Thanks for watching, Super Nerds, and happy new year! 2020 is going to be interesting. Looks like you all love some Witcher science, so if you want to see more, let me know! -- kH
In the game you can clearly see in the dark of the night whats going on. Like in most games. In reality you wouldnt be able..try to go in a forest at night. You see shit. The potion enhance this ability even in pitch black darkness
@@Tuxedosnake00 You don't get my point. Nocturnal animal like cats don't require addiational help to see in the dark. So why go through a mutation that is totally unnecessary if you still require aid? And no, I cannot remember how many times I to brew potions or walk with the lantern to be able to see. During the fight with the werewolf in his cave, You couldnt see shit without help.
I guess it just further enhances the effect. Think about it, witchers sometimes have to fight in pitch black darkness against opponents that are super fast and/or almost transparent. Under those conditions having anything less than perfect eyesight might prove to be fatal. This implies that the witcher's normal eyes are simply not perfect, so they need the cat potion.
@@DiZeHiZe ah ah ah, nocturnal animals can see in the dark but cats need to see during the day too, their eyes being too sensitive to light would make them useless while the sun is out, the witcher doesn't need the aid of the potions, they just boost his abilities without making a permanent change that could be highly detrimental later.
@@charleskilo4383 I've always laughed hard that at the "looks like rain..." Dude, it's already raining. Yes, it is rain. Did you use your Witcher senses to notice the rain? Lol
@@guacca I always love that quote from when you're at Kaer Morhen drinking and you have to find Eskel, and when you bend down to find clues Lambert says "You had to bend down to see that?"
*looks at my number of 100%ed games* "Only took a few hundred hours" -just you wait for games that can't be 100%ed because it's always adding new content to itself-
Geralt was using silver only against monsters and only the ones that was sensitive to silver. Otherwise he was using only steel. Silver sword is to fragile to fight anything most of the time.
@@mrsmeee1843 but some parts of the lore don't make much sense. It's clear that tge whole witcher program was sponsored by a king who put together the best alchemists and mages to cone up with the mutation process and the best knights to train the subjects. What is absurd is why the witchers are independent, even if the kingdom that created them fell surely another kingdom would step in and take over. Witchers would perform much better if they operated inside the organization of a royal army. They'd function as rangers, directly paid a stipend by the royal treasure, always equipped with the best gear available and able to rely on the support of the army for missions that required more manpower.
Arthur Magalhaes Witchers don't really look very different to regular people, barring the cat eyes and (probable) multitude of scars. Geralt undergoes loads of extra mutations which bleach his hair. So he's weird, even for a Witcher
@@TheThegoldenspatula the Trial of the Grasses can bring forth many side effects (one of which is their sterilization), albinism (lack of production of melanin) can be one of them.
@@catarinamagalhaes4775 Though as far as I remember things like being sterile is normal for witchers (e.g. one of the loading lines in Witcher 3 states that). Having white hair is caused by the unnatural amount of mutations or the unusually high pain inflicted on Geralt even from a Witcher's perspective. The only other witcher I remember being white-haired is Ciri. But for normal witchers like Vesemir or Lambert having white hair doesn't seem to be a expected side effect like becoming sterile (which apparently every witcher is, though not 100% certain)
HTM geralt is a “Witcher 2.0”. He bested the Witcher trials with relative ease and underwent further more difficult trials and mutations which affected his hair. That’s why he’s the only Witcher with white hair.
This makes that scene in the last episode even sadder when he says "You know what they do to a Witcher's eyes to get them like this?". How painful it must be :(
While I would love to go into all the cellular biology and genetics gone through this episode, I sadly don’t have the time to do so on my lunch break. I will however talk about a bonus that comes with the increase number of red blood cells. Known as polycythemia, an increase in blood cells does increase the oxygen carrying capacity. Research has shown that those living at high altitudes develop polycythemia as a way to cope with the lower partial pressure of oxygen. So if Geralt has a form of polycythemia (there are several but again no time) he would also be able to retain his stamina and wouldn’t get short of breath at higher altitudes, which would be pretty useful for slaying griffins in their nests atop a mountain. Love the episode, keep up the great work!
