#cool research

[obligatorycoffee]

Hybrid Body Lab directed by Cindy Hsin-Liu Kao

A research lab at Cornell inventing culturally-inspired materials, processes, and tools for crafting technology on the body surface. Direct

Thought this was a neat and feels very alterhuman-adjacent (especially for tech-related identities)!

[boggedybloggedy]

Today at work I was like, ‘I wonder if Manatees eat West Indian Marsh Grass,’ so I looked it up and HOLY SEA-COW I found a whole research paper (available for free online, we love to see it) about it.

The short answer is, yes, Manatees eat multiple invasive aquatic species.

(Some important context real quick:)

 1. As you might guess from the name, West Indian Marsh Grass grows along rivers and in wetlands.

2. Manatees have been known to push themselves partially out of the water to nibble on people’s lawns.

ANYWAY, the South Florida Museum did an experiment where they supplemented the diet of their rehab-manatees with 3 invasive plant species: water hyacinth, water lettuce, and west indian marsh grass. The thinking was that it would provide nutritional benefits to the manatees (which are typically fed things like romaine lettuce, bc what other manatee food is available for sale by the ton?) and also help them reintegrate into the wild more easily. And, bonus, for less than the cost of lettuce, they could clear invasive species in a few areas.

APPARENTLY, the idea of using manatees to help combat invasive aquatic plants isn’t new; there’s been numerous studies on it over the decades, particularly in Guyana. I don’t think FWC is gonna give up herbicide any time soon, but the idea that these weeds could finally have some natural predators is encouraging.

What I wanna know is, do wild manatees already eat hyacinth, WIMG, and water lettuce? And do the rehabilitated manatees continue eating these species after they’re released? Do they influence the rest of the herd’s behavior?

Anyway, here’s the full article:

https://nsuworks.nova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1494&context=occ_facarticles

[neuroblogg]

Source

Brainbow

Neuroscience researchers have learned a thing or two from electricians, at least where Brainbow is concerned. You see, in order to figure out how different neurons interact with each other, scientists need to be able identify single neurons as they are going down twists and turns in the brain and body. And what better way to do that than by coloring them, as electricians have been doing with wires for decades? Brainbow does just that. It was developed by Jeff W. Lichtman and Joshua R. Sanes at Harvard, and it makes neurons in mice express different colors (around 90) using a genetic recombination method called Cre/lox, which shuffles DNA fragments. 

In fact, even the way Brainbow works is similar to the way the red, blue, and green pixels in a T.V produce many colors. Constructs, which are essentially packages of genes, are inserted into a neuron. These constructs can express one of four different fluorescent proteins (like green, cyan, or yellow) and the Cre/lox mechanism chooses which of the four colors is expressed through random DNA shuffling. In the end, each construct will express only one color. But since many constructs can be inserted into one neuron, you can get many different colors, just like a TV! 

[franceslin90]

Chernev, Alexander and Sean Blair (2015), “Doing Well by Doing Good: The Benevolent Halo of Social Goodwill” Journal of Consumer Research

[alanshemper]

A new model of the chemistry of the early solar system finds that up to half the water now on Earth was inherited from an abundant supply of interstellar ice as our sun formed. That means our solar system’s moisture wasn’t the result of local conditions in the proto-planetary disk, but rather a regular feature of planetary formation — raising hopes that life could indeed exist elsewhere in the universe.

"Earth's Water Is Older Than the Sun," D-Brief, 9/25/14