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sugarplumharry-deactivated20170

Snoop Dogg narrating planet earth is what the world needs

1alyssaayaan-deactivated2018090

we dem boys

guncharge

i need a series to be made off of this

thoodleoo

modern greek mythology stories i am tired of seeing: gritty, “the gods are dying because we don’t believe in them” stories where the greek gods mingle sadly with mortals and lament their lost power

modern greek mythology stories i would like to see: cerberus manages to escape from the underworld and hades has to find him before he can unleash his rage upon the mortal realm, only to find out that cerberus was found by a child who tamed him by sharing her after-school snack with him and giving him pets, and he now has to figure out a way to sneak into the suburbs and avoid getting the cops called on him while he steals his three-headed hell-hound back from a five year old girl

islandsurfer13

He was a big dog, but not crazy big. And he was so soft! Her hand sunk into his fur like it was a fuzzy pillow when she went to pet him.

The fact that he had three heads and three sets of sharp teeth didn’t bother her. It was silly. One head licked her face while the others nosed at her pockets for treats.

He was way better than the neighbor’s dog. That one was annoying and small and liked to bite little girls who lost their ball. No, this dog was perfect. This dog was hers.

“Come on, it’s time to go home,” she said. “You can sleep in my bed. But Mommy sneezes around dogs, so we’ll have to be careful.”

The dog yipped excitedly, bounding ahead of her. She noticed a splotch of lighter grey near his butt before he turned around to face her again.

“Spot! That’s a good doggy name. You’ll be my Spot.”

And so she took him home. She pushed him into the backyard so she could go say hi to her mommy like she did every day. The bus stop was at the end of the street, so her mommy said as long as she was really careful she could walk home with the boy next door. She was really, really careful. She was in kindergarten. She was a big kid now.

Spot was digging at the edge of the garden when she went back outside.

“No, Spot! Mommy’s flowers will break!” She hurried after him, ready to play with her new best friend.

—

There. At the edge of town, tucked in a nondescript neighborhood.

What was he doing there? Waiting, no doubt. He had to admit, it was a good location to begin his rampage. Women, children, families - he could create a lot of damage.

He should have been paying more attention. His duties to Olympus took up too much time lately. Persephone did what she could, but it wasn’t always enough. She wasn’t there the whole year, so the poor boy got lonely.

Hades was lord of the underworld; he should have sensed that something was amiss. But no.

No, now he was lurking in the mortal realm, trying to corral a three-headed hellhound and keep him from unleashing his excess energy by destroying a fifty-mile radius.

He blamed Zeus. He just liked to listen to himself speak, the old windbag.

So, he needed to figure out a way to get Cerberus back without alerting anyone. Shouldn’t be too difficult.

—

Why did this shit always seem to happen at the end of a double shift? She just wanted to go home and sleep, but they had one last call to respond to.

A neighbor called in that some asshole was trying to steal a dog. Who even did something like that?

So, Officer Marquez geared up, ready to take out her frustration on this douche (seriously, you don’t steal pets - that should get you thrown in the lowest circle of hell) only to find the weirdest thing she’d ever seen.

“What the fuck?” her partner muttered as they got out of the squad car.

A man stood near the road looking very uncomfortable now that they’d garnered an audience. He was tall, pale, and kind of gangly, but he didn’t look like a wackjob. In fact, he looked like a businessman - freshly pressed suit and everything. Just went to show you couldn’t judge a book by its cover.

An adult woman stood in the middle of the yard, clearly not sure what to do.

Then, there was the little girl who had her arms wrapped around a dog. She was about five, but she had the grip of a sumo wrestler on the poor dog. It was about the size of a Great Dane, maybe a little bigger, a deep charcoal grey, almost black.

But it had three heads. And rows upon rows of teeth. And three lolling tongues that occasionally licked the girl’s face.

“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Marquez murmured to her partner as they approached.

“Scooby Doo with three heads? Oh yeah.”

“Good. I was starting to wonder if they laced the coffee or something at the station.” She took a breath before approaching the man while her partner sidled up to the woman to calm her down. “Sir, may I ask what you’re doing here? From all accounts, this is not your residence.”

The man sighed, his shoulders sagging. He seemed kind of harmless, but she wasn’t about to let him off easy. She waited him out. “No, officer, you’re correct. I am only here for the day, but my dog escaped. I am simply trying to retrieve him.”

“No!” the girl yelled. “You can’t take him! I found him! He’s mine!”

Marquez tried to take a quick survey of the situation. The dog seemed perfectly content with the girl, but he kept his gaze trained on the guy. The girl was almost in tears, but, really, she’s five. That could be about anything.

The mother was the wild card.

“Sir, can I just have you wait here for one moment?”

“Of course.”

And he did actually stay there while she walked towards the mother. Amazing.

Her partner excused herself from talking to the mother. “She’s in the dark. She’s never seen the guy or the dog.”

Marquez rolled her eyes. “Got it. Kid finds dog, kid claims dog.” She raised her voice slightly as she turned back to the guy. “Sir, will he come if you call him?”

The man nodded. “Κέρβερος, άγέ.”

Suddenly, the dog was across the yard sitting in front of the man, tail wagging and three tongues lolling. Marquez would have sworn - only under oath and only if asked directly - the Great Dane sized dog was now the size of the house with glowing red eyes and smoke billowing around him. The girl broke out in piercing sobs breaking her concentration. She couldn’t be sure anyone else saw.

“Please don’t take my Spot!”

The guy paused in checking over the dog and looked at the girl. He smiled sweetly at her. His whole demeanor changed, he looked lighter, more sure of himself, and kind of… glowy.

“You named him Spot?”

She sniffled, “It’s a good puppy name. And he’s got the spot on his butt.”

“You are absolutely right,” he chuckled. “I named him Spot too. It’s just in a different language.”

“Really?” The girl’s eyes nearly bugged out of her head. But she’d stopped crying.

“Really. Listen, would you maybe like it if he came to visit sometimes? I work a lot, as does my wife, so sometimes he gets really lonely.”

“Please! Mommy, can he visit? Please, please, please!!”

The poor woman just nodded, but it was clear she had no idea how to process what was going on.

The man smiled. “Perfect. He’ll be thrilled to have a new friend.”

Marquez left with her head spinning. Her and her partner sat in the squad car silently for a minute before driving back to the station.

“Let’s just skip the paperwork on this one.”

–

“And that is why we now have a wall covered in drawings of Cerberus from a five year old,” Hades explained to Persephone.

littlejavasparrow-deactivated20

Foo Fighters (フー・ファイターズ Fū Faitāzu), more commonly known as F.F., is a side character and ally featured in Stone Ocean.

newblogwhosferninism-deactivate

*uses lol lmao and rip as punctuation*

botanyshitposts

hi- what is your opinion on GMOs? i have friends in bioengineering who seem to pretty much agree on the consensus that they are all around better than non-GMO strains, except maybe when it comes to soy. basically what I'm wondering is are GMOs: - healthier? - better for the environment? - more agriculturally efficient? sorry this question is so long, thanks a million for answering it! (if you do)

from a scientific aspect:

the facts are, GMOs are the future and the key to increasing crop production for our increasing population if your goal is to keep up food production for more people. remember, the goal right now in agriculture- the key goal that we’re throwing everything into because big yikes fam- is to produce more food off less. so like, vertical farming? good, saves space. smaller plants with bigger yield? great, saves space, can plant more and get more food. plants that are resistant to drought? to high temps? to low fertilizer? amazing, it means you have hardier plants that you can put in places that regular plants wouldn’t be able to stand.

so are they agriculturally efficient? hell yeah, because remember, it takes about 10 years for a crop in testing- GMO or not- to reach a point in development where it can be submitted for approval by the USDA for the market (something I’ve learned in my current job). imagine doing all breeding without GMOs. you would literally be able to do one cross a year, maybe two if you’re in a warmer area (this is why a lot of soybean breeding has been moved to South America, where they can do twice as much breeding). with GMOs, you can develop and test stuff faster, so by a monetary standpoint it’s awesome.

