Binge drinking 5 drinks in an hour gets you much more drunk than if you were to have the 5 drinks over the course of a night-but why?

It turns out that the enzymes that allow you to digest alcohol get fully saturated when you drink. So once you have your first drink, any more that you have sits around in your body, making you that much drunker , raising your blood alcohol level that much higher , making your hangover that much nastier , and making potential mates that much hotter . All because your body can’t process the alcohol any faster. It’s like pouring more water into a funnel than the funnel can drain out the bottom: the excess water starts to fill up the funnel. This, my chemistry kiddies, is zero-order kinetics .

It also happens with aspirin and phenytoin (Dilantin), an anti-seizure drug.

Graham Walker. Taking the fun out of drinking since 2005.

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5-10% of alcohol is removed from the body through the breath. This fact, of course, lead a classmate to ask if you can sober-up by hyperventilating. “Theoretically, yes,” said the lecturer.

Seeing as though this’ll be Valentine’s Day #2 without a significant other, I may just have to try it.

Speaking of V-Day, there’s a really nice piece at the end of this week’s This American Life about Johnny Cash, his wife, and the song Ring of Fire . Told by Sarah Jewell, one of my favorite contributors. It starts at about 47 minutes in, and it’s so sweet and romantic that it even made me feel a little less jaded and bitter about the whole thing.

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Aldehyde dehydrogenase is the enzyme in your liver that helps you get rid of alcohol (actually, it’s the second step in the process, but I digress). Some people of Asian decent have less of this enzyme, so when they drink alcohol, they can turn red; in most texts, this is a mutation that decreases alcohol metabolism.

Turns out that everyone else is the mutation. If you look at animals’ versions of aldehyde dehydrogenase, they’re more similar to the Asian version of the enzyme; so somewhere along the way (Germany? Russia? England?), I evolved the ability to drink more. (Disulfram, a drug that can help alcoholics stop drinking, blocks this enzyme, making you flush, and not enjoy the alcohol as much.)

So no, I can’t control the weather, shoot force beams out of my eyes, or read minds… but I can drink more alcohol. Better than nothing, I guess.

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Twelve to twenty-four hours of heroin withdrawal can make a person restless and develop goose bumps. That’s where “quitting cold turkey ” comes from.

Twenty-four to seventy-two hours of heroin withdrawal typically leads to flu-like symptoms, and thrashing and flailing of the arms and legs. That’s where we get “ kicking the habit.”

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Now that we’re in endocrine, we’ve been talking about prolactin and other hormones that cause milk release, or, as the professor calls it, “milk letdown.”

My classmate Peter loved the phrase, just with a different definition: Milk letdown. When you have milk, you expect it to be really good, and it’s just okay.

Another interesting fact: the name galaxy (ex: our Milky Way) comes from the root galac- , which means milk. See picture below.

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Farting-I mean, flatulence -is due to poor absorption of carbohydrates.

Beans contain raffinose and stachyose, tri- and quadrupe saccharides, and cannot be digested by humans. They get passed along through your large intestine, where your normal flora (bacteria living in your colon) feast on them. (They do this anaerobically, fermenting the carbs, so that’s where the gas comes from.)

This is clearly why I went to med school.

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We’re in GI right now, and I couldn’t be happier to learn today in lecture that “dumping” is a medical term .

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Yes, that’s right. Eat too much black licorice, and your heart can stop.

(Okay, okay, it’s a bit of a dramatic extreme, but it’s true. I swear .)

Black licorice contains a compound called glycyrrhizic acid, which mimics a hormone in your body (aldosterone), which causes you to lose potassium through your urine. This causes what’s called hypokalemia , which can lead to abnormal heart rhythms. (Maintaining the right level of potassium in your body is vitally important. Too much or too little can cause abnormal heart rhythms. Luckily your kidneys usually keep everything juuuuust right.)

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Bacitracin, a common antibiotic found in Neosporin and other topical antibiotic creams, is named after a girl named Margaret Tracy . It was first discovered growing in a wound of Margaret infected with Bacillus subtilis.

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The fastest growing bacteria can double every 10 minutes (it takes human cells about 24 hours).

If these bacteria were given unlimited nutrients and a stable environment, they’d be larger than the size of the Earth in 1 day.

Amazing, isn’t it?

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