Recent comments in /f/askscience

Equal-Dinner t1_j1ylblq wrote

Reply to How do shifts work on really long medical operations? by TerjiD

Daughter of a spine surgeon here: They DO eat and drink, just not a meal. Nurses give them "bite size snacks", like a piece of chocolate, or some water/juice with a straw. The surgeon does not touch the food, the nurse gives it to them, and this keeps them going till the end of the surgery. However if they know they have a long surgery ahead they will eat and drink well before going to the surgery room. They also DO go to the toilet if they really need to. Even though surgeries do have critical moments in which everybody must be concentrating at 110%, there are also moments that are a bit less "critical", and these are the moments where they can go for a quick pee or take the snack from the nurse (bare in mind there are usually more than 1 surgeon so the other one can keep things stable and safe). They try to hold if they can, and rarely go number 2, but if they have an emergency diarrhoea they must go, simply because it would not be safe for the patient if the surgeon is performing a delicate operation while having massive cramps :/ in those cases is best to just quickly go to the toilet and come back.

133

swollennode t1_j1yl74s wrote

Reply to How do shifts work on really long medical operations? by TerjiD

Everyone except for the surgeon gets rotated out.

Usually big long surgeries have 2 surgeons. One is the primary surgeon and the other is assisting. The assisting one may be another attending surgeon or a resident surgeon. Even big surgeries have a point where the patient is stable enough to temporarily pause so one of the surgeons can be relieved for a minute to get some food, use the restroom. So the patient is never without a surgeon, but surgeons don’t operate through a 36 hour case without a break.

776

Spanks79 t1_j1ydoj3 wrote

Reply to What is the ‘widest’ ancestral generation? by vesuvisian

In the end we all descend from just a few women (mitochondrial eve)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

And a handful of men (y-chromosomal Adam)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y-chromosomal_Adam

There was a period humans were almost extinct and of those only a few people are responsible for all of our genetic material.

Even so: mitochondrial dna might come from ‘eve’ , some of the other humans or even humanoids (like Neanderthals) might have given us part of their dna by breeding. It’s just mixed into the y- or mitochondrial lines.

Still there are many factors of which I know only a few. Must important would be distance / travel. Micronesian people might share a Europe’s and African forefather, but after they separated ages ago they didn’t breed back in. Same for native Americans or Australian natives.

Still it’s very interesting to see there’s still a lot of things being found out. For instance that denisova man interbred with early humans and Neanderthals and many Asian people have some denisova dna and Europeans/Caucasian have up to 5% Neanderthal dna.

2