lets not forget that GMO crops can withstand more because of the pure amount of precision put into them. like, lets say your corn breaks a lot. you can spend 3-4 years meticulously cross breeding your developing strain with a break-resistant variety to get that trait in, or you can just cut and paste in the gene. and get this: it doesn’t even have to be from the break resistant variety. you can pull it from another plant that might be better at not breaking, and get an even better resulting variety.

another thing that we can’t forget about is that new GMO tech helps us keep up with pests and diseases. at work, i’ve seen experiments involving root pests; plants infected had root systems destroyed down to a single tap root. imagine that happening to a farmer’s field. like, all of it. that’s the kind of thing we’re up against here; to stop infestations and to solve new challenges quickly by developing technology quickly, while still improving the plant to commercial level.

when talking to the breeders at work, they told me that the industry as a whole recently upped its goal from creating a crop that would give each farmer a 200 bushel harvest (200 bushels has been the goal for the past 30 years; they’ve recently reached it and exceeded it) to 300 bushels per harvest. they have to do this just by modifying the plants. they have no control over how much the farmer plants and/or how many fields they have.

to give some perspective here, one bushel is 60 pounds of grain. they’re aiming to have each farmer that buys their products be able to reliably harvest and sell 18,000 pounds of grain per year.

the moral of the story is that the breeding and agri industries are under a lot of pressure here, and they have to work fast, because the population is rising.

knock knock

whos there?

dwindling nitrogen supplies in farmland and unsustainable farming practices but im gonna save that for another time

are they healthier? it depends on what you believe. like, what we’ve found so far is that GMOs don’t hurt you. some of them have added vitamins that can help you (lets not forget the famous GMO golden rice, which uses a daffodil gene coupled with a soil bacterium gene to make a rice variety produce a huuuuuge amount of vitamin A. this has been so effective in solving vitamin deficiencies and health problems in 3rd world countries since it was introduced in 2005 that its won awards and been used as a universal case study for the whole “GMO plants” thing) but most are just like. idk. kind of there? they help the health of the plant and help the farmer bring in income, so???? idk???

are they better for the environment? i have no idea. i suppose indirectly, because like. if you have a heartier plant you have to clear less land for agriculture?? (can anyone weigh in here?). But if these got out into the wild, the effects could be DEVASTATING, which is why the USDA and related government organizations (depending on where you live) make it so you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that what you’re putting out into production won’t be crazy damaging if it magically gets out somehow.

ethically: i have no idea man. like im still super split on it. my scientist self says “you can literally buy everything to do it and modify plants to produce heat right in your own home right now” but then im like……………..idk man we just dont know. i dont want to hurt my plant friends. if this hurts our plant friends. idk

plantyhamchuk

(hears the siren song, waddles into the fray)

Re: health - the only GMO plant bred for health so far (that I know of) has been the Golden Rice. and know that Golden Rice also faced a HUGE backlash from anti-GMO activists.

Golden Rice is just rice + beta carotene, that stuff that makes your carrots orange. Your body converts beta carotene into Vitamin A, which allows you to live and not be blind. People in developing countries with poor diets, especially children and pregnant women, can have huge difficulties getting access to enough Beta Carotene so scientists thought it would be super helpful to add it to a dietary staple - rice. Even Bill and Melinda Gates think that this is a great idea.

Wikipedia: “The research that led to golden rice was conducted with the goal of helping children who suffer from vitamin A deficiency (VAD). In 2005, 190 million children and 19 million pregnant women, in 122 countries, were estimated to be affected by VAD.[24] VAD is responsible for 1–2 million deaths, 500,000 cases of irreversible blindness and millions of cases of xerophthalmia annually.[25] Children and pregnant women are at highest risk.“

Anti-GMO activists HATE it though, so there’s currently a lot of difficulties for farmers in developing countries to get access to Golden Rice. They tend to prefer having people take supplements, which they can’t always get (they are provided - sometimes - by charities), and can’t make on their own (which leaves them dependent on others), instead of letting local farmers help solve this problem.

