dirt enthusiast
$LAYYYTER
Love Begins
@theartofmadeline
RMH
titsay
taylor price
Keni
Not today Justin
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art blog(derogatory)
⁂
Xuebing Du
we're not kids anymore.
almost home
DEAR READER
Claire Keane
styofa doing anything
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@goteamscience
my fave thing about alligators is that evolution was just like.. “yeah that’s fine” and left them for 80 million years
My favorite thing about evolution is that it’s tried to make crabs on at least 4 different occasions independently of previous species
so this IS peak performance
Biology be like "time for crab"
It's a rumour that just won't die. When asked whether the COVID-19 virus was genetically engineered in a lab, scientists have already said "
Despite what the general public believes, "making" or modifying a virus thatll actually sicken people, intentionally or otherwise, has never been done and still far beyond the capability of how gmo tech even works. Its one of those sci fi things that people find so believable they assume its been done but thats just not how this stuff works.
@goteamscience is waking up from the dead to remind everyone to approach conspiracy theories about the Coronavirus with skepticism. Do your research, spread the word, get these idiots off the street.
one of the most important things ive learned from upper level biology education so far is that dna isnt the god-like all-powerful beacon of similarity between all living beings on the face of the earth as high school science textbooks will lead u to believe but actually is, in fact, the molecular equivalent of a smoldering dumpster fire that’s in a constant state of chaos and cellular scandal like some highlights:
-the parts of dna that just casually detach on a physical level from the main strand, do some sick skateboard tricks in the cytoplasm, and land somewhere else with 43552342 copies
-the parts that would do A Thing if they wern’t physically spooled up so tightly that the Make Thing Happen machinery couldnt get to them
-the dna thats in ur mitochondria bc the mitochondria used to be a bacteria that our bigger, buffer cellular ancestors just vored in the primordial ooze
-the dna that’s in chloroplasts in plants for the same reason
-rna….bitches be crazy like what is she gonna do next?? o she gonna act like a protein now and do shit?? im on the edge of my seat
-sometimes u just gotta make more chromosomes man like sometimes u just be hanging out and u gotta make ur genome 64 sizes larger and then change ur mind only 100,000 years later and delete half of it and thats just how it is on this bitch of an earth
-random shit from like 5 BCE is just casually left over everywhere like no susan i told u to leave that gene alone we might need it to fight dinosaurs again u just never know!!!!!
dna is earth’s biggest and brightest train wreck and honestly i wouldnt trust a dna molecule to water my plants let alone run my body but here we fucking are
I am feeling physically very unstable after reading this.
I’m a genetics professor and everything here is true.
There’s a fern that has 1,260 chromosomes. That’s 630 pairs of chromosomes. No, we don’t know why.
Oh, and everyone should know that the person who first presented evidence for endosymbiosis (the official name for cells eating each other and then turning into mitochondria or chloroplasts instead of being digested) was this woman, Lynn Margulis, in 1967:
Her paper where she presented the theory was rejected 15 times before it got published. Over the next decade, her work was mocked and ignored. Now every biologist knows that she was right.
The bits of DNA that move around (“jumping genes”) were discovered by this woman, Barbara McClintock, in the 1940′s:
Her work on them was ignored and derided for about two decades before some people started to take it seriously. In 1983 she won a Nobel Prize for it.
Something of a derail, but I feel strongly about talking about the contributions of these two women.
it’s never not the time to learn about cool women in science
I planted some saguaro seeds about a week ago. Who woukda thunk that such large lads start out so smol. (submitted @nolayelde)
this speaks for itself when paired with a pic of the grown plant for scale:
they usually live to be 150+ years old. cutting one down in Arizona, where they’re native, is a felony with a maximum 9 months in prison.
in my brief wikipedia exploration to find out how old they could be for this ask i found out that there was a dude in 1982 who was vandalizing one (which is also highly illegal) by shooting at it and then poking at it, and not only did the 500 pound arm of the cactus he was shooting at fall on top of him, but the actual trunk of the cactus then also proceeded to fall on him. he died. smited by the cactus gods for his transgressions
There was one we had in our backyard that fell on our fence and buckled the steel bar. When the guy came by to take it away he sliced into roughly foot long segments and we kept one. It was really cool in the inside, also the chlorophyll is on the inside. My mom turned the outer layer into a lampshade
Sorry it’s dusty lmao no idea how to clean it
i…………..idk how to react to this but this is definitely an item i wasn’t expecting
here’s another fun fact about saguaro cactuses (or cacti - both are fine!): when they die, the flesh on them erodes away and leaves these really cool wood-like structures
they’re called bones. these are cactus bones
……oh
growth of a seed
RIP Stephen Hawking Jan 8 1942 - Mar 13 2018
Disney Ladies + Science (& “Science”). Thanks to our followers for ideas.
Yes, textile engineer. That’s not a fashion designer in any way.
