Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2007 July 26

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[edit] July 26

[edit] Lettuce in the dishwasher

Why is it that when I don't completely rinse off all of the scraps of lettuce from a utensil, or plate, or anything, it won't come off in the dishwasher but will easily come off by just rinsing it under the sink? 68.231.151.161 02:10, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

In the sink, a very clever intelligence is controlling the washing action and the lettuce-loaded water goes down the drain. In the dishwasher, the lettuce-loaded water just goes round-and-round again, potentially redepositing the lettuce elsewhere. (The water does go through a built-in garbage grinder, but it may not handle 100% of the flow and the grinder may not be 100% effective.) Also, depending on how you load your dishwasher, there may be lots of "shadows" that aren't effectively washed by the water blasts, forming sorts of hydraulic Lagrangian points for food debris.
Atlant 16:00, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Hah, nice one I like it =) --frotht 02:16, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Identify this insect

What kind of bug is this?

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=900187829&size=o

Foobody 02:33, 26 July 2007 (UTC) (edited to add sig)

Well, the image is somewhat blurry and small, but they look like wood lice to me (or, more generically, the woodlouse article). -- MarcoTolo 03:47, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

The skin beetles or Dermestidae. The picture is from german article - Gemeiner Speckkäfer.--Stone 12:32, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Looks like a carpet bug sometimes known as 'wooly bears'?213.249.237.190 13:04, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I agree with Stone that the "bugs" are probably the larvae of a Dermestid. They look like one of the species in the genus Anthrenus, commonly called Carpet Beetles. They can be serious problems in homes or museums because they can severely damage textiles and other organic substances. --Eriastrum 16:11, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] what percentage of bone is carbon?

Hi I'd love to be able to find out what percentage of bone is carbon ? I'm interested in calculating how much greenhouse gases are "fixed" into bone when farm animals grow. Cheers 61.9.137.86 05:41, 26 July 2007 (UTC)DaveBeggs

Farm animals don't get their carbon from greenhouse gases so "0". But water is the biggest greenhouse gas and animals are about 70% water I believe. --Tbeatty 06:26, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Yeah um, animals get their carbon from food, not from air. Only plants fix carbon from the atmosphere. —Keenan Pepper 10:22, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Cows get carbon from grass, grass gets carbon from the air - so although the cow doesn't fix carbon from the air, it does incorporate atmospheric carbon through the intermediary of grass. DuncanHill 10:45, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The problem is that it's a zero sum game. When the animal dies, the bone's organic content is metabolised by bacteria, etc - only the calcium content remains. So burying bones isn't really locking away much (if any) carbon. I'm pretty sure that no useful dent in global warming could be made in this manner. Having animals eat carbon-laden plants then 'sequestering' the animal corpses is a lot worse than just sequestering the plants directly. Note particularly that animals produce methane as well as CO2 - and methane is an even nastier greenhouse gas than CO2. Having fewer domesticated animals in the first place would go some way reducing the greenhouse effect. SteveBaker 11:49, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I remember seeing some little blurb in a NYT article, where some biologist calculated the net effect on global warming the increasing obesity in the United States was causing. By storing away carbon in the form of fat instead of burning it off as carbon dioxide, a continuously fattening populace actually slows the rate of temperature increase. Unfortunately, he calculated the effect to be on the order of billionths or trillionths of the total temperature change. We clearly aren't eating enough. 151.152.101.44 19:39, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Cute. But of course the fatter we are, the more gasoline our cars use to haul us around -- and the more likely we are to drive rather than walk or bike. I'd expect that this effect outweighs the other one by quite a few orders of magnitude. --Trovatore 19:54, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
This claim that America's increasing waistlines were causing us to burn some outrageous amount of extra gasoline was in the press recently - the debate came up at work and I showed that it was utterly negligable. Filling your gas tank only half full and stopping off for gas twice as often will probably save you the weight of 10 gallons of gas (60lbs) on the average - nobody is telling us to do that! Toss out your 25lb spare wheel, carry a AAA card instead. Unbolt and remove the passenger seat when there's nobody sitting in it and you've saved another 25lbs. We don't consider doing these things because their effect is rather negligable compared (say) to driving a 1,300lb Mini instead of a 8,000lb SUV. 02:06, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

