#Science Side of Tumblr

[tomcruisingthroughlife]

Science? On c'mon we all know it's geography

[casual-eumetazoa]

a post-doc was doing a guest seminar at my institute and at the beginning of his presentation he was explaining why he chose birds for his evolutionary analysis - so he said "well first of all, because birds are the best and most interesting animals and it's fun to study them" and a few professors in the room gave him a very serious nod

[chroniclesofachemist]

[wheres-your-paddle]

things i've heard environmental science majors say:

"For the test we'll need to tell the different flavours of mayflies apart." / "Did you just say flavours?"

"It amazes me how many city kids are in this program." / "We're all desperate to get out of this city."

"I think everyone who attended all the surface water pollution lab sections should be allowed to lick one piece of glassware of their choosing. Y'know, as a treat."

"Professor, nobody goes into this major unless they like to eat dirt." / "Great, so you can talk the Students' Association into convincing the board to give me funding for my trees?"

"What're we toasting to?" / "Nitrogen pollution."

"You look frustrated. What's up?" / "I had twenty-one Leptophlebiidae in my dish. He's going to think I'm lying about how many Leptophlebiidae are in my dish."

"If you weren't raised by Wall-E, do you even belong in this class?" / "The Onceler." / "Fuck, good point."

"Dude, I spent the whole exam trying not to sink my teeth into a really, really juicy bug in my sample—" / "Cranefly?" / "...yeah."

"Well, just make sure you're not (person)'s lab partner. Last weekend's trip involved him leaving too many fish in the dirt for the professor's liking."

[exhausted chorus] "And the fish go belly-up."

"What's the major difference between east coast and west coast soils?" / "Alcoholism."

"Got any plans for the holidays?" / "Gonna go home and listen to my entire extended family call me a tree-hugging hippie." / "Aren't we all?"

[the-untalented-photographer]

[beakers-and-telescopes]

OKAY THIS ARTICLE IS SO COOL

I'm going to try to explain this in a comprehensible way, because honestly it's wild to wrap your head around even for me, who has a degree in chemistry. But bear with me.

Okay, so. Solids, right? They are rigid enough to hold their shape, but aside from that they are quite variable. Some solids are hard, others are soft, some are brittle or rubbery or malleable. So what determines these qualities? And what creates the rigid structure that makes a solid a solid? Most people would tell you that it depends on the atoms that make up the solid, and the bonds between those atoms. Rubber is flexible because of the polymers it's made of, steel is strong because of the metallic bonds between its atoms. And this applies to all solids. Or so everybody thought.

A paper published in the journal Nature has discovered that biological materials such as wood, fungi, cotton, hair, and anything else that can respond to the humidity in the environment may be composed of a new class of matter dubbed "hydration solids". That's because the rigidity and solidness of the materials doesn't actually come from the atoms and bonds, but from the water molecules hanging out in between.

So basically, try to imagine a hydration solid as a bunch of balloons taped together to form a giant cube, with the actual balloon part representing the atoms and bonds of the material, and the air filling the balloons as the water in the pores of the solid. What makes this "solid" cube shaped? It's not because of the rubber at all, but the air inside. If you took out all the air from inside the balloons, the structure wouldn't be able to hold its shape.

Ozger Sahin, one of the paper's authors, said

"When we take a walk in the woods, we think of the trees and plants around us as typical solids. This research shows that we should really think of those trees and plants as towers of water holding sugars and proteins in place. It's really water's world."

And the great thing about this discovery (and one of the reasons to support its validity) is that thinking about hydration solids this way makes the math so so so much easier. Before this, if you wanted to calculate how water interacts with organic matter, you would need advanced computer simulations. Now, there are simple equations that you can do in your head. Being able to calculate a material's properties using basic physics principles is a really big deal, because so far we have only been able to do that with gasses (PV=nRT anyone?). Expanding that to a group that encompasses 50-90% of the biological world around us is huge.

[visciously-face-fckd-by-a-cactus]

ok. imma do this again because im so sick of this neurotypical label-centric world we live in and the inability that people have to understand individuality, masking, and nuance in presentation of disorders.

edit: this is not meant to exclude all the various neurodivergence diagnoses other than just adhd and autism- this poll was created first and foremost because i was curious about those two in particular, but also because there's not that many button options for the poll itself and if i added more than those variables the permutations would skyrocket

[is-this-yuri]

can the science side of tumblr tell me how to politely greet a beetle

[tomcruisingthroughlife]

[locke-writing]

Okay, look, I've been in college for two years and my Biology professor has pretty significantly rooted this educational science game called Labster into her course.

I was not expecting to be playing Portal all day for school.

Yeah, this is a full, 360 sci-fi free roam lab environment that you can pretty much do whatever you want in. You know those cruddy flash game experiments you used to do in middle school? Those are a thing of the past.

And check this: the entire lab is being run by this super cool AI droid named Dr. One

She floats around and directs you around the lab depending on the lesson you're taking and sounds eerily similar to GLaDOS. It turns out that Dr. One also has a lore page and that she was created originally for "unethical purposes."

Also, this environment is extremely detailed and even runs shaders and ambient occlusion in your web browser.

That's pretty nuts, considering the only time we ever see these things are built into genuine video games, not a web browser lab. It runs incredibly smoothly on my GTX 1050.

This is insanely impressive and I actually enjoyed my homework today. 10/10, would play this in my free time.

[feyosha]

Attention Science Enthusiasts and Chem Majors!

Reference for the non-chemists:

Alkaline Metals: putting water on these will set them on fire. Combines explosively with Halogens to produce salts, which are largely impervious to heat.

Halogens: corrosive as fuck. Includes Fluorine and Chlorine. Combines explosively with Alkali Metals to produce salts, which are largely impervious to heat.

