Recent comments in /f/askscience

slouchingtoepiphany t1_j331d9p wrote

Reply to comment by Snule in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

It's funny because I intended to provide some of the information that u/masklinn (in much less detail, of course), but saw that he/she had already done a superb job. Still, I want to say something, so I'll mention that the particular, slime like feel of the mucins derives from the heterogeneous, O-linked glycoproteins (i.e., carbohydrate chains linked through an oxygen atom to a protein). These carb moieties have a negative charge on them that causes water molecules to be electrostatically attracted to them, making them very "wet" and slippery.

PS: The UN u/Snule is perfect for this conversation. :)

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fuzzygondola t1_j32vrd5 wrote

Reply to comment by Snule in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

Many answerers don't know a lot about the subject at the time of reading the question, but get intrigued and just start reading about it. It's pretty fun actually, you get to learn it yourself first and then hone your writing skills by distilling the information into an easy to read comment.

I read of a study which concluded that teaching others immediately after learning something new is the most reliable way to retain the information. Personally I believe it is too!

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Naive_Piglet_III t1_j32tqpo wrote

Reply to comment by masklinn in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

I remember talking to a medical student who explained that it also acts as a first line of defence. It has the ability to bind potential parasites in the nasal region where they potentially get killed by specific immune cells or are expelled via cough / sneeze.

Some virus (most common cold) have also evolved to survive this which is why you catch a cold if someone sneezes on you.

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HankScorpio-vs-World t1_j32sz9q wrote

Reply to comment by katt2002 in What are the physical limits of stamping optical media like blu-ray discs? by ChronoX5

It’s about safety and cost when it comes to data storage… yes shorter wavelength emission/reading systems are possible but are they necessary. At the moment we are yet to have a video encoding system that needs a disc bigger than 128GB for a movie. Chances are by the time we do it will be streamed via the internet and a physical disc will be redundant.

But who knows what future tv formats will need for storage, when I was a kid a 240line VHS tape was astounding now 1080 lines is considered old technology.

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Peiple t1_j32q3yp wrote

Reply to comment by mschuster91 in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

That’s true, although syphilis in general has a really tough time evolving resistance to antibiotics. It’s not necessarily true that we’ll inevitably get bacteria with resistance to all antibiotics—bacteria have a significant trade off to evolving resistance, since it usually decreases their overall fitness compared to wild type. That’s why you’ll typically see bacteria revert to sensitivity in the wild, and most multi drug resistant bacteria are only acquired from environments with lots of antibiotics (hospitals).

There’s also some drugs that are really difficult for bacteria to evolve dual resistance to—in S. aureus for example, it’s nearly impossible for them to simultaneously resist methicillin and vancomycin.

More infections = more mutations is also not necessarily true, especially since syphilis is a bacteria and covid a virus. A lot of bacteria have more proofreading materials to prevent mutations, and bacteria that like to form biofilms will have lower rates of mutation. Bacteria also have longer competition against themselves and the microbes around them as they grow coupled with a lower reproduction rate, which enforces more selective pressure than on viruses.

Viruses don’t have a lot of these problems because they reproduce and mutate significantly faster, and they’re not susceptible to antibiotics. Antiviral treatments are a lot harder to target because viruses rely on the host more than bacteria, so a lot of the “targets” are things our body also needs. That’s one of the reasons a lot of antivirals have more common side effects and than antibiotics.

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mschuster91 t1_j32opaa wrote

Reply to comment by Peiple in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

And the problem is that there seem to be [https://sph.unc.edu/sph-news/antibiotic-resistant-form-of-syphilis-bacterium-identified-in-patients-in-cuba/](some strains of syphilis) on the rise that are resistant to antibiotics. It's only time until there's a truly multi-resistant strain, and infections are on the rise in general over all STIs - and as we've seen with covid, the more infections the more mutations.

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Peiple t1_j32mm6x wrote

Reply to comment by --_pancakes_-- in Where does all of the snot come from when you have a cold? by Dunkachin0

Most of the symptoms you get when you’re sick aren’t due to the actual pathogen, they’re because of the body’s response to them. Fevers, cough, runny nose, lethargy, inflammation, sore throat, and decreased appetite are all ways your body works to keep you safe. Even though they’re not pleasant, it’s worse for the pathogen than it is for you. The severity of the symptoms is determine more by how much immune response you need. The influenza virus causes very very few (if any) of the symptoms you commonly associate with “the flu”.

There are cases where this doesn’t happen and you instead just see the actual pathogen’s effects—a good example of that is syphilis, which doesn’t trigger any immune response. Unlike flu/cold/etc you don’t get many symptoms at all (no fever/cough/runny nose/lethargy/etc), until you start experiencing bone decay and brain damage from the bacteria eating away at your internals. Pretty cool in a scary way.

Edit: and one cool addition to this is the story of how they initially treated syphilis—they discovered that if you inject a patient with malaria, the immune response triggers a high fever, which kills the syphilis. That could be followed up with antimalarials to “cure” the patient…although it had a pretty high fatality rate and was also developed through some questionable ethics. Luckily penicillin was discovered soon after, which was significantly safer. Moral of the story is that being sick helps you get better and not die.

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