By the way, I notice that no one has even attempted to answer the literal original question. What percentage of bone is carbon? By the way, I doubt Steve's claim that the carbon in bone is metabolized by bacteria -- my guess is that it's in the form of calcium carbonate or some such, not counting the marrow as part of the bone, of course. --Trovatore 20:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I'm working on it. It's surprisingly difficult to find! Flyguy649 talk contribs 21:05, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
From this ref: Bones are 20% water, and 75% of the dry weight is organic matter, and while there is some carbonate in the inorganic, we'll ignore it. Proteins are ~45% carbon by mass. So roughly speaking, wet bone is 25% carbon. Flyguy649 talk contribs 22:27, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Bone is about 50% protein - mostly collagen. GB 22:28, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Charge buildup through friction with air

Friction between materials can cause the build up of a charge (triboelectric effect), but are there materials that build up a charge when air (wind) rushes past them? DirkvdM 05:42, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

I suppose that's how thunderstorms are made. Bo Jacoby 06:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC).

You mean lightning, yeah, I thought about that too, but that seems to be a different effect (although it doesn't have to be the same effect). Anyway, I'm looking for a solid material, at least something one can build something out of, so to say. DirkvdM 07:48, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

What is your project? A wind-driven electrostatic power plant? That's a great idea. Bo Jacoby 08:01, 26 July 2007 (UTC).
Unless you happen to live downwind of the thing and are concerned about lightning damage! But one assumes the amount of energy you could extract this way would be small - so my concern is probably more theoretical than real. SteveBaker 11:41, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I seem to remember some concern over using dust blowers on static sensitive circuitry due to the fact that the air got charged up, but I cant remember where I saw it. If the air got charged, then presumably an insulated nozzle would get charged the opposite way?--SpectrumAnalyser 12:46, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I have a faint memory of reading in a book or seeing in a documentary about building skyscrapers that static electricity buildup is a problem due to wind blowing past the building and the electrical potential between the air at the top of the building and the air at the bottom of the building. It led to an experiment I tried - putting an antenna on top of a 13-floor building and another in the ground and measuring voltage/amperage between the two (connected by thickly insulated wiring. The amperage was negligible, but the voltage was measurable at only 13 floors. I wouldn't be surprised if it was much higher at 100 floors. -- Kainaw(what?) 19:07, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Well that's promising. A building isn't designed to build up a charge - it might even be designed not to. So if it already works there, then what if the building were coated in the right sort of material? Btw, I want a charge in the material, not in the air, but I suppose that comes down to the same thing. DirkvdM 19:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
SpectrumAnalyser, is or the air and the circuitry that creates the charge? Instinctively I'd say plastic sounds like a good material. DirkvdM 19:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I presumed it the friction between the air and the nozzle that charges them both when I read the advice, but my memory is very vague --SpectrumAnalyser 22:55, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Steve, why do you say the charge-buildup would be small? The surface of a windmill isn't too big, yet it can generate several MW. Imagine this stuff on the roof of a factory. That's quite a surface and would have a great potential for slowing down the wind, which is basically the source of wind-energy (and it would be right where a lot of energy is needed). DirkvdM 19:14, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
You are all making the common error of confusing voltage and current. Sure, you can build up enormous voltages - but you aren't extracting much power because it's just a static charge. Sure, you'll get an occasional impressive spark - but the total current flowing (and therefore the total energy extracted from the wind) is tiny compared to what a windmill could produce. Static-sensitive circuitry suffers horribly from a huge voltage - even if the current flow it tiny and brief - but you can't build useful powerstations that run on static electricity. SteveBaker 01:53, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Wait a minute, Steve, I distinctly remember hearing about a guy who had a house powered by static electricity. To get the living room lights to go on, he'd shuffle his feet on the carpet. To operate his television, he'd pet his cat. In fact, I think his name was Steve. Oh, wait, it was Steven Wright. "Never mind." —Steve Summit (talk) 02:56, 27 July 2007 (UTC)


Sorry, but Wikipedia cannot offer advice on how to create machines to use in your diabolical plans to take over the world. Please consult with your doctor. Thanks. kmccoy (talk) 23:09, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Glad you brought that up. I'm not asking for the design of infernal machines or such. :) I just want to know what material would build up a charge when air rushes past it. And I'm quite serious by the way. I really want to know this. DirkvdM 06:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Iron ore

Why iron -ore deposits on hill tops occur only in sedimentary form ?

