Anonymous asked:
For you 🍁👑🍑💐🥰👽
That is very sweet of you, even if I only understand like, half of it <3
Anonymous asked:
Thoughts on the organic chemist who just complained to me that ethidium bromide was actually perfectly safe and molecular biologists are irrationally scared of it?
First off: sorry this took me so long, tumblr has developed a regrettable tendency to eat any and all message notifications.
Next off:
*hand wiggles* actually. Like, it's classed as 'suspected carcinogen' in Germany, but we don't actually...have proof that it actually does cause tumors, studies on mice have not shown mutagenic effects (here). It is acutely toxic, but the LD50 in rats is Fucking Massive. We're talking 1.5g/kg bodyweight. That's the sort of dosage you don't commonly encounter anywhere unless you drink the stuff straight out of the bottle (please don't).
THAT SAID. I'm all in favour of being a lil bit scared of stuff like that and treating it with care and thus using the right gloves for handling it - or using alternatives, though the alternative stains aren't very well studied either when it comes to ruling out if they're mutagenic themselves, which leaves us at a bit of an impassé there.
Plus, a lot of alternatives are Fucking Expensive and a lot of labs don't have that kind of money, so they prefer shelling out for the correct gloves/PPE over the expensive dyes.
So generally, why we don't actually know for sure it's carcinogenic, I think caution is the name of the game. None of us want to be the person to confirm by personal experience that yeah, ethidium bromide can in fact give you cancer.
fadingfireworkcould I ask you to talk a little more about this? I haven’t heard anything about this
Sure thing!
Essentially, Tumblr’s come up with a subscription service, where you can make part of your posts private, unless someone pays money for it, in which case they can see them.
That this is a McFuckingTerrible idea on a website that hosts so many fanworks, which tend to live and die by the ‘i am not making money of this’ defense of Fair Use is..fairly obvious to anyone not tumblr, apparently.
As a blog whose main reason for existence is ‘i want people to have free access to someone to explain them things’ this is basically 100% anathema to the base existence of this blog.
tumblr’s rolled it out on beta for not everyone yet, apparently, going by their FAQ
and i’ll be real, considering the amount of absolutely horrendous code fail this website is famous for (shoutout to xkit and newxkit for making it useable) i wouldn’t give them any sort of payment information on pain of death.
IMO it’s generally a horrible idea, and fates be willing it will die the quiet, ignominious death it deserves.
So tumblr has apparently quietly installed that ‘post+’ nonsense.
I’ve just seen it in my account dropdown.
Heartfelt: FUCK THAT.
In case it wasn’t abundantly clear: i do not support this, i do not endorse this, and it will never find its way to this blog.
On the danger of getting political on here:
if you were one of the people applauding for medical personnel, and now you could get vaxxed but choose not to:
I wish you a very STEP ON LEGO.
signed: hospital lab tech, very tired.
So I've been reading that a heart rate in the 50 bpm isn't anything to worry about in the age range of 20s if one is active every day
Honestly it's not so much a matter of age, it's a matter of training. A trained athlete, especially endurance athletes can have heart rates of well below 50. I'm saying 'somewhere between 35 and 60' if they're at rest.
Now this is important, these low rates are resting heart rates, meaning 'person is entirely relaxed and sitting/lying on the couch and hasn't been physically for a while before'
The reason for that is that endurance sports train your heart muscles to become stronger and also larger. Something similar happens to the lung volume actually, meaning that the breath frequency gets lower too. And that's not just from 'being active'. When I run around the lab all day I'm active, i'm on my feet and moving. That's not the same as cardio exercise or endurance exercise or any of the things people do to deliberately build up lung and heart volume.
That said, the phenomenon itself can be quite entertaining if the medical professional taking the pulse doesn't know they got someone like that in front of them.