Excellent point. I look at it from the other side of the coin: I have a form of anemia wherein I produce a LOT of red blood cells but my body essentially eats them, leaving me somewhat anemic (my doc keeps an eye on things and despite what WebMD says, I'm not dying of any horrible disease .. in fact, the cause of my condition is unknown, although it seems genetic, so it's not really harmful, just annoying). In an attempt to maintain health in my fifties, I work out HARD most of the week (CrossFit, martial arts, etc.) which has greatly improved my blood work results. My resting heart rate is in the mid fifty bpm range (like my age, LOL). But if we're doing some especially aerobic stuff (or I decide to outpace the younger ones working out), once my heart rate gets up pretty good, I'm DONE ... can't breathe, muscles worn out, vision might get dim ... but give me a minute to drop my heart rate and I'm as fresh as if I just took a nap. That's my long-winded way of saying I'm looking at the situation from the opposite side and you are totally right. Hmm ... maybe I should move high up on a mountain, force my body to adjust, develop polycythemia which would then edge me over into "normal" range? Darn my choice to live on the coast! ;) LOL!
Hi Kyle, I have another mutation to add, and it fits nicely with what we are already making our witcher out of. Since we are also increasing our witchers musculature and increasing oxygen transportation, there is another adaptation we can give him with regards to oxygen availability. Mammalian musculature contains another heme based oxygen carrying protien called myoglobin. In marine mammals, especially deep sea mammals, this protien is expressed at greater concentrations and acts as a primary means to store oxygen for their long dives. If we add a mutation to this effect to our witcher, there should be more oxygen available before those pumped up muscles have to resort to anaerobic processes, thus increasing the amount he could swing those big guns around before feeling muscle fatigue.
@@ankokuraven whatever cocktail that team china weightlifting is using on their athletes is the formula to make a real life Witcher, just add EPO for maximum oxygen efficiency and availability
@@brentmeyers9657 I said that to people who also haven't played AC III, where Desmond died and FFXV, where both Noctis and Luna died. And I'm just like... You have the internet, and these are big games... avoiding spoilers is the miracle here.
When you talked about how to expand the lifespan I was surprised you didn't talk about the telomere research happening and how scientists are getting pretty close to expanding the human lifespan.
Witcher 3 plot in a nutshell: Overdrugged playboy Step-daddy find and save step-daughter from 3 big black cold dudes with the power of magic and The Heart of the Cards
"Any sufficiently analyzed magic is indistinguishable from Science!" - Agatha Hetradyne. This is what you can get with a consistent magic system and enough experiments.
whenever i think of magic i always think of it as another form of science, spells and potions are never just _there,_ someone in the universes at some point had to discover magic exists in the first place, like we discovered all the scientific things we have over the years and gave it the general term of "science", then had to go and create the spells, the potions, discover how everything works, all that stuff, its essentially that series/universes cooler science
The thing about the stamina is in fact a really good theory I think, cause in the books, Andrej Sapkowski writes that a witcher heart beats 4 times slower than a normal human one. That possibly means they have 4 times more red blood cells, so a witcher heart can be slower to do its "normal" work. And maybe it would also means that they can have almost 4 times more stamina and oxygen going to muscles than a normal human. great vid btw, I rly like this one
This Made me love Witcher even more. The science behind all of this is great. Thank you for taking the time to put together all these facts about mutation, mutagens and so on Thank you long haired dude
Call me a cynic but I don’t think 100 percent completions mean as much as they used to. Feels like most game nowadays you could complete 95 percent just doing the story mission. The rest just cleaning out bandit camps and collecting useless treasures. Leaving you feeling like it’s all become a menial task to complete and not compelling at all. I remember scouring the cities in AC2 to find the clues to the precursor civilization feeling like I was actually uncovering a mystery. That sense of satisfaction when I got to watch the final clip after finding all the pieces was cathartic. Now everything become about collecting for collectings sake something even The Witcher 3 couldn’t escape from.
