[noir detective voice] this dame had legs in all the right places
Legs in all the right places and a face that went on for days.
Did they ever reveal how Captain America was thawed? Because I’m picturing a bunch of Shield agents with hair dryers and I don’t think that’s quite right.
I don’t think they’d want to microwave him so hair dryer is really the only remaining option. That’s how I’d do it. badscienceshenanigans Do you have a sciency way to accomplish this task?
Well, let’s see.
To thaw a 1.5 metric ton colossal squid frozen in a block of ice (the only way the fishermen who trawled the thing in could bring it home before it went bad), scientists put it in a big vat of brine just above 0 Celsius/32F. That allowed the fresh water to melt while still keeping the squid as cold as possible. Essential, since for a giant corpse with tentacles, certain parts are bound to thaw days before others and could become quite rotten before the rest comes out of the ice block if you’re not careful.
HOWEVER Captain America was still alive, which complicates things. On the other hand, even supersoldiers are significantly smaller than this record-setting colossal squid. This helps thaw logistics somewhat.
Much like the squid, Captain America would have to be kept at a consistent temperature throughout his body in order to be thawed successfully. If his extremities were to thaw more than a minute or two before his heart and lungs were thawed and reactivated, the tissue wouldn’t have any oxygen and would quickly die. What a shame to bring back Steve Rogers only to have him be the poster boy for gangrene. Brain tissue becoming metabolically active before the cardiovascular system began functioning would be even more disastrous— possible permanent brain damage. And the GH-325 project was born
To keep his temperature as equal as possible across his entire body, something like the squid brine or (more likely) an antifreeze solution would be used. Immerse the Capsicle in brine until the entire unit is within a degree or two of thawing* to begin Phase II.
*Note that due to presence of salts, fats, protein, etc, the freezing point of meat is actually 28-29F. Apologies to non-US readers, sadly I only work with American meat and don’t know the freezing point of corpses/beef in Sane Country Units. That being said, Steve Rogers is 100% American meat. Fahrenheit shall be considered the appropriate unit for this project.
At the thawing point, it’s important to consider life support functions. I don’t know how fast human tissue uses up oxygen at refrigerator-range temperatures, but I’m going to assume that the sooner you have oxygen circulating the better. A heart-lung machine would be needed to oxygenate and move the blood around for a while before the heart gets started back up.
Meanwhile, because Captain America’s last un-frozen moments were spent deep underwater, there may be decompression issues at play. Whatever gas bubbles may have been present in his tissue are currently frozen in place, but when he thaws they can move about and create embolisms —> the bends. Better put him in a hyperbaric chamber just in case.
Since Captain America regained consciousness in a recovery room rather than during the thaw process, it may be safe to assume that he was sedated and/or placed in a drug-induced coma during thaw.
So at this point we’ve got a giant bathtub of brine, a heart-lung machine, oxygen canisters, lots of drugs, plus all the necessary monitoring equipment all inside a hyperbaric chamber. After thawing the antifreeze bath could be replaced with gradually warming water or saline solution in order to bring Captain America back up to normal body temperature. So many machines! This is US medicine at its finest.
Forced warm air blowers (hairdryers) are needed after Captain America is fully thawed, organ systems are reactivated, and he is brought back to normal body temperature. At this point it becomes necessary to dry and style Captain America and put him in period-appropriate jammies to sleep it off in a vintage hospital room. If you think hearing the wrong baseball game tipped him off fast, you should see him wake up with bad hair.
THIS IS THE BEST POST IN THE HISTORY OF EVERYTHING.
That being said, Steve Rogers is 100% American meat. Fahrenheit shall be considered the appropriate unit for this project.
CANNOT STOP LAUGHING.
THANK YOU SCIENCE
I love you Tumblr
Anonymous asked:
sodiumlamp answered:
Before I go on, let me just say: Yikes.
To be perfectly honest, I’d say biologists are closer to chemists than chemical engineers, mainly because I’ve worked with a lot of biologists in the past, and they have an aptitude for laboratory work, written procedures, chemical hygeine, etc. They’re weak on chemistry, but they’re teachable, and the lab setting is something they’re already used to.
By contrast, every chemical engineer I’ve had to deal with tends to put their own assumptions ahead of my data and expertise. I’ve had to argue with engineers who demand testing, then refused to believe the results because they didn’t agree with their preconceived notions.
Chemical engineers love to sat that things are “impossible”, based on the diagrams of the units they deal with. I don’t know jack about diagrams or process design, but when you ask me to test something, you’re already admitting that failure is not only possible but anticipated. Usually what happens is my data is vindicated, and the engineers realize that the result was possible all along. They just didn’t count on such-and-such thing happening to the unit, or another engineer made some change without anyone considering the impact on the unit.