Mercury: thanks to Cooper Pairs and Quantum Weirdness, is liquid at room temperature despite being heavy as Lead. Turns Aluminum to mush. Will drive you mad.

Dimethyl Cadmium: 2 methyl’s on a Cadmium! A Metal, directly on Carbon Functional Groups! Carcinogenic, Teratogenic, Neurotoxic, Lipophilic, with both acute and chronic effects, this shit will wreck your cellular machinery like an industrial mining apparatus turned on a neighborhood brownstone.

Azoazide Azide: hello yes I would like to order 14 Nitrogen atoms, but, can they all be exclusively single bonded in a second-order Azide? Whaddya mean it’s the least stable molecule ever fabricated? What do you mean it self-immolates in isolated conditions?

Sand: it's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.

[REDACTED]: goo

[chroniclesofachemist]

[hellsite-proteins]

Hi, im sorry if this violates no nsfw but i thought i might try coz its been an old meme; delete if you dont want to ans it, no pressure!

I've come to make an announcement: Shadow the Hedgehog's a bitch-ass motherfucker. He pissed on my fucking wife. That's right. He took his hedgehog fuckin' quilly dick out and he pissed on my FUCKING wife, and he said his dick was THIS BIG, and I said that's disgusting. So I'm making a callout post on my Twitter.com. Shadow the Hedgehog, you got a small dick. It's the size of this walnut except WAY smaller. And guess what? Here's what my dong looks like. That's right, baby. Tall points, no quills, no pillows, look at that, it looks like two balls and a bong. He fucked my wife, so guess what, I'm gonna fuck the earth. That's right, this is what you get! My SUPER LASER PISS! Except I'm not gonna piss on the earth. I'm gonna go higher. I'm pissing on the MOOOON! How do you like that, OBAMA? I PISSED ON THE MOON, YOU IDIOT! You have twenty-three hours before the piss DROPLETS hit the fucking earth, now get out of my fucking sight before I piss on you too!

tbh i'm not going to be super strict about the no nsfw thing, but i also don't entirely trust the internet and wanted to make sure no one would submit anything truly vile. this is more comedic than anything else though, so you're all good!

letter sequence in this ask matching protein-coding amino acids:

IvecmetmakeanannncementShadwtheHedgehgsaitchassmtherfckerHepissednmyfckingwifeThatsrightHetkhishedgehgfckinqillydicktandhepissednmyFCKINGwifeandhesaidhisdickwasTHISIGandIsaidthatsdisgstingSImmakingacalltpstnmyTwittercmShadwtheHedgehgygtasmalldickItsthesiefthiswalnteceptWAYsmallerAndgesswhatHereswhatmydnglkslikeThatsrightayTallpintsnqillsnpillwslkatthatitlksliketwallsandangHefckedmywifesgesswhatImgnnafcktheearthThatsrightthisiswhatygetMySPERLASERPISSEceptImntgnnapissntheearthImgnnaghigherImpissingntheMNHwdylikethatAMAIPISSEDNTHEMNYIDITYhavetwentythreehrsefrethepissDRPLETShitthefckingearthnwgettfmyfckingsightefreIpissnyt

protein guy analysis:

if you've been here long enough or have a general idea of what proteins are supposed to look like, i'm sure you could write this analysis from looking at the picture for about two seconds. all i have to say is this: why is it so spread out??? the answer, of course, is that all of the many polar and charged residues are way too hydrophilic to make anything real, and instead are just flopping around uselessly with all the water. proteins were never meant to have this much entropy, and this chaos is downright infuriating

predicted protein structure:

[beakers-and-telescopes]

Slime Molds and Intelligence

Okay, despite going into a biology related field, I only just learned about slime molds, and hang on, because it gets WILD.

This guy in the picture is called Physarum polycephalum, one of the more commonly studied types of slime mold. It was originally thought to be a fungus, though we now know it to actually be a type of protist (a sort of catch-all group for any eukaryotic organism that isn't a plant, animal, or a fungus). As protists go, it's pretty smart. It is very good at finding the most efficient way to get to a food source, or multiple food sources. In fact, placing a slime mold on a map with food sources at all of the major cities can give a pretty good idea of an efficient transportation system. Here is a slime mold growing over a map of Tokyo compared to the actual Tokyo railway system:

Pretty good, right? Though they don't have eyes, ears, or noses, the slime molds are able to sense objects at a distance kind of like a spider using tiny differences in tension and vibrations to sense a fly caught in its web. Instead of a spiderweb, though, this organism relies on proteins called TRP channels. The slime mold can then make decisions about where it wants to grow. In one experiment, a slime mold was put in a petri dish with one glass disk on one side and 3 glass disks on the other side. Even though the disks weren't a food source, the slime mold chose to grow towards and investigate the side with 3 disks over 70% of the time.

Even more impressive is that these organisms have some sense of time. If you blow cold air on them every hour on the hour, they'll start to shrink away in anticipation when before the air hits after only 3 hours.

Now, I hear you say, this is cool and all, but like, I can do all those things too. The slime mold isn't special...

To which I would like to point out that you have a significant advantage over the slime mold, seeing as you have a brain.

Yeah, these protists can accomplish all of the things I just talked about, and they just... don't have any sort of neural architecture whatsoever? They don't even have brain cells, let alone the structures that should allow them to process sensory information and make decisions because of it. Nothing that should give them a sense of time. Scientists literally have no idea how this thing is able to "think'. But however it does, it is sure to be a form of cognition that is completely and utterly different from anything that we're familiar with.

[visciously-face-fckd-by-a-cactus]

this is by no means comprehensive, as this app has a skewed demographic to begin with, but I'm just trying to decide on whether this is a worthwhile topic for the women and gender studies project I'm doing.