The Prophet and The Liar

[thecuckoohaslanded]

AW GREAT now I’m googling a bunch of extinct megafauna like Arctotherium, Argentavis magnificens, and Sarcosuchus imperator

[thecuckoohaslanded]

Sarcosuchus imperator: proof that crocodilian evolution DIDN’T FUCK AROUND

[thecuckoohaslanded]

Purussaurus: proof that not fucking around is an art form

[thecuckoohaslanded]

Argentavis magnificens: the reason sky gods had bird symbols

[thecuckoohaslanded]

BEAR VS ELEPHANT:

HIS FACE SAYS IT ALL:

ARCTOTHERIUM ANGUSTIDENS: AN UPSETTING QUANTITY OF BEAR

[the-gay-prometheus]

If I had pictures of size comparisons between an Irish Elk and a human being I’d put those here because ho damn.

[thecuckoohaslanded]

The Pleistocene is the reason we have nightmares.

[biscuitsarenice]

Peju Alatise’s ‘Flying Girls’ : Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017

[taylortut]

A Guide to Making Up Diseases (as Explained by a Biologist)

So listen up y’all, nothing drives me crazier as both a writer and a scientist than seeing alien diseases that make no fuckin’ sense in a human body. 

If you’re talking about alien diseases in a non-human character, you can ignore all this.

But as far as alien diseases in humans go, please remember:

DISEASE SYMPTOMS ARE AN IMMUNE RESPONSE.

Fever? A response to help your immune cells function faster and more efficiently to destroy invaders.

Sore/scratchy throat? An immune response. Diseases that latch onto the epithelium of the throat (the common cold, the flu) replicate there, and your body is like “uh no fuckin’ thanks” and starts to slough off those cells in order to stop the replication of new virus in its tracks. So when it feels like your throat is dying? guess what it literally is. And the white spots you see with more severe bacterial infections are pus accumulation, which is basically dead white blood cells, and the pus is a nice and disgusting way of getting that shit outta here.

(No one really knows why soreness and malaise happens, but some scientists guess that it’s a byproduct of immune response, and others suspect that it’s your body’s way of telling you to take it easy)

headache? usually sinus pressure (or dehydration, which isn’t an immune response but causes headaches by reducing blood volume and causing a general ruckus in your body, can be an unfortunate side effect of a fever) caused by mucous which is an immune response to flush that nasty viral shit outta your face.

Rashes? an inflammatory response. Your lymphocytes see a thing they don’t like and they’re like “hEY NOW” and release a bunch of chemicals that tell the cells that are supposed to kill it to come do that. Those chemicals cause inflammation, which causes redness, heat, and swelling. They itch because histamine is a bitch.

fatigue? your body is doing a lot–give it a break!

here is a fact:

during the Spanish 1918 Plague, a very strange age group succumbed to the illness. The very young and very old were fine, but people who were seemingly healthy and in the prime of life (young adults) did not survive. This is because that virus triggered an immune response called a cytokine storm, which basically killed everything in sight and caused horrific symptoms like tissue death, vasodilation and bleeding–basically a MASSIVE inflammatory response that lead to organ damage and death. Those with the strongest immune systems took the worst beating by their own immune responses, while those with weaker immune systems were fine.

So when you’re thinking of an alien disease, think through the immune response.

Where does this virus attack? Look up viruses that also attack there and understand what the immune system would do about it. 

Understand symptoms that usually travel together–joint pain and fever, for example.

So please, please: no purple and green spotted diseases. No diseases that cause glamorous fainting spells and nothing else. No mystical eye-color/hair-color changing diseases. If you want these things to happen, use magic or some shit or alien physiology, but when it’s humans, it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense. 

This has been a rant and I apologize for that. 

[mcubed35]

As a microbiologist, I think the main advice here is to take into account real diseases and conditions before you make up a fictional disease or condition.

Some bacteria have physical effects on the body that cause symptoms (EHEC varitype of E. coli ruptures cells at the site of infection, which is usually the large intestine, hence, you have bloody stools from it). If your alien or “made-up” bacteria or virus causes a certain symptom, find a real bacteria or virus that causes the same symptom. They need to behave in a similar fashion and have similar physical traits. Bacteria and viruses do not evolve functions because they’re cool. They evolve them because they’re useful.

