The Student Scientist

The Tumblr blog for online publication The Student Scientist A hub of students who are both scientists and writers. A center of communication for students to talk about what they hear from the news, something novel and interesting they learnt from class, what they are working on in STE(A)M, and any thoughts/advice they have for fellow & aspiring student scientists.

[stemcourseprep]

Unsure about which calculator you need as a STEM student? With so many options it’s hard to know which one you’ll need now AND in future classes. Here’s my list of 3 calculators that I love that will get you all the way through to graduation.

https://stemcourseprep.com/blog/1940716/best-calculators-for-engineering-students

[quantanaut]

How physicists see other fields:

Biology: squishy physics

Geology: slow physics

Computer Science: virtual physics

Psychology: people physics

Chemistry: impure physics

Math: physics without units

[xponentialdesign]

Mitochondrium aperuit

[ruskiizek-deactivated20180227]

[zoreta]

This is an actual, legit problem in Russia.

Kronotsky Nature Reserve, like most nature reserves, is pretty remote and relies on gas generators for electricity, and keeps jet fuel around in case a rescue copter is needed.  

Thing is, these gas drums are just out in the open. And then the bears found them, and discovered that huffing the fumes got them high to the point of passing out. So now there are all these bears addicted to huffing jet fuel, and they’re teaching it to each other.

One one hand, nobody wants bears addicted to huffing highly flammable, toxic crap. It’s not healthy or safe for the bears to just pass out. 

On the other, remove the jet fuel… and you have a population of bears going through drug withdrawal, and a bunch of nature reserve workers stuck with them in the middle of nowhere.  Additionally, bears have started seeking alternate sources, like trailing behind a helicopter in hopes of fuel leaks, so taking away their source might be… ill advised.

[michaelpoe]

This one of the most Russian things I’ve ever read.

[ru-ulians-deactivated20230522]

Can I just say that Khan Academy is the best thing in the world?

[ji-shuu]

School started about a month ago, and it’s harder to study more now, but I’m still studying a little each day at least. ^^ I restarted my N3 grammar textbook a few weeks ago, but I’ve only just now completed the second lesson haha. 

[pleuras]

Subvisual Subway - Bacteria of the New York City subway- Craig Ward

[arkitortured]

07.06.18 Geometry is my favorite math 😂😂

[thewriterkb]

This image shows an enhanced colour, daytime and stereographic image of Jupiter’s south pole. 

It was imaged by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter.

[studious-annabeth]

27/3/16 | (23/100)

bio notes

been really inactive sorry but school gave us a shit load of tests every week

[lilsqueakers]

So, when labs go to take serology samples, they want to keep the rats as calm and still as possible so nobody gets bit!

Their solution to this? 

pastry bags

dsfkdjf

they even make mouse sized ones

[covid-69]

I’ve used these before and if you leave them inside for too long the pressure inside will burst the blood vessels in their head and they start crying blood

[genspen]

You have your personal emails and school emails all tabbed and clogged on your bookmarks bar. You have two different tumblr accounts you have to switch over on a daily. Your essay’s reference sites are flooding in between your online shopping tabs. You want to separate your academic digital life on Chrome, but you just don’t know how.

Did you know you could by creating a secondary profile?

But why a secondary profile? Exactly for the reasons above. To separate your personal life from your academic life and limit distractions and peering eyes when you’re at school or in a lecture. Personally I have it because I get to sift through my bookmarks and history better when looking for references before. I also have it to separate my Tumblr accounts.

This also helps me focus better on my stuff because I get to block websites and use the pomodoro method much more efficiently!

Do I need to do this? No not necessary if you don’t want to! This is just a personal tip I wanted to share to everyone!

So how do I create a new profile?

Keep reading

[academicssay]

[sofistudious]

🎀 My biology master review, consisting of two full notebooks summarizing the last two years of the class! Took FOREVER but 100% worth it. (I’ll post detailed pics later!!)

