Recent comments in /f/askscience

Chemomechanics t1_j69s728 wrote

> For example, strain in metals is due to the crystal structure "realigning" itself, one atom at a time. Doing so fills atomic-scale voids and fixes other defects in the structure. Eventually, you run out of such defects, and the stress is instead applied to the crystal bonds themselves.

[Edited to assume good faith.] This is so very wrong. I suppose you're just making things up or using an AI-generated answer writing without peer-reviewed technical references; the answer also resembles AI-generated answers that are designed to be confident but not designed to be correct.

Elastic strain arises from bonds stretching and recoverable defect movement. Plastic strain arises from unrecoverable defect movement, which itself creates more defects, not fewer. Voids ultimately form and coalesce; they don't disappear. The stress is always applied to the crystal bonds.

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LongUsername t1_j69p2h3 wrote

Botulinum bacteria are a soil bacteria. You're much more likely to get botulism from incorrectly prepared root vegetables than from fruits.

Garlic in oil is one of the notorious ones, also baked potatoes in aluminium foil (held at improper temperature), or prison "wine" (often has potato scraps added to boost starch content)

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AquaSlothNC t1_j69o0fi wrote

In addition to this comment, pH also plays a very important factor in botulism sporulating in the stomach. The pH of an infants stomach acid is not low enough to prevent botulism from germinating (come out of spore-form). I believe the magic number is 4.6 if memory serves from classes in college. Under that acidity, the conditions are too acidic for clostridium botulinum to germinate and release its toxin. Newborns have not yet developed the gastrointestinal pH that older humans have to prevent this. I looked it up and adults are around 1.5-2.0. So too acidic for botulism to do it’s dirty work.

Edit: Sentence structure. Fixed for clarity. Edit 2: found the pH of adult stomach acid.

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CrustalTrudger t1_j69n5ai wrote

> Maybe it was the same type of crystal with different impurities?

Most likely. You can get things like gradations between amethyst (a purple type of quartz) and citrine (an orange type of quartz) in a single crystal because it's all quartz with different things substituting into the lattice. Some minerals can have really complicated intergrowths and gradations of versions themselves, e.g., tourmaline does all sorts of weird stuff, but importantly all have effectively the same lattice structure.

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