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🔗 Medicine 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Medicine/Toxicology 🔗 Pharmacology 🔗 Medicine/Society and Medicine

Some fruit juices and fruits can interact with numerous drugs, in many cases causing adverse effects. The effect was first discovered accidentally, when a test of drug interactions with alcohol used grapefruit juice to hide the taste of the ethanol.

The effect is most studied with grapefruit and grapefruit juice, but similar effects have been observed with certain other citrus fruits. One medical review advises patients to avoid all citrus juices until further research clarifies the risks. Effects have been observed with apple juice, but their clinical significance is not yet known.

One whole grapefruit, or a small glass (200 mL (6.8 US fl oz)) of grapefruit juice, can cause drug overdose toxicity. Fruit consumed three days before the medicine can still have an effect. The relative risks of different types of citrus fruit have not been systematically studied. Affected drugs typically have an auxiliary label saying “Do not take with grapefruit” on the container, and the interaction is elaborated upon in the package insert. People are also advised to ask their physician or pharmacist about drug interactions.

The effects are caused by furanocoumarins (and, to a lesser extent, flavonoids). These chemicals inhibit key drug metabolizing enzymes, such as cytochrome P450 3A4 (CYP3A4). CYP3A4 is a metabolizing enzyme for almost 50% of drugs, and is found in the liver and small intestinal epithelial cells. As a result, many drugs are affected. Inhibition of enzymes can have two different effects, depending on whether the drug is either

1. metabolized by the enzyme to an inactive metabolite, or
2. activated by the enzyme to an active metabolite.

In the first instance, inhibition of drug-metabolizing enzymes results in elevated concentrations of an active drug in the body, which may cause adverse effects. Conversely, if the medication is a prodrug, it needs to be metabolised to be converted to the active drug. Compromising its metabolism lowers concentrations of the active drug, reducing its therapeutic effect, and risking therapeutic failure.

Low drug concentrations can also be caused when the fruit suppresses drug absorption from the intestine.

🔗 United Kingdom 🔗 Education 🔗 Science

The Nuffield Science Teaching Project was a programme to develop a better approach to teaching science in British secondary schools, under the auspices of the Nuffield Foundation. Although not intended as a curriculum, it gave rise to alternative national examinations, and its use of discovery learning was influential in the 1960s and 1970s.

🔗 Animal anatomy 🔗 Marine life 🔗 Limnology and Oceanography

Spicules are structural elements found in most sponges. The meshing of many spicules serves as the sponge's skeleton and thus it provides structural support and potentially defense against predators.

Sponge spicules are made of calcium carbonate or silica. Large spicules visible to the naked eye are referred to as megascleres, while smaller, microscopic ones are termed microscleres. The composition, size, and shape of spicules are major characters in sponge systematics and taxonomy.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Physics 🔗 Physics/Acoustics

Sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Time 🔗 Linux

Unix time (also known as Epoch time, POSIX time, seconds since the Epoch, or UNIX Epoch time) is a system for describing a point in time. It is the number of seconds that have elapsed since the Unix epoch, that is the time 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970, minus leap seconds. Leap seconds are ignored, with a leap second having the same Unix time as the second before it, and every day is treated as if it contains exactly 86400 seconds. Due to this treatment, Unix time is not a true representation of UTC.

Unix time is widely used in operating systems and file formats. In Unix-like operating systems, date is a command which will print or set the current time; by default, it prints or sets the time in the system time zone, but with the -u flag, it prints or sets the time in UTC and, with the TZ environment variable set to refer to a particular time zone, prints or sets the time in that time zone.

🔗 Mathematics

In number theory, a formula for primes is a formula generating the prime numbers, exactly and without exception. No such formula which is efficiently computable is known. A number of constraints are known, showing what such a "formula" can and cannot be.

🔗 United States 🔗 Food and drink 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities

Nutraloaf (also known as Meal Loaf, prison loaf, disciplinary loaf, food loaf, lockup loaf, confinement loaf, seg loaf, grue or special management meal) is a food served in prisons in the United States and formerly Canada to inmates who have misbehaved; for example, assaulting prison guards or fellow prisoners. It is similar to meatloaf in texture, but has a wider variety of ingredients. Prison loaf is usually bland, perhaps even unpleasant, but prison wardens argue that nutraloaf provides enough nutrition to keep prisoners healthy without requiring utensils to be issued.

🔗 Arthropods

Neobuthus factorio is a species of scorpion from the family Buthidae found in Somalia.