Recent comments in /f/askscience

InSight89 t1_j2klfjw wrote

Why has it taken light 13 billion years to reach us?

Wouldn't that indicate that, for 13 billion years, the distance between us and that light source has been expanding at almost the speed of light since the very beginning?

The Andromeda galaxy is expected to collide with the Milky Way in approximately 4.5 billion years. Does this time take into account the expansion of space in between the two galaxies?

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Kingjoe97034 t1_j2kkdx7 wrote

They would love to deliver it the way that is most likely to be done correctly and most welcomed by the patients and doctors. That’s oral pills. They’ve come up with clever ways to do slow release that is protected from the stomach but absorbed in the intestines, for some drugs. Then it has to be protected from degrading enzymes so it stays in the blood or liver at the right level the longest before another pill is needed. Then the degradation products have to be harmless.

When a drug can’t be designed for this, you end up with things like multiple pills per day, or injections, or liquids, or patches, or nasal sprays, or rectal suppositories. Sometimes a patch is best because it can be slow release.

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scottyboy218 OP t1_j2kjdr5 wrote

Let's say target organ is the liver. Couldn't that be handled numerous ways (injested, injected, orally, rectally, vaginally?) I'm thinking of all the ways that people can administer alcohol into their systems.

Do pharma companies evaluate all those methods when testing a drug intended to target the liver?

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Kingjoe97034 t1_j2kiyqs wrote

It depends on the drug. They are going to already know what delivery will likely work without further modification. For example, oral delivery is going to need to survive the stomach and get absorbed. Timing of release and half-life in the blood stream also factor into delivery method. They take these into account when deciding the best way to deliver the drug. Target organ also matters.

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ChrisARippel t1_j2kd97a wrote

I agree that we would not expect much change over human lifetimes.

Another problem, not yet mentioned, is that each time astronomers take a "picture" of the CMB, camera technology improves the resolution creating a much different picture. Improved resolution is easy to see. I don't think changes in the CMB between 1989 and 2013 would be easy to see.

Here are images from COBE (1989), WMAP (2001), Planck (2013).

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wolfram074 t1_j2kcwrc wrote

if 0.07 degrees of arc goes to 50k year time scales, then 0.00007 degrees of arc goes to 50 year time scales, wavelength of 1.9 mm, rayleigh criterion of angle ~= 1.22*lambda/diameter.

I must have done something wrong because I came out to an effective diameter of only 35 meters, we've totally built radio dish networks bigger than that, heck, the EHT made such a big hubbub about planet scale scopes.

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Aseyhe t1_j2k4jp5 wrote

According to this paper, the last scattering surface has a comoving thickness of about 19 Mpc, which corresponds to a physical thickness of (19 Mpc)/1100 ~ 17 kpc or a duration of (17 kpc)/c ~ 56000 years.

Edit: The above concerns how thick the last scattering surface is at any given point on the sky (which is connected to how long recombination -- the process by which the universe became transparent -- took, as well as how opaque the universe was before recombination). I just realized that you are instead asking how the recombination time varied between different patches of the sky. Temperature variations in the CMB are around the 10^-4 level (one part in ten thousand), which implies that the recombination time varied to a similar degree. 10^(-4) of 370000 years is 37 years, so the spatial variation in the recombination time is of order tens of years.

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Aseyhe t1_j2k47iy wrote

That's right, the scales are precisely proportional in that way.

With respect to whether such resolution is possible, I can't say much about the instrumentation side, but I can point out a major physical challenge. According to our calculations, there simply wasn't much structure on very small scales in the early universe, due to diffusion damping. Photons were able to gradually diffuse between hot and cold regions, allowing their temperatures to equalize. This effectively smoothed out the early universe; due to photon travel times, it affected small scales more than large scales.

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