Daily Shaarli
September 23, 2022
What level of CO2 is toxic to humans?
This could occur when exposed to levels above 5,000 ppm for many hours. At even higher levels of CO2 can cause asphyxiation as it replaces oxygen in the blood-exposure to concentrations around 40,000 ppm is immediately dangerous to life and health.
How much c02 in the air is dangerous?
The American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) recommends an 8- hour TWA Threshold Limit Value (TLV) of 5,000 ppm and a Ceiling exposure limit (not to be exceeded) of 30,000 ppm for a 10-minute period. A value of 40,000 is considered immediately dangerous to life and health (IDLH value).
How much CO2 is too much for humans?
350 to 1000 ppm is a good quality concentration in an enclosed room. This is what the Earth is, a confined space. 1000 to 2000 ppm, the air quality is low. From 2000 to 5000 ppm, CO2 concentration starts to cause problems (headaches, insomnia, nausea).
One Seattle morning, Carolina Reid sat in a room with nine other volunteers, each waiting to take part in a clinical trial for a new, experimental malaria vaccine.
Reid's turn came. She put her arm over a cardboard box filled with 200 mosquitoes and covered with a mesh that keeps them in but still lets them bite. "Literally a Chinese food takeout container" is how she remembers it. A scientist then covered her arm with a black cloth, because mosquitoes like to bite at night.
Then the feeding frenzy began.
"My whole forearm swelled and blistered," says Reid. "My family was laughing, asking like, 'why are you subjecting yourself to this?'" And she didn't just do it once. She did it five times.
"We use the mosquitoes like they're 1,000 small flying syringes," explains University of Washington, Seattle physician and scientist Dr. Sean Murphy, lead author on a paper in Science Translational Medicine released on August 24 detailing the vaccine trials.
The insects deliver live malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites that have been genetically modified to not get people sick. The body still makes antibodies against the weakened parasite so it's prepared to fight the real thing. //
He and his colleagues went this route because it is costly and time consuming to develop a formulation of a parasite that can be delivered with a needle. The parasites mature inside mosquitoes so at this proof of concept stage – as early stage trials are called — it makes sense to use them for delivery.
"They went old school with this one," says Dr. Kirsten Lyke, a physician and vaccine researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine who was not involved in the study. "All things old become new again.
JOE BOB: Well you’re a well-known Hollywood liberal. You always put social justice causes into your movies. You made a passion project in 1962 called “The Intruder”, starring William Shatner, about racism in the rural south. An award-winning movie that you once told me was the only movie you ever made that lost money – and that became a turning point in your career.
CORMAN: Yes. It was the only film, at that time, that I ever made that lost money. And the reason was, I believe – although the film did win a couple of awards and the reviews were wonderful – but it lost money, and I think it lost money for two reasons. One, the public just didn’t want to see a picture about racial integration. And Two – and this is where my lesson came in – I was too earnest. I was delivering a message, I was not delivering entertainment.
JOE BOB: You always have a lot going on in the subtext in your films…is that accurate?
CORMAN: That is completely accurate. I am to the left, politically, but I never want to interfere with the entertainment quality of the film. At the same time, with the subtext of the film, there are thoughts that I would like to get in, personally. And I think it acts as a certain catalyst, to a certain extent with the combination. It makes the film more complex, and more interesting.
All of this amounts to revealing that Hollywood doesn’t think very highly of its fans and they express that sentiment in various ways. Sometimes it’s by cast and crew, sometimes it’s in the writing of the show itself, but it’s always going to paint the people creating the work as the enemy of the people meant to view it.
CORMAN: It led me to the themes of my films after that, where I made certain that I always delivered the entertainment value, and the themes I was interested in were always subtextual. They were all secondary.
Nearly six years after the United States helped negotiate it, the Senate has ratified a global climate treaty that would formally phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, industrial chemicals commonly found in air conditioners and refrigerators, insulating foams and pharmaceutical inhalers.
The Kigali Amendment, an addition to the Montreal Protocol climate treaty, aims to drastically reduce the global use of the compounds.
"This measure will go a long way to lowering global temperatures while also creating tens of thousands of American jobs," Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said before Wednesday's vote, which passed 69-27.
HFCs were widely adopted in the 1980s and 1990s to replace another family of chemicals, chlorofluorocarbon, or CFCs, which damage the Earth's ozone layer. But after the switch, HFCs emerged as some of the most potent greenhouse gases, hundreds to thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide. //
On the climate side, there is some evidence that commitments to cut back on the use of HFCs are not being followed. A study published in Nature Communications in 2021 found that atmospheric levels of the most potent HFC, HFC-23, should have been much lower than what scientists detected if China and India, countries responsible for manufacturing the majority of the compound that turns into HFC-23, had accurately reported their reductions.
Many low-resource areas of the world are short on medical technology, including incubators. So why not turn parents into pseudo-incubators? When a baby is born prematurely, a good way to help the baby survive and thrive is simply to hold it close to a parent's naked chest. No technology needed!
That's the essence of kangaroo care.
It's a method of holding the baby, clad only in a diaper, right up against a parent's bare chest for skin-to-skin contact. In 1978, physician researchers Edgar Rey Sanabria and Héctor Martínez-Gómez introduced the technique at the maternity ward of the San Juan de Dios Hospital in Bogota, Colombia. //
"It was what we had to do and it saved my child's life" //
"It creates a link to my child and brings me closer with my wife" //
"I started taking part ... to give the love of a father to my children"