But it’s a lot easier to blame the analyst. I had an e-mail thread of big shots trying to troubleshoot a titration method they had never performed, just to avoid dealing with a low result. The sample was run in duplicate, and multiple samples were tested, each run by seasoned veterans familiar with the procedure. The only possible source of error would have been if the titrant had somehow gotten stronger over the past two weeks (because it had given good results before then).
So naturally they asked if we had some rookie running the test this week, like we routinely hire people off the street and turn them loose on this stuff just to ruin everyone’s day. They asked us about the titrant’s expiration, and it wasn’t for another year. I had it standardized anyway, and it came back right where it should be. So they finally bit the bullet and took steps on their end, and *lo and behold*, the numbers started to improve.
The moral of the story is that I know what I’m doing. I don’t claim to be infallible, but I try to learn from my mistakes and anticipate potential sources of error. Chemical engineers seem to struggle with this. To be fair, I assume that there’s a lot riding on the results I give them, and it’s a daunting task to fix units that aren’t operating properly. But there’s a fine line between skepticism and denial. If your weatherman tells you there’s a tornado heading your way, you’d be better off camping out in your bathroom rather than calling the station and demanding he recheck his Doppler radar to make sure.
I heard of a similar incident at an old job, where the purified water system was being sanitized with bleach and hydrogen peroxide on a regular basis. The idea is that you would alternate from one to the other, thereby killing off any bugs that might have developed a resistance to either chemical.
But somewhere along the way, our maintenance staff started using both at the same time. I eventually looked this up and discovered that bleach and hydrogen peroxide will react with one another, producing salt and water. The only reason their method worked as well as it did was because they used more bleach than peroxide, so there was at least a fraction of the bleach dosage that could still do the work. So it didn’t do any immediate harm, and it seemed to work, so no one had any idea how wrongheaded this approach was.
I would have been about 27 when this happened, and that was about the time I began to realize that the people who’ve worked here longer than me don’t necessarily know best, and I have to be the expert on some of these topics, because there’s no one else who can. And it’s surprisingly difficult to convince people you know what you’re talking about. The news media warned the public about looking directly at the solar eclipse. They quoted experts and everything, but how many people wouldn’t listen? How do you get through to them? I don’t know. Sometimes you just have to pick your battles. I had a guy lose his cool on me one day because I insisted on having samples properly labeled. He said I “freak out over the stupidest shit”, except I didn’t even raise my voice, and it’s *not* stupid shit, it’s basic lab procedure. If I can’t identify a sample, it’s useless. But people think I’m being a dick when I’m just trying to do my job. They don’t respect that they’re in my world when they walk into a lab.
Unfortunately, your workplace seems to suffer from the same problem, to the point where they don’t even have a chemist in the lab at all. They hired you and a gaggle of microbiologists and said “close enough”. And maybe 99 times out of a hundred it *is* close enough. I try not to get too arrogant about this line of work. Lots of people can do laboratory work. I know, because I’ve worked with a lot of laymen. But when things go wrong, and equipment doesn’t work right, or the lab gets a problem they aren’t used to dealing with, *that’s* when you really need an honest-to-God chemist on your team. I might not know the answer either, but I know what questions to ask, and how to investigate.
The main thing you and your coworkers need to keep in mind is that you don’t know what you don’t know. *Why* would you need to make a germicidal agent more powerful? Is the existing disinfectant not effective enough? If HCl could make it stronger, why wouldn’t the manufacturer add it to their formula themselves? This sort of scrutiny doesn’t require a lot of technical or scientific knowledge. It’s just common sense thinking, a way to eliminate courses of action without even getting to the potential hazards.
Also, most manufacturers will take questions about their products. So even if you don’t have a chemist in-house, you can still talk to one who knows about the materials in question. When you have a service rep work on one of your instruments, talk to them and learn as much about it as you can. I’ve yet to meet a service guy who didn’t love to talk shop. Read the SDS. Establish written procedures and follow them. That sort of thing.
Sadly, your scenario is pretty common. I don’t know if employers just don’t value chemistry degrees, or there simply aren’t enough chemists out there in the workforce, but I usually find myself outnumbered by co-workers from other disciplines. But the best co-workers are the ones who make an effort to understand what’s going on and show a genuine curiosity about the work they do. It doesn’t make them chemists, but it puts them on the right wavelength.
LOL SURPRISE Sugar & Spice Big Sisters Compilation DIY Shopkins Shoppie …
Game Center CX S05 035 Princess Tomato and the Salad Kingdom
Storn Cook, who is Champions/Hero System’s answer to Larry Elmore, THE Champions artist.
He did several illustrations in 6th Edition that we ultimately never got an explanation for: a desert setting where people ride lizards, where our heroes are an Arabian lady archer with a love of midriff revealing outfits, and her sidekick, an intelligent gorilla. Who are they? What are they? We never got any answers.
bee-squared-official
