Welcome to the science section
of the Wikipedia reference desk.

Select a section:

WP:RD/SWP:RD/S

Want a faster answer?

Main page: Help searching Wikipedia

How can I get my question answered?

Select the section of the desk that best fits the general topic of your question (see the navigation column to the right).
Post your question to only one section, providing a short header that gives the topic of your question.
Type '~~~~' (that is, four tilde characters) at the end – this signs and dates your contribution so we know who wrote what and when.
Don't post personal contact information – it will be removed. Any answers will be provided here.
Please be as specific as possible, and include all relevant context – the usefulness of answers may depend on the context.
Note:
- We don't answer (and may remove) questions that require medical diagnosis or legal advice.
- We don't answer requests for opinions, predictions or debate.
- We don't do your homework for you, though we'll help you past the stuck point.
- We don't conduct original research or provide a free source of ideas, but we'll help you find information you need.

Ready? Ask a new question!

How do I answer a question?

Main page: Wikipedia:Reference desk/Guidelines

The best answers address the question directly, and back up facts with wikilinks and links to sources. Do not edit others' comments and do not give any medical or legal advice.

September 21

Is this murder method plausible?

In Criminal Cases: The Conspiracy, one of the main plot lines is having to find a serial killer who poisons people by mixing amlodipine with Red Bull (renamed "Rocket Cow" in the game to avoid trademark infringement -- my question is, is this plausible? (I've asked Gemini and WebMD about whether it is harmful to consume caffeine while taking amlodipine, and they said that caffeine directly counteracts the effects of amlodipine (and vice versa) rather than causing any unexpected side effects -- but maybe there's some other ingredient in Red Bull which can cause unexpected side effects when combined with amlodipine?) 2601:646:8082:BA0:D5AF:2A0E:E1D8:F16 (talk) 02:41, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or maybe the author simply made it up. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 05:46, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I have noticed a trend where the writers have been avoiding given out actual murder methods in case some nutter tries to be a copycat. Abductive (reasoning) 07:48, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Hence making stuff up, such as "iocaine powder". ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 15:16, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know why modern authors can't just stick to the traditional methods used by Agatha Christie. Suggesting the use of an important pharmaceutical drug like amlodipine seems irresponsible to me, irrespective of whether it would work or not. Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:28, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

How about slow torture, such as being locked in a room with an insurance salesman? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 17:49, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Massive LOL! —Fortuna, imperatrix 17:58, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Or "A few household chemicals in the proper proportions". Iapetus (talk) 12:43, 24 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

@ User:Abductive: If only the TV networks were as cautious. Instead we have endless videos of people holding up gas stations and shops, bashing people in shopping malls, rioters running amok, road rage incidents, underage/unlicensed drivers doing double the speed limit and running red lights, the whole gamut of human depravity. This is because of the "public interest" and their right to know what's going on in society. Yet any mildly naughty word is bleeped out of existence, and there are endless trigger warnings mostly about all the wrong things while the real trauma-inducing film is shown repeatedly. Copycat nutters, come on down! -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 22:52, 21 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps the scriptwriters changed not only the name of the energy drink, but also its recipe, adding grapefruit juice^[1] – although it is doubtful this would actually pose a serious health risk, in particular to healthy users.^[2] ‑‑Lambiam 18:55, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Amlodipine can kill [3] [4]. Grapefruit may increase the bioavailability of amlodipine, increasing the effective dose (but since the bioavailability is already around 66%, the potential effect is limited). Caffeine-amlodipine interaction is likely fictional. catslash (talk) 21:20, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

We're on at least the edges of our no medical advice proscription here, but since we are already discussing interactions, I'll say that the possibility of interaction between the drug and caffeine is not entirely implausible, depending on the amount and especially if coextensive with certain cardiac or baroreflex conditions. Amlodipine has potential impacts on heart rhythm, in addition to its primary and therapeutic application as a vasodilator. Both also have mild diuretic effects, meaning combined impacts on hypotension may be non-negligible. While I am certainly not familiar with any particularly well-documented toxicity issues or contraindications regarding combining these substances (and do suspect that there is likely accuracy in the speculation here that this represents a creative writing exercise first and foremost), when you consider that Red Bull also contains taurine and guarana, I wouldn't feel comfortable leaving the OP with the impression that we can say for sure that combining the two would be without impacts, particularly for anyone with any number of forms of arrhythmia. Also, as a particularly relevant side-note, an increase of 34% bioavailability is not necessarily a trivial difference, depending on the drug and the physiological/pharmacokinetic context. SnowRise ^{let's rap} 07:23, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And as of a couple of years back, you'd have to squeeze the grapefruits yourself, unless you wanted to add insult to injury by serving up the from-concentrate or the red/pink muck. catslash (talk) 21:42, 22 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

September 27

Organoactinium compounds

At {{ChemicalBondsToCarbon}} we find that, apparently, the only elements seen in macroscopic quantities where a compound bonding it to carbon is unknown are radon and actinium.

