#branches of science

[nemfrog]

"Human liver in which the portal vein had been injected white." The physiological anatomy and physiology of man. 1859.

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[noodlebox-bird]

[superdupersketcher-booper]

Time to draw the stronk, grumpy, science man:

I had a predicament: I wanted to draw more of my technologically advanced troll AU “Furtherance,” but I also wanted to practice drawing my muscle anatomy. My solution? To draw “Furtherance” Branch without his lab coat. With Poppy as a witness. You can expect more of him.

Listen: Branch is a survivalist. He’s very active. He has his own gym, and he definitely uses it, otherwise it would be a waste of space and effort. He is strong, there is no question. With strength comes muscles. Not LEAN muscles, no no no, he is a THIC BOI; my man has BULK muscle. BULK.

[libraford]

Not clear equivalents, but-

Ceremonial magic is neoclassicism.

Wiccan magic is impressionism.

Chaos magic is modern art.

Folk magic is outsider art.

[elbiotipo]

You know how yanqui evangelicals complain about the "war on christmas" and such? like they get offended if people don't celebrate Christmas even though it makes no sense?

well my evangelical side of the family here in my part of Argentina at least, as you might know, adheres to the belief that everything that is fun is sinful and godless, and that includes christmas trees, decorations, gifts, and even worse, getting together to eat and drink because that's worldly and sinful you know.

I wonder how a yanqui evangelical would react when my aunt says "no we don't do Christmas trees, that's not Christian, that's pagan"

[spookygibberish]

I've sort of developed a strange relationship with the concept of "realism" in the things I make.

Something I was very into as like, an eleven year old (im not implying this was immature to be into, just that it was formative for me), was speculative biology specifically for dragons, and now, specifically in the case of dragons I find a lot of attempts to make them biologically plausible fully missing the appeal of dragons at all.

Thinking specifically about the supernatural elements of JoM and where the line is drawn. The dagnyds are made from the remains of godlike entities, and are not entirely earthly animals. They have a supernatural origin. It would be fully justified in giving them magic abilities or making magic an aspect of the setting, but have absolutely zero interest in doing so. It doesn't interest me. I think about shit like healing powers or glowy energy attacks and my reaction is just "what does this even add? Why do I need this? Does this make things more interesting?" And it simply doesn't. Healing is more interesting as a prolonged process, combat is more interesting with teeth and claws and metal and blood. These are options which are more realistic, closer to real life, but the realism isn't what makes them interesting: it's physicality.

When I design a creature for this world, I am not thinking about making it biologically plausible, and yet, I try to design things which look like they could 'move under their own power'. There is a sense of heft and mechanical "soundness" which I value more than realism, but often also aligns with looking 'realistic'.

I would say that it's better to serve a narrative than strive for absolute realism, but I don't actually write stories, although I do have ideas for them occasionally. I guess a version of this which is more relevant and applicable is that i prefer to strive for a particular vibe.

[beetle-b-bug]

Dreamworks trolls reproduce asexually and I’ve never been more sure of anything in my entire life. In this essay I’ll-

[alithographica]

Solve an argument for some friends and I (or make it worse I guess)

Sorry, no option for if you've never heard of this thing before, and I'm not able to get more specific with locations given the 12 option poll limit :(

If you use another name, respond with what it is!

[en-sell-uh-dus]

I can be offended by someone breathing wrong or not be offended by a stab in the back. Even I can't predict when I actually give a fuck.

[beanmaster-pika]

Day 3: Fandom crossover

DGM AU, since I’ve been getting back into it recently!! I might come back to this AU sometime.

[bpod-bpod]

Forest Fruit

Branching out in the tissues of fruit flies (Drosophila), these cells might provide crucial clues to treating human cancers. Pictured at three stages of development, these tracheal terminal cells branch out to expand the young fly’s throat. This morphogenesis is driven by similar genes and proteins to those shaping our blood vessels. By following the cells using powerful microscopes, researchers find three types of growth – branches which extend from their tips, or grow from within, or 'bud' to form new branches, similar to acer trees although ~ 10,000 times smaller. These observations in Drosophila provide insights into how morphogenesis scales in larger organisms. Similar patterns guide growth during our own development, but crucially also drive angiogenesis – when new blood vessels form to serve cancers – and where lessons from the fly might help stop these errant branches.

Written by John Ankers

Image from work by Tatyana Gavrilchenko and colleagues

Flatiron Institute, Simons Foundation, New York, NY, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), October 2024

You can also follow BPoD on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook

[treehuggeranonymous]

I’m glad the Nobody Asked team talked to a psychologist about demystifying kink, but god I wish that they’d talked to a psychology scientist about designing that experiment.

Pavlovian conditioning works because the conditioned stimulus is PREDICTIVE of the unconditioned stimulus, so you needed objects that you would only see in the sexual context during the conditioning period. Also if there were too many other stimuli in the only fans content, more salient stimuli are going to mask the pinecone/sponge (like Oscar hearing his name). Finally, if you had been able to condition a response, the response can generalise to sufficiently similar stimuli so including a yellow duck as a control stimuli is a really bad choice.

[itskaist]

Vibrating over that crossed out handler. Does Ortega remind him of his Farm handler or was his handler another person that was deeply important to him?

