WTF is Medical Air?

I'm not going to lie, this post kind of sucks. No pun intended, because medical air blows.

So here's how this question came to be and eventually led to me writing a crappy post because its air.  I have a friend who has been kicking cancer's ass for a little while but in going full Uma Thurman from Kill Bill on her cancer cells, we've spent a lot of time in the hospital, either taking her to chemo or visiting her. On one such visit, I saw something that confused the hell out of me: Medical Air

I know what oxygen is, I know air, but WTF makes air medical?

Along the wall was an nozzle for something listed as medical air. What. The. Fuck. Medical air? I thought we were over this whole miasma thing and had been for awhile but apparently not. So it turns out, medical air is actually kind of super important. That being said, its description (and therefore this post) is very short.

Medical air is a combination of two gasses: nitrogen and oxygen. It is 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen. That's it. That's medical air.

Thanks for reading and tune in next week...

Just kidding, I'm going into a little more detail but not much. That concentration of gasses, 79% nitrogen and 21% oxygen, its pretty much the same as regular atmospheric air but what makes medical air special is what's not there. There are no contaminants, no "other" gasses like carbon dioxide, methane, argon, whatever, and the amount of moisture in it is carefully regulated. This makes it ideal for people who are in a bad place or are immunocompromised (like people going through chemo...). If you've ever gone to an area of a hospital where things were under positive pressure, what was happening was medical air was being pumped into the room so it was at a slighter higher pressure than the surrounding area, ideally keeping "bad air" away and only supplying the "good air" to the patients.

Medical air is also used a lot in operating rooms, both as something that is given to patients as part of the mixing of gasses in anesthesia and used to power any pneumatic tools the surgeon may use as part of the operation. It's standardized ingredients and cleanliness make it extremely valuable in these cases.

So that's actually the end. Short post because its still air. Not much to say. But because it's such a short post be on the look out TOMORROW for a special BONUS post all about 'MERICA in honor of the Fourth of July!

Why Dogs are Scientifically Adorable as Hell

As I was perusing the internet recently, I came across all these articles talking about "puppy dog eyes" and why your dog can make that face that makes your heart melt and you end up sharing your pizza with your four-legged friend. I was curious so I hunted down the actual paper (authored by Juliane Kaminski, Bridget M. Waller, Rui Diogo, Adam Hartstone-Rose, and Anne M. Burrows) to read because you can never trust blogs (except for this one). Let's dive into it.

We all know dogs are awesome and better than cats (sorry cat people). Part of it is that dogs are so damn expressive and just love you no matter what. Cats on the other hand have resting bitch face and couldn't give two fucks about you (or so it seems). But why do dogs make people feel all warm and fuzzy and the feline fuckers don't? No clue, this post isn't about cat, its about dogs. More importantly, its about doggy eyebrows.  

Now, dogs and humans have had a solid 33,000 years to really solidify any relationship between the two species. As a result of this time, dogs have gotten really good at reading cues that humans give them, whether its pointing at something (I do this all the time with my foot when I drop food on the floor, the dog just goes to it) or even just looking in a direction. Furthermore, have you ever noticed that when your doggo can't figure something out, they look at you with that face and you have to go help them? Yea, wolves don't do that. So something magical has happened in that 33,000 years to really form a link between dogs and humans.

Enter oxytocin. Oxytocin is nicknamed the love hormone because it makes you feel really good and smushy when you see something cute. Its the same hormone that gets released when moms look at babies. Interestingly (weird word to type), the exact same process happens when humans look into the eyes of dogs AND when dogs lock gazes with humans. So when a human looks at a dog, they get happy and when a dog looks at a human, the dog gets happy. Then a loop starts where dog looks at human, human at dog, dog back at human, human back at dog, and all the while both are just falling deeper in love with each other. Additionally, humans love puppy-looking dogs. Floppy ears, big eyes, big ol noggins, those are all puppy traits and some of the most popular dogs (think Golden Retrievers) just look like over-sized puppies.

FANCY SCIENCE TIME: When an organism retains juvenile traits into adulthood, that organism is known as a paedomorph. Paedo- from the Greek meaning boy or child and -morph meaning shape or form. No one knows where morph came from..

Image from TAP

This is where the actual paper goes into a lot of detail about dog face anatomy and data collecting procedures, all of which I find to be pretty interesting but you may not so if you think that would be cool, I highly recommend checking out the actual paper (I think from now on, I'm going to abbreviate "the actual paper" as TAP). The results of some dog and wolf face dissections, as well as video recordings, led to the following conclusion: dogs have this magic muscle that wolves don't called the levator anguli oculi medialis, abbreviated LAOM. This magic muscle allows doggos to raise their inner eyebrows, resulting in an eyebrow shape that resembles that look you get right before you cry. But it gets better.

Humans get a lot of information from each other from eyebrow movements, even when you don't realize it. That's one of the hypotheses for why we still have eyebrows even though we've lost most of the rest of our body hair (at least some people...there are some hairy mother fuckers out there). Dogs, having this extra muscle that wolves don't, are able to have much more expressive faces than other critters, with eyebrows moving as much as Nathan Lane (for the older crowd) or Emilia Clarke (for the Millennials). 

Not only have we bred dogs together that led to the formation of a muscle that lets dogs make sad faces, when they lift their little eyebrows, it makes them look even more puppy-like (which we've already talked about the oxytocin cycle). Even better, it shows more of the whites of their eyes (FANCY SCIENCE TIME: whites of the eyes are known as sclera) and its been shown that the more sclera an organism has, the more humans like it. That's why googly eyes are so cute. 

Basically, to sum things up, dogs have a muscle that wolves and some other animals don't that let them make sad faces, which makes them look like puppies, and make their eyes more trusting. Even shorter of a summary: