Why is Pepto-Bismol pink? (McGill OSS)

3 minute read

It’s minty, chalky, unpleasantly viscous, and useful for a wide range of stomach ailments, but why is Pepto-Bismol so vibrantly pink?

The active ingredient in Pepto is bismuth subsalicylate. Once in the stomach, bismuth subsalicylate breaks down into two products—bismuth and salicylic acid—the latter of which is rapidly absorbed into the bloodstream. Salicylic acid is the active ingredient in many anti-acne and wart products and is closely related to acetylsalicylic acid, better known as Aspirin. Bismuth is a metal with somewhat unique properties, including notably its low melting point of just 271.5 ˚C. As such, it finds use as a lead replacement in various contexts. One important one is in lead bullets, the use of which has been highly discouraged, or even outlawed in some places, due to its toxicity. If you have a free day, a bottle of bismuth subsalicylate and some laboratory equipment, you can even extract the bismuth from Pepto-Bismol—it’s iridescent and quite pretty!

Bismuth in the stomach is very poorly absorbed and combines with other compounds present to form various bismuth salts. These salts have antimicrobial activity and prevent bacteria from binding and growing on the mucosal cells of the stomach, as well as increasing fluid reabsorption and decreasing intestinal secretions and inflammation. In these ways, bismuth subsalicylate can help with a wide range of digestive issues, including nausea, diarrhea, stomach ulcers, heartburn, and even cholera.

Contrary to what you may be thinking, it is not bismuth subsalicylate that gives Pepto-Bismol its carnation colouring. That compound is beige. It turns out that Pepto is pink simply because Procter and Gamble dye it pink!

According to Pepto-Bismol, the doctor who developed their pink medicine in the early 20^th century chose pink, but no one really knows why. They keep it pink because you don’t mess with success, and who can blame them? The practically neon hue of their product is instantly recognizable, even when their products are in chewable tablet or pill form. Even generic preparations of bismuth subsalicylate tend to stick to the pink colour palette.

In 1992, a Procter and Gamble spokesperson told the LA Times that the doctor chose pink to appeal to children, but as Pepto-Bismol is not recommended for kids under 12, that seems questionable. This recommendation is due to concerns that bismuth subsalicylate could contribute to a rare condition called Reyes syndrome in children. It’s for this exact reason that Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) is not approved for children under 12.

You shouldn’t worry about Pepto-Bismol turning you pink, but there is a slight chance it could turn your tongue, or your poop, dark black. This happens due to a reaction between the bismuth metal and sulfur in your mouth or digestive tract, producing bismuth sulfide. This might happen if you’ve recently eaten a lot of sulfur-rich foods—like cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, kale etc.) or alliums (onions, garlic, leeks, etc.)—taken a high dose of a sulfur-containing medication (like sulfonamide antibiotics) or live somewhere with high sulfur concentrations in the water. Don’t panic; it’s only temporary and totally benign.

While the doctor who developed Pepto-Bismol and chose its hot pink shade probably didn’t know, the colour of a medication may have surprising impacts on how patients perceive its effects or rate its effectiveness. A couple of studies have found that patients are more likely to perceive warmly coloured medications (red/orange/pink/etc.) as stimulants or antidepressant drugs versus an association with tranquillizers or depressants for cool-coloured (blue/purple/green) meds.

When studied, the marketing of medications echoes this colour coding, implying a feedback loop between buying medications of a particular colour and associating that colour with that type of medication. Interestingly, studies have also shown that the colour of a drug can influence how bitter patients think it will taste and how strong they believe it is. Specifically for children, there’s a belief that red or pink medications make them look sweeter or more palatable to kids. So maybe the inventor of Pepto-Bismol was trying to invoke the idea of a strawberry milkshake!

This article was written for the McGill Office of Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/you-asked/why-pepto-bismol-pink

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You can’t hear this music, but it could still make you dance (McGill OSS)

1 minute read

Provided by bass instruments, the low-frequency parts of music tend to contribute the beat we actually dance to. Songs with lower-frequency baselines tend to have higher perceived “groove” ratings, but what if the frequency is so low that it falls outside humans’ audible range?