There are also dietary issues, medications and chronic diseases that cause physical changes–copper toxicity can cause an orange ring around the iris, an eyelash lengthening “medicine” causes darkening and/or color change of the iris, hemochromatosis (sometimes known as “Bronze Diabetes”) causes darkening of the skin etc. If you want to use this sort of thing, again, find something real that causes it and work through things logically. 

Play your cards right, do your research and you will have hordes of readers in the scientific and/or biological community cheering, screaming and crying because they love your work.

[katistrophe]

@biologyweeps, this feels up your speculative alley - anything to add?

[biologyweeps]

Ohhh.

I’d like to add that the same goes for parasitic infections, more or less. If you want a certain trait for a diseases, cross reference with existing parasites to see what’s happening, and also make sure you check what happens if you put a parasite in a host it’s not meant for. We can sensibly assume that alien parasites that encounter a human would be ‘wtf’ and potentially cause complications that would never happen in the native species. Maybe in the native species it causes a cold like reaction at worst, but in a human the parasites may attempt to nest in a totally different tissue. Maybe that causes widespread tissue damage by the parasite itself as it tries to borrow in? Again, check existing cases to see what horrific things could happen.

While we’re on it, also check how your disease is communicated. One of the things that annoy me so much with zombie movies is that ‘biting’ is supposed to be a very effective way to spread it. It’s not. Anything that requires such intimate contact is actually kind of hard to communicate. Airborne things? Now there we are at potential ‘oh shit’ territory. So if you want your disease to sweep the country/planet/ship, pick something that’s easily communicable. 

Also consider the incubation period. How long until someone shows symptoms? Are they already infectious to other people before showing symptoms or still after they stopped? As mentioned above, illness symptoms are in most part immune responses and the immune system needs time to get up and run. Give it that time.

And while we’re at it… there are symptoms that aren’t immune responses. For example the cramps that accompany tetanus are caused by a toxin the bacterium produces that damages/destroys nerve cells. Viruses can cause tissue damage when they insert in cells, replicate in there and destroy the cell on exit. Think of how HIV can wreak havoc on the human immune system by killing of a specific kind of cell. Depending on where your viruses likes to replicate it can massively impact the look of it. Something that destroys liver cells will look different (and if survived may come with different long term damage) than something that prefers skin or muscle cells. If it’s alien also consider how it might behave differently in its original host. 

[futureevilscientist]

Fantastic post, I can relate to OP 100%. More points:

Nothing makes me groan harder than a made-up plague which gives anyone X diseases within seconds to MINUTES. I’m looking at you, most zombie movies. And if your alien/synthetic/sci-fi pathogen is at all like a virus (read: no metabolism of its own, just genetic material of some kind which it uses to reprogram host cells), then the rate at which it mupltiplies is limited to what normal human cells can do. Now, viruses can multiply pretty damn fast. But give you symptoms within MINUTES? Nope.

So long as we’re on the subject of epidemiology, and speed:

 "Oh no, patient died less than a day after being infected! We’re all doomed!“ Wrong. While that SOUNDS scary, a plague that kills that quickly would not actually be that dangerous, and would be unlikely to have evolved to begin with. A disease needs to pass itself on to at least one other person, on average, before it kills its host, or it’s doomed to extinction. Any virus that kills its host before it has a decent chance of being passed on will basically quarantine itself. (Of course, you CAN do this if you handwave its origins as being made in a lab or whatever, just know it won’t realistically pose a truly terrifying threat on a population level.)

Mmore ideas for a realistically scary made-up plague:

- Long incubation period (say, a couple of weeks), making quarantine much more difficult, disruptive to everyday life, and unlikely to succeed. - Infectious period != symptomatic period, i.e. someone can spread the disease before they appear sick. (Note: if this condition is met, then dying very rapidly after *manifesting symptoms* becomes plausible again, more plausible than dying quickly after being infected.)

- The possibility or relative prevalence of healthy carriers - think Typhoid Mary. I.e. rare people who skip the symptoms part entirely but are still infectious.

- The disease is transmitted through an animal that is hard to keep out, the definition of “hard to keep out” would depend on the setting here. Poor water sanitation means waterborne bacteria and microscopic parasites would be a huge danger. Insect or arachnid (e.g. tick) bites could be a danger in almost any setting..