[securityunit-ese]

How to educate yourself on the latest research

1. Pick your topic: Tail docking in dogs

2a. Pick your library or research searching source. Google Scholar and ResearchGate are pretty accessible. Research Gate even lets you ask people for help if you’re struggling to find studies relevant to your interest!

2b. If you’re at a university or school, your library might have access to articles behind a paywall. Go forth, before you lose that information!

3. Filter by date to read the latest bits of literature, as things from 30 years ago will be referenced if still relevant and ignored if not. Peer reviewed articles are nice, as are commissioned independent reports that review the assorted literature to give you launch points.

4. An Example:  Canine Tail Docking Independent Report Prepared for the Ministry for Primary Industries (July 2017)

5. Read it. The whole thing. I already read this and others, back in 2017, when I was considering docking my dog for medical reasons (pictures are under cuts)

Here’s some choice bits of information I got from this report, and a few others, while I was thinking about if I should go the plunge to dock my dog (spoiler: decided against and it healed up, no repeat since!)

Does tail docking have the potential to cause significant pain or distress in the case of puppies under 4 days of age?

To understand how behavioural responses to pain (OP note: aka “the puppy was more upset over being picked up!”) may be misleading, two phenomena need to be appreciated:   

Firstly, sometimes responses like vocalizations and struggling may be shown in response to handling alone. These responses are more vehement in animals not used to human handling or that are from species that are naturally demonstrative (…) It has been shown that the intensity of response is higher when a painful procedure occurs rather than handling alone or a sham procedure.

Secondly, some species, including dogs (Hellyer et al, 2007), tend to be stoic even when they experience considerable pain. (…) “Neonates have intact neural pathways for pain transmission, but both neonates and senior animals may not express their pain as plainly as other animals” (pg. 472, Hellyer et al., 2007). Therefore, passive coping should not be mistaken for the absence of pain given the potential anatomical basis for welfare being compromised, and the demonstration of active pain-related behaviours by some docked puppies (Noonan et al, 1996). 

Factors that increase the likelihood of passive responding include prior experience of gentle handling (Muns et al, 2015) and being rapidly returned to the dam where they are able to suckle (Blass et al., 1995; Johnston et al, 2008). Essentially, a puppy returned quickly to the dam is not motivated to escape or alert the dam to their distress, and they have access to anti-inflammatory environment including heat and nursing. Research that better characterises how neonatal puppies experience and express nociception and pain, and factors influencing these outcomes, would be informative. It is likely that careful and expert breeders minimise the disturbance to the puppies and the potential distress caused by tail docking, but it is not plausible that the procedure is rendered completely safe and reliably harmless.

6. Think about what you’re reading. Does it conflict with things you think you know? Or have been told? Are there conflicted sources of information? What is most current and reviewed? Are you concerned that you might have been doing the wrong thing through outdated knowledge? Are you worried if you change your perspective, friends with your old perspective may reject you? If you read up more on this topic, do you think your view might change? How do you think it might actually change you? Why is your view so important to you? How can you find out more? (See step 1)

 And already mentioned, surgeries performed early in life without analgesia make animals more pain-sensitive and anxious (Matthews, 2005).  For this reason the best age for performing a tail dock, when the procedure is appropriate, is a decision that should be made on a case-by-case basis.

It may do them pain now and put them at heightened risk of complications directly related and pain sensitive risks, but are there other potential complications?

In some cases there is evidence that tail docking, even when not acutely painful, may lead to chronic health conditions (LaPrarie et al, 2010). Some dogs may begin to self-mutilate after tail docking, and this behaviour is related to the presence of neuromas (Gross & Carr, 1990).  Neuromas are nerve formations that may develop after nerves are severed, and they are associated with increased sensitivity to pain and chronic pain.

I don’t know if you guys noticed, but I’m a major fan of physical ability. I got upset over my dog’s whiskers being shaved because aside from looking stupid, it affected his ability to accurately judge his jumping! So I also looked into how the tail loss my affect my very active and large dog.