The last time my dad was in the hospital (mountain biking accident), one of the training nurses took his pulse and got Very Nervous when he came up with like 45-ish. My dad was 49 at the time. My dad has also successfully completed several Iron Man Triathlon competitions and is still VERY much going out to do pretty strenuous exercise every day. This heart rate is completely normal for him.
What is or isn't a 'too low' heart rate really depends on the overall condition of the person. Age plays a role, but exercise plays a bigger one, and of course if the person has any actual issues. Some people tend to have a naturally lower pulse rate than others. There can be a huge individual span to not just where your resting pulse is, but also how quickly it rises and falls again when you exert yourself, where the top rate is, if you are taking any medications or have medical conditions, all that stuff.
There are general guidelines that go for most of the populations but if you're an outlier (endurance athlete, medical issues) that guideline may have to be adjusted quite a bit to establish YOUR acceptable range.
biologyweeps reblogged
So there’s a challenge being run by Wyatt Andrews on twitter and instagram called #DinosThroughThe Decades, the aim being to compile a timeline of our scientific understanding of one prehistoric species as represented through palaeoart! I decided to do Stegoceras validum, since I feel like it’s gone through a lot of changes that aren’t appreciated as they should be! And so, here’s my breakdown of each drawing in this timeline:
1903
The year in which Stegoceras was described, as Stegoceras validus, by Lawrence Lambe. The identity of the fossil was pretty much completely up in the air at the time, since all we had of it at that point was the dome of the skull:
One of the conclusions that Lambe reached, and the one I’ve gone with here, is that the dome was the base of a large single horn on the snout of a ceratopsian dinosaur. There is sadly no actual palaeoart depicting Stegoceras like this, so I based my reconstruction heavily on Charles Knight’s beautiful ceratopsian illustrations from the 1890s and 1900s.
1918
By 1918, Lambe was now suggesting that Stegoceras was not a ceratopsian, but a member of the group stegosauria, which included ankylosaurs and stegosaurs and is now known as thyreophora. He even erected a new clade for Stegoceras, psalisauridae, which did not last long.
This was probably the toughest one for me to work out since the brief is basically “a thick-headed 1910s-style generic thyreophoran”, and I ended up working mostly from Knight’s Stegosaurus and improvising the armour. That said, it’s a wonderfully weird concept and it’s one of my favourite end products!
1924
We finally know what the rest of Stegoceras looks like! Charles Gilmore described a complete skull and partial skeleton of Stegoceras, and very helpfully for me it included a skeletal diagram!
But yes, the small birdlike elephant in the room: Gilmore’s description reassigned our beautiful bumpy-head boy to the now-considered-dubious tooth taxon “Troodon”. This ended up with the kinda confusing situation of having what is now known as pachychephalosauridae being grouped under the name “troodontidae”, which now refers to a clade of dromaeosaurs. Even after the clade name was changed, new pachycephalosaurs were still being described as species of “Troodon” all the way into the 1950s!
1980s
The way that palaeontology viewed dinosaurs was beginning to alter during the 70s and 80s, and dinosaurs were starting to run faster and lift their tails up off the ground. The last few decades had been good for pachycephalosauridae too, with new fossils showing a much greater scope of the group’s diversity in North America and Asia, and “Troodon” finally being ejected from the group as recently as 1987 by Phil Currie.
My main inspiration for this one was these awkward dinosaur book illustrations from around this era that just seem kinda off. Either it’s something about how cylindrical and formless the limbs are, or the stiffness in the pose, but I find them charmingly odd. They look very much like plastic dinosaur toys.
1990s
The Dinosaur Revolution is in full swing at this point, and dinosaurs are tending to look leaner, meaner, and kinda in need of a decent meal. The 90s and the 2000s really form a bit of a single era in dinosaur palaeoart, with dinosaurs in wiry muscle and skin and not much else, often adorned with spikes and osteoderms and the occasional single spiny dewlap. It was a weird time and of all of them this one was the hardest to draw faithfully and correctly without feeling like I was making a parody.
