Eukaryote tumbles

[eukaryotetumbled]

Blog name changed to eukaryotetumbles. See last post.

[eukaryotetumbled]

Because I seem to be converging toward a steady stream of puns and deep-sea creatures:

I’m restructuring this tumblr! I’ve been having a hard time getting what I want from it, so I’m coming up with a new plan.

This address (nottodayvoid.tumblr.com) will be changed to eukaryotetumbles and used for blog posts, or other things I don’t mind theoretically associated with my name. Might delete some things.

Said puns, deep-sea creatures, and personal posts / community engagement will be moved to my older tumblr. That tumblr is also associated with my other community I’d like to connect with more, so it’ll be two tofus with one stone for me. I’ll follow rat tumblr people from that blog.

If you follow me here, or read this tumblr despite not having one yourself (I know there’s at least a couple of you), or whatever, please ask me for the URL of the one I’ll be using more. (We don’t have to be best pals or whatever for you to ask, I just don’t want the URLs to be obviously linked in public.) :)

Weird things I find during research will be moved to... possibly twitter? Or facebook or the other tumblr.

[red-eye-radio]

So I thought y'all would like this too This great white comes to the jersey shore every year and this year they named her and have been tracking her hella so this is Mary Lee and she decided to show herself under this rainbow for pride month A true gay icon

[victoryyodel]

#This is the representation I’ve been looking for

[eukaryotetumbled]

incredible

[alphynix]

Synophalos xynos, a shrimp-like arthropod from the Early Cambrian of China (~515 mya). Thought to be closely related to stem-crustaceans like Waptia, it was about 2cm long (0.75″) and had a bivalved carapace with a segmented body ending in a forked tail.

Unlike any other known arthropods, however, it formed long “conga line” chains of up to twenty individuals, with the tail of each animal locking securely into the shell of the next. The function of the these chains is unknown, although suggestions include some sort of mating behavior, migration, or defense against predators.

Only one specimen was found completely on its own, and its slightly longer carapace suggests it may represent a different solitary life stage of these strange little creatures.

[sizvideos]

Video

[frogsuggest]

movie night with the lads

[phalange-crone]

@nightjarring

[eukaryotetumbled]

oh my god

[eukaryotetumbled]

Beespotting on I-5 and the animal welfare approach to honey

It seems like bee welfare is possibly important, and since there are 344,000,000,000,000 of them under our direct care, I’m inclined to err on the side of “being nice to them”.

I waded into the Honey Discourse. New blog post.

[eukaryotetumbled]

Given that tolerance already has divergent definitions in biomedicine, none of which align with our definition, it is reasonable to ask why we do not use another word. ... Second, tolerance already means a variety of things to different animal disease biologists, so we are adding negligible additional confusion.

The “ehhh, fuck it” approach to naming science concepts. I can appreciate it. (Source)

[sinesalvatorem]

This community is full of transwomen. How do other people get shoes? I do not understand this madness and need a help.

[eukaryotetumbled]

Zappos (free return shipping) and Nordstrom Rack (or presumably Nordstrom for greater variety, but, you know, cost) are my go-tos for large lady’s shoes. You might have to check the Rack a few times if you’re looking for something specific (or get other people who go there to look for you) - they have high amounts of turnover from the store, so options will vary a lot from month to month. That said, I’m fairly picky in shoes (and also size 13) and have usually managed to find something there that I want to wear.

[eukaryotetumbled]

Swallowed Whole - a comb jelly preying on a comb jelly

Beroe ovata preying on Ocyropsis cristalina (Ctenophora) Beroid comb jellies lack tentacles and often swallow entire large preys, usually other gelatinous pl...

[eukaryotetumbled]

@slatestarscratchpad

I found this in a book I’m reading. As far as I can tell from google, the Q thing involves bouncing lasers through the sapphire between mirrors and seeing how much energy is absorbed. Taken loosely, I think this confirms what we already know: That sapphires on strings are very important for Angles.

[eukaryotetumbled]

I have a special pen that I got as a Christmas present ~3.5 years ago, which I’ve held onto ever since then. I’ve temporarily lost it a couple times, but never for long. Meanwhile, I bought a pack of 3 pencils, went out of town for a week, and lost all of them one by one over the course of the week. The colored pens I’ve bought over the last two years tend to fare a little better, but usually not longer then a couple months. What’s going on here? There seems to be some kind of value/attention-paid-to-keeping-track-of-it thing exchange happening (and certainly there are things like “if I lose the case I keep my pen in, I’ll look for it in the future” - but I also keep pencils in that case), but keeping track of my pen never actually feels like it costs brainpower.

[myfrogcroaked]

We Finally Know How Naked Mole Rats Survive Without Oxygen, and It's Really Freaking Weird

Naked mole rats ( Heterocephalus glaber ) have never been the most conventional mammal - the scrotum-looking creatures are resistant to cancer , can survive almost 20 minutes without oxygen, and can barely feel pain .

Instead of sticking to a glucose-based system, which is dependent on oxygen, when a naked mole rat is deprived of oxygen, it switches its metabolism so that its brain cells start burning fructose for energy instead of glucose.  

Fructose can be turned into energy anaerobically - which means it doesn’t require the presence of oxygen to be broken down into cellular energy.

