Skybound

Ren // xxii // bioengineering graduate student // i follow from my main

[power-chords]

[thesaltofcarthage]

this is brilliant and also out of control

[headspace-hotel]

the idea of protists is really funny. Ah yes, the kingdoms of life: Animals, Plants, Fungi, and Don't worry about it:)

[man-cave-chronicles-stan]

i just started taking my first botany course and politely op what the fuck is this supposed to mean

[headspace-hotel]

Well

Um

...

All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.

Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By "friends" I mean "permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells." This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.

One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.

A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.

A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.

But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn't become multicellular is a protist.

The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).

If each of those multicellular clades counts as a "kingdom," how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.

Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there's a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it's not supposed to be, or there's something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there's at least two fistfights and one brawl.

Protists: Just don't worry about it.

[headspace-hotel]

Also I lied and there are plenty of eukaryotes that are multicellular and not animals, plants, or fungi, such as giant kelp

However those get called protists half the time too because with kelp, it's easier than trying to explain what the fuck it is if it isn't a plant, and with everything else, talking about it just starts an argument about what counts as a "cell" and what counts as "multi" for that matter and nothing good comes of it.

[drafty-castle]

Wait wait wait. Hope do you argue what counts as multi. Anything larger than one, right? Anything larger than one?

[headspace-hotel]

Well

Xenophyopores found a cool hack to be unicellular but still get 20 centimeters long—they just have lots and lots of nuclei in their single cell.

They look like this. Of course it is in the ocean where all kinds of freaks are.

Behold, a single celled organism

Maybe it is cheating though.

[headspace-hotel]

Don't worry, though, the squiggly thing isn't really its body, it's more of a shell they secrete. Yes, you see they take in minerals from their surroundings, like for example, uh...

...Okay, maybe worry a little bit.

[headspace-hotel]

wikipedia article btw

They really like radioactive isotopes and collect radioactive materials in their bodies at high concentrations.

But this is exactly what i'm talking about, these guys are totally different from plants, animals, or fungi, just like they're totally different from kelp and amoebas, they are Their Own Thing.

[headspace-hotel]

@ayoungparent Well apparently slime molds are a polyphyletic group (a bunch of unrelated organisms that happened to look similar).

The Myxomycetes are the ones known as plasmodial slime molds and basically they form spores which hatch into single-celled haploid guys (basically like sperm or egg in humans) and when the spores meet each other they become a diploid cell with more and more and more nuclei until they can be one cell several meters in area and several kilograms in weight. Despite being one cell technically and having no brain, they can learn and have some form of intelligence. They are good at designing the most efficient railroad system.

The big green ball I assume you refer to is Valonia ventricosa. It has some complicated structures inside and lots of nuclei to make it work, but it is just one really big cell.

Yeah. It does mitosis and everything like a regular cell.

This guy is actually much closer related to regular plants than kelp or anything else we've discussed.

[leebrontide]

Ok this is fascinating but how the fuck isn’t kelp a plant???

[avidfireflycatcher]

@leebrontide hi!

Kelp is a type of brown algae (Phaeophyceae), which are protists. They may look like plants, but they sit in different parts of the family tree.

Eukaryotes phylogenetic tree:

Brown algae phylogenetic tree:

Kelp also have several physical characteristics such as blades, stipe, and holdfasts, which are analogous to leaves, stems, and roots of vascular plants but are a case of convergent evolution (like a shark and dolphin both having similarly shaped appendages!)

More importantly, all plants descend from a common ancestor that did primary endosymbiosis of that cyanobacteria way back when. Anything else that can do photosythenthesis and is not a cyanobacterium or a plant has an ancestor that has done secondary or tertiary endosymbiosis of an organism that already had chloroplasts.

Brown algae's ancestor took a red alga as an endosymbiot, and red alga is also a protist and thus did secondary endosymbiosis of a which is why their chloroplasts have four cellular membranes, whereas plants only have two:

So basically, plants and brown algae are wierdly related distant cousins cause one of them ate the other's grandpa or something like that.

Hope this kelps! 💚

[imanbenerrabeh]

february spread / hobonichi weeks

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[marsoid]

Do u have any advice for artists who draw ridiculously slow???

draw faster

[marsoid]

jk haha. here's some tips:

1. identify what's making you draw so slow. can't figure out pose/anatomy? too perfectionist about inking? getting caught up in details? indecisive coloring?

2. timed gesture studies. draw a loose figure w photo reference in 10 minutes. do that a bunch of times. then 5 minutes, 3 minutes, 1 minute. train yourself to omit as much detail as possible while keeping the figure recognizable.