Most of the time sedimentary, but pyrite for example is not sedimentary but created by hot water transport.--Stone 13:01, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
We have quite a good article at Iron ore which discusses some of the different ores and their modes of formation. DuncanHill 16:47, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Exotic or Negative Mass to reduce net mass?

Picture of the object

Assuming one could create and use exotic matter or negative mass, would it be possible to reduce the "net mass" of an object made of both mass and exotic mass (as shown in the picture)? If so, would that not mean that the net mass of an object could be reduced below that of a photon (or all together negate the effective mass of the object) so that higher-than-lightspeed-travel would be possible? --Demonesque 07:30, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes, assuming the impossible, anything is possible. Bo Jacoby 07:55, 26 July 2007 (UTC).

Thanks, so very, very, extremely helpful. I realize that my question is speculative, since exotic matter itself is speculative, but what I am trying to find out is whether or not the two bodies would negate each other's mass as described or if it would be no different than two objects of different types of mass (or in other words, if the exotic mass would just be adding to the mass of the object.) --Demonesque 14:22, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Seriously, the answer is yes or no depending entirely on the assumed properties of the exotic matter and how it interacts with normal matter. As we have no examples of exotic matter, we have no constraints. Hence you are free to assume it to be true if you want to. That said, I think it would be far less weird if exotic matter had a positive inertial mass and only a negative gravitational mass. My opinion on what is asthetically pleasing would exclude your scenario. Dragons flight 14:43, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I'd agree, looking at the articles, only negative gravitational mass appears to have been postulated, negative inertial mass appears to be paradoxical in its very concept, that applying a force in one direction would provide acceleration in the other, I cant see how that could possibly fit in with conservation of energy and momentum. Philc 14:28, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
It wouldn't work. From my knowledge of special relativity, anything with a nonzero real mass must move below the speed of light in order to have a real amount of energy. If you can have nonreal amounts, it can be done with just matter of positive mass. What you're looking for involves imaginary mass. You also can't just package something with positive mass and something with negative mass to make it add to zero and go the speed of light. Each individual particle has to be able to travel that speed. By the way, I'm using mass to mean absolute mass, and energy to mean relative mass. — Daniel 23:38, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] automobile steering

after an automobile initiates a turn ,its steering automatically aligns or comes back to its initial position even without our effort.how does this happen? 210.212.228.8 07:58, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

see caster angle. It is actually more complicated than that, but only at a level way more complex than wiki can stand. Greglocock 08:33, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

A couple of ways to do it.
Caster: First, by tilting the steering axis, it can be set up so that the contact point of the tire with the ground is actually behind the steering axis, rather than right on it as when the steering axis would be vertical through the centerline of the hub. Since there is some drag, the contact of tire with road will naturally attempt to place itself as far back from the steering axis as possible. (look at the steering axis of a bicycle for example; i.e., the headtube, the bearings right below the handlebars that the fork pivots in. They're not vertical, they're tilted so that the line through them hits the floor forward of where the tire hits the floor. The curve in the bicycle's forks that moves the wheel forward is to reduce the self straightening action of this. The further back the contact point is from the axis, the more "relaxed" the steering is, wanting to just stay straight. the closer the contact point is to the axis, the more twitchy the steering becomes. If the contact point is moved forward of the steering axis, the steering is unstable, it has to be constantly prevented from deviating from straight.). Same reason "casters" on furniture or suitcases or grocery carts get called that; in that case, the steering axis that the whole thing swivels on is vertical, but the whole wheel is offset so that the steering axis doesn't go through its center; when you push the cart or whatever, the wheels naturally lines up so that it's straight back from the steering axis.
That all works, as you may have noticed, on wheels that are not powered, i.e. not front wheel drive. You can imagine that if the wheel is pulling the car forward, the tendency for the wheel to be pulled straight back from the steering axis is reduced. So, another way to do it is having it set up so that when the wheel is turned, it raises that corner of the car up a tiny bit; the weight of the car will then tend to pull it down, and keep the wheels straight. Luckily, this is accomplished by... tilting the steering axis.
The other thing that is partially related is toe-in. The front wheels are sort of pigeon toed, i.e. the fronts are closer together than the rears. If you fiddle with that for a while, you see that if the car is turned in one direction, that makes one wheel run straighter, while the other wheel is more "crooked". This generates a force that tends to push the car back to where both wheels are equally crooked, in opposite directions. Again, this doesn't work for front wheel drive, where they are often toed out.
So, combining all these things to the proper amount depends on fwd vs rwd, the weight of the car, and a dozen other things. Gzuckier 19:35, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Tilting Immersion blenders

