Too much water

I remember reading about the "Aquatic Ape Hypothesis" many decades ago and thinking it was clever but I'd like to wait and see about it. Researching WW-I diseases brought it back to mind--if we adapted so well to water, why is prolonged soaking so bad for the skin?

"Don't just do something, stand there!"

Please!

So you have a theoretical amelioration for putative global warming. Great. Are you sure there are no side effects? Warming is potentially good for some areas; did you ask them about your plan?

Cold fusion

Some years ago I read an overview of cold fusion research. It gave the history and the various experiments current and completed. Some were variations on the "try to dissolve deuterium in palladium", while others used different metals--in one case powdered nickel. That wanted high temperature, with a small amount of heat released--which would result in a quite inefficient heat engine. (The survey was pre-Rossi and his infamous E-CAT.)

I wanted to see what more recent work said, and began poking around. After a while I noticed that I'd have to write a brand new survey myself to cover the material, and I think I'll leave that to experienced nuclear physicists.

There's not a lot of evidence for the $d + d \rightarrow He^{*}$ reaction. The Navy funded $d + Li$ research, but I didn't find any results published. (Why $Li$? Because it was present as a hydride to introduce the $d$ in some of the experiments.)

Some fancy schemes have been invoked--to try to see if the effective electron mass could be increased so you could get something akin to muon-catalyzed fusion. Atomic physicists have looked at how much hydrogen actually dissolves deep into the metal and how much is superficial, and into ways of loading more hydrogen in, and so on. I wondered if $d + Pd^{n} \rightarrow p + Pd^{n+1}$ would work, but that would probably produce $\gamma$'s also (2?) from excited $Pd$--not detected, and anyhow the potential barrier is higher than for $d + d$.

Doing the experiments right is hard, and some give tantalizing results. Some see neutrons--at energies that don't make a lot of sense, except that: well, it turns out that when you dissolve hydrogen in palladium, certain preparations are susceptible to cracking. Cracking can produce microscopic local high voltages, and those can accelerate $d^{+}$ to high enough energies to dissociate the deuterium on collision and release neutrons. Not many, but detectable. Who'd have guessed? FWIW, one survey article (on the positive side) claimed that the non-cracking preparations of palladium were the ones that provided anomalous energy.

I don't believe in cornucopias, but you can get room temperature fusion with $\mu^{-}$ particles, and I won't swear there aren't other ways. I'm not convinced any of these other things are the hoped-for fusions, but there are certainly some odd things going on. And, I'm afraid, there's some carelessness, and dishonesty (Rossi).

UPDATE: Remember that lightning can produce antimatter.

Hawthorne effect

Never mind the fashionable accusations: this article from McGill is interesting.

From 1927 to 1932 the Hawthorne Works tried varying conditions in its factories to see what would improve morale and increase productivity. They found that any sort of changes made for brief increases in productivity, presumably (so said our textbook) because workers felt that somebody was taking an interest in them.

So goes the story. Or one variant thereof. It turns out that "A 1989 study of 86 studies that tried to isolate this Hawthorne effect found no evidence for it." That I hadn't heard before.

The raw data were found on fiche not long ago, and re-analyzed. There were several different studies, most quite sloppy. One tidbit: lighting changes were done on Sunday when nobody was at work. Was the Monday productivity increase similar on other Mondays? Not noted.

One study involved women taken off the main factory floor for study in a smaller and more easily modified room.

They were less supervised than the women in the main room and they were consulted with regards to how their conditions would be changed. Some of them were interviewed fifty years later: they had been working so hard because they did not want to be returned to their former department, where their supervisor was said to be very harsh. Also, when asked what they had liked about being in the test room, one of them immediately said, “We made more money in the Test Room.”

What's in a name

Dr Boli discovered a Macedonian work on linguistics that sheds some light on an old political dispute with Greece.

Lysenkoism

Trofim Lysenko was a deadly protege of Stalin's, with widespread influence. (I'd guess that his impact on the Great Leap Forward was minor compared to the other insanities, though.)

He believed in nurture above nature. Newly acquired traits would be passed on to offspring. His supporters claimed to be able to transform rye into wheat.

Stalin liked him. "Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist"." Scientific evidence was not a defense. Critics were considered elitist opponents of the wisdom of the peasants. Many opponents were fired, some imprisoned, some executed. Wikipedia says the ban on criticism of Lysenkoism was only lifted in the 60's.

