Amazing knowledge

Chapter 12 Horror Concentration Camp: High Wind and Dark Moon

*What kind of fire is "wild fire"?

Practicality: ★★★★★

Knowledge: ★★★★
Interesting: ★★★★★

I often hear about "ghost fire" in ghost stories. It is said that when a person walks at night, the ghost fire will haunt you, and it will go when you walk, and it will stop when you stop.What kind of fire is a will-o'-the-wisp? Is it so scary?

The ancients didn't know what ghost fires were, so they naturally felt scary, but now we have figured out that ghost fires are actually phosphorus fires, which is a very common natural phenomenon, so there is no need to worry.

Our bodies are basically composed of three elements: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. These three elements account for the vast majority of elements, but there are still some other elements in our bodies, such as phosphorus and iron. etc.Bones contain a lot of phosphorus, because there are a lot of calcium phosphide in bones.

After death, the body begins to rot, and the phosphorus in the body undergoes a series of chemical reactions into phosphine.Phosphine is a gas, but its ignition point is very low, and it can react with air at room temperature and burn.

At night in midsummer, the air temperature is relatively high, and phosphine is easier to synthesize at high temperature. The phosphine underground emerges from the cracks in the ground and starts to burn in the air. People say "wisps".

Phosphine also emits a smell of rotten fish. The reason why "the will-o'-the-wisps follow when people walk away, and when people stop, the will-o'-the-wisps also stop" is because the mass of phosphine itself is very small, and people walk around. Time will drive the surrounding air to flow with it, and the phosphine will also float along with it. Once the person stops, the air will no longer flow, and the phosphine will naturally stop.

When organic matter decays, some phosphine will be produced more or less, so there are often "wisps" in cemeteries or swamps.

The final word: "wisps" are not ghosts, nor will they "chase" humans. "wisps" are just a very common phenomenon in nature.

*Can biting your tongue really kill yourself?
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Knowledge: ★★★★
Interesting: ★★★★
In TV dramas, there are often scenes of "biting your tongue and committing suicide after your whereabouts are revealed", especially for killers or spies. It is almost uncommon, but can biting your tongue really kill yourself?Is the TV show true?
If, as described in TV dramas or novels, one bites hard, the tongue snaps off and blood flows out, and the person dies immediately, that is really unreliable at all.Not to mention biting your tongue to commit suicide, you might as well try it and see if you can bite your own tongue "to the root"?
It is okay to bite the tongue, but it is impossible to bite it off with one's own strength. At most, you can only bite off a part, and you have to have a strong willpower to support it.

Although our tongue is small, the pain-sensing nerves on it are really rich. Whether it is cold, hot, or spicy, our tongue can feel it. The pain was so painful that "Aww", if you want to kill yourself by biting your tongue, it's really better to change it.

Even if you choose to bite your tongue and kill yourself without fear of pain, there are three consequences:

One is to die of pain.After the tongue was bitten off, the pain caused confusion in the brain. The brain could not normally control the respiratory system and circulatory system, and the person was killed by the pain.

The second is still painful, so painful that I don’t know what to do, and I even swallowed my tongue, but wanting to swallow something without my tongue is simply a fantasy.The biggest function of the tongue is to help us swallow and spit out. If we want to swallow the tongue without a tongue, we will either be choked to death by our own tongue, or choked to death by a large amount of blood gushing out.

The last one is hemorrhagic shock.The tongue is not only rich in pain-sensing nerves, but also rich in blood vessels. If the tongue is bitten off and blood is allowed to flow, no amount of blood will flow enough!In the end, of course, he bled to death.

The final word: It's not impossible to kill yourself by biting your tongue, but it's too difficult to execute, requiring the executor to have extraordinary willpower.

* Are hair and nails really "immortal"?

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Knowledge: ★★★★
Interesting: ★★★★
It stands to reason that after a person dies, all life activities of the body will stop, and there is no such thing as continuing to grow. However, some people say that human nails and hair are "immortal", and they can continue to grow even after death. is that true?
We may have seen some ancient corpses unearthed from thousand-year-old tombs on TV. Their hair and nails are indeed abnormally long, but this is not because the nails and hair continue to grow after death, but because the corpse lacks water, so It seems that these things have become longer.

After death, the heart and lung function is lost, the body cannot breathe independently, the blood will gradually become cold, all metabolic activities will stop, and the originally soft and flexible limbs will become cold and stiff.

However, there are all kinds of cells in our body, and the time these cells can survive is also different.When breathing stops and there is no sufficient oxygen supply, the nerve cells will bear the brunt, and they will die in as little as 3 minutes, and they will not last longer than 7 minutes.The main organs such as the liver and kidney can survive for 6 hours, which is why the transplant operation must be carried out as soon as possible, because the cells inside these organs will die after a long time.

Among all the cells, skin cells should be regarded as the most "tenacious", 12 hours after death, skin cells can survive.

But whether it is nails or hair, if they want to continue to grow, they must have new cells, and the new cells keep pushing the old cells forward, so the nails and hair will grow longer and longer.But if there is no supply of glucose, no new cells will be born, and nails and hair will not grow.

The reason why hair and nails feel "immortal" is because after death, the skin will start to dehydrate, and once dehydrated, it will shrink, so it seems that the nails and hair have become longer. In fact, their growth process has stopped long ago. There is no end at the moment of death, and it will stop completely after a day or two.

The final word: death is the end of all life activities, whether it is hair or nails, it is impossible to continue to grow after death.

* Does the soul really have weight?

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Many people believe that human beings have souls. When a person dies, his soul will leave his body and go where he should go. Some people say that souls have weight. Is this true? ?
Not to mention whether people have a soul, it is not credible to say that the soul has weight.

A scientist named McDougall once conducted an experiment in the United States. After the experiment, he believed that the weight of the soul was 21 grams. It is said that this experiment was published in the "American Journal of Medicine", but this statement is truly nonsense.

First, let's look at Dr. McDougall's experiment in detail.He recruited 6 volunteers, all of whom were critically ill patients who were dying.Then McDougall let these people lie on the bed, and continuously measured the weight and changes of these people before and after death.

The value of the so-called soul weight comes from one of the volunteers, who lost 0.75 ounces of body weight within a few minutes after his death. McDougall believes that this is the weight of the soul.

But what about the weight data of the remaining five volunteers?Abandoned by Dr. McDougall!Because Dr. McDougall thinks the remaining 5 sets of data are meaningless.One of them lost 5 ounces of weight at the moment of death, and then lost a little after a few minutes; other volunteers lost weight again and again, and some of them fluctuated in weight, rising and falling again.

In short, the data of the remaining few people are not the data that Dr. McDougall wants, so Dr. McDougall chooses to ignore these data and stick to his "21 grams".

Not only that, shortly after Dr. McDougall's paper was published in American Medicine, a doctor wrote an article saying that Dr. McDougall's experimental results were unscientific.

The doctor said that after death, because the thermoregulatory system no longer works, the body temperature will rise first, resulting in accelerated evaporation of body fluids. The 21 grams of soul is just a fallacy without scientific basis.

The final word: It is hard to say whether there is a soul. After all, the dispute between materialism and idealism has not ceased for hundreds of years, but the idea that the soul has weight is definitely not a matter.

*How to determine if a person is dead?

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Countless new lives are born in this world every day, but at the same time, fresh lives leave. The first cry of a baby after birth is their declaration. So how is a person's death judged?

Death is divided into three periods in sociology, which are social death, intellectual death and biological death.In medicine, death is also divided into three periods, but unlike death in sociology, death in medicine is the dying period, clinical death, and biological death. What we usually call death is actually biological death in sociology. Death and medically clinical death.

Death is not something that can be accomplished in an instant, but a process, a process in which the essence of human beings gradually disappears.

In the past, cardiopulmonary function was a sign of a person's survival. In medicine, the loss of breathing and heartbeat ability was regarded as the criterion for death. Keep breathing outside.If there is no heartbeat, CPR can also be used to restore the heartbeat.

However, whether it was or is now, brain death is an irreversible process, so now medicine has changed the standard of death, from the original cardiopulmonary function to brain function.

