The same website is also for the excellent Science News print magazine, which will ship you top notch science reporting right to your door. My father was a subscriber since, well, whenever blue LEDs were invented, because I recall reading about them in Science News.
Strong recommendation for any science-lover.
shanemhansen · 7h ago
Science News is a big part of my childhood. My stepdad's dad was a subscriber and every issue was handed down to us gently used. I have thousands of back issues.
pugworthy · 6h ago
Same. My highschool library in the 70’s had a subscription and I would read through them with relish.
porphyra · 5h ago
It's always weird to me that acetaminophen has such a low therapeutic index, like in order to get enough for it to do anything, you're also on the verge of liver failure (especially if you also drink alcohol). Also it just doesn't work super well in my personal experience --- I hardly feel anything when I take it. And yet it's one of the most commonly taken medicines worldwide.
oliwarner · 2h ago
"Therapeutic index" is a strange number to worry about. Those index scores are the balance between efficacy and toxicity.
Acetaminophen is an effective analgesic, just toxic in large doses. It's perfect for lower intensity pain. It's non-addictive, doesn't have long term issues like NSAIDs. It's popular for a reason.
Jolter · 13m ago
It’s cheap, too.
pipes · 3h ago
Calpol in the UK, paracetamol for children in liquid form (which is British name for acetaminophen) works wonders for kids with a fever. I'm not exaggerating when I say that every doctor I've seen with my kids has said not to withhold it as it really helps with fever.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t work for you. Personally, I’ve never experienced a pharmaceutical that worked so reliably and predictably. It would bring a fever down in my kids when they were young without fail in about 25 minutes.
To be fair though I really haven’t been involved with more than a handful of medications. I’m sure there’s many that work very crisply.
AndrewDavis · 1h ago
Similar to you it is incredible at bringing down fever in my kid. I've seen my kid go from whimpering looking like death, to be crawling about playing happily again in half an hour. With the behaviour change tracking with her temperature coming down.
As an adult using it as a pain killer it has been ineffective.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
For me I’ve found it works incredibly well at killing a headache or outright stopping a scintillating migraine (especially when combined with caffeine). But for body aches and pains I also find it doesn’t do a whole lot, especially compared to ibuprofen.
db48x · 1h ago
That's because ibuprofen reduces inflammation but acetaminophen does not. Joint pain and other such aches are all accompanied by inflammation, but headaches are not.
dreamcompiler · 5h ago
Two tablets work great for me for headaches but results do vary. The danger zone for liver damage is roughly 14 tablets taken all at once. (Less if you've been drinking.) From what I'm told, acetaminophen overdose is quite an unpleasant way to die.
dogtorwoof · 3h ago
You die from liver failure. Which is a horrible way to die. You’re bleeding and clotting at the same time. Your abdomen swells with fluid. Then your legs and your whole body. Your skin turns yellow and you’re itching constantly. You become increasingly confused and violent. Infections start brewing in that pool of fluid in your abdomen.
andai · 3h ago
I am going to cancel my internet subscription...
Waterluvian · 1h ago
You should sign up for Nautilus. Monthly compact discs mailed to your door containing 650MB of assorted interactive multimedia. It was the original broadband (with very large packet size.)
(You might need a Time Machine first)
chistev · 4h ago
The maximum single dose of paracetamol is 1000 mg, and four doses (4000 mg) in 24 hours.
Any more and it's liver damage.
johnisgood · 2h ago
I will respond here with links, because my comments regarding NAC and silymarin are getting down-voted.
That said, do not exceed the maximum dose. Try ibuprofen, diclofenac, or whatever else, but they are not without risks either. For the record, acetaminophen is the only painkiller you can take on an empty stomach without it causing any GI issues.
oliwarner · 38m ago
Acetylcysteine isn't magic though.
It needs to be administered within 12h and 5% will have a severe anaphylactic-type reaction with risk of respiratory arrest. And the liver can still have been irreparably damaged due to other factors.
In the context of this being a miserable way to kill yourself, it's absolutely awful because there is very much a cut off point where you will still be suffering immeasurable pain and no amount of NAC will save you.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe · 4h ago
It's terrible that you are counting in tablets instead of actual amount of acetaminophen
hgomersall · 3h ago
It's for this reason in the UK paracetamol (as we call acetaminophen) is only ever manufactured to 500mg tablets. I don't know if that is global.
Findecanor · 55m ago
Here in Sweden, a carton of 10 × 500 mg is the most you can find without a subscription. (Boxes of twice that amount is supposed to exists but I've never seen it)
Two years ago, I was prescribed the maximum dosage: 2 × 500 mg every six hours for a couple of months. Because it wears off more quickly than that, I tried to reduce it to one and a half pill more often but that wasn't enough to have any effect.
Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.
I also got it as intravenous liquid at a time when I couldn't swallow.
masklinn · 35m ago
> Here in Sweden, a carton of 10 × 500 mg is the most you can find without a subscription. (Boxes of twice that amount is supposed to exists but I've never seen it)
That ain't much, I don't think I've seen boxes with that little around here. Normal packaging is 30~40, and you can get larger boxes, all without a script.
Are the boxes that small because sweden tends to use an other analgesic as primary culturally e.g. aspirin or ibuprofen and paracetamol is for more exceptional situations?
> Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.
If the goal was pain relief, you can combine ibuprofen and paracetamol. They can be staggered or taken together (in which case there's less duration coverage but some evidence that the combination works better than either separately).
The real tragedies with acetaminophen are "cry-for-help" situations where someone thinks it is the same as aspirin, and swallows a handful, perhaps washing it down with alcohol. What might have been a suicide hesitation mark becomes an entry on a liver transplant list - if they are lucky. If you have children, make sure they know which one can be deadly, especially before going off to college.
Waterluvian · 1h ago
Do you guys have liquid forms, especially for children where the dosage is, obviously, entirely up to you?
One memory I have of visiting our U.S. head office with a bunch of UK people was the “we have to get to Target because they sell Tylenol in ungodly quantities.” And I thought bottles of 200 pills felt ridiculous up here in Canada.
It feels like it’s quite simply a sensible approach to normalize as much as possible.
masklinn · 2h ago
1000mg is readily available around here, and although 500s are splittable you’ll find the odd 200~250 (mostly for children I assume).
pests · 1h ago
I don’t think it is. Many combinations available in the USA.
pasc1878 · 2h ago
You can get 1000mg tablets but only if prescribed by a doctor
Ylpertnodi · 1h ago
My doc wouldn't prescribe 1000s for me. I took two 600s (severe pain was kept at bay).
reedf1 · 5h ago
I take it mostly as an anti-pyretic (fever reducer). For which it is extremely effective. It's my drug of choice for colds, flu, etc.
MichaelRo · 4h ago
Well, it doesn't work for high fever (> 39-40 Celsius). For that, I alternate Ibuprofen and sodium metamizole every 4 hours.
For pain release, paracetamol it's very modest. Some effect for light head pain, zero for strong pain. Zero effect for strong back pain. Ibuprofen works better in all these cases but comes with stomach damage if taken for long.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe · 3h ago
Paracetamol is nicely synergic with all known painkillers. For example prescribing it with morphine leads to less morphine consumption.
Also: it's a terrible rule of thumb to take an NSAID routinely for general infectious symptoms like fever.
cluckindan · 2h ago
Prescribing cannabis for pain also leads to less morphine consumption.
Jolter · 3h ago
But how many cases of poisoning occur each year?
mulderc · 3h ago
“56,000 emergency department visits and 2600 hospitalizations, acetaminophen poisoning causes 500 deaths annually in the United States” -Acetaminophen Toxicity
Suneil Agrawal; Brian P. Murray; Babak Khazaeni. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK441917/
Jolter · 15m ago
That’s a lot. I keep forgetting how many idiots are in the world.
Some of those are probably intentional suicide attempts. What’s the maximum number of tablets for one purchase? Sweden has it regulated down to 14, because that’s just enough to not cause permanent damage in a depressed teenager.
I'm impressed beyond words by these kids, though I think I'd give her the top prize. Watching my grandfather's final days taken away from him by the effects of morphine has always made me wish so much that we had much more effective non-narcotic painkillers
She's in top 4, awarded $600? I dunno this is a confusing layout/structure for how the program is conducted seeing as how the headline is $9m awarded.
ricardobeat · 8h ago
Reversible computing, materials science, genetic research… it’s insane that these kids are doing this level of work in high school.
timr · 6h ago
They aren't doing it on their own. Most of these kids are working with established researchers who give them the shape of the project, as well as the tools and the expertise to accomplish it.
More recently the US scientific funding bodies have had summer programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise get that kind of access, but it's still the exception. It takes more than a summer to do this kind of work.
Edit: quick search for the father's name brings up this professor of biochemistry at UT Tyler:
I don't mean to take anything away from the kid or suggest that they don't work hard, are smart, etc., but these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
carlmr · 4h ago
>these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
Completely agree there, which kind of brings me to a related thought:
One thing I do wonder is, if you look at a few hundred years ago a lot of the inventors in math, physics, engineering, were a tiny group of people with access to resources and education. You're always reading the same names.