I am informed that apparently substantive differences between people can be made to vanish if the right words and role models are invoked. I am informed that punishment causes crime. I am informed that math is racist and that the experiences of the disadvantaged should play a role in math. I am informed that speech is impermissible violence and violence is protected speech. I am informed that a man is not a man and a woman is not a woman. I am informed that people are harassed and fired and fined for denying these things.

So far no executions, though.

---

After Lysenko's rise, a similar attack was made on the "idealist" and "bourgeois" theories of quantum mechanics and special relativity. Luckily for the physicists, Stalin wanted a nuclear bomb very badly. Kurchatov warned that the bomb could not be made without scientists who knew these theories, and when Stalin was appraised of a meeting of Lysenko-types to challenge the scientists, he famously said "Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later." For some reason the meeting never happened. (Lee Pondrom, The Soviet Atomic Project)

Psych studies

Go have a look at Graph Paper Diaries' summary of "what we know now" about some famous psych studies and cases. Of the four cases she mentions, 2 studies were not reported on with integrity, 1 was the most dramatic of 19 and therefore the eyeball-catcher, and the Kitty Genovese murder wasn't what the textbooks say it was.

Galli without a cause

Among the gods the Romans worshiped was a relatively late addition: Cybele, the Great Mother. The Galli were her devotees. They castrated themselves, probably amputated the penis, and wore women's clothing. They collected alms in return for fortune-telling--or else for going away. In any case, they made their devotion to their goddess perfectly clear.

Some three hundred years ago if a young Italian boy had a good voice he might be castrated to preserve his beautiful soprano. That was brutal, but a career as a singer was more lucrative than many other available opportunities. There was a grisly point to the mutilation.

Today we have despicable hucksters hawking expensive surgery and drugs to make people into modern Galli. It makes the hucksters wealthy, but the victims have neither the honor of being dedicated to a god nor the possibility of a lucrative singing career. They become Galli in the name of finding their true selves--as though mangling yourself and drugging yourself out of your mind was ever likely to be a path to self-discovery. It's much more likely to lead to suicide, but that doesn't phase the hucksters or the fashionistas.

The fashion seems to be based on sympathetic magic--if you make a doll of something that looks like X, it becomes X. It might also remind you of the Aristotelian notion that a woman is an incomplete man--just make yourself incomplete, and presto!

We usually don't intervene in most affairs of adults, even when one party is plainly preying on the other. But they have taken to preying on children and persuading gullible parents that being a tomboy or wanting to dress like a Cavalier is a sign that the child needs to be mangled.

Octopus

I've had a plate of the small ones a few times. They're OK, but quite a long way from being my go-to dish. My sense was similar to this Slate writer's: "Here is food." Except he likes them better.

That article is interesting--he reports on a claim that the famous escape artist Inky didn't actually escape. And some of the other things you've heard...

In spite of their purported brilliance, the study found that octopuses did not learn to do the task any better over time. (They’re slow learners in other contexts, too.) And what about the classic research from the early 1990s, which suggested an octopus could learn to choose a colored ball just by watching other octopuses? That behavior, which helped make the octopus an “honorary vertebrate” for the purposes of British law, isn’t so extraordinary, even for invertebrates. Bumblebees, for example, can learn to choose between green and orange flowers after watching other bumblebees. Yet no one ever calls the bee “the genius of the garden.”

I guess it’s easy to write off bumblebees, since they seem so much the same. The octopus, on the other hand, delights us with its special talents and funny personality. We hear Inky was “a curious boy,” that Otto was prone to getting bored, that Ozy was a whiz with jars, that Paul would sometimes share his thoughts on soccer games. But this focus on the octopus’s temperament and character might also be a canard. While research published in the early 1990s found some hints that octopuses might have personalities, their patterns of behavior didn’t even seem to hold across the two weeks of the study. A more recent paper, out in 2010, suggested an octopus doesn’t have an overarching disposition. (There is better, formal evidence for personality in cuttlefish and squid.)

Ahh, reproducibility... Hank was a fun cartoon character, though.

Have you seen this warning?

