//attempted science

i'm studying for a master's in biochem at some old uni in england cancer biology is what i research, but i post about more

[botanyshitposts]

scientists in the 1990s, putting a Get More Purple gene attached to a harmless plant virus into an already purple petunia: please get more purple

the petunia, sensing an apparent honest to god Get More Purple Disease, using the previously undiscovered RNAi antiviral ability to shut down all other purple genes along with it just in case: you put VIRUS in petunia? you infect her with the More Purple?? oh! oh! her children shall bloom white! jail for mother, jail for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[flipocrite]

[clickityweasel]

[dankmemeuniversity]

[supreme-leader-stoat]

[lesbiancinnabun-deactivated2023]

Y'all should Google the article, it’s actually pretty neat. Basically, the Aldabra Atoll was once inhabited by the Aldabra Rail, a flightless species of bird that had diverged from the flying White-Throated Rail when a section of the population landed there and found they had no natural predators. However, the Atoll occasionally gets completely submerged, and all of the flightless Aldabra rails were wiped out. But then, after the Atoll re-emerged, a bunch of the EXACT SAME species of flying White Throated Rail decided to settle there again, and immediately proceeded to evolve into flightless birds AGAIN.

[spoonie-living]

How Do-It-Yourself Diabetes Looping Works

DiabetesMine describes the open source diabetes technology movement in which hundreds of patients are building homemade artificial pancreas systems.

[Image: photo of a smiling middle-aged couple, Doug and Mychale Boss. Doug is the featured Looper in this article.]

We live… in a weird world. On the one hand, we have incredible technology. On the other hand, it’s not always being put to good use by big companies: there are huge gaps where a technology is desperately needed, and nobody is bothering to develop it for consumer use.

This is a story of patients taking things into their own hands. No devices available to regulate my diabetes? Whatever, I’ll make my own!

If you’ve got Type 1 diabetes (not sure if this helps Type 2) and are really feeling the hassle of manually regulating yourself, have a look at this article! It lays everything out and links to several groups and resources for getting started.

Power to the patient!

[fattyatomicmutant-deactivated20]

You wanna know some impressive shit? The Cuttlefish is colorblind, and yet despite that it can change its colors PERFECTLY to mimic its surroundings.

IT CAN EVEN DO THIS IN TOTAL DARKNESS

HOW THE FUCK 

[houyo]

Just like Daredevil, they can probably feel the vibrations of different color textures via sound waves or some other bullshit.

[bogleech]

Oh the truth is even more bullshit than that, if recent deductions are correct:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/07/how-colorblind-cuttlefish-may-see-living-color

Because every color is a different wavelength, it’s possible to have a lens focused in such a way that only one color at a time is clear and others are blurry. So it seems that the eyes of cephalopods rapidly “sweep” across every possible level of focus. It might all look like different shades of grey to them, but in just an instant, their powerful brain registers exactly which shades of grey come clear at exactly which levels of focus and tells the skin which chromatophores to switch on and off to match that shade as close as possible. *focusfocusfocusfocusblurblurblurblurblurblur* I don’t know what these other assholes are seeing but THESE greys in THIS situation sure seem to confuse them”

[wonders-of-the-cosmos]

Mimas (moon of Saturn) taken by the Cassini spacecraft.

Credit: NASA/JPL

[montereybayaquarium]

A solitary female copepod, about the size of this comma right here , rests for a moment with her twin egg cases on the Martian surface of an anemone.

We live life at human scale—because, well, yeah. But at night the stars remind us of the vast universe beyond Spaceship Earth. And, we’re something’s giants too, leviathans to the microcosmos, galactic shadows in the heavens above an expecting copepod and her anemone.

Famed biologist Ed Ricketts and his merry band of collectors often recited the following rhyme, thinking of their time exploring the tide pools of Monterey Bay:

“Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum. And the great fleas, themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on; While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.” - “Siphonaptera,” Augustus De Morgan, 1915

[spacefidelity]

MIR space station. 🌎

[xperiane]

[neopoint-blog]

woah bitch the fuck was that for

[hungry-joe]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What happens when you let computers optimize foorplans (I love this SO MUCH)

I eagerly await our new AI masters’ world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:

Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways, etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the perspective of optimization and without regard for convention, constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.

Adds Simon: “I have very mixed feelings about this project.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/07/30/what-happens-when-you-let-comp.html

[thewriterkb]

X- Rays of a Hammerhead Shark

[labphoto]

Chromatogarphic separation of a quite complex reaction mixture. 

Column chromatography is a time and solvent consuming hobby of organic chemists. It is often used when classic methods: crystallization, distillation or solvent-solvent extractions fail to separate the n+1 product what was produced in the flask from a reaction. 

If you are lucky enough the main component will separate, or as in this case partially separate. The first 40 fractions contained the “A” component, from 45 to 55 the mixture of “A” and “B” component, from 56 to 72 the “B” component and after that everything else from “C” to “Z”. 

[6-phds-and-no-sense]

sometimes people try to tell me that scientists are paragons of rationality and I have to break it to them that I have yet to work in a lab that didn’t have at least one weird secret shrine in it

[6-phds-and-no-sense]

new guy: why is all of the equipment in this room covered in toys?

me: dONn’t touch those

new guy:

me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.

new guy:

new guy:

me: when something breaks just take the wizard and wave it around for a while. they seem to like that.

[humansoflatecapitalism]

[accidentallybiology]

Ooh I started an Instagram for lab photos @labaesthetik and it seems to be going down quite nicely...

[space-pics]

Newly released NASA Juno spacecraft photo of the “Dolphin” on Jupiter [3322x1800]

[aestheticalspace]

Head-on Collision of Two Vortex Rings

[crossdreamers]

@ScienceVet2 explains intersex variations on twitter.

ScienceVet is a Ph.D in Biochemistry and has published in the fields of endocrinology and sexual differentiation.  His Ph.D. is in Biomedical Sciences - Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmocology.