#contribute to science

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Do you have a snoot noodle or other variation of sighthound? If yes, there’s new heart health research for the breed happening!

A researcher at Texas A&M whose work I’m familiar with is starting a new study looking at genetic factors contributing to heart disease in Borzoi and related breeds. They just put out a call for dog owners who are willing to submit saliva samples & (noodle) medical records. Studies like this need a big sample size! They’re accepting new sign-ups starting now until March 1, 2025, for dogs both in the US and internationally.

Let’s help make some science!

From the study page:

“Background and purpose

Recent research in Borzoi dogs has revealed that dogs of this breed experience sudden, unexplained death. About 85% of sudden, unexplained deaths in humans are linked to an underlying heart disease. Our existing research in Borzoi dogs has shown that they are predisposed to developing arrhythmias (abnormal heart rhythms) and dilated cardiomyopathy (a heart muscle disease causing dilated heart chambers and weak pumping function).

Due to our documentation of the frequency of these conditions in Borzoi dogs, we seek to identify responsible genetic variations similar to what is seen in humans with electrical cardiac diseases that trigger arrhythmias and dilated cardiomyopathy.

The objective of our study is to identify genetic mutations associated with heart disease in Borzoi dogs and document their existence in other sighthound breeds.

What happens in this study

We are collecting saliva samples from both healthy Borzoi and Borzoi dogs affected with arrhythmias and/or dilated cardiomyopathy. We will also collect saliva samples from any other sighthound breeds.

We will extract DNA from these samples and perform genomic sequencing on a select number while retaining the remainder for further screening.By analyzing the sequencing data, we can compare the genes of healthy and affected Borzoi dogs and identify variants linked to their heart conditions. We will also compare the findings in Borzoi dogs to results from other sighthound breeds.

Pet owner responsibilities

A swab kit will be sent to you for at home use along with a link to an instructional video on how to properly obtain a swab of the mouth. The kit will contain equipment to collect the saliva swab, a history form for your pet, a client consent form and a shipping label to return samples to us.

Participation requirements

To participate, you must have a Borzoi dog or a sighthound breed that is either healthy or affected by arrhythmias and/or dilated cardiomyopathy. Pets may be any age or sex. Electronic or paper veterinary medical records will need to be provided.

Benefits and risks of participating

There is little to no risk for taking a brief swab of the mouth for saliva collection if procedures outlined in the video are followed. No individual genetic test results will be provided to study participants.

Compensation

There is no cost to the owner for participating in this study. No compensation will be provided.”

[marlynnofmany]

It’s back!

If you missed it the first time around, the “human are weird” anthology is back for a second printing. (There’s even a new story included: “Black Box” by Dara Brophy.)

Here’s the blurb:

In science fiction, humans are usually boring compared to other races: small, weak, with no claws or tentacles, and no special abilities to speak of. But what if we were the impressive ones, the unsettling ones, the ones talked about by all the other aliens? What if we're weird?

If you’d like a collection of excellent stories about humans inspiring awe, fear, and utter confusion, it’s available everywhere books are sold!

[dailycupofcreativitea]

(Was digging through old messages on Slack and found these pics I sent to myself 2 years ago).

Please enjoy my collection of “overly honest methods” in science that were supposedly curated from a Twitter hashtag ;D

[specialagentartemis]

Citizen Science and Contributing To Scientific Endeavor When You're Not "A Scientist"

Comments on some of my posts about science and misinformation express frustration with scientific establishments, and want to see more accessibility and attention given to amateurs participating in the scientific process and having their scientific voices heard.

If being involved in the creation of knowledge and discovery is something important to you, that's something I strongly encourage! It's absolutely possible. Amateur researchers with a passion and an eye for detail have made some fantastic discoveries - but what is often glossed over in stories like these are the years of work, the patient dedication, and the collaboration with university researchers that often underlie such discoveries.

The search for truth and information and the passion for science is present in a lot of people who aren't official "scientists" - curiosity is natural! And if participation in scientific observation, hypothesizing, experimentation, and discovering new things about the world is important to you, there are lots of ways to go about contributing - and the new year is a great time to start.

What are you interested in?

Ecology

Observing the world around you is for everybody. Getting invested in the environment of your hometown is for everybody. And, as the Mythbusters famously said,

Some ideas for a local ecology project:

Record the temperature outside every day at the same time - at sunrise, or noon, or sunset, or midnight. Depending on where you are, the local weather recording station may be miles away or on top of a mountain - measure the temperature yourself and compare it each day to what your app says. When is it accurate? When isn't it?

Record the weather every day. How much precipitation? What time of day? What kind?

Record what animals you see every day, where, when, and how many. Or choose a specific animal, like birds, or bees on flowers, or turtles or frogs in a local pond, or whiptail lizards vs. invasive house geckos, and record the numbers you see each day.

