Very Interesting!

Average IQ is always 100, so technically no at least as you asked the question. But yes you’re right that exposure to exhaust from leaded gasoline impairs cognitive function and there is a lot of research to back that up. This 4 decade long study which followed hundreds of children who grew up after exposure to leaded gas showed they had lower cognitive function and lower socioeconomic status by the time they were middle aged. This is still far from definitive and its too small of a sample size to draw conclusions about entire generations.

Look up the Flynn Effect, IQ scores in developed countries have been increasing steadily for a long time (although it looks to be leveling off). They're probably numerous reasons for it, but it's possible some of the increase is due to unleaded gasoline.

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Lead exposure is directly linked to developmental issues and lower IQ:

- https://today.duke.edu/2017/03/lead-exposure-childhood-linked-lower-iq-lower-status

We also know for a fact that levels of lead in blood decreased significantly following the phase out:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5810431/

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3620025/

- https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/691686

There's pretty good evidence that lead exposure from fuel is linked to an increase in crime:

- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3829390/

- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0014498316300109

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They didn't skip them. There are variants that use the other greek letters. Lambda is just a variant making a larger impact. You won't hear about all the variants unless they were influencing more public action.

Epsilon was the "California variant" identified roughly a year ago. It had some interesting mutations at the spike protein that helped it evade a fraction of the antibodies fighting the pathogen.

But since there are dozens and dozens of specific antibodies attacking dozen and dozens of specific sites on the spike protein, full immune escape wasn't nearly approached.

There were some implications for specific monoclonal antibody treatments.

But Epsilon basically died out (at least in the US) as people gained immunity to it either by vaccination or infection, especially with alpha or delta.

Other comments have answered your question, but for a deeper dive: I was just looking at this interesting article the other day that describes that many variants have been found, but only a handful are considered Variants of Interest (VOI) or Variants of Concern (VOC):

https://ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S0002-9440(21)00317-5/fulltext

The greek-letter-naming is not scientific, it is bureaucratic. Scientific names are pango lineages (e.g., B.1.1.7 for alpha) or GISAID clade (e.g., GRY for alpha), etc.

The World Health Organization (WHO) "names" strains of particular interest to avoid nomenclature such as the "British variant" or "Brazilian mutation". Bureaucratically each Variant of Interest (VOI) gets a Greek letter name handed out in the order they were designated VOI. The Variants of Concern (VOC) are Variants of Interest which have been "upped one level". Not all VOI become VOC. Currently, the designated strains are alpha (VOI + VOC), beta (VOI + VOC), gamma (VOI + VOC), delta (VOI + VOC), eta (VOI), iota (VOI), kappa (VOI), and lambda (VOI). See table below:

In general, the media only mentions the Variants of Concern (VOC), and do not mention the Variants of Interest (VOI) according to the WHO. The scientific community does not use the WHO-designations since they are not scientifically meaningful. I.e., if you are interested in research on the "alpha-strain", use B.1.1.7 and not alpha as a search term.

The current listing of international and bureaucratic names of SARS-CoV-2 variants can be found at https://www.who.int/en/activities/tracking-SARS-CoV-2-variants/

There is a literal gazillion of strains which are neither VOI nor VOC.

A - the other variants have been identified and named. They just didn't mutate in ways that make them notable at scale.

B - Lambda was mentioned weeks ago as a major concern as it was clearly becoming dominant in South America, but it's only just now being mentioned here because it has finally begun to spread away from that continent. This also tells you something about our news cycle.

The WHO has a page dedicated to stats on variants. It doesn't work well on mobile, but it shows that these evolutions are noted and monitored long before they ever hit headlines. Delta first reared its head in India last October.

First: saliva is 99% water, so anything in it will be in very low concentrations (which is why you should chew thoroughly before, so you can mix the saliva and help with very small portions).

Second: most of the enzymes present are for breaking starch and fat, both of which are not found in the outside of our thumbs.

Third: our thumb thumbs (and most of the body as well) are protected by the skin, made primarily of a protein called keratin (it rhymes). This is a very hardy structural protein, the same in our nails, hair and in some animal horns.

