Alt text:
While it seemed like a fun prank at the time, I realize my prank fire extinguishers full of leaded gasoline were a mistake.
I'm sorry, what transplants?
this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
907 points (98.4% liked)
xkcd
8839 readers
19 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
It's about the microbiome, lots of critters living in your bowels breaking down stuff for you. Some conditions or treatments (e.g. chemo) can fuck with that severely up to completely obliterate everything so you need a donor to get it started up again.
Most of your body’s mass does not have a human genome, it represents other living things existing in symbiosis with your body. And your digestive tract is nearly 100% reliant on these microbiota to break down food and provide it to the small intestine. If you don’t have the right mix/balance or you have too many of the wrong species, you can suffer extremely deleterious health effects. If you have none at all, you starve pretty quickly regardless of how much food you eat.
Fun facts:
- Almost all of your excrement that isn’t visible remnants of unchewed food are the remains of gut bacteria that died.
- Scientists have recently confirmed that your appendix acts as a “safe room” for your good, beneficial gut biome to retreat to when the rest of the intestinal tract is suffering from catastrophic environmental issues or another bug is running rampant and dominating in a destructive manner. Once things calm down, the intestines are re-colonized by good bacteria from the appendix.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
I… am strangely ambivalent and conflicted about soup.
I recognize logically and rationally that it should be lower or to the left, but would personally place it higher or to the right.
Maybe smack dab in the centre gives us the worst of both options.
If anyone else is also curious on why "putting mold on infections" is more good than crumple zones:
They [molds] also play important roles in biotechnology and food science in the production of various pigments, foods, beverages, antibiotics, pharmaceuticals and enzymes. - Wikipedia
load more comments
(1 replies)
Heelies should be at least below the middle line.
Yesterday I heard a conspiracy theory that the reason lead was added to gasoline was to keep the Pouge carburetor from becoming viable because it allegedly used pre-heated gas vapor to achieve 100-200mpg efficiency, but the lead clogged it up instead.
Here's my own counter-conspiracy on that... if everything we read says that it didn't actually work, why did Breen Motor Company claim it worked when THEY tried it? And why did Pouge suddenly disappear?
Hmm, I had never thought of it...but soup is absolutely a neutral experience. Even a good soup on a cold, winter day is still slightly above neutral, and is improved by non-soup add-ins.
Combo washer dryer are never as good as two decent machines. Empiric fact.