Fuck Yeah Scientia!

@fuckyeahscientia

Geeking out over science and how incredible it can be.

1,061 posts

fangnominous-deactivated2025101

That cryptid post is still bothering me, so I just want to make a quick PSA for all of my followers: If you live in North America or parts of Northern Europe, and you see a “weird” deer (or elk, or moose, or reindeer), it is extremely likely that particular animal has Chronic Wasting Disease.

I see panic posts all the time on this website about how creepy CWD is (and it is creepy), but what I never see included in those posts are accurate prevalence estimates. We think that somewhere around 40-50% of all cervids are affected in highly endemic regions, and even outside of endemic regions, prevalence estimates still hover around 10%. That’s 1 to 5 out of every 10 deer in North America!

If you see a “weird deer”, or a solitary deer that’s just acting oddly (lowered head, poor coordination, seems confused), do not approach it, even just to get a better picture! Stay away! Document where you last saw the deer, and contact your fisheries and wildlife department.

Also, don’t mess with vehicle-killed cervids! I know vulture culture is a whole thing, but seriously, if you do not have proper equipment to be handling biohazardous materials, and you don’t know which animal part you would immediately need to excise for testing (this is a pop quiz–and if you didn’t immediately know the answer then you have no business harvesting roadkill), and you don’t know where to take the tissues to be tested, don’t fucking touch it! CWD-afflicted animals often lose their sensitivity to normal stimuli (like the lights and noises from a busy highway), and the chances that an deer that wandered into traffic and died might have latent CWD infection is….very high.

Also: CWD can persist in the environment for years, as it is very resistant to heat, radiation, and chemical disinfectants. In fact, even if the animal you want to harvest looks “totally fine”, it might not be. CWD has an incubation period of about 3-5 years in most cervidae, and guess what? It’s still infectious during this time period (especially if you want to, say, harvest the bones, antlers, or other specific parts or the carcass).

If you see a “weird deer”, please leave it the fuck alone and contact your fisheries and wildlife department or your local public health authority. If you see a dead deer on the side of the road, call the animal control department and for the love of all that is holy, do not touch it.

Love from,

Your friendly neighborhood infectious disease epidemiologist and cryptid lover who just wants all of their followers to be safe

There are many benefits of being a marine biologist. I’m not sure running into this is one of them.

just-rhys-things

That’s the marine biologist don’t be rude

ah, to be a rolling mass of loaches(?)…

chillgamesh-the-swing

Diversity win! These fish are shambling

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

why do so many viruses look like abstract crochet art projects

sonicunleashedfan124

Because they’re not really showing the virus, they’re showing an infected cell

Uh, no these are definitely viruses.

Viruses come in lots of shapes, but they all have a lipid membrane with proteins sticking out of it and some kind of genetic material inside.

The reason they look like yarn is twofold:

Living things are mostly made up of long chains of chemicals (proteins, RNA, DNA, carbohydrates etc). They’re basically strings that fold up into the right shape to do their jobs! Modelling software does tend to make this look like yarn and it’s very cool-looking.

These are computer models (and one made with a foam ball and pipe cleaners) where the person who made them highlighted each different component with a different colour. Viruses are too small to reflect any light in wavelengths we can see, so they don’t actually have any colour at all.

We can see them with an electron microscope, though! Here is a picture of lots of virions (individual viruses) of the 2009 H1N1 flu from Wikipedia:

The ones that look like hollow circles have been “sliced through” by the focal plane and their contents haven’t taken the stain so they look empty. The outline of the circle is the lipid membrane!

For the other ones, the dark blobs “inside” them are proteins in the membrane of the virus. The virions are slightly out of the plane of focus so we see the stuff on the outside of them.

You can see a halo of these proteins around all of the virions!

How cool that we can actually see real viruses!

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

you’re telling me germs are “invisible” not just bc they’re too tiny to see, but bc they’re TOO TINY TO REFLECT VISIBLE LIGHT WAVES holy frick

tockthewatchdog

dancinbutterfly

IM NOT CRYING YOU’RE CRYING SHUT THE FUCK UP

[transcription:

Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings? Like, “What were they doing? These don’t… look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.

-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-

And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.

-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth. Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-

The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks. And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.

For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized. But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into this cave in southern France, and it changed everything.

Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way. Here is how he described the experience.

He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on. I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall. As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift. When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified. When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme. Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated. Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly. It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared. The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern. Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within. By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed. In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement. Form appeared and disappeared. Colors shifted and changed. In short, I was watching a movie.”

Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators. And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.