Researchers from McMaster University, Fitchburg State University and the Rotman Research Institute set out to test just that. Utilizing so-called very-low frequency (VLF) sound, researchers fitted participants with motion capture headbands at a live concert for electronic music duo Orphx and had them fill in pre- and post-concert questionnaires. VLF speakers were turned on and off every 2.5 minutes throughout the 55-minute performance, and the recorded mo-cap data was used to calculate participants’ head movement speeds in the presence or absence of VLF.

The resulting data showed that audience participants moved an average of 11.8% more when the VLF sound was on versus off. The researchers also performed additional experiments to confirm that the VLF was inaudible.

If it can’t be heard, how can VLF sounds contribute to a sense of groove or make people dance more? The researchers suggest that VLF sounds lead to changes in behaviour through subconscious processes involving our brains’ vestibular, vibrotactile, motor and reward systems. Sounds are mainly processed through our auditory pathways; however, low-frequency sounds are additionally processed via the vibrotactile and vestibular pathways.

While known for controlling our balance and proprioception (sense of where our bodies are), the vestibular system has previously been implicated in perceptions of rhythm. In addition, both the vestibular and vibrotactile pathways have close links to our motor systems. The researchers believe that one, or more, of these pathways, are responsible for the dance-inducing effects of VLF sound.

This article was written for the McGill Office of Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/you-cant-hear-music-it-could-still-make-you-dance

What Does Snake Venom Do to the Human Body? (McGill OSS)

2 minute read

There are more than 3000 species of snakes on Earth, ranging from the Barbados threadsnake at roughly 10 cm long (about the same as a deck of cards) to the reticulated python at around 6 m in length (almost as tall as an adult male giraffe!). Luckily, only about 600 are venomous, and only around 200 are venomous enough to seriously harm or kill a human.

Despite the existence of hundreds of venoms, nearly all snake venoms fall into one of three categories, depending on how they affect us: neurotoxins, cytotoxins or myotoxins.

Neurotoxins are common to the Elapidae family of snakes, which include cobras, mambas, coral snakes, and copperheads. They work on the nervous system by disrupting the electrical impulses that our nerves and muscles use to function.

Neurotoxins can mess with our neurons in a few different ways. Imagine your neurons like a lamp plugged into an electrical socket. For the lamp to function normally, it should be able to turn on and off at different times. With α-neurotoxins, it’s as if someone put a babyproof cover on the socket, preventing us from plugging our lamp in at all. The result? No light. On the other hand, with dendrotoxins, the lamp is plugged in, but no electricity flows from the socket to our lamp. Again, no light. But with fasciculins, it’s like the lamp’s plug is stuck in the wall. Constantly activated with no off switch, even though we want to go to bed.

Vipers favour the use of cytotoxins—venoms that directly damage cells. Some common types include phospholipases, which disrupt cell walls, and hemotoxins, which affect the circulatory system. Some hemotoxins trigger the destruction of red blood cells, while others affect the clotting factor of blood—either by making blood too clotted and thick to flow or too thin to ever clot and stop external bleeding.

Myotoxins are less common in serpent physiology but are found in certain species of rattlesnakes. They contain basic peptides (chains of amino acids too short to be considered proteins) that directly disrupt the flow of charged molecules our muscles rely on to contract.

With such a wide range of venom types and mechanisms of action, it’s no surprise that nearly every snake species needs a tailor-made antivenom. Luckily, Canada only has four native species of venomous snakes.

Nonetheless, it can be pretty tricky to identify snakes reliably in the wild. So, if you’re ever on the receiving end of a snake bite, seek medical attention immediately! Do not try to catch the snake to bring with you—some help for your doctors in identifying your attacker is not worth a second (or third, or fourth) bite.

This article was written for the McGill Office of Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-you-asked/how-does-snake-venom-kill-human

Blood Tests for Menopause (The Midlife)

4 minute read

One of the most common questions that we hear is, “How will I know if I am in menopause?” As you likely already know, that is not a simple yes-or-no question.

