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Mammals can breathe through their intestines (2021)

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Re: Mammals can breathe through their intestines (2021)

#41
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly

Yes, and what about the pigs? The detached coldness in the writing about the experiments on these creatures dates all of us. I find it odd how this can float by while we pine over the potential sentience of a server at Google. The acceptance of the brutality is inherent to our false sense of modernism.

Future generations will look back on this era's treatment of animals as barbaric. They will have the benefit of being able to grow vat meat identical to any steak and perform drug testing purely in-silico, so they will not need to use animals in the way we do now, but still, when you remove the economic/scientific rationale and look at the fundamentals of our treatment of animals, you can't help feeling at least a little bit saddened by it.

Re: Mammals can breathe through their intestines (2021)

#42
One other "fun" use of perflurocarbons (like fluorinated crown ethers or cyclo-alkanes) is that, containing large amounts of 19F, they are MRI visible. So, you can directly image the compound in the lungs leading to some really striking images [1, 2] while they are in the gaseous phase, or indeed in the liquid phase when one lung is partially inflated. I think that some compounds like these have been proposed for use in patients who have inhaled hot or burning gasses (viz: most likely blast/explosion/deflagration victims) and suffered an internal lung injury. Oedema can impair oxygen availability at the surface of the lung and it's my understanding that there is at least one or two research projects using PFCs as an intensive life-supporting measure as a consequence .

[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jmri.26292?...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/mrm.28270?c...

[3] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/mrm.10008?c...

Re: Mammals can breathe through their intestines (2021)

#46

Poor mice

Rarely do I wince at the mention of animal testing (which is not endorsement), but this article so thoroughly described the torture and killing of move and pigs in such a clinical fashion so as to be horrifying. All to prove a premise that is also quite horrifying in itself.

Re: Mammals can breathe through their intestines (2021)

#50

One limitation I’ve seen on this is that the same mechanism can’t remove carbon dioxide, so this is limited to supplemental oxygen in like a surgery or emergency scenario vs a long-term alternative to say a tracheotomy.

Not necessarily as limiting as you might think. At altitude, people urinate more starting well before you are in any danger of altitude sickness because the air is too thin to breathe out waste gasses rapidly enough and the body compensates by shunting them out through the kidneys.

So... at high altitude, your piss is carbonated?!
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