You’ve obviously not watched the movie. She invented those fabrics to resist flame, turn invisible, resist high amounts of friction, and stretch infinite times, and avoid tear from bombs
she did a tad more than “design” them
(Id go so far as to say “tactical textile engineer”
And since the fabrics have to be comfortable as well, she’s a tactile tactical textile engineer.
And since the uniforms also had to look stylish and not gaudy, she’s a tasteful tactile tactical textile engineer.
And she’s the best at what she does, which makes her a talented tasteful tactile tactical textile engineer.
Uhhh. [@safelyendangered]
so this happened
Our astronauts are really paving the way and making history every day
Ok but what I wanna know is how long would a spinner stay spinning in the ISS?
Astronaut Peggy Whitson returned to Earth late on Saturday, wrapping up a record-breaking flight that catapulted her to first place for US space endurance.
Whitson’s 665 days off the planet – 288 days on this mission alone – exceeds that of any other American and any other woman worldwide.
She checked out of the International Space Station just hours earlier, along with another American and a Russian. Their Soyuz capsule landed in Kazakhstan shortly after sunrise Sunday – Saturday night back in the US.
She set multiple other records while in orbit: world’s oldest spacewoman, at age 57, and most experienced female spacewalker, with 10. She also became the first woman to command the space station twice following her launch last November.
Returning cosmonaut Fyodor Yurchikhin logged even more time in space: 673 days over five missions. Nasa astronaut Jack Fischer returned after 136 days aloft. The men flew up in April.
It was an emotional farewell for Whitson, Yurchikhin and Fischer. Before retreating into their Soyuz, they embraced the three colleagues they were leaving behind at the 250-mile-high complex. Yurchikhin patted the inside of the station before floating into his Soyuz for the final time.
The station’s newest commander, Randy Bresnik, noted the outpost was losing 1,474 days of spaceflight experience with the departure of Whitson, Yurchikhin and Fischer. Four years and two weeks, he pointed out.
“We are in your debt for the supreme dedication that you guys have to the human mission of exploration,” Bresnik told them on the eve of their departure. He offered up special praise for Whitson, whom he called “American space ninja”.
Whitson, a biochemist, set a breakneck pace on all three of her space station expeditions, continually asking for more and still more scientific research to do. Scientists on the ground said it often was hard to keep up with her. She even experimented on food up there, trying to add some pizazz to the standard freeze-dried meals. Tortillas were transformed into apple pies on her watch.
Whitson was supposed to fly back in June after a half-year in space. But when an extra seat opened up on this Soyuz, she jumped at the chance to stay in orbit an extra three months. Only one other American yearlong spaceman, Scott Kelly, has spent longer in space on a single mission. …
Nasa record breaker back on Earth after logging 665 days in space | Science | The Guardian
She should have a statue. Not those confederate MFs.
BEES ARE THE ULTIMATE QUEENS OF THE COMBACK 🐝🐝🐝🐝
Source to article.
The Department of Agriculture honeybee health survey released a report (August 2nd 2017) that proves honeybee colonies rose 3% compared to last year. Also the amount of bees that disappeared or died has gone down 27%. Bees, you’re doing amazing sweetie
YESSS. Thank god. 🙌
I’m proud of them
how do u actually save bees?
Plant bee-friendly flowers
Support your local beekeepers
Set up bee hotels for solitary bees
If you see a lethargic bee feed it sugar water
Spread awareness of the importance off bees
+Don’t eat honey✌🏻
NO.
That will not help save the bees at all. They need the excess honey removed from their hives. That’s the beekeepers entire livelihood.
Seriously refusing to eat honey is one of those well-meaning but ultimately terrible ideas. The bees make way too much honey and need it out in order to thrive (not being funny but that was literally a side effect in Bee Movie). Plus that’s the only way for the beekeepers to make the money they need to keep the bees healthy. Do not stop eating honey because somebody on Tumblr told you too.
excess honey, if not removed, can ferment and poison the bees. even if it doesn’t, it attracts animals and other insects which can hurt the bees or even damage the hive. why vegans think letting bees stew in their own drippings is ‘cruelty-free’ is beyond me. >:[
the fact that we find honey yummy and nutritious is part of why we keep bees, true, but the truth is we mostly keep them to pollinate our crops. the vegetable crops you seem to imagine would still magically sustain us if we stopped cultivating bees.
and when you get right down to it… domestic bees aren’t confined in any way. if they wanted to fly away, they could, and would. they come back to the wood frame hives humans build because those are nice places to nest.
so pretending domestic bees have it worse than wild bees is just the most childish kind of anthropomorphizing.
If anything, man-made hives are MORE suitable for bees to live in because we have mathematically determined their optimal living space and conditions, and can control them better in our hives. We also can treat them for diseases and pests much easier than we could if they were living in, say, a tree.
Tl;dr for all of this: eating honey saves the bees from themselves, and keeping them in man-made hives is good for them.
