«Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is. Or occasionally: It is raining. I do not like it.» Illustration series for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
«It does not matter that you do not understand the reason. You are the Beloved Child of the House. Be comforted. And I am comforted.»
Illustration series for Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
I've asked this question before and been surprised by the results, now I have access to more weirdos it's your problem:
It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.
Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.
Not naming options to skew votes but...
I think there's something fundamentally baffling with the way most of you think.
according to wikipedia there are 44-50 countries in europe so i just went with 50. have fun!
one of the most infuriating things about becoming an adult is when you realize that it actually is 10x easier to solve problems by making a phone call vs literally any other communication method
Hi Tumblr! It’s been [redacted] years that I haven’t posted something, which is rather silly actually. Fixing that.
Anyway, here’s Harrowhark Nonagesimus from The Locked Tomb series! :) Enjoy!
Day 2 in new flat. I am going to attempt to use... The contraption
Contraption lowered. This is the scariest part of contraption usage, once you release it the drop is very fast
Contraption loaded!! Here goes
Successful contrapting!!
important thing to note about the contraption: i have no idea how old it is. building is 19th century and it could potentially be an original feature. however you can buy ones that look just like it online so who knows. i know the previous owner didn't install it.
anyway reviews are in:
we like the contraption :)
i'll go first my parents almost named me felicity. which would've been so cool but i definitely would've been like 5x crazier if i was named that
If I ask nicely will people reblog this and tell me what their most common breakfast is? Not your favorite necessarily, just what you have for breakfast most frequently? 🙏🏽
what's worrisome is that everyone has more or less the same primordial version of history these days when you look into mainstream discourses, just like putin. ukrainians say they're actually the real inheritors of kievan rus, the russians are asiatic barbarians. israelis say they have a 2,000-year-old biblical claim to the land. azeris and armenians go back and forth over who has lived in the caucasus since time immemorial. china says taiwan was always chinese and pulls out 17th century fishing maps for the south china sea. and so on, and so forth, none of this broaches the fact that the real problem here is that people are getting bombed, tortured, and raped in the name of these pathetic fantasies, not the veracity of the claims
so i just found out that the name for the compound that generates bioluminescence is called luciferin. which sounds fake but it's not. and it's literally named after lucifer. not the devil but the latin word meaning light bearer. i love chemistry sometimes
During WWII, the Japanese Imperial Navy would harvest bioluminescent plankton, dry it, powder it, and disperse the vials to soldiers. In the dark of night, a pinch of Luciferin and a dollop of spit rubbed between the palms could produce a faint glow; just enough light to read a map, but not so much you give away your position.
This was just one of the many gifts of nature that Imperial Japan weaponized in this expansionistic period. I recall reading about the inclusion of freeze-resistant liver-oil of deep-sea sharks in the lubricant of the engines of the legendary Zero aircraft.
But, yes, the molecule responsible for bioluminescence is named after Lucifer Morningstar; Bearer of Light, Bringer of Dawn.
Cool shit.
No, no, hey now, you do not get to just casually drop a “oh yea that one time I” on fucking genetic engineering it’s storytime I simply must know some fucking context for how and why you were injecting retroviral luciferinase codons into anything
Ah, the context is quite boringly ordinary in that I was doing a PhD in stem cell research, specifically looking at the immune response to regenerative medicine therapies (liver organoids, initially stem cell derived but then I moved on to primary organoids because stem cell ones couldn’t survive in vivo), using humanized mouse models.
Assessing the survival of the transplanted organoid graft in the humanized mice was super time consuming, to the point that I basically spent nearly every weekend of second year doing nothing but sectioning mouse kidneys and basically made no real progress, so I figured if I could edit my cells to express luciferase, an increasingly common and popular technique in these kinds of studies, then I could do live bioluminescence imaging on the mice after transplant and assess graft survival or destruction that way.
I managed to transduce a couple of organoid lines with the luciferase plasmid (using a lentiviral vector, working in CL2 in the middle of a heatwave was… interesting), and there was a clear bioluminescent signal immediately after transplanting the cells. The problem was that the signal quickly disappeared in all animals, including the control mice, and histology later showed that loss of signal didn’t correlate to graft destruction.
So either the cells were losing the ability to express luciferase once transplanted, or (probably the case) loads of cells died off after the initial transplant due to stress or whatever, and the surviving number weren’t enough to be detected through the tissue and skin of the mouse.
So I basically wasted months of work and a whole lot of expensive reagents for a complete dead end but eh… that’s how it is with PhDs sometimes 🤷🏼♀️
fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.
so i just found out that the name for the compound that generates bioluminescence is called luciferin. which sounds fake but it's not. and it's literally named after lucifer. not the devil but the latin word meaning light bearer. i love chemistry sometimes
During WWII, the Japanese Imperial Navy would harvest bioluminescent plankton, dry it, powder it, and disperse the vials to soldiers. In the dark of night, a pinch of Luciferin and a dollop of spit rubbed between the palms could produce a faint glow; just enough light to read a map, but not so much you give away your position.
This was just one of the many gifts of nature that Imperial Japan weaponized in this expansionistic period. I recall reading about the inclusion of freeze-resistant liver-oil of deep-sea sharks in the lubricant of the engines of the legendary Zero aircraft.
But, yes, the molecule responsible for bioluminescence is named after Lucifer Morningstar; Bearer of Light, Bringer of Dawn.
Cool shit.
reblog to give the person you reblogged from the strength to complete The Task™