2020s
And finally, my comfort zone! The impact of the book All Yesterdays on the trajectory of modern palaeoart is truly hard to understate, since it basically pushed weird, experimental palaeoart into the mainstream palaeo consciousness. Moving on from the almost literally bare bones dinosaurs of the 2000s, we’ve started rounding out or dinosaurs a bit, and inferring speculative structures and behaviours from what we observe in the fossil record and in the world around us!
The details of integument including quills but also the foot scales and skin on the legs are inferred from the absolutely stunning Psitaccosaurus specimen from a few years ago, since it’s really the closest species we have to pachycephalosaurs that preserves those details.
I think a big part of the culture shift around palaeoart in the last few years is the acknowledgement that we as palaeoartists can never reconstruct a species 100% accurately, and that there is room for interpretation and speculation. If you’re guaranteed to be wrong anyway, you might as well experiment and try out new things, so long as it doesn’t contradict the things that are knowable!
And that’s brought us all the way through almost 120 years of Stegoceras validum, and also 120 years of cultural and artistic evolution in the way we look at and understand dinosaurs! Thanks for sticking with me, I hope you enjoyed the ride!
Owlet? Here’s a heartening moment of Halloween Biology Win.
These people (in contrast to the old horror movies that persistently stocked Castle Dracula with flying foxes) are costumed as the correct bat species for a spooky Halloween effect:
https://testosteronetwink.tumblr.com/post/665074229627256832#notes
Oh that's cute as hell, thank you for showing me!
Submitted by anonymous
biologyweeps reblogged
Anonymous asked:
I thought it would delight you to know that ants do have a sort of funeral mound for their dead
yes there is a name for this! necrophoresis is a process with social insects where the bodies are taken to a specific location on the outside of ( or within ) the nest - ants tend to keep them all in the same place, and the way an ant is signaled to be "dead" by its other members is through the release of a chemical called oliec acid
theres even been a few experiments where live ants were coated in the same chemical and other ants treated the live ants....exactly as though they were dead and tried dragging them into the pile
Anonymous asked:
A friend just called me and explained they felt a bit sick after injecting hormones from a syringe they had pre-filled a few days earlier for ease of use. There are bacteriostatic additives in there, so how risky is that?
1) This is a question for your doctor, if your friend keeps feeling bad, or goodness prevents, gets worse, they gotta see a medical professional asap
2) Don't Do It.
Yes it's easier to use that way, but once it's inside that syringe it's open, even if you recap it. Even the best bacteriostatics aren't perfect, and there are non-bacteria things that can grow in a syringe. You want exactly none of them in your blood stream.
This is a fantastic way to give yourself sepsis so please, PLEASE ask your friend to not repeat performance. I understand the appeal of having it pre-done, but it's really, truly, not safe to do something like that in a home setting.
Anonymous asked:
With all the talk about vaccines and boosters these days, I had a shower thought and wanted to ask someone who knows more about biology than me. Say you are vaccinated for X disease. You are exposed to X disease and it gets into your system. Your prepared immune system destroys X disease before you get badly sick. From an immunological standpoint, does that "boost" your immune system response to that disease? Why or why not? (Sorry if I'm misusing terms.) If you have time to reply, thanks! :)
Yes, though what the 'boost' actually is does need some explanation.
The 'boost' isn't like a general improvement to your immune system or anything.
What it does is up the count of antibodies in your blood again, and basically 'refresh' what protection you had. The same thing happens with bloodgrouping, if someone HAS an antibody against a blood group, but at a level that cannot be detected anymore. The body can still make those antibodies, but you don't see them in a regular test anymore.
However, if you give the patient a blood unit that contains the thing they have antibody's against, you WILL see the antibody reaction again, because the body will start releasing the relevant ones into the bloodstream pretty quickly.
It functions the same way for antibodies the body forms against diseases, which can determine if you need a booster shot.
Again, an example: medical staff usually has to have had a Hepatitis B vaccine, because there's a fairly large chance that if you injure yourself on a used needle on someone who has it, you'll get infected to.