Circus Tree: Six individual sycamore trees were shaped, bent, and braided to form this.
Actually pretty easy. Trees don’t reject tissue from other trees in the same family. You bend the tree to another tree when it is a sapling, scrape off the bark on both trees where they touch, add some damp sphagnum moss around them to keep everything slightly moist and bind them together. Then wait a few years- The trees will have grown together. You can use a similar technique to graft a lemon branch or a lime branch or even both- onto an orange tree and have one tree that has all three fruits. Frankentrees.
As a biologist I can clearly state that plants are fucking weird and you should probably be slightly afraid of them.
On that note! At the university (UBC) located in town, the Agriculture students were told by their teacher that a tree flipped upside down would die. So they took an excavator and flipped the tree upside down. And it’s still growing. But the branches are now the roots, and the roots are now these super gnarly looking branches. Be afraid.
But Vi, how can you mention that and NOT post a picture? D:
[source]
I am both amazed and horrified of nature as we all should be
I love how trees are like “fuck it, I’ll deal” at literally everything. Forest fire? Cool, my seeds’ll finally grow. Upside down? Branches, suck, roots, leave. What’s this new branch? Eh, welcome to the tree buddy.
I need to be more like tree
I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.
what kind of professor did these students have that they needed to prove him wrong so badly that they literally dug up a tree, flipped it and put it back in the ground?
Sounds like y’all’ve never heard about the Tree of 40 Fruits. Well, it’s exactly as it sounds. Sam Van Aken, an artist based in New York, decided to try his hand at grafting (e.g. the process by which you attach the branches of a different tree to a host tree).
As artists are inclined to do he decided to push some limits and over the course of a few years he grafted over 40 different fruit onto the host “ including almond, apricot, cherry, nectarine, peach and plum varieties.”
It has a fruiting period lasting from July to October and this is what it looks like when blossoming.
Shit’s tight yo.
Also we have a group called the Guerrilla Grafters. A group who started in San Fransisco with the goal of grafting fruiting branches onto non-fruiting trees of the same type.
Most cities have fruit trees that simply don’t produce fruit because having all these would be a mess and inadvertently providing unregulated food to people comes with a lot of legal risks I suppose. These grafters seem to think otherwise and have taken it upon themselves to try and bring fruit trees back to urban areas.
HOLY SHIT
THE LAST ONE
Solarpunk as fuck!!
Reblogging for “I continue to fear and respect out arboreal overlords.”
what the fuck are even trees man
i’m crying oh gosh
TUMBLR PROF ANNOUNCEMENT: If you are trans or nonbinary and you are in the same situation as the student above, email your professors before class starts. I understand that it might be uncomfortable, but generally professors are absolutely happy to accommodate you. I know I always will be!
If your professor does not respond positively, contact the Dean or the campus LGBT+ resource center with a copy of the email and show them that you are concerned about gender discrimination in the classroom.
Also this is a link to the template I used to write this email, and I’ve seen another similar template going around, and this was extremely helpful.
just a reminder that this is an option for you folks! i did it and all my teachers replied within a few hours saying that it was okay. you can do this! school does not have to be painful.
Reblogging because everyone should see this. C:
DNA Replication Has Been Filmed For The First Time, And It's Not What We Expected
See on Scoop.it - Knowmads, Infocology of the future
Here’s proof of how far we’ve come in science - in a world-first, researchers have recorded up-close footage of a single DNA molecule replicating itself, and it’s raising questions about how we assumed the process played out. The real-time footage has revealed that this fundamental part of life incorporates an unexpected amount of ‘randomness’, and it could force a major rethink into how genetic replication occurs without mutations. “It’s a real paradigm shift, and undermines a great deal of what’s in the textbooks,” says one of the team, Stephen Kowalczykowski from the University of California, Davis. “It’s a different way of thinking about replication that raises new questions.” The DNA double helix consists of two intertwining strands of genetic material made up of four different bases - guanine, thymine, cytosine, and adenine (G, T, C and A). Replication occurs when an enzyme called helicase unwinds and unzips the double helix into two single strands. A second enzyme called primase attaches a 'primer’ to each of these unravelled strands, and a third enzyme called DNA polymerase attaches at this primer, and adds additional bases to form a whole new double helix.
The fact that double helices are formed from two stands running in opposite directions means that one of these strands is known as the 'leading strand’, which winds around first, and the other is the 'lagging strand’, which follows the leader. The new genetic material that’s attached to each one during the replication process is an exact match to what was on its original partner. So as the leading strand detaches, the enzymes add bases that are identical to those on the original lagging stand, and as the lagging strand detaches, we get material that’s identical to the original leading strand. Scientists have long assumed that the DNA polymerases on the leading and lagging strands somehow coordinate with each other throughout the replication process, so that one does not get ahead of the other during the unravelling process and cause mutations. But this new footage reveals that there’s no coordination at play here at all - somehow, each strand acts independently of the other, and still results in a perfect match each time.