It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
fc417fc802 · 1h ago
> if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
That's how ML research is - all you need is sufficient compute and some torrented training data. It gives rise to a new problem of drowning in the literature. I think we simply don't have the tooling and institutions to integrate simultaneous scientific advancements from any significant portion of the population.
timr · 4h ago
Meh. While I think the broad theme is fine (more access to education is generally good -- particularly when it comes to scientific literacy amongst the general public!), I think trying to encourage "research" in this way is largely pushing on a string. I can never figure out if this whole phenomenon of "science fairs" is just Kabuki theater for everyone involved, or if there's a core group of deeply deluded organizers who really believe that they're Making A Difference (tm) in scientific research, and are just completely blind to the career prospects of actual young scientists [1].
Time and experience has shown that "scientific innovation" cannot be made to happen faster by throwing more money at it, and a promising young person would be much better off by putting their talents to use doing something less random [2]. You can produce more good research in aggregate (maybe), but only in the same way that you can find more gold by crushing more rocks. Either way, you have to crush the rocks.
For example, the US government dramatically increased grad school funding through the 80s-2000s, and the primary outcome was an employment crisis amongst PhDs in the sciences. In the 40s-70s it was fairly straightforward to establish a career in research, but these days it's Hunger Games. I sort of fundamentally believe that the reason most science came out of the European aristocracy was not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic. Science is an avocation, not a vocation.
Science fairs and the like are a weird little subculture of college-application polishers, in part because nobody in their right mind actually wants to become a scientist. I think it's a safe bet that the young woman in this article ends up doing something more lucrative with her life (and good for her, if she does).
[1] Or even more cynically: the organizers do know, and are doing it because it builds their own careers.
[2] Or at least, with a higher alpha.
mjevans · 2h ago
I suspect you're correct about basic / true research and discovery of 'the new'.
Also probably about that US Gov funding. I've heard it's more about knowing how to write a grant than it is about being worthy of getting one. Better direction, better active identification of candidates (instead of the passive system that's biased towards large players), better stability. All of those would help.
However, there's a _lot_ of stuff that would be within reach, were only enough mass manufacture involved to drive down the adoption cost and break through the catch 22. Many things only need for gathering the correct sort of people, giving them enough room to work on a clear goal, and seeing where things really are.
The big business problems with that are figuring out if the return is plausibly worth the investment, and feeding the baby long enough that it can become a working adult.
tomabuct · 1h ago
Eh. Even if 1 in 10000000 of the kids that do "science fairs" end up in "science research" with at least one "scientific innovation", and the rest of them make $$$ in industry, that's them working. This comment is asinine on too many levels to fully rebut.
carlmr · 1h ago
Agreed, I don't believe the science fair will push research, but we need to lay the groundwork to build a society of researchers instead one of office drones, going through JIRA tickets.
The comment above yours is a really poor strawmanning attempt.
timr · 1h ago
> This comment is asinine on too many levels to fully rebut.
Thanks. I mean, it's not like I have direct experience with this stuff or anything, as one of those 9,999,999 who spent years of my life doing science, only to end up in industry.
Also, it's not like we would do better by skipping the years of science and going directly to the productive part, or that those (now grown up) "kids" are encouraged to continue circling the airstrip of life by the funding programs that are happy to pay postdoc salaries -- postdocs being the best kind of cheap, indentured labor -- to keep the dream alive just a little bit longer. After all, walking away from a PhD/postdoc(s) is only just a bit harder than chewing off your own leg to escape a bear trap.
It's clearly much better to waste the time of our smartest people by injecting false economic incentives into the system in an effort to socially engineer some kind of scientific command economy. Let's grind those rocks, and turn the cheap gravel into concrete to build glorious future!
fc417fc802 · 1h ago
> not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic.
Aren't those effectively the same thing? At least in the given context where society doesn't have the resources available for everyone to live like that.
timr · 1h ago
Effectively the same in terms of distribution of outcome, perhaps, but it's a bit like saying that it's really unfortunate that poor people can't afford their own manicured gardens, peacock collection and garage full of antique race cars.
mschuster91 · 58m ago
> It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
Yep, but we collectively decided that it is more profitable to put the best minds that manage to survive the education trials to either shaving off 0.0000001 cents of each financial transaction and to still make billions of dollars off of that or to sell ads so people get convinced they need to buy something. And those that get dropped along the education pipeline, we either let them stay on the road side and let them rot in poverty or we just use them as yet another source of labor ready to be exploited.
AStonesThrow · 6h ago
Science projects are a family affair, more often than not. Ask me how I know.
fracus · 7h ago
I thought morphine didn't cause health damage to the human body apart from addiction and withdrawal symptoms.
shanemhansen · 7h ago
Well it absolutely muddles your mind when you're on it and it causes constipation. It can also depress your respiratory system.
johnisgood · 1h ago
Not everyone experiences side-effects of opioids, in fact, they are not even THAT common. I do not experience euphoria, nausea, mental fog, or any sedation from ANY opioids. I experience constipation, but I am fine with that. Morphine might be more dulling (or foggy) than say, oxycodone, but it highly varies.
As for "depress your respiratory system", yeah, in high enough doses, or if you are especially sensitive to it.
Pharmaceutical opioids are pretty much safer than NSAIDs. The side-effects of NSAIDs are actually worse than the side-effect of opioids. You will not get ulcers, blood clots, stroke, heart issues, GI issues, and all sorts of other issues with opioids.
dreamcompiler · 5h ago
And it can make some people very nauseous.
Nobody discusses these mundane drawbacks when they talk about the evils of heroin addiction. When you're high, you puke and you cannot give a shit. Both figuratively and literally.
cjbgkagh · 6h ago
Morphine, like all neurotransmitter drugs, affects the autonomic nervous system which can yield a cornucopia of unwanted and seemingly unrelated side effects. It’s a complex system that’s best treated with care.
lenerdenator · 7h ago
at least according to these people [0], you can overdose on morphine, same as any opiate or opioid. not sure their credentials but it makes sense; it's an opioid/opiate and those can cause respiratory depression.
Yeah its like any other opiod- it depresses respiratory function which can cause death but it isnt directly toxic to any organs like APAP is
dreamcompiler · 5h ago
Oh yeah morphine overdose will kill you dead because you will stop breathing and you won't even know it happened.
The instant antidote is Narcan which is available over the counter at pharmacies in some states.
AStonesThrow · 6h ago
Nurses in palliative care and hospice are well-known to generously administer morphine in increasing doses, because it eventually takes away all the pain and suffering (of the families and nurses).
> Watching my grandfather's final days taken away from him by the effects of morphine
Those were not prbly his final days. he was artifically kept alive by modern medicine. Those final days are not natural part of dying.
petesergeant · 3h ago
Journavx!
foxwolf · 1h ago
All my life, I've suffered from frequent (as in daily) headaches. I even have a photo of myself from my 10th birthday (or thereabouts), where you can visibly tell from how I'm holding my head that I had a headache. The nature and intensity of my headaches has changed over time.
In my 20's I discovered Excedrin (acetaminophen + caffeine) and, surprisingly, it not only worked, but worked very well. One tablet would kill most of headaches I was having at that time of my life in about 15 minutes.
Unfortunately, it stopped working for me by the time I was 30. It no longer has any noticeable effect.
Aspirin, Naproxen, Ibuprofin, and Tylenol 3 have no effect, either.
mancerayder · 1h ago
Have you ruled out head/neck muscle tightness due to jaw clenching?
Have you tried muscle Botox injections? or seen a migraine specialist?
djmips · 1h ago
That is a tragedy. Sounds like you could use some precision medicine but it feels like that revolution is not happening fast though.
ItsHarper · 8h ago
This would be incredibly cool if it works in reality and not just simulation. Remarkable that the author is just 17.
epcoa · 8h ago
I’m not going to shit on it, nothing wrong with going into the family business - but it isn’t a complete coincidence that her dad is a PhD biochemist at UT Tyler.
jmcgough · 7h ago
Yeah, it's great to have kids excited about science, but at 17 it's extremely unlikely that she taught herself enough chemistry, organic chemistry and biochemistry to come up with this. She needs years more of college-level coursework. Essentially impossible without a biochemist in the family to guide her.
It never is, the winner of this competition is in astral radio telescopes.
Something tells me he didn't launch the satellite.
felineflock · 7h ago
With mentorship from Caltech and access to data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission, Matteo created a machine learning algorithm and compiled a groundbreaking database called VarWISE.
I knew someone who reached the final stage of one of these science fairs. Project was done at a lab in an Ivy League university over a couple of summers. Relative was a senior scientist at the lab and guided them every step of the way. Not to discount what these kids are doing, but the reality is that these science fairs have largely become a contest about how well your family is connected to science-fair-friendly research facilities and how good your presentation skills are. I mean, do we really think 17 year olds are out there doing human trials on novel cancer therapies? I’m sure there are some projects that are genuinely thought of and done by the students themselves, but looking at a lot of these PhD level research that are supposedly done as after school projects of high school kids, I can’t help but think the whole thing has become a bit of a farce.
fracus · 7h ago
She's also a very talented violinist.
14 · 6h ago
Seeing articles like this is almost hard to read. My kids are very smart but this girl is 1000 times what they are doing. This girl is 1000 times what I am doing.
Maybe it is just imposter syndrome but sometimes I read articles like this and think I fell short in life. But I am also top of my peers at work and I am a health care provider and my clients all request me so I know I am doing good. Sometimes I just wonder what mark I will leave on this world.
Glyptodon · 6h ago
My experience is that stuff like this isn't because someone is wildly smarter than everyone but because there are connections, support, and resources of some form.
14 · 3h ago
I understand that and I do know that I am actually very intelligent and smart. Same for my children I mean damn I have already taught my 8 year old how to solder as good as a professional and am working on programming with him. And as a health care worker I can look after even the most difficult complex care clients where other health care workers struggle. That is what I am known for at work. But sometimes seeing literal teens doing things that seem so far ahead of me it
throwawaymaths · 6h ago
it's just a four step synthesis. with the help of a phd chemist you could probably learn the steps in three months, and if you put your mind to it you could learn the ochem in a year. this project is the culmination of at least a year-maybe even up to three-of work.
whats surprising is that parents let their kids do ochem at 17!! thats some toxic shit :). safety is why chemistry is not a super popular field at high school level science fairs.
mofunnyman · 5h ago
C'mon, who doesn't like their kids dusted with methylmercury?
nenaoki · 3h ago
it's sad to compare.
apart from that: the word "mark" comes from a root for "boundary" or "border", and really it doesn't need to be about that; we're all in this together.
djtango · 6h ago
The key synthetic step using Ir was published after I graduated (and left Chemistry...) way to make me feel old :)
I'm very impressed by the level of chemistry demonstrated by a 17 year old. During my time as a chemistry student this level of project and synthesis probably could have been included as a chunk of a master's thesis. Did she perform all the synthesis herself? That takes a decent amount of experimental skill and more importantly what lab did she do all of this in?
Any uni ought to be delighted to get a precocious talent like this!
nandomrumber · 4h ago
Can acetaminophen be packaged with n-acetyl cysteine to render it not rate limited by same?
meew0 · 3h ago
The problem is that N-acetylcysteine tastes and smells awful (like farts/rotten eggs) and often causes nausea and vomiting as a side effect.
The vast majority of people use acetaminophen in a safe way, and acetaminophen doesn't really have many side effects by itself, so you'd make life more unpleasant for a large number of people in order to prevent a tiny number of acute poisonings.
Probably if this were implemented, most acetaminophen users would switch to e.g. ibuprofen which is less acutely toxic in overdose but has much more chronic toxicity (to the stomach and the kidneys) when used over a long period of time, even at a normal dose. I'd wager this change might even be a net negative on the whole.
AnthonBerg · 1h ago
Experiences may vary; I’ve tasted and smelled NAC.
The smell is reminescent of a high-potency cannabis strain. (Sulfur-containing molecules.)
The taste is very acidic and a bit astringent.
Generally the smell and taste of something isn’t a concern with medication. I don’t think acetaminophen tastes great.
I’ve never encountered or seen the digestive issues that are often mentioned. I’ve seen other side effects which were noticeable – mast cell and histamine related I believe, kind of weird ones, like psoriasis kind of drying out a bit and the skin on the lips “refreshing” itself. (Really!) Subtle side effects and hard to put into words without making them seem bigger and weirder than they are, but NAC can nonetheless be a sort of histamine and mast cell “flusher”, so to speak and as it seems. Beneficial in the long run imo ime, but tricky to package universally.
Still, NAC is also tragically unknown and unused! There’s tons of fascinating literature on it. They fried rats’ brains with methamphetamine and fixed them with NAC; Brutal study, intriguing results on very significant mechanisms.
Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe · 3h ago
Always wondered that.