3. the dot/line exercise, sometimes called the "target practice" warmup. draw two dots, then a line connecting them. keep moving the dots farther apart while drawing the line as fast as you can while keeping it STRAIGHT (not wobbly!) and hitting the second dot. the line is ONE stroke. it's harder than it sounds. this should help you get an idea of how fast you can make a controlled stroke

4. look up tutorials on coloring more quickly in whatever art program you're using if you do digital art. chances are there's a tool or setting that can make it easier to fill in shapes. i almost never color by hand, i fill bucket everything

5. free yourself of "clean line art"... 9 times outta 10 people think sketchy lines are more visually appealing anyway. it's faster and they have more life. in my opinion at least

6. use lots of references. spending hours on a complicated pose from memory instead of just looking at photo/3D model reference isn't impressive it's just stupid and unnecessary

7. study with intent. if you struggle with leg anatomy for example, do lots of studies from photos (eyeballing and tracing), then try it freehand/from memory, rinse and repeat 9000 times until it's not something you get stuck on when it comes time to do an illustration/comic page

8. less detail. simplify. you can have ultra detailed art or you can draw fast. pick which is more important to you

9. bullshit it... draw ugly and bad but do it fast. done is always better than perfect

10. thumbnail. it's not just for comics. do a teeny tiny sketch of your drawing beforehand with colors. then use it as reference. helps to finish the actual piece faster when it's planned out

bonus: be impatient and easily bored. i rarely spend more than 2-3 hrs on any one drawing, including comic pages. i got other shit to do!!!! like nap

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Devastating to have more evidence that done IS better than perfect

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Additionally, findings indicate that the act of doing shows you that you were not seeking perfection, you were fearing inadequacy

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

@grey-and-lavender

#oh that last line gutted me #is there a place between perfect and failure?

Good news! There is!

Bad news! It is called 'done'

[grey-and-lavender]

✨ fuck ✨

[tadporrridge-deactivated2026030]

laughed at this image for five minutes straight today

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

[eddieintheocean]

Introductions to academic papers will be like "everyone knows that the sea is cold (citation), as well as salty (5 different citations). Things live in there (citation) and the environment is important to that (2 citations)"

[disorganisedautodidact]

these tags gave me thesis writing flashbacks

[saltedweather]

the thing about writing history. Is that you get used to this. And sometimes, some of us get too comfortable and so we're writing shit like

"Murder is bad. In the time period discussed, people sometimes committed murders (2 citations). And most people agreed that murder was bad, but it was widely known that murders still happened."

And your advisor goes, "Did most people agree, though? Was it widely known?"

And you go (sigh.). Okay. And do twelve hours of going back through your readings. And rewrite.

"Murder is bad (4 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations)."

And you look at your draft. And you go. But. But we all — I mean, the archival sources from the time are in fact QUITE CLEAR about how widely known it was! Like–! I've read hundreds of letters and a third of them mention murder! I've talked to so many historians of this time and place and we ALL talk about the murder thing!

And you look at the twelve goddamned hours of searching you did. And you write several increadingly desperate emails to colleagues. And after another few days, you come to the agonizing realization that, in fact, there are no citations of published work establishing that people knew murders occurred despite them being bad and against the law. And then you spend another week looking up those archival sources. And you rewrite again.

"Murder is bad (6 citations). In this time, people sometimes committed murders (6 citations). People did not all agree that it was bad (2 citations). There was disagreement about exactly how bad (3 citations). While no conclusive study has been done, from communications in this time, we can say that at least a significant number of people knew that murders still occurred (18 citations)."

[bucketofdeltav]

I currently have exactly this problem.

"Everyone knows that [reaction A] works like this and [reaction B] works like that". Very common way to start a paper or thesis in this field. Everybody knows this, we can carry on with the more interesting stuff about [reaction C].

Huh. These 73 citations all cite each other in a ouroboros and the only original source in the lot is a popular science book which is indeed worth citing, but it's a memoir, which I have read repeatedly, and the author of the memoir just threw this out there as another example of "things everyone just knew in those days".

...I am now doing a PhD on "Hang on just one second, we have no concrete evidence for how [reaction A] or [reaction B] work and even whether they're different at all."

[daburdboi]

I love seeing my sources cite each other so much. It really makes me feel more like a researcher and like part of a community when I'm reading a paper and I see this person read that too, and also found it worth citing and sharing. This is the stuff that makes me love teaching people about MLA and APA.

[thatlittleegyptologist]

Going back to the history for a second: my external examiner for my PhD was determined, for some ungodly reason, for me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians had the concepts of shame, politeness, and “saving face” after embarrassment. But she didn’t want secondary sources, she wanted primary ones.

