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PET Explained Using Only the Ten-Hundred Most Commonly Used Words We’re going to try to explain something that most people here at this work party should understand but rather than use lots of not simple words we're going to see if we can do it using just the ten-hundred most often used ones. Someone who lives in a much bigger country where they speak with the same words and is well known for drawing pictures to be looked at on all the computers that are tied together has done this for space boats and lots of other cool stuff so we thought that it would be a good idea. Enjoy! “I’ve spent a lot of my life worried that people will think I don’t know enough. Sometimes that worry has made me use big words when I don’t really need to.” Randall Munroe – Thing Explainer (Complicated Stuff in Simple Words) 2015 SPECIAL PICTURE MACHINE FOR LOOKING INSIDE SICK PEOPLE Peter Julyan1, Chris Oldfield2, Jill Tipping1 & David Julyan 1The Christie NHS Foundation Trust, Manchester; 2University of Manchester SPECIAL SIMPLE SWEET FOOD We can make special bits of simple sweet food and put these in a SICK PEOPLE person’s blood. Special bits of simple sweet food go to the bad tiny Some people get sick when the tiny bags of water we're all bags of water. These will stay where they are as they don't work quite made of grow too fast and in the wrong way. These wrong like normal simple sweet food. working tiny bags of water would rather grow in the same way that we make beer, by using simple sweet food. If we're really We make these special bits of simple sweet food good at thinking we can use this fact to take pictures of the using a bit of extra heavy green burning air that insides of sick people and then try to make them better. kills. The special bits of matter are ten-add-eight times heavier than the bits of matter that are the We can also use ideas like these to look at people in whom the most often seen in clouds of hot air in the night sky. blood pusher or thinking bag is not working in the right way. NORMAL + NOT NORMAL NOT NORMAL MATTER The extra heavy bits of green burning air don't like being extra heavy and break The idea of not normal matter came out of the work of a man from the country into an extra heavy kind of the air we use for breathing and a small not normal bit where this work party is being held who was good at using his brain. He was of matter. The not normal bit of matter will travel a short distance and then thinking about how small bits of normal matter work. Turns out the set of numbers meets a normal bit of matter - this means trouble. They both disappear turning he thought up also said there should be small bits of not normal matter. And he into two bits of very fast light moving away from each other. Yes, matter can turn was right! into light, a space doctor who was very well known for being good at thinking and for having mad hair has a set of numbers about this – it’s the one set of numbers most people know. He used to work in an office looking at other people’s new ideas but in his own time thought lots about whether it matters if something is still or moves. He then also thought about if it matters if something gets quicker or is being pulled towards something heavy. Long thin bits of metal. EXTRA PICTURE MACHINE There are a lot of these. As well as the special picture machine, we have a slightly less special picture machine. We use it take another SPECIAL PICTURE MACHINE different, but still rather good picture. After a while we put the person in the This does two things: it helps the special picture machine. This is made out of computer to make the first picture, and a circle of clear rocks that give a flash of it also helps us to know what we're light we can see when hit by the very fast looking at. light. Long thin bits of metal join the rocks together. We can look all these flashes It works by firing not quite so fast light trying to work out when the very fast light from one side of the person and seeing pairs hit rocks on either side of the person how much comes out of the other side. at the same time. We don’t look at the light instead we use a computer. If they see two (I say it’s not quite such a good picture, at the same time we know that there was but the people who thought up this way some of the special simple sweet food along of making pictures of people’s insides a line between the two rocks. got an important gift named after a man who worked out how to make big quick We need to see many hundreds and fires to blow things up. These fires make hundreds and hundreds of these events. A some people very angry. The gift is from computer then sorts through all the pairs of the country known for making tables and flashes and turns them into a picture of the chairs that you have to put together sick person. Nice covers to make machine yourself. These also make some people Circle of clear rocks look less bad very angry.) This tells us exactly how heavy all the bits of the person are and so we can tell Don’t take out between the different forms of bags of LOOKING AT THE PICTURES living water in the body. Finally we get a picture doctor to have a look. This is someone who has spent a large part of their life looking at such pictures to try to say exactly what they think is wrong with the sick person. They usually do this using rather a lot of long words that are outside our set of ten-hundred work, but we let them have their fun. Long thin bits of metal so the This will help us to decide what to do to try to make the sick person better. This may be cutting bits out; firing picture doctor can sit a long very, very fast light at the bad bits; or putting a not food that stops parts of the body working into the person way from all the bad light. hoping that it will hurt the bad bits more than the good bits. This special picture machine has made a big change to the way doctors can help people with bad bits and get them the best ways to get better. Additional illustration commissioned from Contact: [email protected] Andrea Julyan and borrowed from xkcd.com Presented at: Reference: Julyan P J, Oldfield O, Tipping J and Julyan D S. PET Explained Using Only the Ten-Hundred Most Commonly Used Words. Nucl Med Commun 2015 37(5) 566 (abstract) Check out the xkcd cartoons each Monday, Wednesday and Friday at: xkcd.com We’d also highly recommend Randall Munroe’s previous book: what if? (Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions) 2014 You can also see what other people have done at: splasho.com/upgoer5 Some Explanations: • The beer reference (as well as enjoying the fact that beer is in the list of ten-hundred words, as is tea) refers to the Warburg effect by saying how cancer cells take up more glucose because they preferentially “ferment”. Warburg “On the Origin of Cancer Cells” Science 1956 123(3191) – The cancer cells have about as much energy available as the normal body cells, the ratio of the fermentation energy to the respiration energy is much greater in the cancer cell than it is in the normal cells. (It’s a great paper, everyone should read it.) • “Special bits of simple sweet food” are obviously 18FDG. Fluorine-18 is the “extra heavy green burning air that kills”, using the terminology from The Pieces Everything Is Made Of, i.e. the periodic table of elements in Thing Explainer itself. And it’s about 18, or ten-add-eight, times heavier than the hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe. • We prefer the term “fast light” rather than say “hard light” that some may have thought we’d use. “Fast” clearly referring to the frequency of oscillation. • Clear rocks that give a flash of light = scintillators. • You got the whole Alfred Nobel, dynamite, Swedish prizes thing, didn’t you? Of course you did… We hope you had fun reading our work party big picture, or that it was at least a brief distraction from all those nasty big words everyone else are using!.

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