#sci

bpod-bpod
bpod-bpod

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Renewal Noticed

The gall bladder and bile ducts and associated small glands are a part of the digestive system, distinct from the liver, known as the extrahepatic biliary tree. This study reveals the mechanisms underlying how, like the gut, these components constantly renew their lining cells (epithelium)

Read the published research paper here

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congrats on going independent bpod! you should update the link to your twitter if you changed that toomedsci
bpod-bpod
bpod-bpod

Gather Round

The immune system's B cells recognise their foe (antigens) with receptors (also known as immunoglobulin or antibody) on their cell surface. Here, super resolution microscopy combined with 4D image analysis reveals how these receptors on the cell surface localise into clusters as ridges and finger-like projections called microvilli to aid recognition of their targets

Read the published research paper here

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medsciooooo the microscopy
roach-works
femmenietzsche

Researchers have argued that pointy eggs are common to cliff-nesting birds because they roll in a circle and are less likely to tumble off an edge. Or that asymmetric eggs pack together more easily and would allow females with large clutches to incubate their broods efficiently. Or that spherical eggs are stronger and less prone to breaking, or use the least amount of shell for a given volume, which would be useful for birds that can’t get enough calcium in their diet.

“There are a lot of hypotheses, but no conclusive explanation or theory,” says Stoddard, who’s an evolutionary biologist based at Princeton University. “It was a good puzzle.”

To solve it, Stoddard teamed up with L. Mahadevan, a biophysicist at Harvard University who has studied “how leaves ripple, how tendrils coil, and how the brain folds, among other things.” He realized that all eggs could be described according to two simple characteristics—how asymmetric they are, and how elliptical they are. Measure these traits, and you can plot every bird egg on a simple graph. They did that for the eggs of 1,400 bird species, whose measurements Stoddard extracted from almost 50,000 photos. It was the resulting graph that revealed the left-field nature of chicken eggs.

Pretty interesting, actually

elodieunderglass

Can I just share this graph from the original paper:

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BEHOLD………. THE EGGNESS OF EGG

hell yeah.zoologysci
leagueofaveragefolk
sspacegodd

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The Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector is a physics experiment the size of a 15-story building buried under a mountain in Japan. The detector is full of ultra-pure water, which can leach the nutrients out of your hair and dissolve metal.

deathcomes4u

#one of my favourite stories is how they installed all the pmt's (the gold things)#they filled it very slowly whilst some grad students and engineers sat in a boat and rowed it around and gradually installed the pmts#though at one point when it got to aboht halfway full one of the pmt's broke#It then preceeded to send a shock wave through the water and caused any pmt's that we're submerged to shatter#needless to say that wasn't a great day and we've learned to make less shatterable things#the real kicker is these things are fucking expensive (and surprisingly big!) and I think the glass involved was hand blown#they then had to drain the whole thing and sweep up the glass and redistribute the remaining ones (with shock proof sleeves)#eventually they got enough pmt's manufactured they could actually operate at full pmt capacity#but honestly what an l#also in the tweet 'it can help scientists detect dying stars' is true but what a dramatic way to put it#when a star dies it outputs a shit tonne of neutrinos at a specific energy range and then all the neutrino detectors get a rate uptick#OHOHOH it's a part of SNEWS which is pronounced 'snooze' along with some other neutrino detectors like IceCube (please let me talk about#IceCube please...) and SNEWS is SuperNovaEarlyWarningSystem#Sorry I'm getting carried away talking about neutrinos I'll stop now

@dragonsareimagining YOU GET THE FUCK BACK HERE AND START TALKING ABOUT ICE CUBE RIGHT FUCKING NOW DO NOT EDGE ME WITH SCIENCE LIKE THIS

dragonsareimagining

I adore every single person who has indulged my nerding out on this post but also nobody is appreciating how silly the boat thing is

like, look at these nerds:


Three people in an orange boat installing electronics into the Super Kamiokande experimentALT

(it also puts how big super-k is into perspective)


ANYWAY ICECUBE MAY NOT BE SUPER-K BUT IT IS SUPER COOL

(literally, it's at the south pole)