Menopause is defined clinically as 12 months of amenorrhea or absence of menstruation. That seemingly straightforward definition, however, masks a complex condition affecting millions of people. With an average age of onset of 47 years old, perimenopause—the transition period from fertility to menopause—can only be diagnosed in retrospect by considering a set of wide-ranging, somewhat vague symptoms.

Given the ambiguity and interpretation required in menopause diagnosis, a simple test that could definitively state whether someone has reached menopause or not would be extremely helpful for clinicians and patients alike. Medical practitioners can use some hormone tests to gather information about your reproductive status, but none provide the definitive answer we’d like them to.

This article was written for The Midlife. View the entire original here: https://themidlife.com/blood-tests-for-menopause/

When It Comes to Avoiding Flies, Stripes Are In, Solids Are Out (McGill OSS)

2 minute read

Fairy tales about the origin of zebra stripes are abundant. Some blame sunlight filtered through tree leaves for tanning the zebras hide, others claim the dark lines are scorch marks, acquired after stumbling into fire during a fight with a baboon. Scientists’ ideas of the stripes’ origins are less fanciful, but no less varied. From thermoregulation to signalling to other zebras, a lot of theories have been floated. Fewer theories have been tested, and only recently did support arise for one hypothesis: avoiding fly bites.

Despite their name, horseflies do not limit themselves to horses. There are well over 2000 species of horsefly that target a wide variety of animals, including humans. However, horseflies earned their moniker due both to horses, donkeys and zebras’ extreme prevalence, and the risks these bugs pose equids. Amongst other diseases, horseflies are infection vectors for equine infectious anemia, a retrovirus from the same genus as human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

Within the Equus family, all 7 extant members have long tails to help flick away pesky insects. But the 3 living species of zebras have an additional tool in their anti-fly arsenal in their fur patterns.

Japanese Black cows painted with white to mimic the zebra coat received 50% fewer deerfly bites compared to those painted with black stripes, or no stripes at all.

Photo source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0223447

Don’t go painting yourself or your animals to avoid deerfly bites just yet though. There is one important specific you need to know first: the critical width. Black and white stripes present a sort of optical illusion to deerflies. Scientists believe that stripes narrower than a critical width (approximately 5 cm) trigger what we call the Wagon-wheel effect. This illusion makes a wheel, propeller or other regularly rotating object appear as if it is spinning backwards. You can see an example of it here.

When faced with black and white stripes, horseflies approached their target faster and failed to decelerate in the final stages of their flights, before contacting zebra surfaces. It’s not just painted mammals that seem to work though. Researchers demonstrated that horseflies will avoid landing on horses wearing a striped blanket, or other surfaces with thin stripes or small (<10 cm in diameter) polka dots.

This article was written for the McGill Office of Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/environment-did-you-know/when-it-comes-avoiding-flies-stripes-are-solids-are-out

An essay on farts and 7 other deleted scenes from Love Actually (whynow UK)

5 minute read

It has been nearly 20 years since Love Actually was released, and it has grown from being a quirky ensemble film to a much beloved holiday tradition for many. Its intertwining storylines showcasing love of all varieties invoke nostalgia and tug at our heartstrings. But do you know its eight deleted scenes? From Sam being a gymnastics star to the cut lesbian lovers, Ada McVean looks at what could have been part of this Christmas classic.

It’s Porn

In this cut scene, Mia (Heike Makatsch) visits her friend Mark’s (Andrew Lincoln) gallery as he opens the new art for his Christmas exhibit, only to find that it is “porn.” Mia confides in her friend that she is considering having an affair with her married boss. He advises her to respect sacred marriage vows.

This scene foreshadows Mark’s struggles being in love with a married Juliet (Keira Knightley) and the deliberateness with which Mia pursues Harry (Alan Rickman). It establishes a link between Mia and Mark, making later scenes clearer. With this scene, we establish that Mark owns a gallery or is friends with Mia. When Harry says he’ll dance with Mia “as long as [her] boyfriend doesn’t mind,” and the camera pans to Mark, it now makes more sense!

An Essay on Farts

Bernard, Harry and Karen’s son, is unhappy at being cast as an Angel in the nativity play since they’re “made up rubbish.” His mum pushes back, suggesting that angels might be real, but in disguise—“these days they probably don’t have wings.”