It does, but the enzymes in saliva aren't particularly effective at breaking down protein (which happens to be what your skin is made of). Salivary glands produce salivary amylase which breaks down starches, and salivary lipase which breaks down fats. There isn't a lot of Starch on the surface of your skin, so the amylase doesn't impact it much. The lipase probably does break down some of the lipids in your skin, but the proteins will remain more or less intact and unaffected leaving you with a fairly robust barrier to further damage.

the shortest answer is that the way saliva breaks down food doesnt work that well on living human skin. the slightly longer answer is that there isnt much in the way of enzymes (the stuff that breaks stuff down) in saliva and what is there isnt good at breaking down the stuff our skin is made of. its like how soapy water can help break down stuff on dirty plates, but it wont break down the paint or the plate itself.

It does. Your thumb will get very raw if you leave it in there. Ever seen a young kid (or older special kids) who drool, and they get a red, raw area all around their mouths?

My brother sucked his thumb til he was 12 . He has very small thumbs .. coincidence? You bet your ass it is but we still mock him for it and he's 36 now

UPC, specifically UPC-A, is a series of line of varying thickness representing 25 bits to encode a 12-digit number

QR code is a series of black squares presented in a grid that can represent up to a 7089-digit number with 23624 bits.

So if you're strictly speaking of data then a QR code can have 23599 more bits of data.

When you start encoding different types of information then it varies. There are multiple ways of encoding data into a QR code across the many iterations of the specification.

Edit: Sorry, I shouldn't rush to answer something on mobile. 11 digit UPC-A code plus the 12th check digit would represent 40 bits of data. This would be 23584 bits less than the largest QR codes.

Imagine if you made a document in something like Word, and you pasted in a barcode image on one line, then hit Return and pasted a different barcode on the next line, then hit Return and pasted a different barcode on the next line, and so on. Line after line of barcode images. Now imagine if you didn't have to make those barcodes very tall - if you could squish the images' height down so each one is short but still wide. Now you take those lines of squished barcodes and remove the spacing between the lines of the document so they butt up against each other. Now you have a little rectangular block made of multiple rows of barcodes. That's *sort of* what a QR code is doing (not exactly, because there's other blocks embedded in the middle to help with formatting and fixing alignment in case the image is bent or folded, and QR codes use a lot more redundancy for error detection and repair, so "rows of barcodes" is only *sort of* what QR is doing.)

Now imagine if you print this document out on paper, and then cut out the square with the codes and hand that to someone to decode. One problem they'd have is that they don't know which way was "up" on the paper in the first place because you cut it into a square. I'm sure you've seen that QR codes always have this big ugly box in 3 of the corners but not all 4 corners. That's to solve this problem of which way is up on the image. It tells the computer which way to rotate the image in its head before decoding it. It should rotate it so the corner without the big box is in the lower-right.

As to how much more it can hold than a UPC code, that question isn't simple because there's multiple UPC code standards and multiple QR code standards. You may see numbers quoted like 7000 different digits, but keep in mind that that refers to the biggest most dense QR codes which are not usually what you'll find in general public usage. What you typically find in consumer usage only holds a hundred or so digits. Usually that's enough to encode a basic alphanumeric string for a web URL, as long as it's not super super long. (An address of about 50 chars or less).

As to why not use the denser format? Well, because it's easier to get a "good scan" when the image is clunkier and blockier. It makes it a lot more tolerant of noise. For things like labels on store products, or images quickly snapped with a mobile phone, that tolerance of noisy images is important.

If you think about what a UPC code is, it's just a series of black and white lines, right? Each of those lines can be represented as a binary digit, a 1 or a 0, depending on whether it's black or white. If you only cared about a binary string, that's all you'd need. You could make a barcode that was 4 digits long by having 4 lines. If B is 0 and W is 1, then 4 lines of BWWB will be read as 0110. However, this isn't super convenient, so UPC organises these lines into blocks of 7, and uses the order of the lines to represent a decimal digit. 1110010 for example represents 0.

But, those lines don't actually need to be very long. The vertical dimension in a UPC code is doing absolutely nothing in terms of the information it delivers, it's just making it so the line of light from the barcode reader doesn't need to be perfectly aligned - it's making it much easier to scan. So, you could squish a barcode down to be potentially even just 1 atom tall if you really wanted to and could invent a reader capable of seeing something that small. With the shift to cameras, which can see the actual image and not just detect the red line bouncing off it, the height of the barcode can be shrunk down immensely. This is pretty much what a QR code is doing - by shifting to squares instead of lines, it can fit a lot more information in, because it frees up the vertical dimension to contain different information to the bits of the code above and below it.