Proposition 65 WARNING: This product contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

I remember buying some textured paint and discovering that sand was supposed to cause cancer. I assume they meant if I sanded the dry paint off without using a breathing mask then maybe some of the silica would find its way into my lungs along with all the other paint crud.

It must be there, just unconscious

Princess Ojiaku wrote "The studies just keep coming. Unconscious racism is pervasive. It starts early. And it creates a deadly empathy gap" She cites study after study purporting to show a lack of empathy between races (but not, oddly enough between white and purple). It all sounds fairly interesting, until I hit

Some of the best evidence comes from Peking University, where scientists used fMRI to scan the brains of Chinese college students as they viewed images of Asian and Caucasian faces with either neutral or pained expressions. Before viewing the images, some students were primed with rapidly flashing statements specifically about death, such as ‘My body would rot after death’. Others were primed with negative statements unrelated to death, for instance, ‘The coming exam makes me uneasy’.

Later, researchers examining the data found that Asian students who were primed with thoughts of death had greater empathetic response to the pain of other Asian faces than to white faces in two specific regions of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the nearby mid-cingulate cortex, reflecting work that came before. The study, published in NeuroImage in 2015, documented the powerful impact that thinking about death, otherwise known as 'mortality salience’, has on the empathy gap between races, a chasm with obvious relevance to police on call.

If that strikes her as the best, in view of what's been learned about priming studies lately, I harbor deep doubts about the accuracy of the rest of the studies. And the further claim that tribal differences don't seem to matter just adds to my skepticism.

Does anybody know much about the methodology and reproducibility of these things?

Aiming

If you haven't read this article about "the replication crisis in psychology", do. It's pretty clear and concise.

A visitor noticed that one ranch fence was riddled with bullet holes, each beautifully dead center in the target. He congratulated the owner on his marksmanship. The owner said "Truth to tell, I shoot first and draw the target second."

Science stories

Bethany has begun her series on Internet Science with a post on "how they reel you in," about how "Look, shiny!" stories and images catch your attention and play on your biases. I look forward to the rest.

There are a few things that raise red flags when I see them in headlines. Some of them are easy to describe.

1. History: I'm old enough to have seen a dozen breathless headlines about how some new scrolls and "suppressed gospels" may overturn our understanding of Christian history. Same old, same old. Whether it's because reporters have no knowledge of history or because editors think we don't, the same old discoveries and breakthroughs appear year after year. Sometimes a quick googling shows that the same researcher issued an almost identical claim 5 years ago, and 4 years before that and... Unfortunately familiarity with the history isn't something you can pick up in five minutes
2. Paradigm-changing breakthroughs are very rare. Incremental progress is the rule. If it sounds too dramatic, somebody is probably pulling your leg or trying to make a quick buck. This is especially true in attention-grabbing fields: anything to do with weight loss or aging or sex or politics.
   

   The IceCube experiment announced that they had probably discovered extra-galactic neutrinos, some of which were puzzlingly higher energy than expected. Did you notice the little word "expected" in there? To have spotted them at all is a tour de force, but pretty much everyone in the field expected there to be neutrinos, some from other galaxies. The general public didn't know anything about them, and the news (I hope) unveiled a new part of the world for them. But these are a tool for further research, not a paradigm-shifting breakthrough by themselves. A milestone.

3. Herding cats has nothing on coordinating scientists. "Every French soldier carries in his cartridge-pouch the baton of a marshal of France." Every scientist seems to have a place on the shelf for a Nobel Prize. If you're head of the team doing the cutting edge research, you are helping shape the culture of the field, but everybody else harbors a "but what if it were like this" question that they'd like to put to the test.
   

   If the question is simple (special relativity) there's virtual unanimity, but even there you find scientists saying "Have we proved it for every case yet?" If the question is complicated and simulations are hard to do, you should find plenty of discord in the wings. If unanimity is claimed for a difficult problem, be skeptical. Anthropogenic climate change is one good example: the problem is very hard, proxy measurements are not easy to define, and the climate models are hard to test. (They're no good for year-to-year variation, and as for predicting the far future... the Sun monkeys with medium term results, and I'll most likely not be alive in a century.)
   

   If at all possible, compare the story with what the received explanation is in the field. This is no guarantee (see Lysenko, AGW, etc), but it is generally a good rule that Newton stood on the shoulders of giants and so ought the scientists in the report.

