Submitted by AspireAgain t3_11zroqu in todayilearned
>Ah, so it's basically Joker Venom, but real...
And to bring it full circle, the Joker was based on the movie and book The Man Who Laughs. Although his smile was surgical not chemical in origin.
How is that full circle?
Full semicircle.
Hey man, geometry is hard!
Did a 360 and walked away.
This is a nice vintage meme.
If you do a 360 you'll be walking the original way you were facing
Full 360 whoosh
180%
Book takes place in England, I guess that's the connection they're making on top of the whole death grin and spicy lettuce.
180°
Full tangent.
My immediate thought.
Smilex Gas.
He’s gonna kill everybody! Knox goes super saiyan
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>Its poison constricts the muscles, causing death by asphyxia, which also causes a rictus like death grin.
Not unlike Tetanus then. Yikes.
It's exactly like that. Quite a few nasty things can cause that type of spastic paralysis (defined as paralysis where muscles cannot relax or un-flex: it's the opposite of flaccid paralysis where they cannot flex).
Your brain, nerves, and muscles have an interconnected system bridged by a small physical gap called the neuromuscular junction. This tiny gap has neurotransmitters that flow between a motor neuron and a muscle. First, your brain decides you want to move or make a motion of some sort, and communicates that to the cerebellum, which subconsciously coordinates the movement (because all movements are quite a bit more complicated and involve more muscles than we realize consciously). Next, the cerebellum, via the spinal cord, sends a message to the muscles saying, "flex!" That message is communicated via a small messenger molecule, acetylcholine. When we no longer wish to flex, we both stop emitting acetylcholine and we actively destroy and recycle any acetylcholine remaining in the junction using enzymes (acetylcholinesterase iirc).
Things that cause paralysis (other than brain and spinal cord injuries) interrupt this process in some way. Things that cause spastic paralysis either mimic acetylcholine but don't get destroyed by enzymes so they stick around for a long time, or they do it by preventing enzymes from finding and reacting with acetylcholine. In the latter example, they usually bind to the enzymes themselves, and "plug it up". In the former example, they bind to the acetylcholine receptor on the muscle cell, activating it and also "plugging it up" such that it stays turned on regardless of what our brain is trying to tell it.
You could also cause flaccid paralysis by disrupting the release of acetylcholine, or by plugging up the muscle receptor with a molecule that binds to it but does not activate it, similar to but critically different from the spastic example in how it affects the cell's interior.
There's quite a lot of plant and insect toxins that can do one or the other. Curare is an often used example in undergraduate biology.
Thank you! I always love it when there's a well-researched comment under a post to learn something new. I've looked up curare and found this neat:
Curare is deadly but it can be used as an antidote to another dangerous poison, strychnine, because their acetylcholine activity cancels each other.
It’s best known use though is as a medical grade paralytic. Rocuronium, vecuronium, and other derivatives (notice the root of the word “cur” as in curare) are used every day to keep people relaxed during surgery
Cool! I also dig the fact that botulotoxin, one of the deadliest substances to exist naturally, is successfully used in medicine. Botox treatment doesn't only remove wrinkles from skin, it can deal with spasms, tics, chronic pain, excessive sweating... basically everything that can be stopped by suppressing nerve signals. Who knew that swollen tins of biohazardously spoiled food contain the key to curing so many conditions.
Tetanus fun fact! It functions as a precision set of molecular "scissors" and cleaves the synaptobrevin2/VAMP protein complex SNARE in inhibitory interneurons. The SNARE complex is responsible for the exocytosis of neurotransmitters, and the inhibitor neurons basically send the "off" signal to the rests of your neurons and tells them to stop firing. The degradation of the synaptobrevin protein prevents these signals from being sent causing massive overreactions in muscles to any and all stimuli. The really cool part is because the toxin is so specifically targeted to this specific type of cell, parts of it are being co-opted to deliver medications in a targeted fashion!
That....that is a fun fact :)
"Taste: The root is said to taste pleasantly like parsnip before poisoning the consumer." - The Website.
Love it.
I had a medical plants book that said messing with members of the parsley family is "like playing herbal roulette." Well put, I thought.
I mean, that sounds like an apt description. Some stuff is lovley then some stuff is this or hemlock.
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"I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates when he said...I drank what?"
Was it a dream where you were where you see yourself standing in sort of sun-god robes on a pyramid, with a thousand naked women screaming and throwing little pickles at you?
What a fantastic film
You left out the worst part most of modern deaths related to the plant is because its mistaken for Edible plants
Yep, Reddit Titles are only 300 characters long, and its difficult to include some details.
Why is this getting so many upvotes? Of course most deaths from nearly any poisonous plant are due to people accidentally ingesting it?
Are most people surprised that it’s not very common to force people to knowingly eat poisonous plants anymore?
This is what was given to Socrates as a death sentence
>The trial of Socrates has always seemed mysterious ... the charges sound vague and unreal ... because behind the stated charges was Socrates's real crime: preaching a philosophy that produced Alcibiades and Critias ... but of course he couldn't be prosecuted for that under the amnesty [which had been declared after the overthrow of the Thirty Tyrants] ... so his accusers made it "not believing the Gods of the city, introducing new gods, and corrupting the youth".
Not exactly the same plant. Socrates is believed to be poisoned with true hemlock Conium maculatum, not hemlock water-dropwort Oenanthe crocata, which is presumably named after the real deal. They are both in the same family that contains a lot of extremely poisonous species, and also edible ones like carrots and parsley.
COOL. I wonder if this has anything to do with the origins of the “grinning man” horror trope.
Pretty sure either Star Wars character is named after this. He even brags about creating a poison that he's immune to.
I like to call it forbidden parsley or forbidden parsnips, depending on which part you want to eat.
And it looks so much like cilantro. Or parsley.
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Check out a 1961 movie called 'Mr Sardonicus'.
Is it painful?
So, it’s a Joker Venom plant?
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HarvesterFullCrumb t1_jddtx0r wrote
Ah, so it's basically Joker Venom, but real...