Until now, this anaerobic pathway was thought only to be used by plants.  

[heterocephalus]

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION COMPROMISED

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION COMPROMISED

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION COMPROMISED

CLASSIFIED INFORMATION COMPROMISED

[eukaryotetumbled]

wtf

[just-evo-now]

Alright y'all ready to have your minds fucking blown? Because this is the weirdest shit I’ve heard all year:

There are 21 amino acids. In humans.

[just-evo-now]

At @uncertainkitten​‘s request here is some elaboration:

For a long time (~40 years), we thought humans only had 20 proteinogenic amino acids (i.e. amino acids that get directly incorporated into proteins by RNA). At this point this is just Biological Dogma: if you look up a list of amino acids you are pretty much guaranteed to see a list of 20. If you ask a biologist how many amino acids there are in humans they are very likely to say 20.

The 20 amino acids are all encoded by specific triples for RNA bases (for instance a cysteine is encoded by UGU and UGC triples), which are all encoded by specific DNA bases. It was accepted dogma (by which I mean this thing is literally called the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology) that DNA -> RNA, and that RNA codons -> amino acid chains (i.e. proteins). This is basically the Newton’s Laws of biology.

Then in 2000 some jackass scientist* came along and complicated things for everyone made a discovery. Turns out there is a 21st proteinogenic amino acid: selenocysteine.

The reason no one had noticed this before is that biology is fucking bullshit. You see, there is one RNA triple (UGA) which is a stop codon: it tells the molecular machinery to stop reading the RNA, the protein is done, move along. However under particular (read: bullshit) circumstances, the stop codon can be read as a normal codon, and it produces selenocysteine. Specifically if the RNA adopts a particular loop structure (a SECIS element), then the stop codon will be interpreted as a selenocysteine. God knows *how* this particular loopy thing causes this effect. On second thought God probably took one look at this thing and said “fuck it, I’m gonna be a clockmaker”.

If at this point you’re thinking “gosh biology sure is BULLSHIT”: congratulations, you have taken the first step on the road to enlightenment.

* Thressa Stadtman

PS: The original paper is here, although it’s behind a paywall so I would like to take this opportunity to remind all of you that sci-hub exists.

EDIT: Added some more references/links.

[dhominis]

biology is bullshit

My bacteriology professor discussed this–apparently the bacterial SECIS element (a palindromic sequence, that forms a section of double-stranded RNA) makes the ribosome pause–it physically blocks the ribosome and prevents release factors from binding, even though the A site has reached a stop codon. SelB, a selenocysteine-specific elongation factor, interacts with the stem and loop to recruit a selenocysteine-tRNA. Termination doesn’t occur, and elongation continues after selenocysteine is attached to the nascent polypeptide.

Eukaryotes and archaea have a totally different process, too.

(Certain bacteria and archaea have a 22nd rare proteinogenic amino acid, pyrrolysine. Its translation seems to work similarly.)

And selenoproteins are old. They’re present in all three domains of life, and as we currently understand it, all three domains’ selenocysteine-incorporating machinery is homologous–i.e. all descend from one ancestral protein, before Archaea/Eukarya existed. That’s at least a few billion years…

Also, some organisms have cysteine-containing proteins that are descendants of selenoproteins, where a selenocysteine was replaced by a normal cysteine. These proteins have decreased enzymatic activity, but apparently translating them is easier and the cell avoids the need for selenium. Relatable lazy cells.

[just-evo-now]

Cool! Yeah, they’ve been known in bacteria for a while, it’s the ‘in humans’ (or eukaryotes, really) thing that’s weird. Glad to hear about the mechanism, I didn’t realize we had any idea how it worked.

[eukaryotetumbled]

“If at this point you’re thinking “gosh biology sure is BULLSHIT”: congratulations, you have taken the first step on the road to enlightenment.“ True, incredible

[eukaryotetumbled]

Facebook Messenger’s addition of choosing chat colors and customizing the default emoji has, to me, made a weirdly big difference to what it feels like to use them. I think (at least with online messaging platforms I’ve tried before) it’s unique in letting you customize the environment you interact with another person (or a group of people) in.

In meatspace, you might often talk with someone in the same place - a bedroom, a college dining hall - and that interaction takes on the flavor of that place.

Even if not, in meatspace, you have an experience in common, which is the surrounding environment. It sets that interaction apart from all of the other ones. Taking a walk or going to a coffee shop to talk to someone feels different from sitting down in your shared living room, or from meeting them at your office. 

You also have a lot of specific qualia of interacting with a person - a deep comfort, a slight tension, the exact sense of how they respond to eye contact or listen to you - all of which are either lost or replaced with cruder variations in the low-bandwidth context of text channels.

And Messenger doesn’t do much, but it adds a little bit of flavor to your interaction with someone besides the literal string of unicode characters they send you. Like, we’re miles apart and I may not currently be able to hear your voice or appreciate you in person, but instead, we can share the color red and send each other a picture of a camel in three different sizes, which is a step in that direction.

[mapsontheweb]

A Topologist’s Map of the Contiguous United States.

[eukaryotetumbled]

!!!!!

[eukaryotetumbled]

The current state of biodefense in the US

For all the attention drawn by biological weapons, they are, for now, rare.

New blog post.

[eukaryotetumbled]

...For now. #decaymindset