In 1968, the 22nd World Medical Association formally proposed "irreversible loss of brain function" as the criterion for judging death.There are generally four criteria for brain death:
First, the body has no response to the stimulus;

Second, the body loses the ability to move spontaneously and breathe spontaneously;
Third, there is no reflection;
Fourth, flat line brain waves, and last for more than 10 minutes.

These four criteria have been adopted by countries all over the world as new death standards, and more and more people have begun to accept this criterion.

The final word: brain death is the final stage in death, and brain death is irreversible.Once brain death occurs, the human body will stop metabolizing, which is irreversible, and it is death in the true sense.

*What happened to the "ghost press"?

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People often find that they can't move when they are sleeping, but their consciousness is clear. The old saying is "ghost pressing the bed". It is ghosts that make people unable to move. Is this true?

In fact, "ghost pressing" is just a physiological phenomenon. Doctors call it "sleep paralysis", which has nothing to do with ghosts.Half of the people will experience "ghost pressure bed" at least once in their life.

Generally, "ghost pressing" will happen when you are about to wake up in the morning or when you are about to fall asleep at night. The reason why you choose this time to get sick is because your mind and body may have a misalignment during this time. There is a difference in the time of waking up with the motor center, the nerve center starts to work first, but the motor center is still in a "stagnation" state.

The period of entering deep sleep and starting to dream is medically called the rapid eye movement period.During the rapid eye movement period, the human brain starts to function, and dreaming activities are frequent.

But our body begins to relax. Except for the respiratory muscles that need to maintain normal breathing as always, and the eye muscles that need to adapt to rapid eye movement, all the skeletal muscles of the body are in a relaxed state.In fact, this is a kind of self-protection, preventing us from making excessive movements when dreaming and hurting ourselves unconsciously.

If the consciousness begins to wake up at this time, but the muscles of the body cannot move because they are in a completely relaxed low-tension state, there will be "ghost pressing", that is, sleep paralysis.The abnormal brain of the body cannot give an explanation, and we will imagine a series of frightening scenes, which is why we have hallucinations and the saying "ghost presses the bed".

"Ghost pressure bed" has a lot to do with sleeping posture and environment. Don't worry if you encounter "ghost pressure bed". Wait patiently for a while and the symptoms will naturally ease.

The final word: "ghost pressing bed" is not a supernatural phenomenon, but a physiological phenomenon.If you often have the trouble of "ghost pressing the bed", you should think about whether you are too anxious and seek help from a doctor.

*Why can't you wake up a sleepwalker?
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It is said that if you meet someone sleepwalking, you must not wake them up, otherwise they may be scared to death by themselves, is this true?Is it really impossible to wake up someone who is sleepwalking?

The head of the Sleep Disorders Research Center in California made it clear that although waking up a sleepwalking person may indeed cause them some distress, it is not enough to scare them to death.Claiming that waking sleepwalkers will scare them to death is pure scaremongering and has no scientific basis.

Sleepwalking is a kind of sleep disorder. It does not happen often. Some people may sleepwalk for only a few seconds, such as getting up suddenly and sitting on the bed. Some people may sleepwalk for several minutes or even tens of minutes. Some people sleepwalk just walking unconsciously, but others have very complicated sleepwalking behaviors, cooking, washing clothes, driving, and even having sex with others are all possible.

Sleepwalkers generally don't remember what they did during sleepwalking after waking up. People are in a half-dream and half-awake state during sleepwalking. Although they have the ability to act, they don't remember what happened during this time. have any memory.

Compared with the fright caused when sleepwalking is awakened, the dangers people create themselves during sleepwalking are more likely to cause certain injuries to the sleepwalker's body.

People who sleepwalk often do things that they would not do or even do at all, like a foreign sleepwalker who broke the door of his room while sleepwalking, and this sleepwalker was only 10 years old The little girl, she usually doesn't have the energy to do this at all.

It is difficult for people to wake up when they are sleepwalking. Even if they are woken up, they will not be overly frightened. At most, they are a little confused about their current situation.

If you encounter someone who is sleepwalking, it is best to take them back to bed to sleep, lest they hurt themselves while sleepwalking.

The final word: It's not that sleepwalkers cannot be woken up, it's just that they are difficult to wake up.Instead of waking them up and letting them face what they woke up with, it's better to just lead them back to bed and let them rest.

(End of this chapter)