Some African giant snails have yellow and black stripes down their backs (on the non-shelled bit). Naturally I thought racing stripes and my brain immediately recalled the old joke "Look at that S-car go!"
Keto diets are literally poisonous. Our bodies are designed to burn sugars. They only like to burn fats in emergency situations, like when we run out of sugar for a long time, and as such aren't fantastic about it. Which is great for weight loss, and that's what most people use it for. The problem is when you protein up while on a keto diet, as people are wont to do when they're trying to burn fat and build muscle at the same time, a bi-product of digesting the protein is ammonia, which can poison you.
Serious question: how does that work with populations that essentially have a keto diet, like the Inuit? Is it just that eating a diet like that all your life means you build up something of a tolerance to a certain amount of ammonia?
That's just not true. Our bodies burn fat fine, that's precisely why we use it as a storage molecules for energy. our brain needs sugar (or keton bodies) to run properly which is why many people get cranky as fuck on low-carb diets - the brain is yelling for carb. It's protein which isn't an ideal calorie source (great for amino acids tho, that's why you need it too) as you said, but fat is perfectly fine. I'm not sure if you made a typo in your original post, but fat is a perfectly ok calorie source for the body. I'd also note that while ammonia buildup can be very bad for the body, our bodies have provisions for getting rid of it through metabolism and excretion, unless you're having some sort pre-set health issue, in which case we're back to 'keto - or any other diet that fundamentally changes your eating habits - should only be undertaken with medical/nutritional professionals on the sidelines' Because as mentioned above, the body preferentially burns fat. Note how a lot of things up north have loads of fatty tissue and the body will prioritize that over protein.
Seconding that. I have a relative with a urea cycle disorder (I can't remember for sure, but I think it's ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency). She has to eat a very low protein diet and receive regular medical intervention because she lacks an enzyme that prevents ammonia from accumulating. This is a very rare condition. High levels of ammonia are toxic, but I don't think most people are going to experience a dangerous buildup from digesting proteins. It's converted to urea and excreted.
Ammonia gets straight-up dumped into urea, so that should be fine, yeah. Seconding/thirding stuff people have said. This is what humans have tasty, tasty livers for.
Having a malfunctioning liver, as seen in cirrhosis (alcoholic or otherwise) can cause ammonia to build up and can cause hepatic encephalopathy, but that's easily cured with laxatives. Preferably lactulose, just as long as the patient defecates twice a day.
She Has Her Mother's Laugh is an excellent book and I'd recommend it for anyone interested in heredity of various types, but something particularly interesting that I learned today from it... Fraternal twins are very often chimeras that have cells from their siblings that can persist for decades, if not their entire lives. People who grow babies in their bodies have a significant chance of picking up cells from their children and becoming chimeras later in life. That particular exchange can work in reverse too, with children being chimeras with their parent's cells. Port wine stain birthmarks are also examples of chimerism!
By dabbing ants in a particular chemical, it is possible to convince them that they are in fact dead, at which point they proceed to 'bury' themselves...
The famous "Americans use 500 million plastic straws a day" figure was derived from a survey conducted by a then-9 year old.
y'all are gonna think i'm the stupidest human being to ever grace this planet but today at the age of 25 and a quarter I learned for the very first time that geese and swans are different species
That's not about a goose and a swan, though, that's a Canada goose/other variety of goose hybrid. Swans are about 2 or 3 times the size of a Canada goose: (And, by all accounts, even more full of seething hatred, which is frankly impressive.)
I didn't exactly learn this today, but I learned it pretty recently so it's counting: I learned that the tea-brewing travel mug I've had for just under a year is not, actually, obnoxiously difficult to clean properly like I thought. The mug has two chambers - an outer insulated metal bit, and a glass cylinder that the top screws onto. The glass cylinder also has a mesh sieve attached to the bottom, so that you can brew loose-leaf tea in the mug, and a rubber ring to keep the cylinder from sliding into the metal part too fast. The rubber ring is really hard to get bits of tea leaves out from under. It turns out, the sieve unscrews and you can actually take the whole cylinder apart and wash all the components - including the rubber ring. This makes it a lot more appealing to use, and much easier to make myself tea more often.
From similar sources as my last entry here, "weeping and gnashing of teeth" in Biblical times and places did not signify physical pain; it signified shame.