- As an alternative to above point: the bacterial/viral/parasite/whatever can form spores that are fucking EVERYWHERE. (Read: the reason for both tetanus and botulinum poisoning.)

- The pathogen is both dangerous and impossible to fully exterminate through vaccination because it has a huge population of reservoir hosts. (Reservoir hosts are entire SPECIES that can carry and propagate the disease without being affected much by it.) Same way the Black Plague is still out there because a shitton of rodent species passively carry it.

And many more things if you do some research for inspiration! Pathogens are scary, fascinating things, and I really wish we had more realistic fictional representation of them than “virus which causes zombie behaviour in 3 seconds flat” (looking at you, 28 Days Later) and “virus which can MIND-CONTROL people who view the main carrier through a COMPUTER SCREEN” (wtf???) (looking at you, Jessica Jones).

[delayedresponse]

Yes to all of this. Another thing that irks me in these fictional disease situations is how the cure is handled. As a pharmacist and medical engineer-in-training, most diseases and viral infections are not going to disappear with a single pill or syringe. The process of curing a patient is long, complicated and takes into account many aspects. These aspects are route of delivery, target organ and side effects. For example, a “zombie” fungus or bacteria that resides in the brain is not going to be affected by an injection to the arm. Most first cures also tend to be highly unstable and pose dangerous side effects (that’s why we have clinical trials!) These are just some things to take into consideration when developing your fictional cure.

[futureevilscientist]

This is a great addendum and something I definitely don’t know much about. Both cures and vaccines suffer from lack of realistic treatment in movies, which is frustrating not merely because that’s not how it works but because writers miss out on great opportunities like that.

[tienriu]

Why octopuses are building small “cities” off the coast of Australia

Divers found octopuses building structures out of shells, socializing with neighbors.

Scientists named the octopus cities Octopolis and Octlantis and I just - yes.

[orestian-deactivated20180120]

wow i hope they invite us to their parties

[kc749]

I saw a documentary about this. Climate change and habitat destruction, while bad, are forcing some octopuses to live closer together, potentially solving a problem that has kept them from being a far more dominant species. They are super smart and very capable of learning from each other but when they live alone, they never get a chance to learn from other generations because their parents leave or die. Now there’s older ones living with younger ones who can pass on knowledge.

[tienriu]

#gonna keep getting smarter#eight brains#if we stop killing them they might do alright#octopus#also remember the other day when a bunch came up on the beach to call us on our shit#lol#at least that’s what i’m gonna say was their motive (@kc749)

Wait what?

[kc749]

Lol a bunch of octopuses just crawled up on a beach the other day for no discernible reason and it was like “meh, it’s 2017” and everyone kinda missed it. I found it funny as fuck and decided they were coming out here to tell us all to cut our shit out.

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/925095582003286016

[drawingden]

Different Angles of a Skull - Open Mouth by XeiArt

[currentsinbiology]

DNA proves fearsome Viking warrior was a woman

A 10th century Viking unearthed in the 1880s was like a figure from Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries: an elite warrior buried with a sword, an ax, a spear, arrows, a knife, two shields, and a pair of warhorses. And like a mythical valkyrie (depicted above in a 19th century painting), a new study published today in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology finds that the warrior was a woman—the first high-status female Viking warrior to be identified.

 Excavators first uncovered the battle-ready body among several thousand Viking graves near the Swedish town of Birka, but for 130 years, most assumed it was a man—known only by the grave identifier, Bj 581. A few female Viking soldiers have been unearthed over the years, but none had the trappings of high rank found in the Birka burial—not just weapons and armor, but also game pieces and a board used for planning tactics. In recent years, reanalysis of skeletal characteristics had hinted that the corpse might be female. Now, the warrior’s DNA proves her sex, suggesting a surprising degree of gender balance in the Vikings’ violent social order.

[currentsinbiology]

World’s First Artificial Kidney Is All Set To Replace Dialysis in 2-3 Years. Here is how it works !

A team of university scientists has developed the world’s first artificial kidney technology to be implanted in the body. Their bio-hybrid approach uses living kidney cells in tandem with a series of specialized microchips powered by the human heart to filter waste from the blood stream.

