They say in the article that capillary action draws the coffee along the narrow edge. This is aided by surface tension, just like how water is drawn into a capillary tube.
Doctor-chemist here. You are correct. The carbon-fluorine bond is very inert to metabolism. Ingested Teflon would be almost entirely eliminated unchanged.
Takes pretty harsh conditions to break Teflon, but interestingly it can react with explosive violence, as I have witnessed, when combined with small particle sized Mg.
Besides the well-known opioid peptides, such as the endorphins, the opiate morphine itself is endogenously produced in humans as a signaling molecule. This was a controversial and highly surprising finding to many in the neurosciences.
I wonder about the dosage you might’ve been taking. Many, many people take much more than needed, and higher doses are more likely to have adverse effects. 250-300 µg is an appropriate dosage for most adults. Note that common over-the-counter dosages are 10 to 25 mg. There is a Cochran collaboration meta-analysis supporting this.
I work in a pharmacy school in the US. One of my colleagues told me a funny anecdote about traveling in Great Britain. He had forgotten his melatonin, so went to a pharmacy to get some. The pharmacist told him that it was only available with a prescription, being a neurohormone. But here’s some promethazine OTC. That’s Rx only in the US.
10-25mg seems really high. UK NHS advice is 2mg for sleep, 3mg for jet lag, w/advice it can be increased to up to 10mg if you don't get the desired.effect at lower doses.
For my part, 3mg leaves me totally ruined (exhausted, lethargic, worse than being ill) the following day. 1mg seems to improve my sleep, but I can totally believe less would work too. I will certainly not go higher.
UK is weird with this - I can order all kinds of stuff from abroad that I can't buy OTC here, but there's also another recent "workaround": online pharmacies here can sell you a variety of prescription drugs provided they ask you the appropriate questions and have a prescription issued as part of the sales process. Got my last melatonin that way.
I can tolerate 3 mg very well, 5 mg seems to be the bridge too far, where I wake up exhausted and lethargic.
I experimented with higher doses, such as 15 mg. They worked like sledgehammer to the forehead, with a weird feeling the next day. Not recommended. A good sleep mask and ear plugs are better than increasing dosage of melatonin, at least for me.
In addition to the same 3mg, I ask my Google Home (the first "mini tower", not the puck) to "play the sounds of the ocean" + run an older, slightly noisy purifier (mainly for the white noise, have other much better filtering purifiers in the house that are just too quiet!). Putting my phone away, after a few pages of a novel in my Kindle 11 SE (warmest setting ) I'm dead asleep.
My level of tiredness in the morning seems mainly linked to hours of sleep + how heavy I lifted the day/s before.
I think that's super reasonable and I have no record or memory of dosage, sadly. Although nowadays I approach such things from a very different angle: why do I think I need to medicate at all? Why am I, a relatively young and healthy person, not sleeping well? Jet lag in my book is not a strong enough reason to self-medicate, just suck it up and learn to enjoy early mornings =)
I have been reading a book about biological effects of daylight and how little sun a modern person is exposed to on a daily basis. There has been more research on the topic, especially since a recent research on receptors in the eye responsible for detecting gradual changes in daylight (ipRGCs). Spending more time in the daylight might be a better way to self-medicate.
My own two cents on melatonin at low (.5mg) dosages: it helps me go to bed and keep a reasonable circadian rythm 100x better than any sleep hygiene trick. Without it I have racing thoughts for hours and no sleep pressure on a 24 hour cycle. It's a great boon for me, a healthy normal person.
It can be frustrating finding it in reasonable doses. I remember reading somewhere that the original formula was quite a small dose and other manufacturers simply increased the dose to get around the patent. Naturally, people showed a preference for the higher doses because they assumed it must be better, despite a lack of evidence. As a result, manufacturers making pills with a more reasonable dose were less likely to sell their product and a general trend of increasing doses was observed. This is why it’s easy to find 10-25mg dosed pills in stores, but difficult to find anything sub 3mg, let alone sub 1mg.
Note that a number of well-known drugs violate Lipinski's rules. For instance, digoxin is absorbed by transporters and violates 2 rules. Atorvastatin is another famous example (again 2 rules violated). I believe that it is absorbed through Peyer's patches in the intestine.
Thanks for pointing it out. The Wikipedia article mentions that as well, along with some other examples:
> Some authors have criticized the rule of five for the implicit assumption that passive diffusion is the only important mechanism for the entry of drugs into cells, ignoring the role of transporters.
> Studies have also demonstrated that some natural products break the chemical rules used in Lipinski filters such as macrolides and peptides.
This famous "rule of 5" has been highly influential in this regard, but only about 50% of orally administered new chemical entities actually obey it. [5]
[5] O Hagan S, Swainston N, Handl J, Kell DB (2015). "A 'rule of 0.5' for the metabolite-likeness of approved pharmaceutical drugs". Metabolomics. 11 (2): 323–339. doi:10.1007/s11306-014-0733-z. PMC 4342520. PMID 25750602.
I am a native English speaker, and may be wrong about this, but I believe that the use of "de nada" from Spanish, and "de rien" in French to mean "you're welcome" suffer from similar loss in translation. Do not the former phrases imply that thanks is not needed?
A close English idiom might be "Don't worry about it" or "no problem" in the place of "you're welcome." Even "You're welcome" implies this as in "You're welcome [to ask for such a favor in general]"
That is an interesting implied addendum. However, there still seems to be an acknowledged favor granted, while the French and Spanish phrases I understand to mean that no favor was granted and no thanks are needed.
When it's really, really windy, my dog likes to stare out the window and bark at the trees for moving too much. (It took me a long time to even figure that one out.)
At the same time, he likes it when trees drop little pieces of fruit or seeds, like mesquite beans or pine cones. So on windy days sometimes he gets into a loop with a tree where he
* stiffens up and barks at a tree for shaking its leaves
* cautiously approaches the tree, sometimes growling
* snatches something the tree has just dropped and runs away with it
* runs around in circles with the tree debris, pausing and play bowing wvery now and then, batting it around with his paws, etc.
* ... cautiously approaches the tree again
and so on, where he gradually gets bolder and more casual about approaching the rustling, swaying tree on each iteration.
(He's pretty suspicious of wind-related movement generally— he'll also yell at flags and banners sometimes.)
Brings back pleasant memories. I certainly loved the one I had as a child. I can still smell the _almost_ burning plastic that the device created in operation.