There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.

/end transcription]

taurus-deactivated20210526

im sorry for reblogging this again but this tag has obliterated me

her-eyes-dared-me-with-danger

For anyone who’s wondering, that is a yellow spotted box fish. And they love human attention and have the personalities of small puppies. Also, if you stress them out they release a toxin that kills everything around them.

Adamsia palliata

a-book-of-creatures

Best friends forever. Ever hear about how some hermit crabs carry anemones on their shells? The cloak anemone Adamsia palliata takes the relationship to the next level (seriously). It doesn’t just associate with just one species of hermit crab (Pagurus prideaux). It doesn’t just defend its friend with its stinging tentacles and feed on its scraps. It doesn’t just wrap itself completely around the hermit crab’s shell for maximum hugs protection. It goes as far as to secrete a chitinous material to make the crab’s home bigger so it’s less likely to outgrow it and switch shells.

Now that’s friendship.

badpsychicadvice

The world's longest-running lab experiment

The Pitch Drop Experiment

The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar that is the world's thickest known fluid and was once used for waterproofing boats.

Thomas Parnell, UQ's first Professor of Physics, created the experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties.

At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a hammer. But, in fact, at room temperature the substance - which is 100 billion times more viscous than water - is actually fluid.

In 1927 Professor Parnell heated a sample of pitch and poured it into a glass funnel with a sealed stem. He allowed the pitch to cool and settle for three years, and then in 1930 he cut the funnel's stem.

Since then, the pitch has slowly dripped out of the funnel - so slowly that it took eight years for the first drop to fall, and more than 40 years for another five to follow.

Now, 87 years after the funnel was cut, only nine drops have fallen - the last drop fell in April 2014 and we expect the next one to fall sometime in the 2020s.

The experiment was set up as a demonstration and is not kept under special environmental conditions - it's kept in a display cabinet - so the rate of flow of the pitch varies with seasonal changes in temperature.

The late Professor John Mainstone became the experiment's second custodian in 1961. He looked after the experiment for 52 years but, like his predecessor Professor Parnell, he passed away before seeing a drop fall.

In the 86 years that the pitch has been dripping, various glitches have prevented anyone from seeing a drop fall.

- University of Queensland, Australia

mechanica1-hands

x

AKFJEKJD my god

thedreadpiratejames

a watched pot never boils, and a watched pitch says “fuck you”

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

sometimes I think about how brussel sprouts, cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, collard greens, savoy cabbage, kohlrabi, and gai lan are all the same species, and i understand why biologists are constantly furious about taxonomy

peppermint-madness

I’m sorry what

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

same species. same fucking species

Somebody please explain this because what the fuck

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

i can do that!

Introducing the Brassica oleracea, a plant species whose cultivars include…all of the above. They all originated from the same plant aka THIS FUCKER!

No, really. This thing has existed in Europe for thousands of years, during which time different societies had different culinary preferences, leading them to selectively breed for different traits. For example, a preference for the eating leaves led farmers to select seeds from the plants with the largest leaves, resulting gradually in the development of kale.

The real fun thing is, this happened on a vast timeline. Kale was developed over 4000 years ago, while Savoy cabbage was first documented just 5 centuries ago. And different cultivars developed in different regions across Europe and Asia, with their phenotypes and names changing wildly over time. (Fun fact, Brussels sprouts are indeed named for Brussels, the capital city of Belgium, where they were developed from a predecessor imported from Rome.)

The list above isn’t even exhaustive btw. There are plenty of other ridiculous cultivars (such as the Jersey cabbage, pictured below), and there’s no telling how many other forms existed throughout history, and which would have counted as distinct cultivars, and how many names and groups they were separated into, and, and, and—and imposing taxonomy on the real world is a mess, basically, because the real world does not give a shit about making itself comprehensible or categorizeable. But still we try. Planet Earth has Hot Mess Energy, and would you really have it any other way?

ko-fi

peppermintcrisptart

biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist

oh honey

yeah

The other day I got a bug up my ass about lake Natron, because I’ve seen the photos of the calcified remains of animals that died on the lake (contrary to popular rumor, the lake doesn’t outright kill them as soon as they touch it but it probably doesn’t help), but I’ve only seen those photos in black and white. I’m sure you’ve seen them.

This particular photographer posed them for the photos, but I thought, you know, calcified remains should be really interesting to see in color, so I tried to find some that had been taken by others, in color. It was not nearly as visual stunning, they were just white rotting remains.

But what caught my eye wasn’t the dead. It was the fucking lake.