The National Kidney Foundation estimates that over 100,000 patients are on the waiting list for a donor kidney, and over 3,000 are added list each year. The average patient spends 3.6 years waiting for a viable transplant, and may be treated with dialysis while they wait, but only one in three dialysis patient survives longer thanfive years without a transplant.

Transplanted organs from deceased or living donors must be carefully matched in order to avoid tissue rejection, but an artificial solution could potentially bypass these complications and be manufactured to better meet the demand. To address this unmet need, William Fissell from Vanderbilt and Shuvo Roy from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) launched The Kidney Project.

“We can leverage Mother Nature’s 60 million years of research and development and use kidney cells that fortunately for us grow well in the lab dish, and grow them into a bioreactor of living cells,” explained Fissell in a recent article published by Research News @ Vanderbilt. Fissell described the device as a “Santa Claus System,” because it can reliably distinguish between waste chemicals and those nutrients a body should reabsorb.

[peippodraws]

A few people have asked about this recently so I tried to break down my method of painting faces to the best of my ability. I personally like to use gritty chalky brushes, and this particular painting was mainly done with this brush by Mark Winters.

[gonda-deactivated20210511]

Another crap thing I do to make references, if you like it I can make more tutorials but idk if someone would find sense in my crazy stuff hahaha

[babyanimalgifs]

This is truly incredible.

[mhalachai]

This is a textbook example of trophic cascade, where predators influencing the behaviour of their prey species drastically influences species elsewhere on the “food chain” or trophic level.

And it’s amazing.

This is a short documentary on this subject on wolves in Yellowstone:

here’s a slightly longer one (with surprise!narrator Edward Norton):

Everything is connected.

[wunkolo]

Hey dudes this is a FREE extension I just finished for Windows after ages and ages of reverse engineering of Painttool Sai. It provides thumbnails for the .sai file type from right within explorer so you can preview the contents of .sai files and it even works for .sai files within folders like this folder full of .sai files and with Window’s built-in preview panel

Download Here!

[scriptmedic]

Wound Wisdom: Stitches, Sutures, and Staples, Oh My!

Welcome back to Mangled Mondays, where every Monday we talk about another facet of maiming, mangling, mauling, and mistreating your main characters — and all of their friends.

Today we’ll be talking about Stitches, Sutures, and Staples, Oh My! For the rest of the Mangled Mondays series, [click here].

First off, this title is a misnomer. That’s because sutures is the medical word for both stitches and the act of stitching.

The concept of sutures and staples for wound closure is a very simple one: in order for skin to properly heal, the edges of the skin must be held together. With shallow cuts, the tension of the underlying tissue, known as the fascia, may be enough to keep skin together for good healing, but for deeper cuts, this isn’t the case.

Sutures and staples help by making it easy for the skin to start to glom together.

Types of Closures

Traditional Sutures

Traditional sutures themselves are an art form. Humans have been stitching themselves together with horsehair for ages, and “gut” stitches made from cat intestines were popular at one time. Today sutures are typically made from nylon, which must be removed, or dissolvable materials such as Vicryl.

Suture material is rated by size, from 5 (largest, used to stitch tendons together) to 10-0 (smallest, used for eye surgeries).

Muscles are typically sewn with a 4-0 dissolvable suture (such as Vicryl). Some body elements, such as abdominal walls and deep tissues, may have non-absorbable sutures used which will eventually simply become part of the area.

A rough guide for suture size:

[Tumblr Mobile: Read More Here]

Keep reading

[gif87a-com]

[science-fiction-is-real]

STAR TREK IS HERE

[cornwallacebienbenaruoo-deactiv]

I looked it up out of excitement; it’s called “ili”, and it was created by a Japanese company called Logbar.

It costs $249. It supports English, Spanish, Japanese, and Mandarin (for now). It comes with one language, but new languages can be added with updates.

General sales will begin this November, but you can join their waitlist/ learn more information here on their website: https://iamili.com/

Here’s their FAQ page: https://support.iamili.com/hc/en-us

And here are more videos from their website:

The reasoning behind ili’s one-way functionality:

An extended version of the video above posted by OP: 

And User Reviews: 

And you can go here for more updates!: https://updates.iamili.com/

[neurosciencenews]

Why Can’t Cats Resist Thinking Inside the Box?