Cross-out? What cross-out? ;)

Haha, good spot! Referencing some easter eggs over here. And thank you for asking! <33

Again, got long. I simply cannot shut up about My Favourite Fucked Up Guy.

Yeahhhh, so. Josiah is very emotionally un-self-aware. Emotions, patterns of behaviour, cycles of abuse, he wasn't ever taught any of this. Even after he escaped, his priority was survival, his priority was not getting caught again; learning how to hide; learning how to function like a human being on a very 'make money, buy stuff, eat, make decisions, talk to people' level. And he's still very much stuck in this survival mode. This intense of a trauma will do that to you. Especially if he never talked about it to anybody, there never was anybody who would take him by the hand and say 'hey, what happened to you? that's not normal. that was fucked up and no one should have ever behaved towards you like that.' So to him, the Farm is the baseline Normal, and anything new he learns gets added on top of that. Even with his time as Sidestep, and then returning as a villain, foundations might have been shaken but not yet cracked.

With all this in mind, the patterns of life at the Farm are very much burned deeply into him. They are the earliest foundations of his reality, what he studied and replicated as he came into his own personhood. That includes patterns of relationships. Since he was a cuckoo, I don't think he was able to socialize much with other Regenes; especially adding the still-kind-of-uncertain Sidestep's special status there. Doubly so because of the cuckoo's education in blending in with human culture, I imagine that extra efforts would be extended that they do not internalize those lessons and try to replicate them in the Farm's social context. Isolating them more than others. Being trained by handlers and having to rely solely on them. Remember your place as only Tool, not Person.

And so that, that is Josiah's most formative relationship. In the psychodynamic branch of psychology, there is what's fancily called 'object relations theory' or more precisely, the theory of relationship to the Object. 'Object' specifically being the Mother, and how the relationship to one's mother (or any other primary caretaker) in the earliest days and years of life, and the type of attachment style developed towards her, will determine or at least heavily influence any future attachment styles to all other people in one's life. Whoof! That's a lot of fancy words to simply say that you replicate in your life what you've learned the earliest, and the earlier you learned something the harder it is to change later; because everything that you built atop it would have to be disrupted as well - and that, you know, is what builds up your entire identity as a person.

So. Josiah's earliest relationships, really the only relationships that he had, were with handlers. And that duology is what is very much burned into his brain. There is Person, and there is Tool. Master and slave. The one being provided for, and the one providing. Even after he escaped, all of his later relationships would follow this pattern to some extent, almost always with him falling back into the role of the Tool. Be useful, be needed, prove your worth, provide. If you're needed, you can't be rejected. If you provide, you will be rewarded (with affection, resources, safety). Not anything that would be in any way conscious, mind you. That was simply the only thing he knew. He latched onto the Rangers because that was the easiest group that he could offer something of himself to. He latched onto Ortega because he was the leader, and he dealt out assignments, and judged worth. So it was a priority to be judged by him, accepted by him. Even as they got closer as friends and then question-mark-something-more, Josiah was still very much stuck in the mode of providing, and unfortunately, that was also what held him back from commiting, from trying. Because he didn't believe that in that sort of a relationship, he would be able to provide much of anything at all. And Ortega would be disappointed, and grow bored with him, and their friendship would suffer from it too, and as such his position among the Rangers, and--

…Yeahhh. In his role as the villain, this time, Josiah positions himself as the Person. As the Master. He's the one giving out orders and making decisions now. And it is so empowering, and so thrilling, and-- if he ever realized that he is becoming a handler himself, he would shut down. Just like he does when he realizes that he's hurt the Puppet same as Shroud had hurt her, that he hadn't left his learned Regene patterns at all.

Whoof. Yeah. A lot, a lot of learning still ahead of him. A lot of terrifying realizations, a lot of having to question the reality you took for granted and a restructuring of identity. I'm curious who he will be on the other side of that.

[materialsscienceandengineering]

What is Sound? The Fundamental Science Behind Sound

Why does water sound the way it does? How do vinyl records work? Sound is everywhere, but at its core: What is sound? Also- What are sound waves? This video explains the fundamental science and key concepts behind sound using in-depth examples and animations.

[radiofreesanjak]

//BEGIN TRANSMISSION

Loading up for the next blockade run. Couldn't get as much filament as I wanted to, so I got more room for cargo. Is there anything non-printer based yall need? Booze guns or otherwise.

//END TRANSMISSION

Took some time to compile a list for you from my local area:

Smokes

Food, ideally non-perishable and novel to climates like Sanjak. Someone sent some canned meat a while ago and that was a huge hit.

Alcohol (not moonshine)

Natural fiber, processed or not (we have some sheep and know how to process it ourselves)

More Omnihooks (we don't have many and they're a bitch to repair)

Smokes

P keeps asking for gliss but I don't think you should give that to him.

Seeds (we're good on grains, but vegetables would be appreciated)

Tools traditionally used in food preservation (canning equipment, dehydrators, etc.)

Bulk utility powdered chemicals

Generic medicine, Union DoJ/HR keeps a list of essential medicines, grab what you can from that but we are most reliably low on anti-infectives and vaccines.

[nemfrog]

"Larch, showing natural engrafting."

Science-gossip. 1888. Processed image.

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