@@kingjamestres You should check out the trophies for the Witcher 3. Some of them are nightmares. I started trying it and stopped when I found out you needed to kill 50 enemies with reflected crossbow bolts.
sephirothsadvent it’s not reflected bolts. It’s 50 head shots Edit even doubled checked it’s not that hard of a game. I got it platinumed. Working on the disk platinum now. Different trophies lists.
Oxygen has 2 Valence electrons, that's how to look at it. Carbon has 4, Fluorine has 1. ETC, however the amount of Valence electrons means very little in actuality, because there are non-valence electron bonds as well, valence electrons basically mean a vacuum that could house an electron, but even so, the view of electrons as existing in shells is extremely faulty. After all, Electrons aren't really bound by some law to any particle in particular and exist purely as possibility clouds around atomic nucleus.
As a graduate student studying red blood cell development in low oxygen, I approve this episode. In fact, EPO production in the kidney is induced by hypoxia sensing protein HIF-2a, which is degraded by PHD2 protein if oxygen levels are high. So if the witcher mutagen damage the EGLN1 gene (which encodes PHD2 protein), they would have more HIF-2a, and so more EPO, and therefore more red blood cells. There are actual clinical cases where patients have mutated EGLN1 gene, and the symptoms include chronic erythrocytosis (over production of red blood cells). In non witcher normal human this is a problem because too much red blood cells make the blood too thick and easily clot in your body. Another interesting fact is that Tibetan populations have a mutation in EGLN1 gene that *enhances* its activity, and therefore produce less EPO even though they are constantly living in low oxygen environment. This prevents frequent blood clotting from chronic erythrocytosis and gave the Tibetan population a selective advantage in highlands.
9:51 - Geralt has to take herbs regularly to keep his side effects in check (unless you played Witcher 1 on the easier difficulty). Herbs, especially ginger, contain anti-oxidants and sometimes even vitamin E that absorb the effects of oxidative stress. Those anti-oxidants are plant-based, which is why the human body sucks at making them on its own. That is why the best course is to keep eating that stuff regularly and with food to minimize the chemical stress of the food. Most of the harmful chemicals come from the food, so minimizing the food effects will help to preserve your genome. If people took more olive oil or ate seeds daily, they could get the vitamin E easily that way.
I love that the only 2 things you didn't cover too much were covered in the show. The sterilization because the life of a Witcher doesn't leave a lot of time to be a parent. And they mentioned the cat eye procedure being very risky and often failing and causing blindness which sounds about right with how invasive it would be
In the section about repairing damage from monsters, while you did cover that increased amount of certain growth factors like VEGF would lead to faster healing, but you neglected to mention the really important fact that in real life, increased amounts of those growth factors are often present in cancer patients, due to growth factor genes being important oncogenes in tumor formation, though if you’re already able to give Witcher’s cat eyes, being able to put more tumor suppressor genes to decrease cancer risk might be able to mitigate increased risks from increased growth factor activity. As well, you covered Witcher’s potentially being more resistant to oxidative stress, which would lower risk of cancer overall, though it would be hard to see how mutagens would produce those same characteristics consistently over many generations of Witcher’s.
Lēoht Steren one of the 5/6 great mass extinctions in earths history was caused by the production of oxygen by early photosynthetic organisms. And it is slowing killing all of us, but the amount of ATP generated by using oxygen as our final electron acceptor is about 16 times greater than if could not use it. So the juice is worth the squeeze.
@@morriganrenfield8240 Yennifer is no better, she wants everything done her way and if anyone goes against what she wants she throws a huge temper tantrum.