It’s BLOOD fucking RED.

It’s super alkaline (typically 10, but can get up 12, and just so we’re clear, pH13 melts skin, go look up Lye), blood fucking red (terrifying), and oh, it gets to be 106F/41C in the water (which is not scalding but still unreasonable for a LAKE). Red spirulina cyanobacteria (toxic!) thrives here and provides food for the main denizen of the lake…. fucking lesser flamingos.

Look at their fucking mud nests! They have to build nests out of mud because there’s nothing else and the water is caustic enough to kill their babies before those babies are tall enough to stand out of the water! The parents are feeding them crop milk that contains BLOOD.

Additionally!! The chicks often get soda anklets from soda and other minerals collecting and hardening around their feet and legs, which is the major killer of lesser flamingo chicks! They’re so hard that they would need to be hammered off! Like with a hammer or a smashy rock!! Humans had to do this for thousands of babies one year just to keep them from all dying off after we screwed with the balance of minerals in one of their lakes!

Look at this place! What is that black void!!

You need to leave!! You have found flamingo Silent Hill!! What are you still doing here!! I’ll tell you!! They’re still doing there because literally the death lake protects them from predators, nothing big enough to be a threat to them gets across the lake to get them. There are millions of them living there safely.

What the fuck. what the FUCK nature. This is some of the most amazing shit you’ve ever pulled and hardly anyone knows about it. I’m on to you. I see your blood lake with your pink goth bird decorations. I see you.

Ooh ooh ooh! This looks like an excellent excuse valid reason to talk about one of my favorite topics, matriarch trees!

So, when you see trees in a forest, they stick up outta the ground, some distance from each other, and you're like 'these are unconnected critters,' right? But! The thing is! Just like the trees in the picture are connected above-ground, trees in a forest are normally connected below-ground. There's this whole complicated thing involving a symbiotic relationship with fungi, but we're gonna simplify it to this: trees connect to each other through their root systems.

And they use it to share resources, across the whole forest.

If there's a tree over here growing in soil with a lot of, like, potassium, they'll pull up more potassium than they need, and send it out through the root system to other trees that are living where there isn't much potassium.

And one of the coolest things? Trees communicate their needs. If a tree is sick or damaged or starving, they send chemical messages out through the root system that tell the other trees to send them more food and tree-equivalent-of-immune-system.

Trees will share so much of their resources, they'll even keep trees alive that are almost entirely dependent. Like this tree! The tree above is getting some energy from its leaves, but no other nutrition of its own. And it wasn't able to link up to the shared root system. So the other tree reached out and hooked up to it directly, feeding it all of the nutrients it needed!

You see it more commonly the other way around: in an old-growth forest, where the roots are well-established, you can find stumps where a tree was cut down a century ago... but if you scrape the stump it's still green wood. The tree's still alive, without a single leaf. Because all the other trees in the forest are feeding it.

I promised to talk about matriarch trees, so here's where we get to them.

In a very old forest, you have very old trees. You have some trees that are so very, very old, their own roots cover entire regions of the forest. Their leaves reach up to the sky over everyone else. And after so long, they've developed to where they can take in way more resources than they need.

So what do they do?

They feed baby trees.

Baby saplings in an old forest can't reach up to the sun. There's no light down there. And their roots are too small and shallow to dig down to the nutrients they need. So the matriarch tree will draw energy from its towering canopy, and nutrients from its massive, ancient roots, and feed them to the little trees that are too small to feed themselves. For anything she can't get on her own, she'll act as a central hub, taking in spare resources from the rest of the forest and giving them to the little ones.

And one of the best parts - she won't just do it for her own species. She'll connect to all kinds of trees, because they're all necessary for the ecosystem to work. She'll adopt the whole forest's children.

Sometimes in forests you'll find a spot where there are a lot of small trees in an open space around an old, fallen tree. People generally assume they could find more light there, or maybe the soil's more fertile from the decomposition.

But no.