IceCube is one of the few physics experiments with a cool name that isn't a hilariously tortured acronym (see: ATLAS, COBRA, NOvA, etc)

It does look hella evil, however:


IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South PoleALT

this is clearly a supervillan lair

though some scientists are locked in here for months at a time over the winter period with no natural sunlight and just other scientists for company so I wouldn't be surprised if an actual supervillan came out of here

scihell yeah.
dduane
mini-wrants

Why this is so important:

Typical commercial white paint gets warmer rather than cooler when subjected to sunlight or other light sources. Paints on the market that are designed to reject heat reflect only 80% to 90% of sunlight and can’t make surfaces cooler than their surroundings.

In comparison, the world’s whitest paint reflects 98.1% of solar heat away from its surface.

Because the paint absorbs less heat from the sun than it emits, a surface coated with this paint is cooled below the surrounding temperature without consuming power.

Using this formulation to cover a roof area of about 1,000 square feet could result in a cooling power of 10 kilowatts, more powerful than the air conditioners used by most houses. At SXSW, researchers demonstrated the effects of the difference with two model barns sitting under direct halogen lights: one painted in commercial paint and one in Purdue’s white paint. Judges were able to compare thermometers reading the barns’ internal temperatures and to feel the difference in the roofs. The barn painted in Purdue’s technology consistently held cooler internal temperatures by 8-10 degrees Fahrenheit. The “whitest white” barn roof was also much cooler to the touch, prompting many surprised responses from judges and viewers.

While Ruan’s original paint formula is massively efficient, it required a layer 0.4 millimeters thick to achieve subambient radiant cooling. The newer, thinner formulation can achieve similar cooling with a layer just 0.15 millimeters thick.

The new paint also incorporates voids of air, which make it highly porous. This lower density, together with the thinness, provides another huge benefit: reduced weight. The newer paint weighs 80% less than the original paint yet achieves nearly identical solar reflectance – 97.9%, compared to the original formula’s 98.1%.

This could be an important piece in fighting global warming. Imagine if the city of New York City repainted all the skyscraper roofs with a paint that cools down buildings.

broooo?!also new york is a weird example to pull there. pick a city with more exposed pavement and fewer trees. atlanta?techscii also have to ask what makes you think a skyscraper has a roof with like. surface area.do you mean 'high rise'.
axiomofhope
the-real-numbers-deactivated202

At first, González-Acuña did not want to devote resources to what he knew to be a millenary, impossible to solve problem. But upon the insistence of Héctor Chaparro-Romo, he decided to accept the challenge.
After months of working on solving the problem, Rafael González-Acuña recalls, “I remember one morning I was making myself a slice of bread with Nutella, when suddenly, I said out loud: Mothers! It is there!”
(Note: Mothers, from the Spanish word “Madres,” means, of course, many moms. But in this context it is equivalent to the expression “Holy sh*t!” in English, or, to a lesser extent, “Eureka!” in Greek.)
He then ran to his computer and started programming the idea. When he executed the solution and saw that it worked, he says he jumped all over the place. It is unclear whether he finished eating the bread with Nutella.
Afterwards, the duo ran a simulation and calculated the efficacy with 500 rays, and the resulting average satisfaction for all examples was 99.9999999999%.

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once again, legendary inspiration strikes during a food break

from 2019sci
random-shit-writing
gowns

I Can Eat Glass

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick's original page disappeared in or about June 2004.

As Mollick explained, visitors to a foreign country have "an irresistible urge" to say something in that language, and whatever they say (a cited example being along the lines of "Where is the bathroom?") usually marks them as tourists immediately. Saying "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me", however, ensures that the speaker "will be viewed as an insane native, and treated with dignity and respect".

townofcrosshollow

Genuinely assumed this was unreality but nope

sciartone daresays.language
architeuthisducks-blog
gatheringbones

[“Fungal appetites are diverse, but there are some materials they won’t break down unless they have to. In one of his workshops, McCoy explained how he had trained Pleurotus mycelium to digest one of the most commonly littered items in the world, cigarette butts, more than 750 thousand tons of which are thrown away every year. Unused cigarette butts will break down, given time, but used cigarette butts are saturated with toxic residues that impede the process. McCoy had weaned Pleurotus onto a diet of used butts by gradually phasing out the alternatives. Over time, the fungus had “learned” how to use them as its sole food source. A time-lapse video showed the mycelium seeping steadily upward through a jam jar filled with crumpled tar-stained butts. A burly oyster mushroom soon bundled itself up and out of the top.