4. Does the story have some political implications? If it purports to show that Your Team ™ is smarter than the rest, or that some resource is effectively infinite or on the contrary almost exhausted--qui bono?
5. Is it sociology? Or drug related? Wait for verification. Then wait some more. Sociologists tend to study WEIRD people and have sample sizes that are way too small. Drug test results are very heavily biased in favor of positive results--negative ones typically don't get published. When you only look at the right side of the distribution of results from small effects, things look much better than they really are. Plus, it turns out that lots of promising drugs to treat X wind up causing Y, and are quietly dropped from view.
   

   Sociological studies that show that people are happier if they are virtuous just aren't sexy; discovering that "Good things come to those who wait" is a sound rule doesn't get publicity or grant money.

6. Will the world be destroyed? Check to see if the scientist has just published a book--and needs publicity
7. Take a quick gander at the story itself, which often has a family resemblance to the headline but doesn't support it very well.
8. If it talks about other universes, read the funnies instead.

Read How to Lie With Statistics.

Blowing smoke

The same article says, without noticing the contradiction, both that "But there is no such thing as a female or male brain, according to the first search for sex differences across the entire human brain. It reveals that most people have a mix of male and female brain features" and "If a neuroscientist was given someone’s brain without their body or any additional information, they would still probably be able to guess if it had belonged to a man or a woman. Men’s brains are larger, for example, and are likely to have a larger number of “male” features overall."

I tag this as sloppy science because of the conclusions they try to draw. The research itself may be fine (I haven't read it), but this doesn't support the far-reaching claim of "non-binary gender."

Phrenology is still not a very exact science.

Sleep differences

Black and white sleep patterns differ? "Whites in the study slept an average of 6.85 hours; blacks slept an average of 6.05 hours." and "“Notably,” the study reads, “these associations remained evident after adjustment for sex, age, study site, and [body mass index].”" and of course "(It should be noted, however, that researchers concede their attempts to control for economic indicators are far from perfect. “We know our measures for adjusting for socioeconomic status are still somewhat limited,” says Redline. “Sometimes the variation isn’t great enough.”)"

Not everything is well thought-out: can you say "a proxy for race?" Also notice that "There is a consensus" drops in without any reasons why.

ON THE QUESTION of how to explain the black-white sleep gap itself, researchers have a number of related theories. (There is a consensus that innate biological differences between blacks and whites are not a factor.) The stress caused by discrimination is one strong possibility. In the San Diego sleep study, Tomfohr’s team knew, going in, that slow-wave sleep is very sensitive to stress—which is, in turn, our body’s signal to remain vigilant against perceived threats, including discrimination. “That was our thought: If people are feeling really discriminated against, then of course they are not going to want to get into a really deep stage of sleep,” she says.

On the grimmer side of things, sleep apnea is more common, 12.8 vs 7.4% This is comparable to the obesity rate difference, and might be due to it, but it seems to be less frequently treated than among whites--and sleep apnea leads to lots of problems.

Bacterial showers?

Along the lines bs king’s comment about teaching high schoolers how to spot bad science reporting, how about a step by step walkthrough of a science claim?

”I have not taken a shower in over 12 years,” says Dave Whitlock, a chemical engineer and MIT grad who says he doesn’t miss bathing at all. “No one did clinical trials on people taking showers every day. So what’s the basis for assuming that that is a healthy practice.” So . . .

In fact, what Whitlock does believe is healthy is restoring good bacteria to our skin that our ancestors enjoyed long ago and that has slowly been stripped away by excessive cleaning. To prove his theory, he helped found AOBiome, a company based in Cambridge, MA.

Maybe your BS meter pegged already, but just for the sake of the exercise let's see what simple searching does for us.

We are fortunate to have search engines to help us.(*) One of the first things that pops up for "skin bacteria" is Wikipedia’s “skin flora” And one of the first sentences is “Many of them are bacteria of which there are around 1000 species upon human skin from 19 phyla.” You can also read about fungi, and note that there are skin diseases. That 1000 is an interesting number—it isn’t gigantic, but it isn’t tiny either. We’ll get back to that. Notice that the term “hygiene” turns up. And “damaged skin.”

