The "disappearing" aspect of the title doesn't appear in the summary.

From TFA :

While the initial detection was exciting, the research team needed more data to come to a firm conclusion. However, additional observations of the system in February 2025 and April 2025 (using Director's Discretionary Time) did not reveal any objects like the one identified in August 2024.

The actual papers are on Arxiv : https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fabs%2F2508.038... ("Worlds Next Door: A Candidate Giant Planet Imaged in the Habitable Zone of alpha-Cen A. I. Observations, Orbital and Physical Properties, and Exozodi Upper Limits") and https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Farxiv.org%2Fpdf%2F2508.038... ("Worlds Next Door: [...] II. Binary Star Modeling, Planet and Exozodi Search, and Sensitivity Analysis")

Or even worse - when the computer gives the right answer to the question that was asked, but the person does not believe it, or does not want to believe it.

If you have more than a few percent of CO-hæmoglobin amongst your oxy-hæmoglobin, you already have a problem.

You probably do have that much though, if you live in an urban environment ; you get exposure form traffic fumes, second-hand smoke, general combustion pollution (industrial, domestic), and there are a variety of other environmental sources that contribute to background CO-hæmoglobin saturations.

When did Paracelsus say the "the dose makes the poison"?

16th century?

Still true.

See also the estimates that by az-saguaro (1231754) and I have posted up-thread, where we estimate (using different methods) the necessary amount of drug to get into the blood stream to be in the hundreds of grammes.

That's the drug. Not the solution containing the drug.

See also "In Mice". I forget who was promoting the idea, and it hasn't taken hold ; but the idea of requiring all such reports to have flashing neon signs which emphasise the "In Mice" bit of the report does have some good points.

Ambulances also (universally?) carry oxygen, and are trained to administer it. So this product will be in direct competition with it's most obvious, well-tested, alternative treatment.

I looked at the question form a different basis (diving physiology), but got to fairly similar answers.

I don't like topics like this. They strike too close to home. I'm a diver (amateur). And I've worked with "sour" hydrocarbons on more than a few occasions. And this sort of topic leads me to finding really unsettling papers like this. Yeuch.

Ambient pressure oxygen is already available in every ambulance. And it's very effective. If a patient has such intense CO poisoning that their respiration centre is packing up, then the likelihood of survival, let alone survival with their brain, mind, memories and personality is very rapidly tending towards zero.

these systems, which are expensive, rare, and in some cases old.

Steel "pots", yes.

Inflatable plastic "pots" have been available for diving expeditions, which are light enough to helicopter a casualty inside, have been on the market for approaching 30 years. Typically, after one use, they go back to the manufacturer for inspection. Just like, say, a boat's emergency liferaft. Many dive boat operators improve their annual insurance bills by renting them, just like they rent liferafts (and have them changed out on a regular basis).

BTW, steel "pots" have this thing called "maintenance" - and in the UK at least, a 2- to 3- yearly pressure test regime. Even though the Byford Dolphin disaster wasn't a maintenance issue, it provoked a root-and-branch review of the industry's procedures. (I was a trainee diver when those 5 guys died. It was ... thought provoking. I later worked on the Dolphin - also thought-provoking.)

But how would this be administered to a patient? I assume it would be injected in the blood. Could it be an inhaler?

Good question. I'm decidedly dubious too, from the point of view of being a diver who has personally suffered a carbon monoxide hit from an incautiously-set-up portable compressor. (Insufficiently-cautious - the wind changed direction between starting and finishing the filling session.)

Let's see - human air consumption is highly variable with stress etc, but when planning shallow depth (but high penetration) dives we estimate with about 30L/minute of air. And Exhaled air is about 18% O2. Which makes O2 consumption around 1L/minute at NTP. Oh, goody, Wiki agrees. That would be about 1.4 g/minute, or 0.088 moles per minute.

What size of molecule is this Great New Treatment? No indication, except that it's a peptide. Guess at 100 amino acids, averaging 120 AMU per residue, which would make 12,000 AMU per molecule and 12kg per mole. It's a number ; it might even be correct.

If you're going to displace half the O2 content of the blood stream in a minute (the inverse of the amount of CO they talk of displacing), then you need to get about 0.088 * 12 kg per minute into the body. Which is just over 1kg. Per minute.

Let's take that number down a bit. If it's a tiny peptide - 10 amino acids, not 100 - you'd need to get 100g of peptide into the human blood stream in a minute. That's a pretty steep ask for something you'll need to deliver in a solution that doesn't dehydrate and destroy every blood cell it meets (read up on "isotonic" solutions).

There are a lot of caveats in that. But it looks to me as if injection into the blood stream is the only credible solution (... sorry!). Which is actually in TFS - but hidden as "a rapid, intravenous antidote".

My caveats after reading TFS is about the first mile of treatment, not the last mile. It's all very well having this in the A&E (EN_US : ER) drug cabinet, but it's not much use if the patient died before the ambulance got within 10 miles of A&E.

So, will it be on every ambulance? Doubtful - CO poisoning is quite uncommon.