Maybe too many people would take even more?
throwawaymaths · 8h ago
impressive for a high schooler but this just adds a protecting group onto tylenol. am i missing something?
edit: oh i see. its really blurry but the silyl modified tylenol is predicted to have good trpv1 binding computationally. afaict no in vitro or in vivo studies were done. could be cool. not sure if diethylethynylphenylsilyl group has good Lipinski properties though (i suspect not)
edit: s/aspirin/Tylenol
abrookewood · 8h ago
It isn't aspirin - Acetaminophen, also known as N-acetyl-para-aminophenol (APAP) or paracetamol
throwawaymaths · 8h ago
lol yeah sorry brain too deep into synthetic chemistry bits. thanks.
snibsnib · 5h ago
I'm not an expert in pharmaceutical chemistry, but this looks like a series of relatively complex and low yield reactions. Would it be likely that this would push the price of this product beyond what is reasonable for a general use drug?
maxerickson · 5h ago
The starting point is ~free (like 2 or 4 cents retail per dose for generic in the US). Given my relatively light usage of pain drugs, I would certainly pay 10x that for reduced toxicity.
And then it isn't necessarily the case that the identified reactions are the most cost effective available.
toast0 · 4h ago
If you have light usage, do you need reduced toxicity?
Acetaminophen's effective dose is pretty close to the dangerous dose, but I would take light use to mean you take something maybe once a month max and only a single dose (or maybe even just one pill when the dose is two pills). At that level of use, I don't think you're at risk of anything.
Otoh, if the title is accurate and it can be more effective at pain release and less damaging to the liver, that would be great for people who experience pain frequently.
w10-1 · 3h ago
If it makes it to market at a high price, it wouldn't compete directly but be targeted to those at risk of toxicity.
aethrum · 6h ago
Reminds me of this drug company I was pitched a while ago:
They're testing it now against all of their genetic targets they bought from 23andMe
throwawaymaths · 8h ago
regeneron is the sponsor of STS. used to be well known as the Westinghouse STS, then intel took it over in the aughts
colingauvin · 7h ago
They would need to show efficacy to patent it. It seems like this is all computational.
throwawaymaths · 6h ago
no she did the synthesis and the yields are averaged? over >5 replicates <== just doing that is pretty (spiritually?) impressive, most phd chemists wouldn't do that kind of reproduction of results.
refurb · 5h ago
Only for a utility patent, not for a composition of matter patent.
more_corn · 5h ago
How about don’t fucking take it because it’s toxic?
Strong recommendation for any science-lover.
Acetaminophen is an effective analgesic, just toxic in large doses. It's perfect for lower intensity pain. It's non-addictive, doesn't have long term issues like NSAIDs. It's popular for a reason.
To be fair though I really haven’t been involved with more than a handful of medications. I’m sure there’s many that work very crisply.
As an adult using it as a pain killer it has been ineffective.
(You might need a Time Machine first)
Any more and it's liver damage.
https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/820200-treatment - Treatment for liver damage is NAC (N-acetylcysteine) which is available as a supplement.
> N-acetylcysteine (NAC) is the mainstay of therapy for acetaminophen toxicity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK537183/
Again, NAC is readily available without prescription.
Additionally, see https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/422884 for Silymarin (which is found in Milk Thistle).
That said, do not exceed the maximum dose. Try ibuprofen, diclofenac, or whatever else, but they are not without risks either. For the record, acetaminophen is the only painkiller you can take on an empty stomach without it causing any GI issues.
It needs to be administered within 12h and 5% will have a severe anaphylactic-type reaction with risk of respiratory arrest. And the liver can still have been irreparably damaged due to other factors.
In the context of this being a miserable way to kill yourself, it's absolutely awful because there is very much a cut off point where you will still be suffering immeasurable pain and no amount of NAC will save you.
Two years ago, I was prescribed the maximum dosage: 2 × 500 mg every six hours for a couple of months. Because it wears off more quickly than that, I tried to reduce it to one and a half pill more often but that wasn't enough to have any effect. Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.
I also got it as intravenous liquid at a time when I couldn't swallow.
That ain't much, I don't think I've seen boxes with that little around here. Normal packaging is 30~40, and you can get larger boxes, all without a script.
Are the boxes that small because sweden tends to use an other analgesic as primary culturally e.g. aspirin or ibuprofen and paracetamol is for more exceptional situations?
> Caffeine is supposed to reinforce the effect, but of course I had to avoid that to sleep.
If the goal was pain relief, you can combine ibuprofen and paracetamol. They can be staggered or taken together (in which case there's less duration coverage but some evidence that the combination works better than either separately).
Trigger warning for self harm.
The real tragedies with acetaminophen are "cry-for-help" situations where someone thinks it is the same as aspirin, and swallows a handful, perhaps washing it down with alcohol. What might have been a suicide hesitation mark becomes an entry on a liver transplant list - if they are lucky. If you have children, make sure they know which one can be deadly, especially before going off to college.