In fact, it is just as much “remembering” as “learning.” A fungus won’t produce an enzyme it doesn’t need. Enzymes, or even entire metabolic pathways, can lie dormant in fungal genomes for generations. For the Pleurotus mycelium to digest the used cigarette butts it might have to dust off an unused metabolic move. Or it might deploy an enzyme normally used for something else and press it into the service of a new cause. Many fungal enzymes, like lignin peroxidases, are not specific. This means that a single enzyme can serve as a multitool, allowing the fungus to metabolize different compounds with similar structures.

As it happens, many toxic pollutants—including those in cigarette butts—resemble the by-products of lignin breakdown. In this sense, to confront Pleurotus mycelium with used cigarette butts is to offer it a commonplace challenge. Much of radical mycology is underwritten by the radical chemistry of white rot fungi. However, it isn’t always easy to predict what a given fungal strain will metabolize. McCoy told us about his attempts to grow Pleurotus mycelium on dishes spotted with drops of the herbicide glyphosate. Some of the Pleurotus strains avoided the drops. Some grew straight through them. Some grew up to the edge of a drop and stopped growing. “It took those ones a week to work out how to break it down,” McCoy recalled. He likened fungi to jailers with bunches of enzymatic keys that can unlock certain chemical bonds. Some strains might have the right key ready to go. Others might have it buried somewhere inside their genome but choose to avoid the new substance anyway. Others might take a week to riffle through the bunch of keys, trying different ones until they get lucky.”]

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life

ohhh my god he conditioned them into upregulating cigarettebuttase ahhhhhhhhhhrolling open the histone like hey we need this. leave this one open. I know we don't really use it but like. we're gonnayou never use your blender and you have it like six layers deep in storagebut you move somewhere where you can only basically get frozen fruit and the whole structure of your life changesI'm such a sucker. every time they're like we got bacteria species to upregulate plasticase I'm like truly now the healing can begin.but this time. fungi. we already know they're better than ussci
unpretty
great-and-small

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

great-and-small

“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”

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bogleech

This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.

thepastisaroadmap

[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:

Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.

We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]

But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?

End image description]

headspace-hotel

because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing

rackiera

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I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation

againscizoologyq
catchaspark
disgruntled-foreign-patriarch

May he plow the Lord’s fields in heaven

en-shaedn

Dave Brandt was probably the longest running no-till farmer in the state; he'd been running his land no-till since 1971. He experimented with fertilizers, cover crops, and different irrigation techniques and he'd been doing all of that for a very long time.

The guy was an institution all on his own; look at this.

  • The “A” profile in his soil is now 47 inches deep compared to less than 6 inches in 1971 and acts like a giant sponge for water infiltration and retention.
  • From 1971 through 1989 David used an average of 150-250 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre to grow his corn crops. After adding peas and radishes as a cover crop mix, he cut his nitrogen needs in half and was able to get it down to 125 pounds per acre.
  • When he added multiple species and became more aggressive with his cover crop mixes, he was able to achieve an additional drop in applied fertility. His starter fertilizer is now just 2 lbs of N, 4 lbs of P, and 5 lbs of K. His corn crop now only requires 20-30 lbs of N throughout the entire growing season. He requires no fertility for his soybeans, relying on fertility gained solely through his cover crops. He uses only 40 lbs of 10 N – 10 P – 10 K for his small grains.
  • Ten years ago (source study published 2019) David stopped using any fungicides and insecticides. This occurred at a time when fungicide and insecticide use has increased significantly with the average commodity farmer.
  • Four years ago he stopped using any seed treatment, including neonicotinoids.
  • His cash crop yields have been increasing by an average of 5% annually for the past 5-6 years, with far less fertilizer and no fungicides, insecticides or seed treatment.
  • What started as a basic heavy clay soils when David purchased the farm in 1971 have been officially re-classified by Ohio State University soil scientists as a highly fertile silty loam soil.
oh so he was also a literal angela genius of perserverancesci
architeuthisducks-blog
headspace-hotel