A UPC code stores precisely 8 digits and it does so only with vertical lines, with various combinations of black or white representing specific values. A QR code does this process over a whole grid, meaning there is simply space for more digits - the most dense version of the QR standard can store 7089 digits.

A non-technical ELI5 explanation.

A barcode only stores data horizontally, while a QR code stores data both horizontally and vertically.

Take a barcode that has 5cm width and 5cm height, it can only store 5cm of data, even though the height of the barcode is also 5cm.

A QR code that is 5cm width and 5cm height, however, can store 5cm * 5cm = 25cm² worth of data.

It may not be technically correct, but it’s good enough for a 5 years old.

Just my personal experience. When I was losing weight I found Coke Zero to be a life saver. I was able to satisfy my craving for sweetness and not ingest any sugar. It work very well for me. I drink it any time I want Coke now. There's probably some other awful side effect of aspartame, who knows, but my concern at the moment is weight loss and for that, it is effective (for me).

Welcome to the wonderfulworld of nutrition, where we can't test people in labs, so we don't know very much for sure.

Some people think that drinking a zero-calorie drinks makes you feel like you did something "good", so you let your guard down and end up eating more food later as a reward. Some people also think that too much artificial sweetener makes the good germs in our tummies sick, which isn't good for us.

Zero calarie sodas have zero calories in the., meaning they won't "make you fat" however some people believe that the sweetness of diet sodas causes you to crave other sweet things. But strictly speaking if you were on a deserted island and there was no food and you found a shipping crate of diet 7-up washed up on shore, you would still starve to death no matter how much of it you drank

Assuming you don't slyly adjust your consumption ("I had a Coke Zero, I deserve a donut!") they do not contain any calories your body can use. Without that, they do not contribute to weight gain.

They may have some minimal effect on your blood glucose, but I haven't found that to be the case. I've done a 1 week and a 2 week fast, both with zero food. Water + electrolytes only. I measured my weight, blood glucose, and ketone levels 2-3 times per day. I drink Coke Zero during fasts sometimes just cause I like it, and it has no appreciable effect on my blood glucose or weight. When I'm not fasting I never drink soda.

So the simple answer is no, not directly. Indirectly? Time will tell. But they will be minor effects. Things like variations in metabolic rates and making your body "hold on to fat" and the like tend to be VASTLY overblown in the diet/fitness world. A diet coke won't make you put on 2 donuts worth of weight when you only ate one. Your body is already very efficient at getting nutrients out of food. If it wasn't you'd know because you'd either be sick and malnourished, or having diarrhea 24/7.

Sugar substitutes work on the premise that they're SO MUCH sweeter than sugar that an incredibly small amount is needed to make the drink as sweet. Because of this the calories of the sweetener are essentially immeasurable for the purpose of our nutrition standards. The artificial sweetners themselves literally do not have the amount calories to make you fat.

They use camouflage paint/wrap to hide the styling and body lines until they’re ready to officially release the vehicle.

Its Dazzle Camouflage and dates back to around WW1 as a way of hiding identifying features of a ship.

The geometric patterns and sharp color transitions make it difficult to pick out curves and contours on the car which is good for keeping updated body styling hidden. Generally manufacturers will need to build a couple units of a new model to test out on the road or tracks to confirm handling of performance, but they don't want people seeing the new body curves or the "freshness" of it all will be spoiled before they can show it off at a big autoshow.

While the answers in regards to the Dazzle camo are on point, I think your example is just a custom wrap job.

This is actual Dazzle camo.

The type of camuflage used is called dazzle camuflage. The concept is that the contrasts and stripes make it very hard for people to see the lines in the design. So it is very hard to copy the design from just a few pictures. There is no way of knowing if a darker area is due to the paint scheme or if it a shaddow cast by the body design. In your image you might notice that it is very hard to see how the lines around the fenders joins up with the side panels of the cars. There is also a feature on the engine cover in front of the gills which might be an air inlet to the engine bay but you can not really see how it is shaped.

While dazzle paint has its history in "hiding the lines" of a car (which it's not so great at if you've ever seen one in person), these days it's also intended to stop photogrammetry tools from being able to produce an accurate 3D model of the car before it's released, and the designs have been tweaked for that very purpose.