First we pick one of the random organisms mentioned (this one inhabits frogs): Batrachochytrium_dendrobatidis. The article contains a lot of $40 words, a few of which you can piece out, but a couple of things strike your attention. It was first discovered in 1998, and only recently was found to be a number of different varieties. And the references listed at the bottom show a lot of different authors—I quit counting at 21 and guess there were more like 50-60. All for one variety or set of varieties of organism. The first article says there were 1000 bacteria types, let alone the fungi.

How many people do you need to study all 1000? Or better, how many man-years of study? 50,000?

Second we take warning from the fact that skin diseases exist, and start our search again for skin diseases. One of the early ones that pop up on the list is candidiasis (acne we won’t worry about). Funny how the term “hygiene” keeps showing up. Warm moist undisturbed areas help the fungi grow. And also notice that among the contributing causes is “taking antibiotics that kill normal flora.”

That last sentence sets up another warning flag. The bacteria and fungi interact. So we don’t just have to study each of the bacteria in isolation, we have to study them in combination. So we have not 1000 bacteria, but 1000*999 pairs to study—not to mention triples. (That’s about 50 million man-years to study the pairs, for those counting.)

I’m certain there aren’t a million researchers in the field, so I conclude that we don’t completely understand all the interactions of skin flora with our bodies or with each other.

But do we understand it “well enough?” (We don’t thoroughly understand metals and concrete, but we can build a bridge that can last a century of heavy use.)

What research is Dave Whitlock building his model on? Unfortunately looking him up brings up a more famous fly fisherman and race car driver. The Daily Mail's report has a little more detail on the man than the CBS story, including these bits

Although he doesn't shower, Whitlock does take an occasional sponge bath to clean the grime off of his skin.

And

The scientist got the idea about 'good bacteria' when a woman he was dating asked him why her horse liked to roll on the ground and the dirt during the summertime, the New York Times reported.

Whitlock said: 'The only way that horses could evolve this behavior was if they had substantial evolutionary benefits from it.'

According to the company: 'Modern hygiene has selectively depleted the natural balance of the skin microbiome particularly affecting AOB.

The company web site includes this “We are developing a new class of transformational products based on the use of beneficial ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB). AOB are naturally occurring bacteria that metabolize the ammonia found in sweat, creating both nitrite and nitric oxide, two critical building blocks of good health.”

What I don’t find (maybe your search would be more productive) is any links to any research showing that having nitrites form in your sweat is good for the rest of your body. I’d think that sweat is mostly a one-way phenomenon, though I’ve heard many times of things being absorbed through the skin. Maybe you’d stink less—ammonia is kind of acrid, and if some bacteria destroy it that might be good.

He’s a chemical engineer and not a biologist, but a gifted amateur can do a lot, so I won’t count that for or against his claims.

Let’s score the findings.

On the plus side, he claims that the skin flora can be disrupted by washing. This we know to be true about antibiotics, and soap also has an antibiotic aspect. In addition, though he isn’t quoted as mentioning it, damage to the skin can cause opportunistic infections by otherwise benign bacteria (from that first Wikipedia article), and aggressive scrubbing can damage the skin. (Why do people exfoliate anyway?)

On the minus side, we know that we don’t fully understand bacterial/fungal interactions on our skin. And he doesn’t cite any research explaining how any of this works.

On the minus side, he doesn’t have any of our ancestors handy to take skin bacteria cultures from. The next best thing would be to find some people who don’t use soap back in the jungles, and take some samples from them. And maybe see if they are more or less susceptible to skin diseases. (In the tropics there turn out to be a lot of endemic diseases, so maybe that’s not a fair comparison.) But once again, not a peep.

Minus again: no mention of whether this prevents athlete's foot. Washing regularly does help.

On the “Hey Wait A Minute” side, I can’t find out whether he recommends washing your hands after using the toilet. I hope he does, and that the reporters simply never had the wits to ask, but that’s an obvious case where washing matters.

Summing up: I don’t know if he is right, but he hasn’t given me any reason to believe that either

1. The rebalancing of flora that results from washing is in any way bad for us
2. His bacterial spray rebalances in a beneficial way

Not proven, and if he wants me to buy his product or cheer him on, he needs to show some evidence. Let’s see some of those clinical trials he was talking about. Blinded, with controls.

---

(*) Wikipedia has some good math articles, and in science it's generally OK, but don't trust it for anything controversial.