There is a group of plant scientists, who work at a plant science charity / germplasm / research institute in the UK, working on creating wheat that contains more iron. They are fighting a huge backlash against their work - experimental fields get burnt down in the UK by anti-GMO activists a lot.

There are also projects to increase the amount of zinc in various cereal crops and increase the protein in sorghum and cassava. These are all called Biofortification, in case you want to research it more.

Something of a holy grail for agriculture would be to transfer the nitrogen fixing relationship/ability of Fabacea to say, corn. This means that you could enable the corn plant to do what Fabacea does - they make friends with things in the soil, are and able to use the Nitrogen which makes up 78% of the air we breathe. Nitrogen-fixing corn would be a world-changing nobel-prize winning kind of achievement. This would dramatically improve soil health and substantially decrease the amount of fertilizers needed.

Some plant scientists in the UK are working on this. It’s incredibly technically difficult.

Better for the environment: GMOs are used to do different things, so it’s hard to talk broadly. The plants that have Bt (Bacillus thurengenisis, a naturally occurring organism and is widely used in organic agriculture) with them ARE better for the environment, in that farmers use way fewer pesticides since they effectively produce their own. I read a study awhile back that certain water ways in China are cleaner thanks to Bt GMOs. There have been some concerns that this will end up with overuse of Bt, pests will evolve past it, and we’re back at the same problem of pests destroying the things we want to eat (or, more likely, animal feed… so much of what we grow is animal feed it’s pretty insane). The thing is, there’s lots of different strains of Bt, scientists keep running across new ones. But we’ll never get away from the arms race that is humans vs pests when it comes to this, it’s as old as agriculture itself.

Papaya ringspot virus - driving Papayas in Hawai’i to extinction

Ethically: People were upset that the terminator gene existed, the public threw such a shitfit that no plants were ever released with them. So now instead everyone freaks out that genes from the GMO plants could end up in the wild. Sometimes, you can’t win.

Scientists were able to save the Papaya trees in Hawai’i thanks to GMO technology. The Papaya Ringspot Virus came through that was wiping out the Papaya trees there to and destroying the livelihoods of many farmers. It was so bad that it was thought that Papaya trees might go extinct, until a few genes were inserted to make them resistant to the virus. There are still anti-GMO activists upset about this for some reason.

Cheese - cheese is made using a a coagulant called rennet. The main enzyme in rennet is chymosin. The old, traditional way of accessing chymosin was from the stomach lining of baby cows. Rennet was/is a byproduct of the veal industry. A combination of people starting to give a shit about animals, increased human population, and increased demands for cheese, meant that rennet prices were all over the place. Scientists managed to create a microbe that could produce chymosin by implanting certain bovine cells, and ended up with a purer product, at a cheaper price, with no baby cows slaughtered in the process. 90% of cheese in the US is made using GMO chymosin aka fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC). Vermont made all dairy products exempt from their non-GMO labeling. However, if you want dead baby cows (or dead unborn baby cows) as part of your cheese making process, insist on buying USDA-organic cheese.

There are tons of non-plant uses for GMOs. We have been using GMOs in healthcare since the 1980s, which has made things safer - no longer using dead animals and human cadavers to harvest certain things. The cadavers in particular were a problem, they were spreading Creutzfelt-Jacob syndrome, which destroys your brain and takes your life, usually in the span of a year. Prions are a nasty business. Children needing human growth hormones were the ones acquiring and dying from it. Now we make hyper-specialized GMO bacteria and yeast to crank out things like insulin, human growth hormone (without prions), and antibodies to diagnose and treat certain kinds of cancer, among other helpful things.

GMOs are also used extensively in science, from breeding special mice to experiment on to creating special fish that will glow in the presence of certain pollutants. There’s new developments every day.

Could there be bad things done with GMOs? Yes, as with every technology, there can be bad decisions or unforeseen consequences and ethical conundrums. These are important conversations.

#cool