Rather. the brain seems to quantum-leap from one slightly-less-with-it stage to the next, with a half-dozen stages total and with each one lasting several minutes. Scientists know this because they can detect different brain waves at each stage. Under heavy anesthesia, basic sensory signals show up as short-lived, low-frequency pulses -- simple stuff. As the patient starts to surface, brain chatter picks up and higher-frequency waves emerge. Pretty soon you see a cascade of signals that instead of dying out quickly, ping back and forth between distant regions. These signals continue to grow in complexity until the patient wakes up fully and the entire brain is humming.
Phew, that was a lot to take in. But it made we wonder about patients entering or remaining in a coma. Are their brains, despite our sophisticated monitors, still pinging away searching for a connection somewhere? We use the word comma to define a pause in grammar, to slow down our reading for a moment to reveal a slightly related but different thought or explanation coming up. Could a "coma" be something close to the same definition, our brain pausing while it searches for a new path or seeks to repair an old one? Either way, a hats off to yet another author tackling a rather simple subject --the air we breathe-- and revealing how none of it could work without our complex bodies sorting and converting and utilizing that which is jumbled all around us. We could do far worse, as plants (which also utilize oxygen despite being told during all of our growing up years that they thrive on carbon dioxide) and fish and microbes all show us. Just as with our air, we should perhaps simply wonder at the everyday complexity around us. It all seems so simple, so natural, so always-has-been there...but it hasn't, it isn't. Our earth rotates and adjusts its own "lungs" as forces above and below change, or so our geological history has shown. We're lucky the world around us works and the world within us works...now if only we wouldn't take all of it so lightly.
Addendum: In my last post on bullies, I forgot to include a rather scary tale of a true bully. Way beyond the playground bully, this tale about a real-life bully was podcast on Criminal, a bully who could stop a school bus and pull a 13-year old girl out of it because he liked her (her parents said nothing, even after he got her pregnant); who could shoot and kill a man in broad daylight with a shotgun and so intimidate the jury that he would be acquitted; who could watch a new sheriff arrive in town to "clean up the mess" only to have the sheriff discover that neighboring police were so scared that they refused to help (the new sheriff turned in his badge in disgust). This was no mob boss, no armed militant, no dictator, and no megalomaniacal billionaire...this was a small-time farmer in the middle of the rural midwest of the U.S. Discover how this could happen, why this could happen, and what finally did happen...this true story of a bully will send chills down your back.
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