While mixing some food with an immersion blender, I noticed that whenever the device was tilted and spinning, there was a powerful force trying to bring it back to vertical. I thought at first that it was some kind of gyroscope effect, as it only happened when the blades were spinning, but found that on further investigation, the blender tried to return to vertical even when started at an angle. Any ideas what could have been causing this effect? (If it helps, I was blending tinned tomatoes) Laïka 13:07, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Does it do this when not placed in the food ? I'm thinking you have it at an angle, partly in the food and partly out, causing it to pull down in the food where you have contact, which would tend to make it go vertical. StuRat 15:17, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
It does only happen in the food, but the bowl is much deeper than the height of the blades; the tomato covers the whole apparatus even when at an angle. Laïka 15:42, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Is it not just pressure differences? The spinning blades accelerate the food being blended so that it exits the blender through the slits in the side of the round head. This lowers the pressure in the round head, so the higher pressure in the rest of the bowl pushes the food into blades; at the same time, the lower pressure below the head compared to above means the head gets pushed down. People often think of this as the lower pressure 'pulling' the round head down and the food up into the blades. The head of the blender gets 'pulled' towards the position of vertically standing up on the bottom of the bowl; if you put it in that position, you'll find it hard to lift up as well as tilt. Thinking about it, I hope you can see that tilting the blender leads to it 'pulling' more strongly one way than the other; I hope you can see it, because I can't think of a good way to describe it over the internet! Skittle 21:05, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
That makes sense; I hadn't thought about the pressure differences caused by the blades. Thanks! Laïka 21:40, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Nano tubes synthesis

Is it possible to synthesise nanotubes of CuS using dimethyl glyoxime as a capping agent?If yes what are the reagents to be used? Its a project requirement.

This is the first I hear of anything other than carbon nanotubes. anyway - Dr N S Xu of Zhongshan University grew copper sulfide nanowire by treating copper foil with hydrogen sulfide and oxygen mixture for 10 hours at room temperature. No solutions were involved.[1]. GB 11:42, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Future of Key Boards

In the future, will the standard keyboard be replaced by another method of communicating?-—Preceding unsigned comment added by WonderFran (talk • contribs)

Probably, but the Reference desk, despite what you may have been told, hasn't had a working crystal ball since the TimeQuake of 2005. - CHAIRBOY (☎) 15:59, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Although not terribly new (patented in 1936), there's the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, which a lot of people are starting to use instead of the standard QWERTY keyboard. -- JSBillings 16:37, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
I've tried to use the Dvorak, but I've had difficulty finding a dumbed-down howto for getting the OS (Fedora in my case) to accept a Dvorak keyboard for input. -- Kainaw(what?) 16:57, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
There's a line you can put in /etc/sysconfig/keyboard that'll tell it to use dvorak. I think it's something like KEYTABLE="dvorak" -- JSBillings 17:02, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
"A lot" is not that many people, no doubt less than 1% of computer markets worldwide (remember that OS X, which you can see in practically any coffee shop, is still only around 5% of the market share!). It's not going to become truly popular anytime soon, because its purported advantages are not enough to overcome the disadvantages of trying to change the input devices for an entire technology. --24.147.86.187 21:54, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Ah, that's for a different reason. People take laptops to coffee shops to show off and be snooty- thus OS X --frotht 02:14, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
This guy who had equipped his bicycle with pc hardware, satellite uplink, etc. way back when and roamed the US writing columns about it for a living had set up eight switches, four for the fingers on each hand, so that he could type while biking, in raw Ascii 8 bit digital. Now that is cool. Gzuckier 19:39, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
That sounds like a great way to have a biking accident... --24.147.86.187 21:54, 26 July 2007 (UTC)