10:20 ish, just to throw this out real quick: another compelling way to prevent ageing in theory is to find a way to preserve (or prevent the loss of) our telomeres. Telomeres are basically a length of sacrificial DNA. You see, during cell replication, DNA polymerase (the enzyme responsible for copying the original DNA onto the new strand of DNA being made) always leaves out a little bit of DNA at the ends, meaning that that part of your DNA isn't replicated. If that happened under normal circumstances, then you'd lose a lot of information in the form of DNA over time (as your cells divided), and eventually die as a result. Our bodies' solution is telomeres, which are basically just added so that _they_ are the part of DNA that isn't replicated (since they code for nothing, this is neat). It is theorised that over time, our chromosomes' telomeres get shorter and shorter until the vital DNA becomes exposed and the cell dies. This is a small scale ageing mechanism, the prevention of which could theoretically slow ageing down on a cellular level. Cool huh? Loved that we got a Witcher episode btw! Keep up the scienceing!
Darn, didn't scroll down far enough before I did my comment on telomeres. Yeah and there are other organisms that don't have that reduction process that we have in ours. If I recall we do have a specific mechanism that cuts a little bit of it away every replication and we're working on turning that off cause things like the starfish are basically immortal.... If it's in optimal conditions at all times.
well no because telomeres are just rebuilt by telomerase, at least for a long while. long-lived populations have been found to have overexpressed telomerase, but still got "old" at the same rate and just didn't suffer the catastrophic cell failure that the absence of telomeres would cause (exonuclease breaking down the DNA due to exposed ends). the real way to make people be "younger" for longer is more efficient cellular repair by slightly overexpressing the proteins that fix simple mismatches or by making the cells keep extra junk copies of the DNA for so it can be used for homologous recombination which doesn't delete any part of the code instead of non-homologous end-joining which deletes as much as the DNA is broken. also more a more sensitive cell death mechanism is probably needed if the speed is cranked up when healing wounds, which would drastically reduce the chance of cancer. witchers or longer-lived people in general need a system for regenerating damaged nerve cells and cleaning up leftover proteins as to not go senile or get altzheimer's.
@@alexandergarfield1561 that's non-homologous end joining and it's required to fix double-strand breaks in DNA as eukaryotes aren't literally always replicating their DNA, so they don't have a reference string of DNA to perfectly fix it by
Fun fact about lobsters: they produce an enzyme called telomerase, which repairs telomeres. If one of the Witcher mutations allows Geralt to produce teolmerase, that could at least partially account for his longevity.
Batspecies of the genus Myotis do not age and only die due to starvation (dental wear) or other external events (accidents, dehydration). These species do not produce telomerase but have up to 21 'telomere maintanance' genes (e.g. ATM, SETX) that prevent the individuals from ageing.... Some wild animals have been annually identified and monitored for over 40 years(!!) For an animal of only 4-10 grams with an exeptionally fast heartrate and metabilism (annual average is incl. several months of hibernation). Studies by dr. Emma Teeling of Dublin University college on genetics advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/2/eaao0926?VancePak+%28updated+6%2F30%2F2017%29&EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_02_02&, interesting topic, this anti ageing.
I say if you were able to make a not sterile witcher, go for it. Chances of things going bad can't be worse then the success rate of making them from scratch every time and the great traits might even be better in a couple of generations. That said there is probably a reason it is like this in the first place.
OR, and I know this is hard to grasp but stay with me, he used the same kind of witchcraft that enabled him to hold the drawing of a sword in thin air in his hand and slice through another drawing. You know... the dark art known as video editing?
@@ithemba While possible, I doubt they have the time/expertise/budget to change his hair color frame by frame. It's way easier to take a static drawing and apply motion to it.
Hey Kyle while we're on the topic of the super natural. How long would it take for a zombie or a group of zombies (if they are just rotting corpses) to decay to the point where they either can't move or are so weak they can't bite into anything?