I suppose for radon this is expected; it's not only radioactive, but it's also a noble gas. But actinium's longest-lived isotope has a pretty respectable half-life of about 22 years, the second-longest-lived one has been tested as a radiopharmaceutical, and its lighter congener lanthanum has a respectable organometallic chemistry. So, is it really the case that no compound with a C–Ac bond is known, or is the template just outdated? Double sharp (talk) 12:42, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I feel like there is no Ac-C, the closest thing I can find is an endohedral fullerene. Radiopharmaceutical ²²⁵Ac complexes use Ac-N and Ac-O instead because Ac-C are water-sensitive like La-C, so they are too unstable to use in body.

I also doubt the existence of Ra-C because I can't find information of the claimed acetylide, but that doesn't sound right when Bk-C is known, perhaps people are avoiding ²²⁶Ra and ²²⁷Ac (produced from ²²⁶Ra) at all costs due to ²²²Rn emission from decay. Nucleus hydro elemon (talk) 14:33, 27 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

September 28

About GTDB phylogenies

How can I visualize GTDB tree files? They do not work on any software, I don't know how Wikipedia editors got these trees visualized. Jako96 (talk) 13:39, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

The link in the infobox of that article to https://gtdb.ecogenomic.org/tree seems to allow visualisation. Do you need more than that? Mike Turnbull (talk) 15:03, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

See Asgard archaea#Phylogeny. Yes, I do need more than that, that "tree" is just their taxonomy. I need to see their phylogenetic analysis results, not just their taxonomy. The "ar53_r226.sp_label" file does not work on any program. This is my problem. Jako96 (talk) 16:47, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Same with their bacterial phylogeny (that file is for archaea). Jako96 (talk) 16:48, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]

October 1

Prosopagnosia for other species

Upon seeing the news of Jane Goodall's death, I read her article and observed that she experienced prosopagnosia, a difficulty or inability to recognise faces. Not surprisingly, our article talks exclusively about its effects on recognising human faces. Would it affect one's ability to recognise the faces of individual chimpanzees? Nyttend (talk) 21:03, 1 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

From an interview whose text I found only in the html source of this page:

Did your prosopagnosia — “face blindness” — make it more difficult to recognize individual chimps at first?

Jane Goodall: Yes, it did. It did take me longer to know the chimps too. But I haven’t got the most extreme form. Once I know somebody, I know them. But chimps are no easier than people.

‑‑Lambiam 10:55, 2 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Lambiam has certainly provided you with the definitive response to your question, but I'll add a little bit of extra detail about the mechanics involved--though in the broad-strokes you will probably find some of it very obvious. Dr. Goodall herself provides some pretty valuable insight into the matter, impressionistic though it might be, because the number of people who have trained themselves to distinguish between non-human ape faces with anywhere near the efficacy with which they recognize human faces, be they primatologists or not, is not exactly massive, and even accounting for the fact that there is some degree of partial congenital prosopagnosia in the general population (in addition to the generally more severe variety that results from trauma or emergent gross defect), the overlap between the two populations can only contain so many individuals--let alone individuals famous enough for the perception in this respect to have become a matter of record. Now that we've lost this unique mind--not just in regard to above overlap, but in so, so many ways... :( -- I can only wish i had been able to ask her follow up questions, as someone with some more formal background in visual cognition and a more amateur experience with ethology.

Of particular relevance to your inquiry, its important to note that perception of the face is a fairly distributed process, taking place in a number of regions mainly in the occipital lobe (which centers are largely concerned with processing precise geometries and other information taken from the fovea especially catches as your eye jumps from feature to feature during the visual process--you might say its visual centers tend to be the locations of "early"* processing) and the temporal lobe (which centers tend to be involved in coordinating and further processing visual information to create the ultimate qualia, by combining individual features into a ghestalt whole, which in reality you are never actually "seeing", in the literal physical sense of where the eye is focused, all at once, but which the temporal creates partly by combining information from lower in the processing chain and applying a whole bunch of assumptions--some conditioned, but largely nativistic--about how faces operate). And then you also have to take into account that the face is not a static object, but rather a highly malleable one whose behaviours are another significant pre-occupation of your brains, and that two is a function of "facial recognition" and one which pulls in yet more neuroanatomical regions. I'd have relished the opportunity to ask Dr. Goodall 1 or 500 questions about her perceptions on chimp emotional expression...I'm sure there's a non-trivial amount documented, but....what a lose for us all, this one is...

*meaning not necessarily first in time (since facial processing operates by many parallel processes simmultaneously with some degree of back-signal between that work in tandem during the process of creating a percept) but rather "earlier" in the sense of being more likely to send signals out to further processing (typically but not always in discrete regions of the temporal lobe). SnowRise ^{let's rap} 04:11, 3 October 2025 (UTC)[reply]

October 3