During galloping, synchronized EMG activity of all tail muscles produced reactive torques to counter those generated by cyclic limb movements and kept the tail in a stable position. These results suggest that tail movements are important in maintaining body balance during locomotion in the dog.

and personally, being that my docking-candidate is an undersocialised unskilled rescue mutt, I had some concerns relating to her ability to adequately communicate with the few dogs I let her meet:

In particular, the tail is known to convey crucial information on motivational state and intent through complex interactions of its movement, position and size (Leaver & Reimchen 2008; Artelle et al. 2011). The position and motion of dog’s tail provide information including friendliness, playfulness, fear, submission, dominance and aggression (Wansborough 1996; Coren 2000). Quaranta et al. (2007) found that dogs wag their tails asymmetrically as a function of their motivational state. When dogs see a tail wagging to the right they are more relaxed, when the wag is to the left they become more stressed (Artelle et al. 2011). Tails are important both in visual and olfactory signalling because they carry scent glands (Hughes 1998).

(Let’s be honest, my dog needs all the help she can get and the tail is part of that)

But what about working dogs? Well, there’s studies for that too! Here’s the most pro-docking yet recent one I could find:

Investigations regarding tail injuries in working gundogs and terriers in pest control in Scotland (2014)

The main findings of study one on 2860 dogs were a clear predisposition for tail injury in spaniels (17.8%) and hunt point retrievers (HPR; 15.6%), especially if undocked. Terriers and pointers/setters were at least risk in this population. Being docked by more than one third did not appear to infer increased protection from tail injury compared to a one-third dock. Between 10 and 30 (OP note: ACTIVELY WORKING) spaniel or HPR puppies would need to be docked to one-third to avoid one tail injury examined at a veterinary practice. 

At a glance, I guess we could squint and be like “hah, see! we prevented injury!”

Tail injuries were mainly tail tip injuries and lacerations elsewhere on the tail, they were mainly sustained during work related activities and were mainly caused by brambles and gorse. While 13.5% of all dogs in the survey sustained a tail injury, 9.8% of dogs also sustained injuries to other parts of the body. 

Most of the tail injuries are fucking scratches and cuts. Which if we cross reference with another bit of research, this one a thesis that analysed 8 years of medical data.

It appears that tail injury is rarely observed usually easily treated. Tail docking puppies seems a severe method of preventing such injuries when only 13.8% had injuries or 0.12% of dogs visiting vet clinics require tail amputation.

When we bring in the rest of the dog community aka the pets and show dogs done for arbitrarily decided standards that are a few decades old but claim to be older:

Veterinary practice data showed that 0.59% of dogs had sustained a tail injury, with a significantly higher prevalence (0.90%) in working dog breeds than in non-working dog breeds (0.53%)

I’m a bit sad the latest bit of the study didn’t meet testing standards, but it still poses questions:

The third, prospective, study could not be conducted as planned due to poor compliance. Therefore only minimal analyses were performed and only few deductions can be made, including that the majority of tail injuries were caused by brambles, gorse and fern, were sustained during work and training, and were almost exclusively tail tip injuries. A minority of tail injuries (between 10% and 12%) were reported as having been examined by a veterinarian.

It’s almost like docking the tail for prevention is an unnecessary process for the sheer majority of the dogs, possibly done primarily out of aesthetics, traditions and old wives tails. 

and tbh I remember being greatly surprised to discover that tail docking is linked with urinary incontinence:

One study showed a clear association between acquired incompetence of the urethral sphincter in both dogs and bitches to an overrepresentation of docked breeds, specifically the Old English Sheepdog, Rottweiler, Doberman Pinscher, Weimaraner and Irish Setter (Holt & Thrusfield 1993Holt PE, Thrusfield MV. 1993. 