So I sat there thinking ‘you want me to prove that the Ancient Egyptians knew what shame was, that very human emotion, using their own words in a culture for which we have very few examples of personal/private correspondence or notations that don’t suffer from strict formalities that are present in 98% of non literary texts? Okay then’ and went through hundreds of fragments over weeks to find this:

P.Bologna 1094 3, 5-10

sS m-H n pA xpS n pr-aA a.w.s. Dd n sS pA-wHm r-nty in.tw n=k sS pn n Dd Hna Dd r-nty m ir s iwty HAty=f iw bn n=f sbAy(t) ir sDr.tw iw.tw Hr mtr=k wrS.tw iw.tw Hr sbA=k iw bw sDm=k mtr nb iw i-ir=k pAy=k sxr pA kry Hr sDm mdt in.tw=f Hr kS tw.tw Hr irt sbAyt n mAi tw.tw Hr q-H ssmt Hrw-r=k bw rx.tw qi=k m-Xnw tA-tmm ix rx=k sw

Mahu, Scribe of the Armoury of Pharaoh l.p.h. speaks to the Scribe Pewehem. This letter is brought to you to the following effect: Do not be a senseless man who has no education. One spends the whole night teaching you and passes the whole day instructing you, without your listening to any teaching, but you act after your own fashion. The ape understands words, and it is brought to you from Kush. Lions are trained and Horses tamed: but as for you, one does not discern the like of you within all mankind. Take note of this.

(Caminos, 1954: 13, cf [Redacted], 2016: 59)

I think I sufficiently provided an example of someone (Scribe Mahu) enacting shame and impoliteness onto his student (Scribe Pewehem). 'Prove these humans had the concept of shame' was a wild task that required a wild citation.

Caminos, R., 1954. Late Egyptian Miscellanies. London: OUP. Redacted, C., 2016. My Doctoral Thesis That I Won't Post Publicly But You Can Ask For It. Unpublished.

[lysissisyl]

I’m amused how we have different perspectives on citations in different fields (in my household medical vs psychology vs history), but we can still all relate to this…

[weaselle]

My perfect mashed potatoes

The secret is in the water; literally, it’s IN the water.

See, when you boil potatoes, a lot of special starches and sugars and stuff leeches out into the water. When you drain the water before mashing them, you throw away a lot of good stuff, which is a big part of what makes mashed potatoes “dry” and bland, even when you add large amounts of cream and butter and things.

So don’t throw out any water.

Here’s how you do that:

First, cut your potatoes into smaller cubes than you probably do. (I’ve left the skins on for flavor and also, that’s where a lot of a potato’s nutrients are, like protien and iron and vitamins B and C, just to name a few)

The reason for cutting them smaller (besides avoiding giant peices of skin) is so that there is less space in the pot between each peice for water to fill, so you use less water to cook them. That’s important because you won’t be draining any water, so you can’t afford to have too much water! For the same reason, just barely cover them with water when they go on the stove.

But! Before you do that, put the pot on the stove with some butter, garlic, and seasonings; let the butter start to sizxle just a little then put most of a single layer of potatoes in the pan and let the brown and sear. Turn them, brown them on all sides, get ‘em fairly dark (I forgot to get a pic here because I was worried I’d burn the butter).

Ready? now throw the rest of the potatoes in right on top, and add your water, give them a stir. This way, you’re boiling in some of that lovely fried potato/french fry flavor.

Okay, so, as they cook, you may need to add a little water, not too much! ideally the very highest piece of potato will be poking just above the surface. Now, when your potatoes are really really soft, mash them directly into the water. Just pull them off the stove, leave all the water in, and start mashing. Trust me. At first you’ll think there’s too much water. If you get them mashed and they ARE a little too liquidy, just put ‘em back on the stove. You’ll have to stir often or constantly, but they will steam off additional water without losing any good stuff.

Now add some salt, and taste. Right?! And you haven’t even put in any cream or cheese or anything yet.

Speaking of which, you can use like, a third of the amount of butter or cream or anything, and they will still taste better than usual. So they taste better AND they are higher in nutrients AND lower in fats and salts! That’s a lot of win — enjoy your potatoes!

Fuck Columbus! Indigenous Rights! And happy Thanksgiving!

[animatedamerican]

Have I never reblogged this? How have I never reblogged this? I've been using this technique for years now and it's become a mainstay of my kitchen toolbox.

OP, I'm sure you've already heard this a lot, but many many thanks for sharing this.

[los-plantalones]

Ready for some delicious syrup made from grape hyacinth (muscari) flowers?! LET’S GO.

Ingredients:

1 cup grape hyacinth flowers

1 cup water

2 cups sugar

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Instructions:

Wash the flowers (we REALLY don’t want bugs in our syrup).

