Ever used a cooling spray, or sprayed yourself with liquid butane while filling a lighter? The evaporating liquid carries away a lot of heat, so it feels cold.

Refrigerators do the same thing essentially, but in a closed tube, and then they recompress the evaporated gas to squeeze the heat out (this happens in the warm tubes you'll find on the outside rear of the fridge), so that it can go around and work as a cooling spray again.

And computers do this lightning fast. They can perform several billion instructions per second.

Hope it works for you.

I don't go onto the wilderness much, so I rarely get bitten nowadays. The highest risk is at the air field where I skydive, but DEET roll-on or stick work great.

A cute Nordic word for a stepdaughter. With all the European folk tales about mean stepmothers (mostly), the step- prefix has a slight negative connotation here. Bonus- is much more positive and better reflects our feelings.

They would still swell up, but not to abnormal size.

Wow, that explains everything that's wrong with MBAs, pretty much. If you don't connect to people you can't lead them, you can only boss them around.

You're allergic.

My bonus daughter used to play soccer, and she'd take allergy medicine beforehand to stave off such consequences from the inevitable mosquito bites.

The Americans tried to import the kilogram way back when, but the weight they brought with them was stolen by pirates: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/12/28/574044232/how-pirates-of-the-caribbean-hijacked-americas-metric-system

Yeah, it's as common as dirt, literally.

Yeah, you can get auto-brewery syndrome, and get drunk just by eating carbs.

Actually, it's very rare and caused by other issues, because a well-functioning digestive system kills yeast cells.

Very interesting, thanks.

Thanks. I'm curious as to how it did evolve, and what it was before it became such a deadly toxin. But all research i can find has gone into what it does to humans and animals.

Bubbles form easier at "nucleation sites", which are often tiny imperfections in the glass. Part of the reason why cola light explodes when mentos is added, is that the candy surface is especially accommodating to nucleation.

Exactly that happened to me when I did my first tandem. I still skydive 14 years later. Best life decision ever.

Radioactive cesium chloride can sometimes glow blue in the dark. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident#Opening_the_capsule

Plutonium RTG sources don't glow, but they have attracted fatal attention by being hot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lia_radiological_accident#The_accident

If alien biology is present, I think bioaccumulation of radioactive substances, as suggested in another post, is an interesting direction to take.

People frequently survive radiological accidents. If you want to make it realistic, read up on the above accidents and others, decide source type and strength, exposure time and technology level of medical treatment, and wrap your drama around that.

Have you read "The Martian" by Andy Weir? >!He wanted to include a radiological accident with an RTG, but couldn't find a way to make it realistic without killing the protagonist.!< He does his best at making the science realistic, and I think his stories, and especially the world-building, are all the better for it.

There are several published diaries of Antarctic researchers and explorers, maybe some contemporary ones can give you good ideas. Here are some excerpts from one, aboard a research ship: https://www.chemistryworld.com/careers/an-antarctic-researchers-field-diary/3008975.article

They all use frequency hopping, in addition to encryption and such. This means that they automatically retune to a new frequency many times per second. A simple tuner can only stay on one frequency. Even if you have one that can hop, it needs to know the pattern to follow in order to track the signal, and the agreement on a pattern between the sender and receiver is kept secret by encryption. The common way to intercept cellphone communications is to have your own device that acts like a cellphone tower, trick the phone into connecting to that, and read off the data after it has been received, while transparently forwarding it to the real cellphone network.

Love that story. In case anyone's curious, it's "Stationary Bike", a short story by Stephen King.

The river bridge that I cross every time I go to or from work is perceptibly sloped. It was the most practical way to buid that particular bridge. Building them level when possible is often easier though.

Every time an exhaust valve opens in a cylinder, the residual pressure of the exhaust gases is suddenly expelled thorugh the exhaust, causing a loud "pop". In most engines, the pops are regularly spaced, creating a regular "tone". In the V arrangement, two pops happen close after one another, and then there's a longer delay before the next two. This causes the characteristic noise.

Methanol is toxic once you have a nervous system that can be affected by it, and a liver that can convert it to formic acid.

Nah, they're just stabbed different