Thalamus activity. When you're in NREM (non-rapid eye movement) sleep the thalamus creates bursts of sigma waves (so called "Sleep spindles"). These sigma waves burst around in the brain, transmitting from neuron to neuron, and are speculated to have a function in helping you consolidate and make sense of memories.

The more sigma bursts you have, the heavier you sleep.

P.S: While I haven't seen research on it I'm also guessing that your attitude changes how deep you sleep. At least I tend to sleep extremely deeply if I'm a place where I feel safe, even if the noise levels are pretty high, but if I sleep in a place where I can't lock the door or in a tent or if someone else is in the room...much lighter sleeper.

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Aside from a few chemical balances, trauma can shape people into waking up towards certain triggers.

For some people, it's the sound of the garbage truck in the morning. Others, garage doors. For me, it's any physical/audio sensation that doesn't feel like it's from myself because of overlap.

It makes sharing a bed a very difficult if not impossible task if I need to actually sleep. Quieter, darker, secure, and familiar are the best bets on qualities for minimizing my tendencies where I can even wake myself up, and it's pretty similar with other light sleepers i've encountered.

Source: Experience and other testimonies.

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If I asked a 5 year old what was in my cupboard they might say:

• A can of beans
• A can of beans
• A can of beans
• A can of soup
• Another can of soup
• Another can of soup
• Another can of soup

If I asked someone else they might say:

• 3 cans of beans
• 4 cans of soup

Both answers contain exactly the same data.

Often computer files store data one piece at a time. By using the method above they can store data using less space.

The technical term for this is run length encoding.

Suppose you have a .txt file with partial lyrics to The Rolling Stones’ song ‘Start Me Up’:

• If you start me up If you start me up I'll never stop If you start me up If you start me up I'll never stop I've been running hot You got me ticking gonna blow my top If you start me up If you start me up I'll never stop never stop, never stop, never stop*

Now let’s do the following:

let xxx = ‘If you start me up’;

let yyy = ‘never stop’;

So we represent this part of the song with xxx and yyy, and the lyrics become:

• xxx xxx I'll yyy xxx xxx I'll yyy I've been running hot You got me ticking gonna blow my top xxx xxx I'll yyy yyy, yyy, yyy*

Which gets you a smaller net file size with the same information.

As others have said, zipping replaces repeated data in the original file with smaller placeholders and an index that allows this data to be added back on unzipping. Something to add is that the inclusion of the index means that zipping a very small file can actually increase its size. An interesting historic use in hacking is the zip bomb, where many GB of a single repeating character are zipped down to an archive of just a few KB. Virus scanners used to unpack archives to check the contents and doing so would result in mass of data that would overload the system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zip_bomb?wprov=sfla1

Two parts at work:

1. Compression - by finding common / similar areas of the file data, you can remove duplicates such that you can save space. Unfortunately, almost all modern formats are already compressed - including modern Word docs, image files, video files, etc. so compression doesn't really play a part in a ZIP any more. Ironically, most of those files are literal ZIP files themselves (i.e. a Word doc is an XML file plus lots of other files inside a ZIP file nowadays! You can literally open a Word doc in a zip program and you'll see).
2. Collating multiple files inside one file. Rather than have to send multiple files and their information, a ZIP can act as a collection of multiple files. Nowadays Windows interprets ZIPs as a folder, and they pretty much are. One ZIP file may contain dozens of hundreds of smaller files inside itself. Because many modern protocols are dumb, they don't make it easy to send multiple files, so a ZIP file is often a convenient way to overcome such difficulties... just ZIP up everything and send that one ZIP file instead.

You can see that if you ZIP several Word documents, they'll all have similar areas inside them that Word uses to identify a Word file, say. So you can "remove" them and just remember one of them, and you've saved space. So ZIP works better if you're zipping lots of similar files, as it will find common areas between ALL the files you zipped.

You can also apply encryption to the ZIP file as well, which will appear as a password-protected ZIP file. This used to be insecure but nowadays it's AES encryption which is perfectly fine.

Thus people can now send one smaller file, password-protected, containing multiple larger files in one go by using ZIP. So it's quite popular.

