Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2014 October 18

= October 18 =

How is ebola affected by fppp (fossilized phido plankton powder) or by natural chlorine from onions?
I know that FPPP is used to remove wax that some larger micro-organisms use to move around. If it can be administered topically in a bath, wouldn't this kill ebola? Or do they not use this wax due to their size? Next ; what of natural chlorine from onions or garlic in heavy doses?

thanks mikefromspace on youtube — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.59.221.4 (talk) 01:43, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Ebola has a phospholipid coat, so yes, if you rub yourself all over with 'diatomaceous earth' it will probably deal with skin contamination... providing that Ebola viruses have not already entered the body. Likewise, the anti viral properties of onions or garlic will only be effective with topical contamination. The best option is to avoid contact. So if someone in your State has Ebola – move to another continent. Antarctica  springs to mind.--Aspro (talk) 02:16, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Or, if you want real fake ebola medical advice, mail a check for $9.99 payable to No One, care of the wikipedia foundation, and I'll get back to you. μηδείς (talk) 03:03, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * There was a news story last night about some guy who's selling high-dosage Vitamin C as an alleged ebola preventive. It was reiterated there that there is no substance known at present which can either prevent or cure ebola. In short, covering yourself in dirt or taking high dosages of vitamins will have the same effect on ebola as doing nothing. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 09:47, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I agree 100% that these "treatments" will not kill ebola and that they are completely useless. However, there are two caveats:


 * "Doing nothing" by providing a convincingly fake treatment can sometimes improve a patients outcome through the placebo effect. But providing an injection of saline or a course of sugar pills would be a better way to do that than all of this nonsense.


 * The very reason that ebola became so widespread in this part of Africa when it had been so well contained in previous outbreaks was related to the practice of bathing the bodies of dead ebola victims.  The virus is shed into body fluids - and while it can't survive for long (about 2 hours) on a hard, dry surface - it stays virulent for days in moist environments.   So if you bathe an ebola patient, you suddenly have not just a little infectious body fluids - but a few gallons of incredibly dangerous bath water to safely dispose of.  So bathing an ebola patient in anything whatever is an insanely stupid and dangerous thing to do.  So what our OP proposes is not at all like "Doing nothing" - it's more like "What could we think of that would spread the disease MUCH faster?".


