Science desk
< October 20	<< Sep \| October \| Nov >>	October 22 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Science Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

October 21

Skeleton question

In this image, Judge Anderson is carrying the skeleton of Judge Death, possessed by his spirit, so he may be resurrected in physical form. Would a skeleton, devoid of any skin and muscle tissue, really stay that well together when picked up, or would the bones just fall apart? JIP | Talk 18:25, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In a comic book, anything is possible. In real life, skeletons on display obviously would have their bones connected by hardware of some kind. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 19:54, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

So as I understand your reply, if it were not the skeleton of Judge Death, but just a normal human skeleton, the bones would just fall apart when picked up? JIP | Talk 19:57, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In real life they would, if all the connective tissue has decomposed. Like when they dug up King Richard recently, they laid the bones out on a slab. There was nothing connecting them. In a comic book, they could be held together by magic. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:00, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

OK, thanks. JIP | Talk 20:06, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

In the real world, it's all about the connective tissue, specifically the ligaments. Without that, a skeleton falls apart, as Bugs describes. But say a human body had just been skinned and flayed of most flesh and organs. The connective tissue would hold a lot of it together. If you've never de-boned a whole raw chicken, I recommend trying it out for a good illustration of how tough it is to separate all the bones of a recently dead vertebrate. So what happens depends on how the skeleton was "made" -- if it's ancient and decomposed, it would fall apart. If it's fresh and nobody took the effort to disconnect the bones, it would stay together. I have no idea if any of that is relevant for the plot of the story, but in the real world skeletons can stay connected for quite a while. SemanticMantis (talk) 20:13, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

That comic book illustration does not stand up to close scrutiny, as there are a number of things that don't look right. But for some more magic skeletons, go to about 5:15 of this:[1] ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:16, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I just got back from an episode of Futurama with a "bone vampire" in it. Turns out, it can eat your shin and leave your leg stable, only wobbling when you shake it to illustrate the point. But yeah, that's the other way around (and fictional). Like Bugs says, if you look at a skeleton in a classroom or doctor's office, the bones are drilled and wired. When you're dealing with a snake, that's a lot of work. InedibleHulk (talk) 20:18, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just got back from the next episode. There's an actual(ish) human display skeleton in this one, and that idiot doctor was checking it for a heartbeat. News flash: You need a heart to live! InedibleHulk (talk) 21:38, 21 October 2014 (UTC) [reply]

I'd think it ought to be possible if you can preserve the ligaments (If there are joints without ligaments, I'm definitely spacing on what they are). For example, you inject your judge with a gene therapy vector expressing the sort of activin from fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, driven by a ligament specific promoter (that's the tricky/artful part that determines the aesthetics of your result; I'm thinking periostin is a starting point). You wait a couple of weeks for your sculpture to set before you kill him, then clean the bones and included ligaments as a unit. Wnt (talk) 00:11, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I have done some amateur taxidermy so have some limited experience in this. I can tell you that if you just leave an animal carcass out for the files and worms, even after several months when all the testy bits are long gone, the bones will still be stuck together by dried and quite hard left over connective tissue. For the case of King Richard, I imagine after some decades even the connective tissue will eventually decompose, but i think there would be quite a long period of time when the bones are stuck together when there is little much else left. Vespine (talk) 02:42, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Incorruptibility affects some corpses. Freezing, embalming, drying or (perhaps) God's will can keep even the skin preserved for many years. Richard was clearly "corrupt", but the year he died, some construction workers dug up an Ancient Roman teenager who looked "as if she had been buried that very day." No word on whether she became a functional marionette, but also nothing saying she didn't. InedibleHulk (talk) 23:39, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Here's a more bookish source for that old young girl. InedibleHulk (talk) 01:51, 24 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for sharing your experience. I wanted to claim similar above, but I have not experienced it first hand in a relatively controlled environment. Even deer carcasses in the woods that have been ravaged for a few years stick together pretty well! SemanticMantis (talk) 14:41, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, but the image is still unrealistic in that the bones are clearly pretty clean, yet are hanging like a limp body, neither of which instance would occur if you had a body with connective tissue still on it. I was going to link to skeletonization, but it's pretty rudimentary. Kind of a bare bones article, actually. Matt Deres (talk) 16:19, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The rib cage looks like it came from a gorilla. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 04:15, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your replies! So it is indeed possible that a skeleton could be picked up like that and stay together, as long as it hasn't been too long since its death, so the ligaments haven't decayed, even though the skin and flesh has. I find it rather funny that people have talked about injecting the judge with a gene therapy vector and killing him as a scientific experiment here. We're talking about Judge Death here. Assuming he was real, if you got within a few metres of him, you wouldn't stand a chance, he'd kill you. And even though he was once human, he has been transformed so much that I very much doubt such an injection would do anything to him. But this is solely a comment about trying to inject and kill him, it doesn't have any relation to the actual question. JIP | Talk 18:56, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Natural immunity to Ebola

Is a thing, as noted here. As part of its efforts to combat the recent Ebola outbreak, the WHO has said that the best treatment yet discovered is a blood transfusion from an Ebola survivor—meaning, presumably, someone whose immune system adapted to kill the virus and provide them with immunity. This is how the first two Americans were cured, if I remember correctly. My question, which may or may not be compromised by a less-than-complete understanding of virology and immunology, is, could the blood of those with hereditary Ebola immunity be used to do the same thing? Could their blood be as good for fighting off the virus in others as that of individuals who have personally fought off the virus? Is there something different about hereditary vs. acquired immunity that makes that not an option? Evan ^{(talk|contribs)} 18:31, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, no, not if what you mean is genetically inherited immunity. For example, there are certain Europeans who have an immunity to HIV because their immune cells lack a certain receptor that HIV needs to bind to in order to enter the cell. Those specific cells can't be infected, but they don't actively fight HIV or produce antibodies. What happens with the transfusion in the case of recently infected survivors, is that their antibodies mark the virus as a threat, and the infected host gets a head-start on his own body fighting the infection. But those who are genetically immune are immune because they lack a receptor or have an altered protein (sickle cell anemia) that prevents infection, not a genetically inherited antibody. μηδείς (talk) 19:19, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

