We colloquially refer to sodium chloride as “salt” and it leads many people to associate the word salt with food. For everyday purposes, that meaning is perfectly fine. However the word “salt” as used in chemistry simply means a neutrally charged compound consisting of positive cation(s) and negative anion(s). Sodium chloride (NaCl, or Na ^+ Cl ^- ) meets this criteria, hence it being called salt.

The same chemical definition fits amphetamine salts and the formulation of lithium used clinically, however that’s the end of their similarity with food items. When using these medications, it isn’t the fact that patients get a “salt” that’s causing a clinical change, but rather that the medications have specific mechanisms of action (e.g. Lithium reduces excitatory stimulation of dopamine and glutamate and up-regulates GABA, though it’s actual mechanism of action is largely unknown).

That doesn’t mean that diet could not, or does not, affect mental health disorders, just that diet’s effect is a completely different topic.

[removed]

[removed]

So the entanglement would break because of how time passes differently close to a black hole?

[deleted]

Bear in mind plenty of viruses do not have any DNA, using RNA instead. But there are other Cas proteins that cut RNA, so you can still apply that kind of approach.

It's not necessarily going to be all that effective for typical viral infections, as it's hard to deliver a lot of CRISPR-Cas machinery in vivo, whereas a viral infection can create huge numbers of viruses.

Where it could be exciting is in potentially permanently curing HIV infection. You use other drugs to knock the infection down, but some of the viruses have integrated into the DNA of host cells, where drugs do no good. But CRISPR-Cas9 could come along and destroy those viral DNA sequences.

A salt is a compound composed of two charged groups. One positively charged, one negatively charged. For drugs such as adderall, one is a positively charged amphetamine (with an extra hydrogen as a proton) and the other half is a negatively charged counter ion (either sulfate, sacharate or aspartate). The reason it is given as a salt, is that charged molecules dissolve more easily in water. If it was not charged, it would not dissolve and be less effective when taken orally.

​

In the case of lithium, it is usually lithium cations (positively charged) with carbonate, bromide or other counter anions. The truth is, we don't really know exactly how lithium works in the brain. It interacts with a number of things but we can't pin down which affects particularly help with mood stabilization.

I remember one an IM attending discussing anuric/oliguric patients with ESRD on dialysis. He jokingly called the GI tract “the biggest nephron.”

Wow, everything you stated was news to me. Thanks!

[removed]

[removed]

Various salts are commonly prescribed for at least two mental health diagnoses that I can think of - (ADHD - amphetamines/bipolar disorder - lithium). I am curious if there is data that these diagnoses indicate salt imbalances at play in the brain? And if so, could diet be impacting symptomology such that a specific nutritional plan might potentially help address this?

Are there any studies about this estimate?

[removed]

Depends on your definitions, but likely great apes. Evolutionary pressure, like pretty much everything else. Bigger brains mean better survival for certain niches.

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

[removed]

I think mostly it's the opposite of what you describe. Diversity is key here, because if everyone had all those same molecular markers, we'd all be susceptible to the same virus. Mixing things up gives the species as a whole a better chance to survive a bad pandemic, if there are some groups that will be relatively safer (because their cells are harder for the virus to infect, or their immune systems start with proteins that will be better able to adapt to that specific virus, etc.). Certain genotypes and haplotypes confer more (or less) susceptibilty (or protection) to some viruses and this would likely be the case with anything "new" that crossed over from another species. It's all really complicated and of course we're all anthropomorphizing species and viruses and cells and proteins because it makes it easier to understand. Evolution is wild.

On a side note, cheetahs are really lucky. There is an incredibly small amount of genetic diversity in the cheetah population--to the point where I've read that any cheetah can get an organ transplant from any other cheetah. One study gave convincing evidence that the total population at one point was down to something like "no more than 7 individuals"... especially at that extreme bottleneck point, but even up to today, it would seem that they may be more susceptible to an extinction-level cheetah pandemic. Something like that could happen to humans, and things would likely be pretty grim, but our diversity could mean a better shot at existential survival in such a scenario.

Hawking radiation just appears (poof), it doesn't actually cross the event horizon.

How do black holes evaporate through Hawking Radiation if nothing can escape?

[deleted]

Angiogenesis inhibitors are a thing that we use to "pull the plug" on certain types of cancers. If you look up the hallmarks of cancer, there are about 10 attributes which a cancer possesses that makes it able to grow, with one being angiogenesis, others being evasion of the immune system, resistance to apoptosis etc. Each of these attributes have been targeted in the pursuit to fight cancer. Axitinib is an example of a angiogenesis inhibitor.

Is it really determined how entanglement interacts with black holes? I’d thought that was kinda open. Like, according to the “no hair” theorem they ought to destroy information, but that’s not unitary, which is kinda essential to the behavior of anything entangled with them (and quantum physics in general).

There are proposed resolutions to this apparent paradox but is there a consensus on the right one? And if not, would an experiment near a black hole be useful to distinguish between theories?