 * So, no. This is a terrible idea. SteveBaker (talk) 13:40, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I'm skeptical that the placebo effect will do much against an infectious disease. I see it as more useful against diseases with more of a psychological component, say one which causes chronic pain. StuRat (talk) 14:52, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I don't think the placebo effect works against viruses. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:17, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The Tiger Rock Effect totally works. Seriously. It doesn't even need to be a rock. It can be whatever nearby object is usually nearby when virtually everyone on the planet don't have ebola. InedibleHulk (talk) 15:30, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Can the ebola virus (or viruses in general) be killed by direct immersion in a chemical, such as rubbing alcohol? ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 14:01, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Absolutely. Bleach kills it nicely on surfaces, but then bleach can kill almost anything. StuRat (talk) 14:47, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * So theoretically if they want to continue their corpse-cleansing ritual, they could improve their chances to survival by using an appropriate chemical rather than just water. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:17, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, but i doubt if they have that much bleach available there, and pouring a toxic chemical on the body isn't exactly part of their tradition. We'd need to change that tradition from "corpse washing" to "corpse disinfecting". StuRat (talk) 15:43, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * AmeriCares cares about one tradition. Clorox to the rescue! InedibleHulk (talk) 16:06, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * As far as using bleach for disinfection, it comes in tablet form too, and that might be a lot easier to ship to Africa in quantity. They could mix it with whatever dirty water they have, to reconstitute it. StuRat (talk) 17:10, 18 October 2014 (UTC)
 * The One Laptop Per Child project (if funded by the UN) could help. With access to the internet, the African, on the sharp end of this Ebola epidemic would not have to rely on bleach from first world countries. The internet would awaken them (to say for augments sake) if there is a source of Limestone nearby, they can burn it to make quicklime, A very good strident.  Anything fermentable can be used to produce alcohol.  Another very good strident. Drip the alcohol over wood chips and you get Acetic acid. ] Yes, your getting the drift.. yet again, another very good strident. Collect dead grass twigs and branches, place them in a retort and heat. The liquid that comes out is rich in terpenoids which at the risk of sounding like a broken record:  is another very good strident. Africans are not primitive sub humans who are not capable of being masters of their own destiny. If we give them access to our knowhow through internet access, then they can stop being depended on us. They  can come up with their on solution and probably react faster.  Google's attempts to bring the internet to Africa seem to me better than Bill Gates's simplistic  idea to inoculation everybody, only to then have whole  families die off due to the lack of basic knowledge of disease prevention which  inoculation alone can't prevent. Think if the politician have anything to learn from this Ebola epidemic is that our well being is dependent impart, to others having access the the skill and knowledge base to nip it in the bud before it becomes our problem. For the cost of one single cruse missile, this part of Africa could have been saturated in laptops. How much is the current screening process costing the US and Europe now the Ebola is out of the bag?--Aspro (talk) 20:22, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * A bit of OR but I'd guess that if you eat lots and lots of garlic you might be less likely to be infected. Eating Durian might also be beneficial. People who are infected would be more likely to stay away from you. Dmcq (talk) 15:17, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Eating lots of garlic might help, as no one would want to come anywhere close to you. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:19, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Even if doesn't save you from ebola, garlic has been shown to help keep heart attacks and cancer away. You almost have a better chance of dying from one of those than calling a coin flip. InedibleHulk (talk) 15:34, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * The original idea is extremely unlikely (apart from a slender hope of accidentally decontaminating yourself immediately after exposure). However, the 1960s Soviet technology of using low dose Interferon alfa 2b for influenza (see also Peginterferon alfa-2b) is interesting.  As reviewed in  the interferon 2-alpha activates JAK/TYK/STAT and p38, whereas Ebola VP24 blocks this pathway.   Now if the block is absolute then interferon would be worthless, but if it is a numbers game of chemical equilibrium, or if the cells can be pre-primed with interferon before infection, then maybe it could still matter.  It has been suggested that Ebola-like viral particles can provide protection via this mechanism  and the question of using interferon has been raised.   Now where this gets interesting is that interferons are a) still available for treatment of flu in Russia and other Asian countries ("Grippferon", "Viferon", etc.) and b) set off by myriad environmental circumstances.  However, while there are obviously going to be a wide variety of "natural supplements" that claim to increase interferon levels (for example, not recommending:  - to summarize, the first is a bunch of herbs, the others sound like eating dirt/leaf litter in a fancy package) I don't actually know what things best stimulate interferons.  Nonetheless, garlic apparently does increase interferon alpha level ; I don't see as much about onion though it (like garlic) increases IFN-gamma.   Obviously though, these things would have to be eaten if anything other than (maybe) the skin cells themselves are to be protected. Wnt (talk) 15:48, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * "For the cost of one single cruse missile, this part of Africa could have been saturated in laptops."
 * Sorry, but NO. As nice as that sounds, cruise missiles have seven-digit price tags, and laptops can be in the low triple digits. That's about 10,000 laptops per missile, hardly enough to "saturate" any part of Africa. Even if we mass-produce cheap laptops and get them cheaper than $100, that's still only about x0,000 laptops. Still a sound idea, but a bit more expensive than you claim.
 * There are other factors. Africans ain't apes (at least, not more so than any other human race ;) ) but some of them (a very small percentage but still many) steal the things the first-worlders give them, enslave them, and/or make them mine metals they sell to the first-worlders who "need" a new cell phone just because there is one every year.
 * Ineffective donations are another problem. Microdonations usually go to waste. If you donate $2 because "it only takes $2 to keep one African child alive for a month", that's not $2 going to Africa. That's $1 paying for the commercial, $0.50 for the employees, $0.30 to bribe the local warlords etc. Why these donation ads exist? Because it only takes 5000 $2 donations to keep an employee well-fed, happy, and equipped with the latest cell phone, I guess.
 * Donate $100 or more, or don't donate at all. If you can't afford to donate $100, you can't afford to donate at all, sorry. - ¡Ouch! (hurt me / more pain) 08:03, 20 October 2014 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure I follow your logic on microdonations; if 50 people donate $2.00, how is that $100 any worse than 1 person donating $100? All of the costs have to come out of the total number of donations, regardless of how that total was summed - it isn't like it's $0.50 to employees per donation, so that more of the $100 goes through. Unless your presumption is that people would donate more if they weren't making microdonations, then I don't see how they have a negative, or simply worthless, impact.Phoenixia1177 (talk) 08:32, 20 October 2014 (UTC)