Note that things like RAR, 7Zip, etc. are all pretty much the same, they just use slightly different packaging, compression, etc. algorithms.

Even your web pages are "zipped" nowadays. Back in the day your browser would ask for multiple file individually and the server had to respond to each request and couldn't compress them so they would take longer to send (HTML compresses really well, but you have to do the compression and in the old days compressing was quite CPU-intensive especially on a large server). Nowadays your browser asks if the server can "gzip" (basically the same algorithm as ZIP) the pages for you. So your webpages take less data and download faster, and it can also put multiple files in the one stream (this is part "zip" and part better protocols) so you don't have to request multiple files all the time.

Most modern file formats don't compress well because they're already compressed with something like ZIP or gzip so we have lost that advantage, really, for the average user. Hell, even your hard drive can be compressed using the same algorithm, Windows has the option built-in. It just doesn't save much space any more because almost everything you use is already zipped, so it just slows things down a fraction.

when zipping a file, the computer creates variables. for example

x = never gonna

now that we have a variable, the computer will replace every "never gonna" on the file.

so from

never gonna give you up

never gonna let you down

never gonna run around and

dessert you

will turn into

x give you up

x let you down

x run around and

dessert you

doing this saves the computer some space, therefore compressing/zipping it

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There’s no direct evidence of the brain’s ‘inner wiring’ of any sort. The best we can do at the moment is tell which parts of the brain have increased activity when the person is doing specific tasks/thinking specific things. If someone has ‘foot fetish’, then obviously when they get sensory input associated with feet they’ll also have increased activity in a pattern associated with sexual arousal. This doesn’t suggest any direct ‘wiring’ between the two parts, it may rely heavily on higher order thought, or at least on more abstract representations in the brain.

In fact, if we consider how any kind of feet-associated input (for example, a picture, verbal description, being touched in the feet, touching other people’s feet, or just imagining feet) can stimulate sexual arousal in someone with foot fetish, it’s a pretty strong evidence that the connection is from higher order thought area, and not any of the basic sensory areas. Put another way, it’s the thought, the idea of feet, not the raw sensory signal, that causes the arousal. There would be no appreciable difference in the brain’s connections at that level.

It is true that the parts of the brain which directly receive sensory input from the genetalia and the feet are adjacent. There's a distinct strip of brain devoted to sensory input called the Cortical Homonculus. The genital area is right at the far end, just after the toes area.

Aaaand that's pretty much the only thing that factoid is based on. The brain is generally pretty specific about its wiring, though 'remapping' of inputs can occur - particularly in the case of limb loss. But there's no evidence that I'm aware of for this specific effect, besides the location of the two sensory regions.

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It’s pain from inflammation. The pain itself doesn’t serve much physiological function beyond making sure you know something’s wrong with you, and thus hopefully avoid actions that would aggravate the inflammation site.

Inflammation is a common, physiological response to pretty much any damage to any part of your body (except a few special places where it is normally suppressed, such as your brain, or the inside of your eye globes), mainly mediated by your immune system, mainly for the purpose of facilitating further immune response and tissue repair. In the case of a sore throat, or in fact any infection, inflammation is induced by both the damage directly caused by pathogens, and by your immune response trying its best to fight off the pathogens.

Viruses or bacteria multiply in the pharynx (throat), nasopharynx (connection of the throat to the nose) or in the tonsils, and the immune reaction is to inflame the region. Thus, mediators of inflammation are generated as part of the process, such as prostaglandins and bradykinins, which sensitize the sensory nerve endings of pain in the throat, thus, sore throat occurs, especially through the glossopharyngeal nerve. Here is my source: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-laryngology-and-otology/article/abs/review-on-the-mechanism-of-sore-throat-in-tonsillitis/5C62DCDC60E6FAB88E1C4D6A62A4681A

This paper explain all the symptoms of common cold and flu: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16253889/

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Viral sore throats are caused by not only inflammation, but the death of your throat cells. A virus basically injects it's genetic information into your cells, and that cell starts manufacturing a bunch of viruses until it breaks open. Immune system cells search for these infected cells and kill them.

Macrophages are cells that come by and try to eat all of the matter that is accumulating, but they sometimes can not keep up, and that is why you have to cough. The get rid of the excess dead cell parts.

Fevers also usually raise the body temperature to a point that is no longer optimal for viral reproduction.

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