Recent comments in /f/explainlikeimfive

hangryhyax t1_iy57qx5 wrote

NSAIDs do not target inflammation. They are delivered systemically and bind to certain molecules present in enzymes that are more abundant at the site of inflammation, inhibiting further production of prostaglandins and reducing inflammation.

In other words, it is more of a passive effect from systemic delivery, but it is not targeting. “Targeting” would imply that the medicine is taken and then goes to a specific location to create an effect; that is not what is happening here.

Even with localized delivery (e.g. steroidal anti-inflammatories), it’s more that a higher concentration is being delivered to the site and directly passing/binding whichever receptor it’s designed for, rather than wandering around until it finds what it needs, so to speak.

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seam0s t1_iy56twg wrote

Imagine you are driving on a high way. Let's say y is the location of your car and x is the time that you have been driving. You can brake, make turns, or change lines. All these are changes made in your location y as a function of the time x. A fraction of y over x would be your speed. dy/dx doesn't only describe your speed. It breaks your journey into an infinite amount of time points, and describes how exactly your car would go from point A to point B at any single point of time.

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BurnOutBrighter6 t1_iy54pvj wrote

Other people are giving you the right answer - it's about surface area and the gills collapsing. But I feel like that needs a more ELI5 description:

Picture someone with long straight hair going underwater. In water, a fish's gills are like a person's hair behaves under water. It's all spread out in the water and every individual strand is floating freely. There's a lot of hair surface touching the water.

When a fish leaves the water into air, their gills act like wet hair when you get out of the water. It all "collapses" into clumps. The amount of contact between hair strands and the surroundings is a tiny % of what it is under water.

Fish rely on their gills being all spread out and free-floating to have enough surface area to pick up enough oxygen. It's not that gills are unable to extract oxygen from air and can only get it from water. The problem is their physical structure prevents them from touching enough air to keep the fish alive.

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Mont-ka t1_iy53y4w wrote

As a follow up. This is why "targeted" pain relievers like paracetamol/ibuprofen can actually be dangerous. Some people take 4 "different forms of paracetamol or ibuprofen for different ailments at the same time not understanding that isn't how it works. They can end up with a much higher than safe dose.

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m4nu3lf t1_iy53n0j wrote

Given a funtion y(x), then d(y(x))(h) (or dy for short) is the differential of y(x) which is defined as y'(x)*h where y'(x) is the derivative of y(x) with respect to x and h is a new variable.
The same goes for dx where x = i(x) is the identity function with respect to x. So given x' = 1 we have dx = h. So dy(x)/dx is just another way to write y'(x).

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ComradeMicha t1_iy539u4 wrote

It generally means "how steep is the slope at this point?". The notation dy/dx can be summarized as "how much distance (d) do you go up (y) here for every bit of distance (d) you go sideways (x)?".

So if you have a gentle slope of a lush, rolling hill (or, say, a function y=0.1x+2), then you go up only a little bit when travelling sideways, in this example for every 1 unit of length sideways you only go up by 0.1 of those same units in the upwards direction, so dy/dx is 0.1/1 which is 1/10.

If, on the other hand, you have a sheer cliff of a giant mountain (or, say, y=9x-1), then for every bit you go sideways you go a lot further up, in this example 9 units up per unit sideways, so dy/dx is 9/1 which is 9.

If it's negative, that means you actually go down, not up.

Since you can easily calculate this for every known function f(x), this becomes a handy tool to find out more about that function. For example, if you want to know the maximum points (peaks) of said function, you simply have to find a point where the slope (dy/dx) first goes up (is positive), then goes down (is negative), i.e. it reaches a peak. That means you just find all the places where dy/dx is zero, and then in a second step you probe whether it went from positive to negative (maximum) or vice versa (minimum).

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Prize_Due t1_iy535ww wrote

Reply to comment by Prize_Due in ELI5 what is dy/dx? by EarlaSallow

also called Leibniz's notation, When x increases by Δx, then y increases by Δy if you try to make the dx go towards 0 but not exactly 0 you get the rate of change of the sole variable Y

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Spiritual_Jaguar4685 t1_iy532nx wrote

Are you familiar with calculus? This is calculus terminology and not division in the sense of a fraction.

For ELI5 terms - we start with something called a "function", a function is a sort of equation where any possible X value has only one possible Y value. So, if you imagine a graph in your head, a line is a function, a U shaped curve is a function, but a C shaped curve isn't.

This is calculus, but you can think of the dy or dx symbol as "change in". So dy/dx is saying "for a given change in X values, what's the change in y values?", which we generally call "the slope" of a line.

In the case of a straight line, the slope is constant, so if you use the language Y= mX + C, dY/dX = m and the C gets dropped. So if you have Y = 2x + 5, dY/dX of this function is just 2.

In the case of curves you drop the exponent and multiply to the slope and leave X.

So y=3X^(2) becomes dy/dx = (3*2)x=6x.

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i_Praseru t1_iy52r8j wrote

It stands for delta of y divided by delta of x (written as) ∆y/∆x Or in other words. A change in Y divided by the change in X.

Sounds like you're doing differentials. There's probably a better place to ask this question if you need help with Calculus. I would try to explain but I struggled with this in school and i don't want to explain it wrong and leave you worse off. Maybe try Kahn Academy? If that's still a thing.

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defalt86 t1_iy52qiq wrote

It's read as "the change in y with respect to the change in x". Basically, it's asking you how changes in x affect y.

If I asked you how volume changes with respect to pressure, you could graph that out. If I asked you how volume changes with respect to color, the graph would look very different - it doesn't. It's important to specify the respected property so you know which graph to draw.

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Target880 t1_iy52nn8 wrote

it is the derivate of y in regards to x.

if y =x^2 the dy/dx = 2x

The second derivative is d^2 y /dx^2 =2

You could derivate in regards to another variable dy/dt = 0 because y do not depend on t.

The notation is common when you have a function that depends on multiple variables as was created by Leibniz in 1675

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Phage0070 t1_iy52bvj wrote

One big difference is that the animal is using a tool towards a specific, understood goal instead of blind instinct.

For example a wasp can build a nest out of mud and a beaver can build a dam from wood and mud, but the beaver will also try to pack wood and mud over a speaker making the noise of running water. The beaver isn't making the dam with the intent to create a lake, it is doing it because a set of instincts tells it to.

In contrast a raven that uses a stick to reach a piece of food, or better yet to trigger a mechanism to release food, is using a tool to achieve an understood objective. There is no instinct to use a stick to trigger a mechanism, the raven could only be doing that because it understands the task and the tool use.

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