 * This has nothing to do with the OP's Question but a reply to some of the comments above:
 * I would agree with ouch that Ineffective donations are another problem.
 * As he intimates, when your that poor you grab what you can grab. Fairness of distribution does not come into it because you and your  families survival comes fist. There is no welfare safety net if you neighbour ends up with more than you have and leaves you staving. So don’t look at it from the rose tinted glasses  of a world that you might  live in. If your neighbour steals from 'you' you only have  pick up the phone, call the police and you expect justice. Not out there. The GNP is not enough to afford that kind of infrastructure. OK,  lets come to cruse missiles. 10,000 Laptop per child. That equals to about 50,000 laptops over there  because our laptops our are own person property and we don’t normal allow other to use them in case they start searching for internet porn and things. Over there they share phones and anything else. That is access to a hell of a lot more Knowledge than they have at present. So lets consider what we see on the news. A ship launches a cruse missile attack. One after another cruse blasts off, one after anther and on and  on on they go off. So let let take the last September  attack. 47 missiles which according to my abacus means converted into laptops  4,700,00 people would have access to up to date info on how to avoid ebola, simple home remedies for dysentery, etc etc etc etc etc. Then they pass this on to their own friends and it grows to 23 million. Civilisation spreads not through the donation of money but knowledge. Look at the US. Did they become a dominant power due to hand-outs from the old world. Of course not, they imported Europe’s  best brains instead. Now days you don't need the best physical brains in your geographical domain, rather just a laptop to provide access to them. For those that haven't noticed we are now in the 21st Century. If we don't give them access to our world the Chines will to their world!--Aspro (talk) 00:38, 22 October 2014 (UTC)

12th century Arabic constellation
Hi all.

Can anyone identify the star constellation heading on the left page in this image of the Doha manuscript of the Book of Fixed Stars? A literal translation would do as I can identify the modern constellation from that. It's just that I can't read Arabic script.

I need this information because I would like to nominate the image as a Featured Picture.

Thanks.

Marinka van Dam (talk) 11:40, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * You should ask this question on the Reference desk/Language page - I'm sure they have people who can read Arabic. SteveBaker (talk) 13:28, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * He asked there before he posted here. He's getting some responses there, so I think this one could be closed. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:15, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * She, actually. Looie496 (talk) 15:33, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * I have no way to know.. Regardless, this could be closed. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 15:40, 18 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Does Marinka look masculine to you? Maybe my question belongs on Language Desk. —Tamfang (talk) 07:03, 19 October 2014 (UTC)
 * Does the name "Bela" look feminine to you? Two problems: (1) suffix is no guarantee of gender; and (2) Inferred gender ID in a user name is no guarantee of actual gender. It is claimed that a high percentage of Wikipedia editors are male, so "he" is my usual default. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 16:15, 19 October 2014 (UTC)


 * Yes, sorry for cross-posting. Wasn't sure which was better. I've had expert response that the left-side page depicts Corona Borealis (The Northern Crown), the right-side page gives the star list for the preceeding constellation Boötes (The Herdsman). Grateful for your time. Marinka van Dam (talk) 17:06, 18 October 2014 (UTC)