Diets

So now we learn that the Paleo Diet may not be all it is cracked up to be. Or so says Yet Another Diet Study.

Kenneth Roberts decided to study the popular diets back in his day (pre 1945 for "An Inquiry into Diets", which the linked post cites):

…every diet, in the opinion of one or more diet experts, is either based on the erroneous ideas of a faddist, or is downright dangerous.

Hitherto, in consulting references on any given subject, I have usually been able to discard the majority as inaccurate, biased, unreliable, or untruthful … Diet books are different. Most of them are written by medical experts who have studied for years to find out exactly what happens to seven cents’ worth of liver when it meets a Welch’s bacillus in the upper colon of a sedentary worker aged forty-five.

I haven't tried this link...

Whatever the popular diet, wait a few years and new YADS will disparage it.

How does this disturb the powerful?

The Guardian wants some science to be political:

But there is a problem, revealed most clearly in the entries for the Association of British Science Writers’ (ABSW) annual awards.

Too few of them, in every category from TV programmes to news stories, tell a tale that someone in a position of power would prefer not to see published. Plenty of good science journalism is entered, but too little of it involves controversy. And while we have a “best investigative journalism” category, the entries for it have not been as strong or as many as we would wish.

This must mean that important stories are being missed, whether they relate to the content of scientific research, the behaviour of individual scientists, or the big decisions about policy and funding that set the direction of the scientific enterprise. So we have decided to do something about it.

I am trying to figure out who is supposed to be worried about whether we can identify sources for cosmogenic neutrinos. I can imagine that some drug firms might be worried if someone found that dilute infusions of Camellia sinensis were just as good as fluoxetine for treating depression. I don't have to imagine what would happen if the president of Harvard were to suggest avenues for research into why women weren't as common as men in the top tenured research positions--the powerful did not want to see that addressed.

But grab a research journal and try to imagine who, besides their competitors, would be upset about the articles published there.

We know there are systemic problems with drug research (negative results tend not to be published). That's not a conspiracy so much as a structural bias. There are fads in research direction, and that has a way of skewing things for a while, but generally the diminishing returns force people to look elsewhere. Eventually.

Gravity

I'd noticed a headline a day or two ago about "gravity changing with time" but I was a bit too busy to have a look, so I won't afflict you with the popularization. This is the paper they were talking about.

The idea is that since the measurements of the gravitational constant G haven't all been the same, perhaps one can find that G is a function of time. The plot that tells it all is below:

The first reaction should be "Ack!" As somebody pointed out today, if you take just about any set of points you can fit them with a sinusoid if you make the frequency high enough. And, of course, the points represent measurements taken over a non-trivial length of time that may not be closely related to the publication date.

But Lorenzo Iorio decided to take the question seriously. He predicted the orbit of Saturn (no, I don't know why Saturn, maybe he had the data handy) and compared what you expect if G was constant with what you should get if G varied the way the first paper intimated. With G constant he can extrapolate from older observations and predict the position of Saturn to 0.1km. If G varied as mentioned above, the displacement would be O(100,000km). Good for him. Raspberries for JD Anderson et al.

FWIW, it isn't insane to think that G might be changing, but I'd expect an exponential or an inverse power of time, not a wiggle. "Cooper has a stream which is fifty feet wide where it flows out of a lake; it presently narrows to twenty as it meanders along for no given reason, and yet when a stream acts like that it ought to be required to explain itself."

Models

When you have a physics/edu email address you sometimes get odd messages, above and beyond the usual breast enlargement and import business proposals. Never mind the odd grammar (his English is far better than my 30C homeopathic Hungarian), but instead look at the shoehorning of all phenomena into his model.

If the speed of an elementary object not equal to the speed of light, then the elementary object is atom, which consists of many electromagnetic fields of photons, X-ray-photons and gamma-photons. The real "particles" of this world are the photon, X-ray-photon and gamma-photon particles. Other particles not exist.

and

Known that the several radioactive nucleuses emitt several energy gamma-photons. Speed of all gamma-photons is the speed of light. From this follows that the nucleuses consist of several mass gamma-photons.

Let's follow the logic. It is known that humans emit sweat, urine, and feces, which move at less than the speed of light. From this it follows that humans consist of sweat, urine, and feces.

Despite the claims of political partisans, I suspect this is not so.