y'all ever reach the end of google

headspace-hotel

I'm starting to gain insight into why people turn into conspiracy theorists. Some topics are so totally neglected that it looks like they were intentionally and maliciously erased, instead of falling victim to arbitrary lack of interest.

I think it's a vicious cycle; when people don't know something exists, they're not curious about it. Also, people use conceptual categories to think about things, and when a topic falls between or outside of conceptual categories, it can end up totally omitted from our awareness even though it very much exists and is important.

This post is about native bamboo in the United States and the fact that miles-wide tracts of the American Southeast used to be covered in bamboo forests

headspace-hotel

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@icannotgetoverbirds It already is a maddening, bizarre research hole that I have been down for the past few weeks.

Basically, I learned that we have native bamboo, that it once formed an ecosystem called the canebrake that is now critically endangered. The Southeastern USA used to be full of these bamboo thickets that could stretch for miles, but now the bamboo only exists in isolated patches

And THEN.

I realized that there is a little fragment of a canebrake literally in my neighborhood.

HI I AM NOW OBSESSED WITH THIS.

I did not realize the significance until I showed a picture to the ecologist where i work and his reaction was "Whoa! That is BIG."

Apparently extant stands of river cane are mostly just...little sparse thickety patches in forest undergrowth. This patch is about a quarter acre monotypic stand, and about ten years old.

I dive down the Research Hole(tm). Everything new I learn is wilder. Giant river cane mainly reproduces asexually. It only flowers every few decades and the entire clonal colony often dies after it flowers. Seeds often aren't viable.

It's barely been studied enough to determine its ecological significance, but there are five butterfly species and SEVEN moth species dependent on river cane. Many of these should probably be listed as endangered but there's not enough research

There's a species of CRITICALLY ENDANGERED PITCHER PLANT found in canebrakes that only still remains in TWO SPECIFIC COUNTIES IN ALABAMA

Some gardening websites list its height as "over 6 feet" "Over 10 feet" There are living stands that are 30+ feet tall, historical records of it being over 40 feet tall or taller. COLONIAL WRITINGS TALK ABOUT CANES "AS THICK AS A MAN'S THIGH."

The interval between flowering is anyone's guess, and WHY it happens when it does is also anyone's guess. Some say 40-50 years, but there are records of it blooming in as little time as 3-15 years.

It is a miracle plant for filtering pollution. It absorbs 99% of groundwater nitrate contaminants. NINETY NINE PERCENT. It is also so ridiculously useful that it was a staple of Native American material culture everywhere it grew. Baskets! Fishing poles! Beds! Flutes! Mats! Blowguns! Arrows! You name it! You can even eat the young shoots and the seeds.

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I took these pictures myself. This stuff in the bottom photo is ten feet tall if it's an inch.

Arundinaria itself is not currently listed as endangered, but I'm growing more and more convinced that it should be. The reports of seeds being usually unviable could suggest very low genetic diversity. You see, it grows in clonal colonies; every cane you see in that photo is probably a clone. The Southern Illinois University research project on it identified 140 individual sites in the surrounding region where it grows.

The question is, are those sites clonal colonies? If so, that's 140 individual PLANTS.

Also, the consistent low estimates of the size Arundinaria gigantea attains (6 feet?? really??) suggests that colonies either aren't living long enough to reach mature size or aren't healthy enough to grow as big as they are supposed to. I doubt we have any clue whatsoever about how its flowers are pollinated. We need to do some research IMMEDIATELY about how much genetic diversity remains in existing populations.

headspace-hotel

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You'll never guess what I spent a month frantically researching myself to madness about earlier this year!

jesus. okay. wow.sci