Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 May 18

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May 18

Tongue position and nasal breathing

In the ankyloglossia article, this is written: "When the tongue rests at the roof of the mouth, it enables nasal breathing." How is this? Why would tongue position make a difference? 2601:18A:C500:C00:C434:A6DB:419B:B5C1 (talk) 00:59, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Because if/when the lips are open, breathing will draw in air through the mouth unless the tongue seals it from the throat. The usual way it does this is to rest on the roof of the mouth against the soft palate. {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 90.208.88.97 (talk) 08:56, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

The paragraph in our article has two references. The second, a journal article, does not mention the ankyloglossia condition, but confirms the importance of a proper tongue posture: "A broad smile, complete to the corners of the mouth, dramatically increases the patient’s chance of posturing their tongue firmly to the palate and making them more likely to be nose breathers." — "Ideal rest oral posture with nasal breathing should be achieved (or as close as is clinically possible). Ideal rest oral posture involves having the teeth together lightly (or very slightly apart), the tongue positioned firmly to the palate with the tip behind the upper incisors, and the lips together without strain." The mechanism by which this "ideal posture" facilitates nasal breathing is not further explained.
The first reference is an entire book on ankyloglossia. Apparently, the impact on nasal breathing can be much stronger than involving merely the tongue posture: "The hard palate is often high and narrow in children and adults who have a tongue-tie due to a low resting tongue posture while swallowing. Tongue-tied babies are born with a high palate from low posture during swallowing in utero as well."^[1] — "If the nasal cavity is narrow due to a tongue-tie or high arched palate, the septum is likely to deviate, the airway will be smaller than normal, and the nasal airflow will be compromised."^[2]  --Lambiam 10:00, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Oil refining

Several questions about the Nelson complexity index: (1) Are auxiliary units (hydrogen production, sulfur recovery, wastewater treatment, etc.) included in the index? If so, how is their relative capacity calculated (is it based on primary distillation like for the product units, or on something else?) (2) How about byproduct integration -- are those units included as well? If so, is their relative capacity based on primary distillation or on something else? For example, if part of the product from the sulfur recovery unit feeds into a sulfuric acid plant, which in turn supplies a sulfolane plant, a synthetic detergent plant and a phosphate plant (the sulfolane and detergent plants also using hydrocarbon products from the refinery proper, and the others not), and the refinery complex also includes a vanadium smelter, are these included in the complexity index or not, and if yes, then how? And (3) if the refinery uses a feedstock other than conventional petroleum (for example, the Sasolburg refinery in South Africa), does the Nelson index even apply, and if so, are all the complexity indexes still calculated based on atmospheric distillation unit capacity, or are they calculated on some other basis (such as the capacity of the primary conversion units)? 69.181.91.208 (talk) 11:33, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Did this destroy thousand lives

https://twitter.com/DrEliDavid/status/1526684981409480706

If the above is true, then are there any proven cases of wrong guys getting Nobel prizes for Physica, Chemistry, Biology, and Medicine? --Ivan Tsar (talk) 14:28, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

So, "wrong guys getting" a Nobel Prize presumes that there exists some pre-determined list, perhaps written by God at the creation of the universe, on who should have gotten all Nobel prizes, and that we've somehow deviated from that list. The Nobel prizes are awarded to people whom, at the time, were determined by the Nobel committees to have merited such prizes. It's purely something where a bunch of people get together in a room and figure out who deserves it that year. It doesn't grant any sort of endorsement to their work as beyond future reproach, and it isn't useful to judge the actions of the Nobel committee based on knowledge they had no access to at the time. Now, if we broaden your question to a more reasonable "has there been other Nobel prizes awarded for work that has later been discredited", then yes there has, in each of the prize categories. (By the way, there is no Nobel Prize in Biology... The original prizes are for Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. Economics was added later). Throwing out Peace and Literature, which aren't awarded based on scientific discoveries, some of the prizes awarded for work later discredited are listed Here. Of note, Enrico Fermi won his prize for discoveries that first were discredited, but later proven by Otto Hahn, who got a Nobel Prize for his efforts; basically Fermi got the prize for claiming to discover something he didn't; it was actually discovered later, and Hahn won the prize for that. --Jayron32 14:42, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

Also, as a side note, yes, a Lobotomy is unequivocally an absolutely horrifying thing, and is a VERY discredited medical procedure. It has been banned for decades in most parts of the world. --Jayron32 14:44, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

(EC) The claims made in the tweet is "Hundreds of thousands of lives". However lobotomy suggests the number of people lobotomised in US+England+Norway+Sweden+Denmark (using the higher individual figures for the last 3 rather than the smaller combined figure) was 68005 and the number in Germany is small. And it sounds like the practice wasn't particularly popular in the Soviet Union. There are still a number of countries which had relatively advanced medical systems and sizeable populations at the time like France, Canada, the other parts of the UK, Brazil, Italy, Spain etc for which we don't have and figures, so perhaps the combined total may reach 100000, maybe even 200000. Such numbers may be way too high when the proper number should be zero, but hundreds of thousands seems a stretch from the estimates used in our article. Of course a lobotomy also affected children, partners and other family members of the person it was performed one, still if this what was being referred to the framing of that tweet is IMO not fit for purpose, which is also fairly silly. You can talk about the horrors of the lobotomy without needing to use questionable stats; or mixing the harm suffered by someone who had lobotomy performed on them, with the effect on their family and friends. Nil Einne (talk) 15:09, 18 May 2022 (UTC)

• For context, the author of this tweet seems to be an antivaxxer, or maybe a covid denier (I did not want to read enough tweets to be sure). They are therefore trying to push the idea that medical authorities should not be trusted. Having historical examples of things where medical authorities were definitely wrong helps to make that argument, and inflating the wrongness of this historical errors makes the argument more emotional.

The logical fallacy in that reasoning is of course not that medical authorities are always right (they are not). Rather, being "sometimes wrong" does not preclude being much less likely to be wrong that any other knowledge-gathering method. Tigraan^{Click here for my talk page ("private" contact)} 09:20, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

Again, this is the failure caused by binary thinking. For people where the world exists in only two states "perfectly right" and "completely wrong", and who don't understand nuance, then it is easy to see that because "X" got one thing wrong once, that's the same as "Y" who gets everything wrong all the time. They're both just "wrong". Understanding that everyone gets something wrong sometimes, but that the scientific process gets the most things right should be sufficient for establishing its trustworthiness. Yes, in the past, medical science was wrong about some things. The important thing to remember is not that, but rather that it is righter about things more than anyone else, and it's also righter today than it was yesterday, and it'll be righter tomorrow than it is today. --Jayron32 11:36, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

That same underlying apparent logical failure arose in an unrelated subject on VPPOL, where User:Spinningspark labeled it: "It's the fallacy of composition (the fact that experts were wrong about something else does not mean they are wrong about the relevant item) spiced with a large dollop of the historian's fallacy (assuming that experts would have reached the same wrong conclusion then even if they had the information we have now)." DMacks (talk) 11:41, 19 May 2022 (UTC)

And nirvana fallacy as well. 2601:646:8A81:6070:8805:AC9A:6203:9448 (talk) 07:14, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

My mother-in-law suffered electroshock "therapy" (not a lobotomy, of course, but useful in this regard) back in the 1950s; I can attest that the negative impact was felt by much more than just one person. DOR (HK) (talk) 18:58, 20 May 2022 (UTC)