This interaction was cut along with a storyline that would have seen Rufus (Rowan Atkinson) as an angel! Knowing this, some of Rufus’ actions make a touch more sense—he takes forever wrapping, hoping Harry will walk away without the necklace, and blatantly distracts the airport agent to allow Sam (Thomas Sangster) through.

Next, we see Harry and Karen (Emma Thompson) discussing their son when Karen asks, “when did my bottom stop being my bottom and turn into Britain’s second-largest seaport?” Harry reprimands her, “don’t be rude. I’ve invested a lot of time and emotion into that bottom.” A simple exchange of banter that shows the love between Harry and Karen, that, of course, also makes his betrayal all that more painful.

Karen and Bernard then meet with the headmistress to discuss his Christmas wish of everyone’s farts being visible. Karen pulls him into the hallway ostensibly to reprimand him and instead laments that no one at the school can understand his “high-class comedy,” we get a lovely look at a non-romantic form of love between mother and son.

This article was written for whynow UK. View the rest at the original here: https://whynow.co.uk/read/deleted-scenes-love-actually

The Little Ice Age That Made Christmas White Forever (McGill OSS)

3 minute read

Our collective vision of Christmas landscapes is so immersed in snow that the very phrase “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” conjures up imagery that is nearly all frosted, sparkling and white. This even though a snow-covered Christmas is the exception rather than the rule for the majority of the world.

Despite what the song “White Christmas” would make you think, for more than half the continental U.S., there is less than a 50% chance of a white Christmas occurring. Snow on December 25^th is rare in the U.K. and not even as common in the Great White North of Canada as you may expect! So why do we pine for a pearly white holiday time?

Maybe Bing Crosby crooning, “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas, just like the ones I used to know,” has given you the impression that climate change is to blame for the seeming lack of modern-day snowy holidays. Global warming certainly has played a role in decreasing the chances of frosty festivities and will continue to do so. But the real reason behind our widespread association of Christmas and snow is less to do with changing weather patterns and more to do with our media.

Charles Dickens’ classic tale “A Christmas Carol” was written and published in England during the Victorian era. Where nowadays, you see far more fake snow than real, during Dickens’ early life, winters in the U.K. were snow-filled times of “piercing, searching, biting cold.” The 16^th to the 19^th century was a climatic period known as the Little Ice Age. As a result, most of Europe saw colder, longer, and more snowy winters than previously known. Winters cold enough to allow the River Thames frost fairs to occur on a frozen-solid Thames—something that hasn’t happened since 1814.

While familiar to us in much of Canada, the lasting snowy landscapes and beauty created by ice and frost were novelties to many artists, and Father Winter served as a muse for many. The Little Ice Age period gave birth to the vast majority of European depictions of winter in paintings and inspired numerous enduring works of art.

Charles Dickens has been called the man who invented Christmas—a definite exaggeration. But we can thank him, Jacob Marley, and Ebenezer Scrooge for helping to cement a Christmas aesthetic that has persisted with impressive consistency. Christmas is a time of nostalgia for many of us, and it was no different for Dickens. His stories contain references to the snowy cold winters of his childhood, making it ironic, in a sense, that we should now feel a sort of nostalgia for Dickens’ childhood winters too.

Our views that Christmases should be snowy don’t exclusively come from the England of yore. New media and art through the years have iterated upon Dickens’ Christmas setting and only further enshrined our association of Christmastime as snow filled. The United States have contributed their fair share to the frost-filled Christmas media. From “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—better known as “’Twas the night before Christmas”—discussing newly fallen snow to stories like “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” by Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel, to the lithographic prints of Currier and Ives and the Christmas scenes of Norman Rockwell. The classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” even won an award for developing a new version of fake snow to replace the painted cornflakes used previously!

While Bing Crosby sings less about the white Christmases he personally knew and more about the ones we as a society used to know, the man who wrote the lyrics for “White Christmas,” Irving Berlin, was likely talking about both. a Jewish immigrant to the U.S., Berlin was born in Tyumen in modern-day Russia. With average daily December temperatures of -12.9 ˚C, he very well may have been referencing both his childhood Christmases and the historic Victorian ones enshrined in our holiday ideals.