The odds are the standard keyboard will not. It allows for precise input of written alphabetic languages at relatively high speeds (with practice, obviously). There is no serious competitor to this sort of functionality at the moment. Voice-to-text technology might increase its ability to replace it but I doubt it will ever be anything more than a supplementary technology — even assuming that it was made far more precise and generalizable than it currently is, strictly speaking you often don't want to have to speak to write things down. (If you think people talking on cell phones is annoying, imagine how it would be if everyone was dictating their e-mails!)
That being said, here are two futuristic speculations:
  • What if alphabetic languages become economically less important? Imagine that a language like Chinese, which is not alphabetic, became a prerequisite for global commerce and communication? Keyboards are notoriously more difficult for non-alphabetic languages than for alphabetic ones, so I could imagine some other technology more suited to non-alphabetic languages becoming popular and supplanting the traditional keyboard.
  • What if we had a way to directly receive signals from the brain and transfer them into writing? You could skip the hands altogether as a way of translating thought language into written language. Is this ever going to be possible? Probably — if the brain can tell the fingers how to use a keyboard, then there is likely going to be some way to intercept that same sort of set of instructions. The real question, as I see it, as to whether it would become a realistic and popular technology is whether or not it could do this easily and non-invasively — I don't think most people are going to want to have things embedded in their bodies just to take care of the chore of not typing (some no doubt would, though — aside from cyberpunk fetish geeks, I could imagine parapalegics, sufferers from repetitive strain injuries, etc. finding this sort of technology useful even if it is invasive). Anyway, advances towards this sort of thing are going pretty well at the moment, I believe, though anything rivaling the precision/speed of a keyboard is still some time off, I think.
Just some food for thought... --24.147.86.187 21:54, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Speech is handy in niche markets - phone response systems, hands-off stuff in cars, that kinds of thing. The human voice has some advantages and some disadvantages - firstly, it works at a distance and it works around corners. It's a broadcast mechanism - one person talks and everyone in the room can hear. It's very error-prone (we mis-speak and mis-hear all the time) - but that doesn't matter too much in most conversation because the person you're talking to can generally ask questions to clarify. These are all great things in some sorts of situation - but they are nothing short of disasterous when interfacing to computers - every computer in the room might respond to your command to copy the file named "reformat" onto the disk - but then the computer you were actually talking to might hear this as a command to "reformat the disk". Humans know that eye contact contains information about who within a conversation is being addressed and who is merely listening in. Offices are annoyingly noisy places - speech input will make that vastly worse. You want to work on your computer while watching TV or listening to music? Dangerous! Who knows what some actor on TV is telling their computer and getting picked up on your microphone? It's notoriously difficult to do something as conveying your email address by voice - mine used to be sjbaker1@airmail.net (not anymore) - the number of times I had to tell people "no that's the digit '1', not the word 'one'" - and correct people who thought 'airmail' was 'air male' or something. Just try reading a C++ program source to people:
  #include <stdio.h>
  #define pythag_rule(x,y) sqrt((x)*(x)+(y)*(y))
  void main ( int argc, char **argv )
  {
    const char helloWorld[] = "Hello World.\n" ;
Reading a million lines of that stuff to the computer ACCURATELY - where a missing semicolon can take you a week to track down...I don't think so!
Keyboards are a pain - but there is very little sign of them ever going away. SteveBaker 01:43, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
There's a bit of a fallacy in your argument, though: "Today's computer languages all require utterly precise placement of semicolons and other punctuation, ergo keyboards will never go away for programming." —Steve Summit (talk) 02:34, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Hmmm - natural language programming...yeah - good luck with that one! So what is "one plus two times three"? Seven? Nine? Maybe I'd better says "one plus open bracket two times three close bracket"...but before you can blink, math and control structure gets so phreaking complicated that you just can't turn it into spoken words...it's just too complicated. To pick the line of code I just typed: "glVertex2f((float)x_cen+rad*(float)sin((double)val),(float)y_cen+rad*(float)cos((double)val));" - how the heck are you going to express that in natural language? The closest we ever got to that was COBOL - which is without doubt one of the nastiest programming languages ever to hit the big-time. It only became remotely usable when they finally dropped: "ADD 1 TO 2 GIVING X  ; MULTIPLY 3 BY X GIVING Y" and allowed "COMPUTE Y = (1+2)*3" but the whole point of using a programming language is to avoid the horrible pitfalls of natural language and to wind up with something concise and unambiguous. SteveBaker 17:04, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Now where did I say anything about natural-language programming? I wasn't even thinking of natural-language programming!
You, I think, are still thinking too narrowly (and perhaps even circularly). If you assume programming has to be done with keyboards, then of course all you're going to think about are computer languages that have evolved around the assumption of typing them in via keyboards, so of course it's going to be difficult to think about abandoning keyboards while those languages are still in use.
Me, I was imagining that once direct-brain man-machine interfaces become widespread (and, yes, I do assume this will happen), we'll begin devising some completely different computer languages optimized around the strengths and weaknesses of that interface. I don't imagine that a direct-brain interface will be perfect; in fact I'm reasonably sure it'll be lousy at handling conventional human languages, or traditional computer languages, or images, or indeed anything that we're used to doing with our five regular senses. But if it works well at some bizarre other level, we can invent "languages" that work well at that level. (Though they're likely to be so bizarre that we can't begin to describe them today, until we know what a direct-brain interface "feels like" and can do.)
But this is probably a little too speculative for the Science desk, and we don't seem to have a Science Fiction desk. So I'll stop now.
Steve Summit (talk) 23:27, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
I believe Loglan (admittedly not a natural language) has a way to pronounce parentheses. —Tamfang 03:42, 30 July 2007 (UTC)
Speaking of the computer-controlled-by-speech-on-the-TV issue, I once heard a (possibly apocryphal) story where a kids show host said "hey kids, hold your phone up to the TV if you want to talk to Krusty!", and they played the touch-tones of a 900 (pay) number on the air, which dialed all these kids' phones and made Krusty (or whoever) a bunch of money! --TotoBaggins 14:16, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Ooohhh! Good one! SteveBaker 17:04, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Actually, it made me think of the recently suggested flaw in Windows Vista (which is now either patched or soon-to-be patched), where a combination of low security on voice-activated commands and a theoretical piece of speaker-controlling spyware could have every computer in a room formatting its hard drive. Confusing Manifestation 11:54, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