Add the flowers to a mason jar or other heat-safe container. Pour 1 cup boiling water over the flowers and let infuse for 1-2 hours (no longer or it can turn bitter!)

Strain the flowers and add the infusion to a pot along with the sugar and lemon juice.

Simmer over medium heat, until the sugar is completely dissolved.

At this point, your syrup is technically done. BUT if you want it to be thicker, you can continue simmering, stirring occasionally, until it’s to your liking.

Remove from heat and pour into a sterilized mason jar. At this point you can either 1) Store your syrup in the fridge if you plan to use it soon, or 2) Water bath can it for long term storage.

YOU DID A SYRUP! This can be used to make lemonade, mixed into cocktails, poured over ice cream. . . you do you!!

[alfrungrima]

Have you or some else ever tried this with lavender, with mint or with pine needles? Should it be the same plant/sugar/water ratio?

[los-plantalones]

I make and sell homemade + foraged syrups! I’ve done all of these flavors before and for the most part keep to the 2:1 sugar to water ratio, but each plant is a little different.

Lavender is very strong so I only use about 1/3 cup fresh or 2 tbsp dry.

Mint stays the same – 1 cup fresh.

Pine needles really depend on personal preference, but with fresh, young needles I typically do 1 cup. Older needles you need less of because they get really resin-y. Dry you will need about 1/4 cup. Experiment with this one!

[micewithknives]

I let myself rest and now I'm daydreaming about academia and academic research and writing again

[micewithknives]

Guys I'm getting some very mixed messaging here

[krindor]

academia perfec t size to put human in to learn! inside very good and learn human get smart put human in academia. put human in academia. no problems ever in academia because no stress and support for human mind in big human head. academia yes a place for human put human in academia can trust college for giveing good brain to human. friend college.

[chaotic-archaeologist]

what could go wrong :)

[thestuffedalligator]

Cooking horror game where you play as a cook working in the galley of a ship in the 1800s. There’s some kind of supernatural nautical horror story going on in the background but you barely notice this because you spend all day cooking in the galley.

[glassrooibos]

I could not stop thinking about this. The only cue you get is the ingredients keep getting more and more unnerving, and like the prep you have to do to make the food gets more and more elaborate??? GIMEE THE GAME.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[sindri42]

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.

[gailcarriger]

I knew pastry would save the world one day.

[fuckyeahyoga]

[yagamimi-aka-mimi-deactivated20]

tweet

Something like this would be so colossally helpful. I'm sick and tired of trying to research specific clothing from any given culture and being met with either racist stereotypical costumes worn by yt people or ai generated garbage nonsense, and trying to be hyper specific with searches yields fuck all. Like I generally just cannot trust the legitimacy of most search results at this point. It's extremely frustrating. If there are good resources for this then they're buried deep under all the other bullshit, and idk where to start looking.

[ama-kitkat123]

>:)c

May I present to you, nationalclothing.org?

It doesn't have everything, but it's still my first source when researching traditional clothing from other cultures.

[penanatomy-studies]

There's also this resource on historical fashion: Claire’s Historical Fashion Reference & Resources

[zheida]

another addition as far as physical media goes there is the encyclopedia of national dress (that i still need to buy myself bc this kind of thing is super important to my sort of fantasy designing) but yes i do agree i wish there was EVEN MORE documentation on this

[2percentsugar]

the fact that "eco" and "ethical" are two separate concerns in the global north, and that "eco" is a much more popular concern, with many "eco" products being made in actual sweatshops, is a big part of why i am The Joker

[2percentsugar]

if you think this is an exaggeration or splitting hairs where it doesn't matter:

i used to work at a Local Organic Produce store that's popular with the lefties in my city who are interested in food justice. i quit for a lot of reasons, mostly the boss, but something i will always remember is one of our suppliers coming in to drop off produce, being told her check wasn't ready, and her laughing and responding it didn't matter -- even a low bank account was more than enough to pay the migrants who picked her produce. i am not filling in any blanks here. she said this.

after quitting, this was a common story i told people about my time there. some then became annoyed at me, acting like i was a wokescold trying to undermine the store's "eco" mission with unrelated "ethical" concerns. but, like -- if food justice isn't for the people making food, who the fuck is it for?

like, don't get me wrong. my contention here is that the things go hand in hand, and that something which is unethical isn't actually eco. after all, humans are a part of the fucking ecosystem, and if a product can only be made by unsustainably exploiting humans, then it's unsustainable. doesn't matter which chemicals were used in making it, or whether or not animals were factory farmed.

[falseficus]

they *cannot* be separated. a product cannot be either eco or ethical — it must be both. a product that is made through human suffering cannot be eco for the reasons you said; a product that causes human suffering by contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem cannot be ethical. it must be both and we must insist on both