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Why Does My Daughter Keep Fainting?

Vasovagal attacks are the commonest reason for fainting.

They typically occur, for example, in a schoolchild who has missed breakfast, after standing for some time (typically in school assembly) or if faced with an unexpected stressful situation.

During such an attack the child may suddenly feel light headed, sweaty, perhaps nauseated and may describe changes in her vision and look pale and clammy.

She may go on to pass out completely and slump to the floor with brief loss of consciousness and some twitching.

The feeling may pass if she moves around or sits down for a while but she may remember feeling confused and dizzy.

Vasovagal attacks are caused by the vagus nerve being over active. This nerve slows the heart rate down and lowers blood pressure. If it suddenly becomes over active this lead to a rapid drop in blood pressure and heart rate.

As a result not enough blood (and therefore oxygen) gets to the brain. This leads to a brief loss of consciousness.

As soon as your daughter falls down, or if there is time, sits or lies down, her head is at the same level as her heart and blood rapidly flows back into her brain, making her come around.

It is important that someone who has seen your daughter have an attack is able to describe it in detail to her doctor. The story is the best way of making the diagnosis.

However her doctor may also need to examine her heart, blood pressure, and run some blood tests to make sure there is no underlying cause such as anaemia,low sodium or diabetes as such conditions could also make her faint.

Sometimes there can be confusion with fits or convulsion as someone who has a marked vasovagal attack may have jerking limbs which can resemble an epileptic fit.

The story of the episode is vital; in an epileptic fit the child has no memory of the fit whereas in a vasovagal attack the child can recall the events leading up to the faint. She will look very pale and possibly sweaty just before passing out whereas such signs are less common before a fit.

If it is a true fit she might be incontinent or bite her tongue whilst this is unusual in vasovagal attacks.

There are certain precautions your daughter can take in the meantime to avoid vasovagal attacks as they can lead to injuries during the fall as well as being embarrassing.

she should not miss breakfast or any meals. When standing still for long periods of time she should keep her legs and calf muscles moving. This makes sure her circulation works well. She should avoid distressing or stressful situations if these are known to make her feel faint. Examples include watching bloody or gory programmes on TV or attending animal dissections. if she needs injections, blood tests or other painful procedures she should be laid flat beforehand and for up to 20 minutes afterwards.

It is rare for vasovagal attacks to cause any long term problems. They tend to be commonest in the adolescent years probably associated with the hormonal changes of puberty. It is likely your daughter will outgrow them.

We recommend readers seek personal medical attention in appropriate circumstances.

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Awesome Prank Or Circuit-Breaker Tester?

Many tools can be used either for good or for evil — it just depends on the person flipping the switch. (And their current level of mischievousness.) We're giving [Callan] the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that he built his remote-controlled Residual Current Device (RDC) tripper for the purpose of testing the safety of the wiring in his own home. On the other hand, he does mention using it to shut off all the power in his house during an "unrelated countdown at a party". See? Good and evil.

An RCD (or GFCI in the States) is a kind of circuit breaker that trips when the amount of current in the hot and neutral mains power lines aren't equal and opposite, which would suggest that the juice was leaking out somewhere, hopefully not through someone. They only take a few milliamps of imbalance to blow so that nobody gets hurt. Making a device to test an RCD is easy; a resistor between hot and the protective ground circuit would do.

[Callan] over-engineers. He used a 50 W resistor where 30 W would do under the worst circumstances. A stealthy solid-state relay switches the resistor in, driven by an Uno and a Bluetooth module, so he can trip his circuit breakers from his smartphone, naturally.

He did find one circuit in his house with an unconnected protective earth line, so the device fulfilled its safety function. But it points out a weakness with this project as a prank device: he can only punk people who have properly installed circuit breakers, after all. Relative to the way we've tested our circuit breakers, this is a relatively safe project. But still, have a read through our nice guide on working with mains voltage if you're insecure in your mains safety practices.

Making Aerogel, It's Not For The Faint-Hearted

Aerogel — that mixture of air and silica — is one of those materials that seems like a miracle. It is almost not there since the material is 99% air. [NileRed] wanted to make his own and he documented his work in a recent video you can see below.

If you decide to replicate his result, be careful with the tetramethyl orthosilicate. Here's what he says about it:

And the best part is, that when it's in your eyes, it gets under the surface, and the particles are way too small to remove. For this reason, you could go permanently blind.

It can also mess up your lungs, so you probably need a vent hood to really work with this. It isn't cheap, either. The other things you need are easier to handle: methanol, distilled water, and ammonia.

The process involves developing a silica gel and then letting it dry. Sounds easy, but you'll see in the video that it isn't as simple as it sounds. [NileRed] made it harder because he wanted to make nice shapes of aerogel even though it is very fragile. The construction of the mold is actually very clever and requires a trip to the dollar store.

Drying the material out requires a lot more methanol to displace water. Then you can remove the methanol leaving the air in the material. Doing that requires CO2 to drive out the methanol and then rapidly convert the liquid CO2 into a gas. A sous vide cooker found a new use in the process.

This was not a quick project. The video is 43 minutes long and we can't think of where you'd cut anything out, other than the promotion of other videos in the last few minutes.

Given you can buy an aerogel disc or cylinder for around $40, we aren't sure we are going to rush to replicate this experiment. On the other hand, we were super impressed with the work and it was interesting to see the solutions to the difficult problems.

There are other materials that can form aerogels, including ceramics. [Ben Krasnow] has done a similar video in the past that uses a very similar process, but he didn't have the clever molds that [NileRed] uses.

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