Now usually, there need to be booster shots for this. However, the interval for it can be quite variable. Every other year when I get my bloodchecks at work, a titer (that is, the amount of antibodies, in this case against HepB) is measured. As long as my titer stays above a certain threshold, I won't need a booster shot even if the usual number of years has already elapsed. That can happen either because well, individual variance in how slowly a titer drops off, or because you got (re)exposed. The latter is really, really common with Tetanus, because it's such an ubiquitous germ in the soil, so chances that you will just periodically
Now antibodies aren't the only thing determining immunity, but it's one of them, and one that can be relatively easily measured.
I hope that was a helpful answer to you!
okay here’s the thing:
We don’t know what exactly causes vitiligo. That is, we know that it happens because the body destroys the pigment making cells in the body (melanocytes). It likes being comorbid with other instances of autoimmune fuckery, like Hashimotos because having one auto-immune thing means you’re more likely to have another one.
That can happen for...well, any reason. The immune system likes to freak out about random shit. Stress is one of them!
That does NOT mean that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ anymore than ‘stress causes lupus’ as much as ‘people predisposed towards certain immune diseases can experience flares or initial onset of the thing from things that upset the immune system.
It can be just stress. It can be trauma, sure. But saying that ‘trauma causes vitiligo’ is VASTLY reductive of the complex relationship between stress and the immune system and its various impacts on the rest of us. (also, fun fact: sometimes people with vitiligo experience spontaneous repigmentation when the body stops being an ass to its own melanocytes.)
Now what really, REALLY gets me is the line about piebaldism. Because that? That’s straight up wrong. We know the inheritance pattern (autosomal dominant, for one, a c-kit mutation on chromosome 4 (here). We have in fact actively selected for in various animals because it occurs naturally in virtually all mammals. It occurs in chimps! It’s just part of the natural variation of pigmentation that happens, into the direction of ‘spot of no pigmentation’.
It has nothing, NOTHING what-so-ever to do with trauma of the mother, unless you’d like to claim that every single piebald-patterend animal out there has had a traumatized mum, and that for the last who-fucking-knows generations back since we started actively breeding for it.
So like, yes absolutely do your research. But like...maybe if you’re doing it, make sure your research is actually y’know TRUE. Instead of claiming that a genetic mutation is ‘Trauma from the mother’.
So remember the Malachite Dildo saga?
https://headspace-hotel.tumblr.com/post/648904636808495104/it-is-a-thing-theres-an-article-briefly
I do and i saw that post on my ‘civilian’ dash a while ago and let me tell you. I feel that persons pain. I’ve been there.
Like if you must absolutely use a gemstone sex toy at least give a body safe coating for the love of all things good and right on this planet.
Submitted by anonymous
Anonymous asked:
Protease inhibitor anon--your response was super helpful, thank you!!
you’re welcome, I’m glad I could shed some light!
Anonymous asked:
Would you be able to offer a "regular person" explanation of what a protease inhibitor is/does? I've seen the term in a few articles about viruses lately, but I'm having a hard time understanding it. Thanks!
Sure thing!
So first of, we gotta know what a protease is. In short, it’s an enzyme that ‘cuts apart’ proteins. The word ‘protease’ contains that. ‘prot’ from ‘protein’ and ‘ase’ always means ‘enzyme that cuts’. So protease -> protein cutting enzyme. (parallel to that: lactase: lactose cutting enzyme)
An inhibitor of that stops the enzyme from cutting proteins. There are a number of ways an inhibitor can do that (my blocking the receiving site of the enzyme, or by destroying the enzyme, for example).
Now, how does that help in the treatment of viral infections?
On the example of HIV, like this:
HIV enters the human cell and hijacks it, using its protein-making functions (which the cell needs to make proteins it - or the body - needs) to instead make the proteins that the virus needs, like say the protein shell the HIV-RNA sits in. However, the virus doesn’t get the cell to produce those exact proteins directly. Instead, what gets produced are ‘precursors’ proteins. They’re close to the final thing, but not there yet. To get there, they have to be cut by the the protease the virus itself has the RNA for.