One memory I have of visiting our U.S. head office with a bunch of UK people was the “we have to get to Target because they sell Tylenol in ungodly quantities.” And I thought bottles of 200 pills felt ridiculous up here in Canada.
I'd be interested to know if I'm wrong though.
For pain release, paracetamol it's very modest. Some effect for light head pain, zero for strong pain. Zero effect for strong back pain. Ibuprofen works better in all these cases but comes with stomach damage if taken for long.
Also: it's a terrible rule of thumb to take an NSAID routinely for general infectious symptoms like fever.
Some of those are probably intentional suicide attempts. What’s the maximum number of tablets for one purchase? Sweden has it regulated down to 14, because that’s just enough to not cause permanent damage in a depressed teenager.
I'm impressed beyond words by these kids, though I think I'd give her the top prize. Watching my grandfather's final days taken away from him by the effects of morphine has always made me wish so much that we had much more effective non-narcotic painkillers
She's in top 4, awarded $600? I dunno this is a confusing layout/structure for how the program is conducted seeing as how the headline is $9m awarded.
More recently the US scientific funding bodies have had summer programs for kids who wouldn't otherwise get that kind of access, but it's still the exception. It takes more than a summer to do this kind of work.
Edit: quick search for the father's name brings up this professor of biochemistry at UT Tyler:
https://www.uttyler.edu/directory/chemistry/lee-jiyong.php
and mom's name brings up this professor of pharmaceutical science:
https://www.unthsc.edu/college-of-pharmacy/eul-hyun-suh
I don't mean to take anything away from the kid or suggest that they don't work hard, are smart, etc., but these kinds of science fairs are fundamentally about access.
Completely agree there, which kind of brings me to a related thought:
One thing I do wonder is, if you look at a few hundred years ago a lot of the inventors in math, physics, engineering, were a tiny group of people with access to resources and education. You're always reading the same names.
It seems if we as a society could decide that science is more important to us, with 8 billion people on earth, if we gave more access, time and incentives to people we should be able to increase the amount of scientific results exponentially.
That's how ML research is - all you need is sufficient compute and some torrented training data. It gives rise to a new problem of drowning in the literature. I think we simply don't have the tooling and institutions to integrate simultaneous scientific advancements from any significant portion of the population.
Time and experience has shown that "scientific innovation" cannot be made to happen faster by throwing more money at it, and a promising young person would be much better off by putting their talents to use doing something less random [2]. You can produce more good research in aggregate (maybe), but only in the same way that you can find more gold by crushing more rocks. Either way, you have to crush the rocks.
For example, the US government dramatically increased grad school funding through the 80s-2000s, and the primary outcome was an employment crisis amongst PhDs in the sciences. In the 40s-70s it was fairly straightforward to establish a career in research, but these days it's Hunger Games. I sort of fundamentally believe that the reason most science came out of the European aristocracy was not due to inequity, but because only someone well-off could devote their lives to something so erratic. Science is an avocation, not a vocation.
Science fairs and the like are a weird little subculture of college-application polishers, in part because nobody in their right mind actually wants to become a scientist. I think it's a safe bet that the young woman in this article ends up doing something more lucrative with her life (and good for her, if she does).
[1] Or even more cynically: the organizers do know, and are doing it because it builds their own careers.
[2] Or at least, with a higher alpha.
Also probably about that US Gov funding. I've heard it's more about knowing how to write a grant than it is about being worthy of getting one. Better direction, better active identification of candidates (instead of the passive system that's biased towards large players), better stability. All of those would help.
However, there's a _lot_ of stuff that would be within reach, were only enough mass manufacture involved to drive down the adoption cost and break through the catch 22. Many things only need for gathering the correct sort of people, giving them enough room to work on a clear goal, and seeing where things really are.
The big business problems with that are figuring out if the return is plausibly worth the investment, and feeding the baby long enough that it can become a working adult.
The comment above yours is a really poor strawmanning attempt.
Thanks. I mean, it's not like I have direct experience with this stuff or anything, as one of those 9,999,999 who spent years of my life doing science, only to end up in industry.
Also, it's not like we would do better by skipping the years of science and going directly to the productive part, or that those (now grown up) "kids" are encouraged to continue circling the airstrip of life by the funding programs that are happy to pay postdoc salaries -- postdocs being the best kind of cheap, indentured labor -- to keep the dream alive just a little bit longer. After all, walking away from a PhD/postdoc(s) is only just a bit harder than chewing off your own leg to escape a bear trap.
It's clearly much better to waste the time of our smartest people by injecting false economic incentives into the system in an effort to socially engineer some kind of scientific command economy. Let's grind those rocks, and turn the cheap gravel into concrete to build glorious future!