As Medeis notes, the transfusion works in Ebola cases because it is a form of vaccination or inoculation; introducing the infectious agent in an attenuated form to induce the host to produce antibodies to fight the infection. People who have hereditary immunity could have it for a variety of reasons; one of them (as Medeis notes) could be that their cells are not susceptible to attack by the virus in the first place. --Jayron32 20:13, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Also note that it may not be possible to determine who has a hereditary immunity to ebola with current technology, other than by exposing them to see if they contract it. That's obviously unethical. StuRat (talk) 01:01, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Just to clarify Jayron's clarification of me; innoculation with particles of inactive virus may be one critical source of aid from transfusions from survivors. But their blood should also contain a large number of antibodies to various parts of the virus that would tell the immune cells of the infected patient; this here is evil, react to it, and enhance reactions to it. I would think that since pigs get sick from the virus, infecting a lot of pigs and fractioning out their antibodies might be a good stop=gap measure to help patients get a head start on fighting the disease. I have no sources for tis, nor have I read anything I can point to, other than the fact that pigs, but not cats and dogs do seem to get infected by the virus. μηδείς (talk) 01:43, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm...so here we have a disease that requires you to suit up in order to avoid catching it, where bodily fluids and corpses of victims are highly infectious transporters of the virus...and you want to deliberately infect a large number of pigs with it? I think I see a teeny-tiny flaw in that plan! An alternative might be to note that 30% of infected people survive the disease - and the ratio of the number of survivors to the number of new victims is more or less constant (about 1/6th), even if the disease is basically incurable and spreads exponentially. So if antibody treatment does turn out to be the way to handle Ebola, it ought to be possible to take blood donations from survivors as they are released from hospital and use that as a source of antibodies - rather than resorting to unnecessarily infecting (and nursing back to health) a bunch of pigs. SteveBaker (talk) 16:26, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Are you implying the pigs will only volunteer if we promise to nurse them back to health? All we need is to harvest the blood and then fraction out the antibodies. Of course you're risking transmission of the live virus, other viruses, and allergic reaction to the pig antibodies. My speculation on this further would be of no value. μηδείς (talk) 18:32, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

No, I'm implying that "fractioning out" the antibodies would produce a huge risk of there being live virus in the resulting treatment...which one would presume could easily be counter-productive! When human antibodies from a survivor of the disease are used, it is assumed that the donor is virus-free. So I'd assume that the only reasonable way to harvest antibodies from pigs would be to take it from porcine survivors...which does indeed mean that you'd have to nurse them back to health. The amount of antibodies produced by the dying pigs would likely be inadequate anyway...just as it's inadequate in the dying humans you're trying to treat. But whether you're able to harvest antibodies from the pigs or not, they'd be showing symptoms and shedding virus into their body fluids long before you'd be able to collect those antibodies - and now you have to have a bunch of pig farmers dressed up in hazmat suits cleaning up, and safely disposing of everything that the pigs got close to. Given the observed failure rates of these suits (or the procedures required to use them correctly) - this deliberate creation of a large pool of infected animals would just be asking for trouble. But we don't need to do that. As the disease spreads, the number of survivors grows in direct proportion to the number of people needing treatment - so we should have a sufficiently large pool of potential donors for the forseeable future...assuming this approach makes sense at all - which is rather uncertain right now. SteveBaker (talk) 15:57, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I am talking about a treatment for people already infected, so the presence of live virus along with the antibodies would be a very small risk, as the patient would already be infected. Your complaint about pigfarmers in hazmat suits is ludicrous. Of course any such process would be dangerous. They'd have to build special labs, and use mice or chicken eggs or whatever was the easiest and most effective to use. Your answer amounts to contrarian naysaying--like claiming we can't build 20 story buildings because the construction workers would fall to their deaths--in principle it could be done. μηδείς (talk) 19:04, 23 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Good news, everyone! Just got back from the next Futurama episode, and in 1,000 years, we'll all be free from the common cold. Except for one little frozen pizza boy. Without the antibodies or knowledge, panic will spread quicker than in 2014 and whether Manhattan is doomed depends entirely on whether we can remember 1988 in science. InedibleHulk (talk) 02:17, 22 October 2014 (UTC) [reply]

Mushroom identification

I found some very large white mushrooms growing in the soil around a tree in my front yard, but I'm having trouble identifying it. Other than being large and white, it has a single large brown spot on the center of the cap and white gills underneath. This is a closeup of one, and here are more of them. You can see in the second photo that a couple of them have caps that are completely round, whereas the one from the closeup image looks like a flower, but is that only because it's diseased? So does anyone know what these are? And I live in southern California, if that helps.--十八 20:52, 21 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The first image looks like some sort of puffball which has bloomed. It might help to know what sort of tree they are growing around, but I can't contribute any more here myself. μηδείς (talk) 01:59, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I assume that the first image is looking at the top of a dried cap that has turned upwards and split. It looks a lot like a lepiota or macrolepiota to me. There are dozens of different species world-wide. I wouldn't like to venture a more specific identification but look at images of macrolepiota acera for a start. Richard Avery (talk) 07:36, 22 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]