(That’s not the only study, just the one with the easiest to paste quote because I am lazy)

WAIT, I haven’t viewed any more research into tail docking since I successfully healed my dog! What if there’s new stuff? Okay back to the first few steps and tailor my search to exclude farm animals…there’s nothing new for me there, but still worth reading up on things.

and I guess when in doubt I could always check in with people who dedicate their life’s work to the health of my beloved pets and see what the current consensus there is, as they know more than I do.

Anyway, that’s an example of how we keep up to date on latest literature so we don’t say stupid shit like “they don’t feel it”, “it prevents injury scratches”, it’s “hygienic”, “it’s the breed standard which has changed so many times” or “i’m a super tough person who’s going to post amputated puppy tails at the general international populace and make jokes about their possibility as keychains to show what a real true blue serious dog owner i am”. 

Versus real reasons that should be discussed with your vet to have it done in a pain controlled and hygienic manner on a case by case basis.

To help ease on the overload of information, here’s my undocked english springer spaniel getting hit in the face by the tail of my tail-injury-recovered mutt:

and my next spaniel, which comes from multi-use lines, will be undocked too :) because I owe it to my dogs to keep myself as on top on as much research as humanely possible to ensure I am continually improving on their health, their care, their management. Hope this was interesting and informative for anyone who read all that! To anyone who didn’t. Well. Fine. PS dewclaws are useful and when kept on the dog, they’re actually the least injured bit of the foot for active dogs, when off the dog they increase the dog’s chance of injury

[thecoffeedesk]

aaa the most challenging class in my senior year — statistics 😰📊📚 here are my review notes for my finals earlier this year!

i’m currently on summer break so i try to be as productive as possible through the online classes on skillshare! the classes include bullet journaling, calligraphy, photography, coding, marketing and more. luckily, skillshare has partnered up with me to offer my followers two free months of premium classes! SIGN UP HERE TO GET IT: https://skl.sh/thecoffeedesk

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

ICE CONFIRMED AT THE MOON’S POLES

In the darkest and coldest parts of its polar regions, a team of scientists has directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface. These ice deposits are patchily distributed and could possibly be ancient. At the southern pole, most of the ice is concentrated at lunar craters, while the northern pole’s ice is more widely, but sparsely, spread.

A team of scientists, led by Shuai Li of the University of Hawaii and Brown University and including Richard Elphic from NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, used data from NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3) instrument to identify three specific signatures that definitively prove there is water ice at the surface of the Moon.

M3, aboard the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft, launched in 2008 by the Indian Space Research Organization, was uniquely equipped to confirm the presence of solid ice on the Moon. It collected data that not only picked up the reflective properties we’d expect from ice, but was able to directly measure the distinctive way its molecules absorb infrared light, so it can differentiate between liquid water or vapor and solid ice.

Most of the newfound water ice lies in the shadows of craters near the poles, where the warmest temperatures never reach above minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Because of the very small tilt of the Moon’s rotation axis, sunlight never reaches these regions.

Previous observations indirectly found possible signs of surface ice at the lunar south pole, but these could have been explained by other phenomena, such as unusually reflective lunar soil.

With enough ice sitting at the surface – within the top few millimeters – water would possibly be accessible as a resource for future expeditions to explore and even stay on the Moon, and potentially easier to access than the water detected beneath the Moon’s surface.

Learning more about this ice, how it got there, and how it interacts with the larger lunar environment will be a key mission focus for NASA and commercial partners, as we endeavor to return to and explore our closest neighbor, the Moon.

IMAGE….The image shows the distribution of surface ice at the Moon’s south pole (left) and north pole (right), detected by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper instrument. Blue represents the ice locations, plotted over an image of the lunar surface, where the gray scale corresponds to surface temperature (darker representing colder areas and lighter shades indicating warmer zones). The ice is concentrated at the darkest and coldest locations, in the shadows of craters. This is the first time scientists have directly observed definitive evidence of water ice on the Moon’s surface. Credits: NASA