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history-environment/little-ice-age-made-christmas-white-forever

Peckers Get Smaller Where It Gets Colder (McGill OSS)

1 minute read

Charles Darwin postulated that Toucan’s massive beaks might be for sexual selection purposes. Other scientists have theorized that it could be for shows of intimidation, for actual defence or for peeling fruit. Given the beak’s serrated edge, it was once thought that toucans used it to catch and eat fish. We now know that toucans are almost entirely fructivorous, although they do opportunistically eat insects, lizards, and even small birds.

Another thing we now know is that the main function of a toucan’s beak is actually thermoregulation! Just like elephants do with their ears and dogs with their tongues, Toucans rely on their big beaks as heat sinks to maintain their homeostasis and save them from overheating.

Bird beaks across the globe follow a trend called Allen’s Rule, which proposes that the appendages of endotherms (warm-blooded animals) are smaller, relative to body size, in colder climates in order to reduce heat loss. A study of 214 bird species from every continent found strongly significant differences in their beak sizes according to latitude and local environmental temperatures. From penguins to parrots, the species that live in colder places have smaller peckers.

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/peckers-get-smaller-where-it-gets-colder

What rhythm does throbbing pain follow? (McGill OSS)

1 minute read

There are many kinds of pain—Piercing, burning, aching, shocking—but the type I want to focus on today is throbbing. Throbbing pain is often associated with toothaches, headaches, migraines, and pain in the extremities but can occur nearly anywhere in the body. Its pulsing nature can be incredibly annoying to those affected, but it also raises an interesting question: when pain throbs, what rhythm is it following?

Contrary to what you might think, throbbing pain is not beating to your heartbeat or pulse. A 2012 study looked at the throbbing rate of 29 dental patients’ pain, as recorded by patients pushing a button every time they felt a painful throb, compared to their arterial pulse measured in their earlobes. The mean arterial pulse rate was 73 beats per minute (bpm), compared to a throbbing pain rate of just 44 bpm. Researchers further analyzed the simultaneous recordings and found that the two rhythms weren’t synchronous in any way.

If throbbing pain isn’t paced against our heartbeat or pulse, then what determines its rhythm? Simply put, we don’t know! The study’s authors theorize that the pacemaker of throbbing pain is contained somewhere within the central nervous system, but we currently do not have any more specific theories. For now, we just have to accept that throbbing pain marches to the beat of its own drum.

This article was written for. the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/did-you-know/what-rhythm-does-throbbing-pain-follow

Why do we wake up feeling cold? (McGill OSS)

1 minute read

A few different bodily processes in humans follow a stable, roughly 24-hour cycle. For example, the cortisol and melatonin levels in our blood. Physical parameters like your blood pressure and heart rate too.

Also under a circadian cycle is our core body temperature. We reach our minimum temperature about halfway through our sleep cycle. By the time we wake up, our bodies have warmed up slightly, but often not yet to our typical body temp.

So, we wake up feeling cold because we are cold. From a normal body temperature of 36.4-37.2 °C (97.5-98.9 °F), normal circadian fluctuations can take us up or down about 1 ˚C. It might not feel like a lot, but remember that most doctors consider fevers to start at 38 ˚C.

Interestingly, there seems to be some variation in when we reach our minimum temperature during the night. A 2001 study measured the temperatures of 172 young men and women and sorted them according to their self-declared status of “morning person,” “evening person,” or “neither.” They found that morning people hit their minimum temps after an average of 3.5 hours, compared to 5.02 hours for neither types and 6.01 hours for evening types. Since individuals tend to feel more alert and perform better on cognitive tasks at higher body temperatures, these differences in the circadian rhythm of body temperature may be one reason some of us struggle to wake up and feel alert immediately.

Image source: https://www.mdpi.com/2079-7737/10/1/65

This article was written for the McGill Office for Science and Society. View the original here: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-you-asked/why-do-we-wake-feeling-cold