They're her children, and she's spent centuries keeping the whole forest alive.

fluffbyday-smutbynight

please explain why i'm suddenly crying over trees

peatbogbodyhasmoved

“I very proudly entered the forestry school as an 18-year-old and telling them that the reason that I wanted to study botany was because I wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. These are these amazing displays of this bright, chrome yellow and deep purple of New England aster, and they look stunning together. And the two plants so often intermingle rather than living apart from one another, and I wanted to know why that was. I thought that surely in the order and the harmony of the universe, there would be an explanation for why they looked so beautiful together. And I was told that that was not science, that if I was interested in beauty, I should go to art school. Which was really demoralizing as a freshman, but I came to understand that question wasn’t going to be answered by science, that science, as a way of knowing, explicitly sets aside our emotions, our aesthetic reactions to things. We have to analyze them as if they were just pure material, and not matter and spirit together. And, yes, as it turns out, there’s a very good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together, so it’s a matter of aesthetics and it’s a matter of ecology. Those complimentary colors of purple and gold together, being opposites on the color wheel, they’re so vivid, they actually attract far more pollinators than if those two grew apart from one another. So each of those plants benefits by combining its beauty with the beauty of the other. And that’s a question that science can address, certainly, as well as artists. And I just think that “Why is the world so beautiful?” is a question that we all ought to be embracing.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Intelligence of Plants”, from the podcast On Being with Krista Tippett

How vaccine works

Thats… thats the best thing i have ever seen.

Buttcheeks. See, vaccines have cute butts. Make sure you have a cute butt by getting vaccinated.

Scientists have discovered how to make glow-in-the-dark cats by inserting the jellyfish genes that create fluorescent proteins into feline eggs.

wordswithkittywitch

I needed to check that this was real, and apparently, it is. What’s more, the end goal in these experiments was to fight feline AIDS, creating glow-in-the-dark cats was a side effect. That might be the greatest sentence I write this year.

supersciencegeek

Ok, so the short version is that scientists want to insert a Useful Gene. But they have no way of knowing if the Useful Gene actually got incorporated into the cat’s (or other animal’s) DNA. So they glue the Glow Gene to the Useful Gene. If the animal glows, both genes got inserted successfully.

the-floral-skeleton

Yes! Pretty much every glow in the dark science animal is that way because of the above! A lot of people don’t get that, and think scientists are just screwing around and doing slightly irresponsible things with animal DNA just cuz they can. That’s not the case at all

To be fair they’re not really glow in the dark, they technically fluoresce under blacklight. The gene responsible causes the animals to produce green (or less commonly red, like the cat on the left) fluorescent protein, which is why it’s usually called the GFP (or RFP) gene. They’ve actually put it into a lot of different animals, including mice, rats, chickens, rabbits, monkeys, cats, fish, frogs, pigs, axolotls (and you can buy these ones!), and some insects!

A few years ago (2009) they bred the first RFP dog, named Ruppy (ruby puppy):

…One of all the above, please.

whitepeopletwitter

So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.

Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.

But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.

So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.

But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.

“Oh come on it can;t be that b-”

ah.

gallusrostromegalus

TRULY A MAGNIFICENT TRIUMPH FOR BOTANY

alexiealducsdrawings

I wanted to see the plant from another POV but it’s literally the only photo publicly available right now. There is however, an anatomic drawing!

Congrats! It looks like an alien!!

gallusrostromegalus

Oh, ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT! I LOVE HER!!

Wake up babe new fish dropped

battlefem-deactivated20170404

you wanna see some badass shit from the early 20th century?? The Lumière brothers created the first full color photograph… in fucking 1903! So these dudes dyed potatoes (in red, blue, and green), mashed them down into just pure fuckin’ starch, and used these dyed potato starches as filters to block out/let in certain wavelengths of light. They coated one side of a glass plate with the starches and sensitized the other side with a mixture of gelatin and light sensitive materials (silver nitrate) and loaded these plates in their cameras.. This is a really simple explanation of the process and I may have missed some things A few of my favorite autochrome photos:

that last one is literally a LOOK

cassiocantdrink

yes!

but lets not forget sergei prokudin-gorskiy, who developed a similar process in 1902, published in 1903 and then toured russia to take hundreds of color photographs:

AND the guy developed color slide processing as well. as a person fairly familiar with modern b/w processing at home, but never EVER stepping into color (negatives or slides) territory, i’d say, BAMF to the highest degree.

Here are a few more Prokudin-Gorskiy / Gorskii shots, and a reminder once again that these aren’t recently colourised BW images but original colour photos taken about 120 years ago. Many colourised pics don’t look this good. Some modern colour pics don’t look this good (as I know all too well. “Delete image Y/N? Y!”)

This is Leo Tolstoy, author of “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”.

Alim Khan, Emir of Bukhara…

…and his Minister of the Interior.

A Type B-15 steam locomotive…

Another of those peasant girls with guest-gifts of berries…

The Church of St John the Baptist at Staraya Ladoga…

…and a Sergei Prokudin-Gorskiy self-portrait.

Unlike some current selfies ;-> he’s not dominating the image, so here’s a closer shot.

Nice hat…

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