Aren't those effectively the same thing? At least in the given context where society doesn't have the resources available for everyone to live like that.
Yep, but we collectively decided that it is more profitable to put the best minds that manage to survive the education trials to either shaving off 0.0000001 cents of each financial transaction and to still make billions of dollars off of that or to sell ads so people get convinced they need to buy something. And those that get dropped along the education pipeline, we either let them stay on the road side and let them rot in poverty or we just use them as yet another source of labor ready to be exploited.
As for "depress your respiratory system", yeah, in high enough doses, or if you are especially sensitive to it.
Pharmaceutical opioids are pretty much safer than NSAIDs. The side-effects of NSAIDs are actually worse than the side-effect of opioids. You will not get ulcers, blood clots, stroke, heart issues, GI issues, and all sorts of other issues with opioids.
Nobody discusses these mundane drawbacks when they talk about the evils of heroin addiction. When you're high, you puke and you cannot give a shit. Both figuratively and literally.
[0]https://www.addictiongroup.org/drugs/opioids/morphine/overdo...
The instant antidote is Narcan which is available over the counter at pharmacies in some states.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4594093/
Those were not prbly his final days. he was artifically kept alive by modern medicine. Those final days are not natural part of dying.
In my 20's I discovered Excedrin (acetaminophen + caffeine) and, surprisingly, it not only worked, but worked very well. One tablet would kill most of headaches I was having at that time of my life in about 15 minutes.
Unfortunately, it stopped working for me by the time I was 30. It no longer has any noticeable effect.
Aspirin, Naproxen, Ibuprofin, and Tylenol 3 have no effect, either.
Something tells me he didn't launch the satellite.
https://www.societyforscience.org/regeneron-sts/2025-student...
whats surprising is that parents let their kids do ochem at 17!! thats some toxic shit :). safety is why chemistry is not a super popular field at high school level science fairs.
apart from that: the word "mark" comes from a root for "boundary" or "border", and really it doesn't need to be about that; we're all in this together.
I'm very impressed by the level of chemistry demonstrated by a 17 year old. During my time as a chemistry student this level of project and synthesis probably could have been included as a chunk of a master's thesis. Did she perform all the synthesis herself? That takes a decent amount of experimental skill and more importantly what lab did she do all of this in?
Any uni ought to be delighted to get a precocious talent like this!
The vast majority of people use acetaminophen in a safe way, and acetaminophen doesn't really have many side effects by itself, so you'd make life more unpleasant for a large number of people in order to prevent a tiny number of acute poisonings.
Probably if this were implemented, most acetaminophen users would switch to e.g. ibuprofen which is less acutely toxic in overdose but has much more chronic toxicity (to the stomach and the kidneys) when used over a long period of time, even at a normal dose. I'd wager this change might even be a net negative on the whole.
The smell is reminescent of a high-potency cannabis strain. (Sulfur-containing molecules.)
The taste is very acidic and a bit astringent.
Generally the smell and taste of something isn’t a concern with medication. I don’t think acetaminophen tastes great.
I’ve never encountered or seen the digestive issues that are often mentioned. I’ve seen other side effects which were noticeable – mast cell and histamine related I believe, kind of weird ones, like psoriasis kind of drying out a bit and the skin on the lips “refreshing” itself. (Really!) Subtle side effects and hard to put into words without making them seem bigger and weirder than they are, but NAC can nonetheless be a sort of histamine and mast cell “flusher”, so to speak and as it seems. Beneficial in the long run imo ime, but tricky to package universally.
Still, NAC is also tragically unknown and unused! There’s tons of fascinating literature on it. They fried rats’ brains with methamphetamine and fixed them with NAC; Brutal study, intriguing results on very significant mechanisms.
Maybe too many people would take even more?
edit: oh i see. its really blurry but the silyl modified tylenol is predicted to have good trpv1 binding computationally. afaict no in vitro or in vivo studies were done. could be cool. not sure if diethylethynylphenylsilyl group has good Lipinski properties though (i suspect not)
edit: s/aspirin/Tylenol
And then it isn't necessarily the case that the identified reactions are the most cost effective available.
Acetaminophen's effective dose is pretty close to the dangerous dose, but I would take light use to mean you take something maybe once a month max and only a single dose (or maybe even just one pill when the dose is two pills). At that level of use, I don't think you're at risk of anything.
Otoh, if the title is accurate and it can be more effective at pain release and less damaging to the liver, that would be great for people who experience pain frequently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibe_Therapeutics