a pile of stuff

ART enjoyer, art enjoyer, science liker, bird admirer adult

[muprocyon]

every time i go out to my favorite field, and there are thistles growing, i try to pluck a flower. each time i rediscover that there is no place from which to pluck it without a great deal of pain.

[muprocyon]

lil' bird. gotta stop being so afraid to draw the bodies

[muprocyon]

Fire alarm battery alert going off intermittently off over the past week, renting place with vaulted ceiling, can't reach it without really tall ladder. They already came out and replaced the batteries, but it's still beeping. By the minute, I am becoming more and more Spiritually and Metaphysically tethered to the IASIP ep where they move to the suburbs and go insane.

[herpsandbirds]

Longtime Nautilus contributor and the "Indiana Jones of marine biology," Peter Ward has spent decades studying the ancient cephalopod that gave our magazine its name. On an expedition to Australia's Great Barrier Reef, Ward and his colleagues sampled two nautiluses long regarded as separate species. Despite striking differences in their shells and anatomy, DNA analysis revealed no genetic difference between them. The discovery became the starting point for Ward's exploration of epigenetics—the study of how environmental influences can alter the way genes are expressed without changing the underlying DNA sequence. In this essay, Ward argues that epigenetics may help explain why some organisms that appear to be distinct species are actually one and the same—and why Earth may contain fewer species than scientists have traditionally believed.

Read here: https://nautil.us/why-the-earth-has-fewer-species-than-we-think-237177

[muprocyon]

I feel like this also works on the opposite direction, but is probably much harder to catch: Two species that are reproductivley incompatible, whose geographical ranges and morphology overlap, but have clearly divergent genomes. If it is two bug species, who is realistically going to notice?

These people noticed the same-species phenomenon with the nautiluses because they thought they were comparing two different species, but realistically, it's less likely people are going to want to do DNA sequencing on some bug #45,890 on enough individuals to catch it, when they could be spending their time and money doing first-time sequencing on a bunch of obviously different species of bugs.

IDK.. Perhaps in another 40 years, when we have a rough reference for all species, people will do more population sampling-sequencing.

[muprocyon]

two-hit hypothesis.

the tumblr image-quality woodchipper finally came for me. oh well

[muprocyon]

Oncorhynchus kawamurae fry

[muprocyon]

cancer

[elumish]

My honest advice if you are reading something (especially something academic or non-fiction) that you don't understand is to read it again. And again, if you need to. And again.

I read the same three or four pages of the new network analysis paper probably six times yesterday, and at some point I had the math notation page on Wikipedia open for reference, and I don't have a subject matter expert's understanding but I do get more of it than I did when I started. And the next time I read it I'll understand it more.

Literally work it out sentence by sentence if you have to. You can learn how to understand things, even if it takes a lot of iterations.

[muprocyon]

The first scientific paper I presented in class (which necessitated that I understood it fully), took me at least 4 days of literally going sentence-by- sentence, looking up almost everything, to fully grasp.

[muprocyon]

lmao

[muprocyon]

my boy!

[muprocyon]

The thing that personally pisses me off most about ai is that it is driving the memory prices up so so much. I am lucky to have gotten my 16TB drive when I did, but unfortunatey I need double-backups of all my raw fastq files and my trimmed fastq files and my bam files, and am having to make hard decisions about what pipeline "savepoints" I want to keep. Fuuuuuuck this bullshit.

[muprocyon]

a florida man asks an incredible question: what if I lit a fire indoors while at the same time, effectively putting on a blindfold

top comment:

[zucchins]

vacation time

[muprocyon]

hope u enjoy ur vacation, onion

[muprocyon]

the reason why you don't see any three-gene punnett squares is because once you've found a phenotype involving more than two genes, they give you a certificate saying you've graduated to Big Boy Biology™ and throw you in the gene mapping dungeon to start making your recombinant inbred lines. If you're rich, you might be allowed to do a little GWAS as a treat.

[hellsitegenetics]

im a big fan of how entering "homo" into BLAST's organism-specific search field will show you every way a scientist has ever typo'd homo sapiens

[muprocyon]

spiens

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

HATE when u can feel ur intestines writhing. cease your wriggling insolent belly worm

[muprocyon]

southern reach pool party time

[muprocyon]

it always wigs me out when I see people put their phones or laptops on their lab bench. I mean, I don't even work with anything particularly dangerous, but i think about what has been on my bench, and I think about how I use my laptop on the couch, in my bed, how i put my phone against my face and I just 😬