Will it be on every fire engine? Only if fire engines start having a paramedic on every "shout" - which they don't (here ; I don't know about US practice, but I doubt it will be meaningfully different).

Will it be on every dive boat? Very unlikely - using an electrical or chemical test on every bottle fill would be vastly cheaper (this drug will have a shelf life). And there are enough people who have had bad fills (in various parts of the world) that most divers know to be wary of it and check every fill. It's very bad publicity for a fill-centre, and news spreads.

The current first aid for suspected CO poisoning is to supply oxygen at sufficient to relieve the patient's respiratory distress - because oxygen is already a standard part of the ambulance/ fire engine/ dive boat load-out. It's a routine consumable, with an existing supply (and resupply) chain.

For really bad cases, assuming the patient makes it to hospital without major brain damage, there is the option of going to hyperbaric oxygen - which again, many hospitals are already equipped for. (My local hospital has a 10 patient hyperbaric spread, but that's because we have 3 major commercial diving companies in town, and up to 50 divers "in sat" at any one time, within steaming distance of town.) But you don't need huge steel tanks - because of the physiology of oxygen metabolism, the maximum pressure you can apply to a patient on pure oxy is 1.8 atmospheres absolute, or 0.8 atmospheres above sea level pressure. Which is well within the "plastic inflatable treatment chamber" territory. Emergency use inflatable chambers have been on the market and in use (saving lives, regularly) for decades. The first person I personally knew who brought one (for a remote exploration expedition was fundraising for it in the mid-1990s.
I've got to ask, how much of a problem is this? It's a well-known poison (in the emergency medicine world) with a well-known treatment with a fairly good success rate. I think their sales people are going to struggle to make a sale.

This could be a lifesaver, but there's a lot of questions that need answers first.

I'm not so sure about a significant "lifesaver". Sure, a few people per country per year. What is the cost of achieving that? The normal price-per-life-saved criterion for industry is order of a couple of million dollars/ pounds/ Euros per life. And would that money save more people by buying an expensive, expiry-dated drug, or ensuring that every fire engine in the country carries oxygen equipment identical to that used by ambulance paramedics (because an ambulance almost always gets dispatched to a fire shout, until stood-down by the shout commander)?

US Government corruption.

Still. Not even "again".

Which papers discussing the various theories of dark matter posit that stars orbit somewhere "as if gravity wasn't a constraint".

Just the Arxiv links would be more than sufficient.

That there should be a phase in the early Universe where immense stars of nearly pure hydrogen would form was predicted theoretically 20 years ago,

I remember reading the paper when it came out.

another fun article in the "things I won't work with" blog

Derek Lowe, currently hosted at Science Mag, for example https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.science.org%2Fconten...

For people of a certain sense of humour, it is utterly, eye-wateringly funny. Otherwise, your kilometrage may vary.

Without RTFA, would I be right in thinking it's the Munich Group of happy laughing pyromaniacs with the leather aprons, armour plate, and light roof?

Anything which burns very energetically in air will turn some of the air into (various) oxides of nitrogen.

Most of which are likely to be GHGs to some degree. They have IR-absorption features so they're likely to reduce the IR transmission from Earth's surface to the rest of the universe.

There are also slow and fast explosives, which basically just rate how fast they convert the explosive material into gas.

The measurement is presented in units of a velocity, because it is, at a very basic level, a velocity.

If you made a 1cm by 1cm by 10km long lu-shaped loop sample of TNT, and placed it near a similar length loop of (say) "AN/FO" (ammonium-nitrate/ fuel-oil) and detonated both at one end from the same detonator, the shock waves of the explosives' detonations would arrive separated by around 5 seconds. TNT has a moderately high detonation velocity - around 6900 m/s, while AN/FO maxes out a bit below 5000 m/s. Pure AN has a detonation velocity of about 2500 m/s, while gunpowder, a "low explosive" can be from 0.06 to 9 m/s (depending on the granularity).

Detonation velocity is a useful thing to know if you're trying to design, say, a demolition scheme to bring the centre of a building down onto it's footprint, then collapse the walls in onto the same rubble pile. Which is why "blasting cord" is designed to have a very specific (per brand) detonation velocity.

dynamite, of Dynamit Nobel fame, is regular nitroglycerin that has been desensitised by mixing it with diatomaceous earth

Various materials have been used, including Kieselgh, the "diatomaceous earth" you mention. It's probably a synthetic zeolite mineral these decades, because the natural product is more expensive. But Dynamite per se is much less popular for general explosive use in favour of various other explosives, such as AmFO and synthetic mixtures such as "PowerGel".

when the nitroglycerine starts seeping out of the clay

On this side of the Pond, we call that "sweating", as in the phrase "porridge oats are good for sweating". See "other materials" above - it's a field expedient worth knowing about for when calling the Bomb Squad isn't such a good option.

nitroglycerine and TNT are unrelated.

Except by both containing 3 -NO2 "nitro" groups per molecule, introduced by quite similar chemical processes. Hence the name.