So the virus causes the cell to make both the precursor proteins for its shell, and the protease that turns those precursor proteins into their final form.
The protease-inhibitor now steps in at exactly that step. It stops the protease from doing its job, which in turns stops the HIV from getting the proteins it needs to make a new shell. And THAT means the virus can no longer reproduce, because that shell is kinda vital to the virus’ continued existence and ability to enter a new cell.
The exact way the protease-inhibitor does that varies. It might block the function entirely, or alter it, so that the protease cuts the precursor protein at the wrong spot - which also results in a protein the virus cannot use. Some are reversible and some terminally make the protease useless, meaning that until new protease is made, no more of that protein will be cut.
I hope this was helpful, and if you still have questions, please get back to me.
Anonymous asked:
My husband has been told he needs to let tap water sit in an open container for a few days so the chemicals can evaporate before using it in his vivarium. Would this actually affect levels of fluoride or chlorine?
Well for one, it’d only matter if your tap water contains either of those things to begin with. For example here (Germany) water is never chlorinated or flourinated.
If your water DOES contain those things, then yes, letting the water sit will remove levels of chlorine. Why? Because the chlorine in the water is actually an added gas. Over the course of a few days, it will naturally evaporate out of the water into the room air. That said, if wherever your water is coming from uses chloramine, you’re SOL. Chloramine doesn’t evaporate at all, so that’ll need some research on your (or your husband’s) part to check what they use. (Article on the issue here). So if your water treatment facility uses a volatile form of chloride, that method work. Otherwise...no.
The flouride... doesn’t evaporate at all. You could distill it off by boiling the water and letting it condense, leaving behind the flouride, but just letting it sit open somewhere, even for a long time, will do nothing to lower the content.
Right so guess who got her shot yesterday?
So the owlet is now vaccinated against the plague. Well, partly vaccinated, I have a second date with the syringe in May.
That said, I thought perhaps it would be useful to share my experience.
I should note that this goes only for the AstraZeneca shot I received, and of course your own experience might vanish but here’s the it:
The shot itself was painless (shout out to the Johanniter peeps who made up the mobile vax team that came to the hospital!). I got it in the morning and for the rest of the workday I was entirely fine.
The first bit of ‘something’s happening’ was about 10 hours later, when the injection arm started to hurt. Over the next two hours that turned into limb and muscles aches all over my body, as well as shivering, so at about 10pm in the evening I decided to go ‘fuck it’ and went to bed. I started running a light fever at about the same time.
I actively decided against an ibu/paracetamol because 1) it wasn’t that bad 2) my immune system going ‘ahh intruder!!’ is the intended effect of the vaccine so I thought it best to let it do its thing unless it got rather bad, which it never did.
I woke up at 2am with the aches mostly gone and the shivering entirely gone. The fever was definitely present at that point. Not a high fever, I just felt like my bed was a cozy little toaster oven. Getting up for a glass of water involved a little bit of vertigo but nothing too bad. There was also a light headache but frankly that was probably a mix of dehydration and weather changes, which always give me headaches.
Went back to bad and when I woke at 10am, the fever was gone, the aches were gone, as was the vertigo. The only thing still present was a tender spot around the injection site, like an invisible bruise. This too has been steadily fading over the course of the day.
I was a bit tired today, but that’s it.
Generally, it wasn’t super pleasant but also not super horrid and I strongly encourage people to get the shot. That said, I would also suggest that if you do get it you make some time for yourself where you can be comfy in bed with some tea and a book, or sleep through it. The worst of it for me must have been the 3h window I mostly slept through.
I hope that having some accounts of what might be coming your way will help people to make this as little as hassle as possible for them and plan ahead as well as perhaps reduce the amount of horror stories about it.