Someone mentioned mind dictation? While mind dictation is not yet possible, mind control in a very limited form is, see [2]. BTW, completely OT but I came across this which I hope is a hoax/spoof [3] Nil Einne 16:17, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Salmonella odds

So I've always eaten raw eggs -- in mayonaises and various other things -- and I now work in a restaurant that keeps its raw egg mayonaisses and other possibly salmonella-risky things for up to a week. The restaurant's in Italy, so nobody cares. And I'm becoming convinced, because nobody cares, that my squeamishness about leaving raw eggs for a week in the fridge is ridiculous. The question I'm getting at is a) whether Salmonella is still so much of a risk as it was, say ten years ago, and b) whether the eggs I and the restaurant use -- organic eggs that have never seen one of those gigantic chicken coups they show in vegetarian horror propaganda movies -- have any risk at all for salmonella. Oh. And also, what is the risk even for mass-produced eggs? If I were, say, to eat a raw egg every day for a year, is it at all likely that I'd get Salmonella? And what are the odds of Salmonella, if I do get it, causing any sort of permanent damage or death? I did look at the Salmanellosis or whatever article, but it was kind of vague where I was concerned. Thanks, Sasha —Preceding unsigned comment added by 151.28.233.89 (talk • contribs)

I can't vouch for Italy, but in the UK, all poultry is vaccinated against Salmonella (see Egg (food)#Edwina Currie, Salmonella and the UK Lion Mark); indeed a random test of 28,000 eggs, a grand total of 0 eggs had Salmonella. Laïka 21:38, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
The CDC says there are 1.4 million cases of salmonella in the USA each year. Presumably some non-trivial percentage of that is from eating raw eggs, so I'd say at least in this country it's a not-insubstantial risk. Italy is probably similar. --TotoBaggins 14:18, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Have a look at figure 2, page 3 here. Looks like Salmonella levels in italian flocks are pretty low, though not quite as low as in the UK. This is not medical advice, but unless you are immune-compromised, pregnant, elderly or very young, your chances of Bad Things from eating eggs seem low. Skittle 13:01, 29 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] aids

can someone get effected by aids through licking? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.69.178.16 (talk • contribs) 21:44, 26 July 2007

Wikipedia cannot dispense medical advice. Please consult a doctor if you have a question. For purely informational purposes, you should read the article about AIDS -- JSBillings
Licking what? Skin, genitals, an open wound? --24.147.86.187 21:56, 26 July 2007 (UTC)
Deer? Capuchin 07:57, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
Licking, Missouri? The Aids Project of the Ozarks [4] being 49 miles away implies that it might be possible. Edison 17:18, 27 July 2007 (UTC)