When young, they used to snuggle with their mom and litter mates, feeling the warmth and soothing contact. Think of it as a kind of swaddling behavior. The close contact with the box’s interior, we believe, releases endorphins – nature’s own morphine-like substances – causing pleasure and reducing stress.

[77zcr-deactivated20240609]

<b>Unreal</b>

[omg-sweetunlikelycollector-me]

Amazing

[midfreakquency]

Can we get a name???

[ororium-z]

This is Chinese artist, Luo Li Rong

Here’s a snippet about her from this article (that also features more photographs of her work, including this sculpture):

Rong has pursued sculpting since an early age. She studied art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, then under the tutelage of sculptor Wang Du, and later she “immersed herself” in figurative sculpture techniques used by European artists in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Their sense of femininity plays a defining role in Rong’s contemporary works, and the stylistic guidelines help carry on the tradition of realistic sculptures in art.

[sworntovalor]

Here’s a “life-hack” for you. Apparently concentrated Kool-Aid can be used as a pretty effective leather dye. I was making a drink while cutting the snaps off some new straps for my pauldrons and I got curious, so I tried it, thinking, “ok even if this works, it will just wash out.” Nope. It took the “dye” (undiluted) in about 3 seconds. After drying for about an hour and a half, it would not wash off in the hottest tap-water. It would not wash out after soaking for 30 minutes. It did not wash out until I BOILED it, and even then, only by a tiny bit and it gave it a weathered look that was kind of cool. Add some waterproofing and I’d wager it would survive even that. That rich red is only one application too. Plus it smells great, lol. So there you go, cheap, fruity smelling leather dye in all the colors Kool-Aid has to offer.

[hammerhide]

WELL THEN!

[pomegranateandivy-deactivated20]

this may be important to some of my followers *and certainly not just getting reblogged because of my costuming and my boyfriends desire for leather armor*

[armeleia]

When I was in middle school we used to use it to dye our hair.  Potent stuff.

[baedlyweathered]

If you’re dying anything with kool-aid it’s best to use SUGAR-FREE ones otherwise the thing you’re dying might get all sticky

[samthor]

the flavor only packets where you are supposed add sugar are the best.  they will dye any natural fiber: leather, wool, cotton, hair,  flax, jute, silk and so forth.  heat the dye water so it is more potent.  let dry then rinse excess out in cold water.  there’s  a whole system to this. 

[typhlonectes]

Tsunami Enabled Hundreds of Species to Raft Across Pacific

The 2011 Japanese tsunami set the stage for something unprecedented. For the first time in recorded history, scientists have detected entire communities of coastal species crossing the ocean by floating on makeshift rafts.

Biologists Detect Longest Transoceanic Rafting Voyage for Coastal Species 

Nearly 300 species have appeared on the shores of Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast attached to tsunami debris, marine biologists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, Williams College and other institutions reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

The tsunami formed March 11, 2011, triggered by an earthquake of 9.0 moment magnitude that struck Japan the same day. When it reached the shore, the tsunami towered 125 feet (38.38 meters) over Japan’s Tōhoku coast and swept millions of objects out to sea, from small pieces of plastic to fishing boats and docks. These kinds of objects, scientists said, helped the species attached to them complete the transoceanic journey…

[hemipelagicdredger]

THIS IS SO COOL

Seriously, this is the first live modern example we have of a mechanism for transoceanic species distribution that has been floated (ha) lots of times in the literature as a mechanism for explaining the appearance of new populations in far-flung locations. It’s generally been accepted by paleontologists as a Thing That Almost Certainly Happens, but this is the first time that we’ve really had any idea how large an event is necessary to cause rafting events large enough to really establish substantial new populations.

Next question: how often do events this large happen? Time to phone a seismologist…hey, @seismogenic!

[seismogenic]

Earthquakes of this size are very infrequent! The higher the magnitude, the fewer there are, so the biggest of the big are also the rarest of the rare.

There have only been five M9+ earthquakes worldwide since seismometers became a thing in the late 1880s:

Kamchatka, 1952 - M9.0

Chile, 1960 - M9.5

Alaska, 1964 - M9.2

Sumatra, 2004 - M9.3

Japan, 2011 - M9.0

There are a number of pre-instrumental historic earthquakes that we can tell were in this size range based on descriptions of shaking, damage, and tsunami inundation, but those are also infrequent.