A terrible death, a lack of self-control, and extermination
A terrible death:
So yesterday in my marine invertebrate zoology class I learned about the most terrible way of dying ever. It turns out that some years back researchers who were trying to work out the Krebs cycle needed to know what chemicals were intermediates in the reactions. Well, the intermediates in the Krebs cycle were present only for milliseconds, so they needed some way of isolating the chemicals very quickly. So what they did was they set crabs on treadmills and ran the crabs until they could no longer run due to exhaustion. Then they sped up the treadmill so that the poor crab was shot backwards into a vat of liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing the critter. Now, this had the desired effect. The crabs, having been constantly running, had the Krebs cycle actively reacting, and flash-freezing the critter preserved all of the intermediates. However, running and running and running until you gave out and then being frozen still doesn't seem like a fun way to die.
A lack of self-control:
Two days ago a friend challenged me to go for three weeks without masturbating. I accepted the challenge. And lasted a whopping 31 hours.
Extermination:
So apparently, when people wanted to buy land in the Amazon rainforest, they had to be sure that there were no native Americans living there. So, what would one do if there were native Americans living on land that one wanted to sell? Well, according to an ex-military type, the story goes that about 50 years ago people would drop a 100 pound bag of sugar into the rainforest where native Americans lived. And in a few days, there would be no more native Americans. Where did they go? Well, the native Americans had never tasted anything as good as sugar, so they would all eat it and eat it and eat it until they went into insulin shock and died. There seems to be no official evidence of this ever happening, but if it were true I wouldn't be surprised in the least, though I would certainly be disappointed in humanity.
So yesterday in my marine invertebrate zoology class I learned about the most terrible way of dying ever. It turns out that some years back researchers who were trying to work out the Krebs cycle needed to know what chemicals were intermediates in the reactions. Well, the intermediates in the Krebs cycle were present only for milliseconds, so they needed some way of isolating the chemicals very quickly. So what they did was they set crabs on treadmills and ran the crabs until they could no longer run due to exhaustion. Then they sped up the treadmill so that the poor crab was shot backwards into a vat of liquid nitrogen, flash-freezing the critter. Now, this had the desired effect. The crabs, having been constantly running, had the Krebs cycle actively reacting, and flash-freezing the critter preserved all of the intermediates. However, running and running and running until you gave out and then being frozen still doesn't seem like a fun way to die.
A lack of self-control:
Two days ago a friend challenged me to go for three weeks without masturbating. I accepted the challenge. And lasted a whopping 31 hours.
Extermination:
So apparently, when people wanted to buy land in the Amazon rainforest, they had to be sure that there were no native Americans living there. So, what would one do if there were native Americans living on land that one wanted to sell? Well, according to an ex-military type, the story goes that about 50 years ago people would drop a 100 pound bag of sugar into the rainforest where native Americans lived. And in a few days, there would be no more native Americans. Where did they go? Well, the native Americans had never tasted anything as good as sugar, so they would all eat it and eat it and eat it until they went into insulin shock and died. There seems to be no official evidence of this ever happening, but if it were true I wouldn't be surprised in the least, though I would certainly be disappointed in humanity.