Record when in the year you see the first, or last, of a plant or animal. When the crocuses sprout, when the buds appear on the maple trees, when you see the first clover flowers or prickly pear flowers, when the first robin comes out or the first lizards come out of hibernation.

If you have an outdoor cat or a free-roaming dog, attach a GoPro or similar small camera to its collar to see where it goes and what it does.

Identify the plants growing in your neighborhood, and check in on it regularly to keep track of how each one fares in different weather conditions, or if any animals particularly like or don't like to eat it.

Bulk order some test strips, then take a small sample of soil from a local park or water from a local waterway each weekend and test them for PH, lead, chemicals, or whatever. See if it changes over the year, or after a heavy rainfall, or during drought.

Take a photo of the same spot every day for a year.

Linguistics

The study of how people use language! Everybody uses language in some capacity.

Do you have any small children near you? Talk to them! Record how they pronounce things and what they call new (or even familiar) concepts. Look for patterns.

Ask people you know if "dog" and "blog" rhyme, or if "Alohop" is a good pun for a pineapple beer. My family gets ENDLESS amounts of mileage out of this one with each other. Ask people you know questions about how they pronounce things, or what they call things. Make maps of dialectical differences between generations, neighborhoods, etc. Track linguistic shifts in the modern world.

History

Everyone and everywhere has a history, and accurate history is pressingly relevant always.

See if you have a local historical society, library archive, or history museum that is looking for volunteers to transcribe or translate collections.

Get elbow-deep in local archives. You likely have some sort of local archive near you that has not been fully digitized. Go in with a topic you want to learn about - Black families, Jewish communities, how your hometown transferred from Indigenous hands to settler ones, women who owned their own businesses, immigration, inter-racial relationships, sports, ice harvesting, farming practices, contemporary opinions on a major world history event that now seems so inevitable, sports and people's reactions to sports - and read everything in newspapers, wills, deeds, photographs, or other available records about your topic of choice. See if you can find connections that you haven't seen anyone else talking about.

These are just some things that occur to me immediately as something that anyone can do, if you're sufficiently interested in a question and want to discover more about it. The more local your topic, the less likely anyone has a solid answer to whatever you're wondering - and the more immediately relevant to the people around you your discoveries may be!

Combining it with a New Year's Resolution can also get you more motivated to do the things you want to do. Is your resolution to get more exercise? Take a brisk walk each morning and take a picture of the same area every day for a year. Take a walk every weekend down to the lake and count the turtles and frogs you see. Is your resolution to keep a daily diary For Real This Time? If nothing else, resolve to write down the weather and precipitation each day! Do you want to volunteer more or meet new people? Look for citizen science or local history groups! Feeling like you're working toward something Real is a great motivator.

Henry David Thoreau's detailed descriptions of the nature each day around Walden Pond in the 1840s provides a valuable benchmark for modern ecologists to compare environmental and climatic changes since then on a granular level. Silly rhyming poems and idiosyncratic spellings in letters and diaries help linguists track dialectical and pronunciation changes across time. Amateur science is great and valuable! We all can have a part in understanding and paying deeper attention to the world around us, if we want to.

[muninnhuginn]

The thought that goes into the fake science in dungeon meshi can be something so special actually. Using golems to explain crop rotation and how removing predators from an ecosystem can have knock-on effects. Talking about symbiotic relationships and parasites too! And characters are actually interested in the science so they keep explaining about it. Finally, some exposition I can get behind.

[hephaestuscrew]

Renée Minkowski is extremely into the abstract concept of Crew Bonding in such a way that it impairs her ability to actually bond with the particular crew that she has.

She wants them to have Christmas dinner together and give each other Christmas gifts, but she's not made an effort to learn Eiffel's feelings about December 25th and to think about what he might like to do that day.

She wants them to each say what they are thankful for at Thanksgiving, but when she says she's "thankful to have such a great crew on this mission", it sounds extremely unconvincing, as if she's just saying what she thinks a Commander ought to say at a Thanksgiving dinner on a space station, rather than expressing any genuine sentiments or revealing anything personal about herself.

She wants them all to participate in the talent show "to boost morale... bond as a crew, and... have a great time doing it", but Hilbert and Eiffel's reactions make it clear that talent shows do the opposite of improving crew morale for them.

Christmas celebrations and thanksgiving dinners and talent shows are all things that could potentially have a positive impact on morale and bonding for some hypothetical space crews, but in the way Minkowski approaches them, none of these things are particularly helpful for the morale and bonding of the people who are actually in her crew. Minkowski puts real effort into group bonding activities for her crew, but they are always based on general ideas about crew bonding, rather than on thinking about the individuals around her and what she can do to connect with those people in particular.

[yonemurishiroku]

Nobody told me we have snow under the sea that's made up of  organic debris from the upper waters. And what am I supposed to do with this new inspiration? Write a Percico one shot? Wth?

[izicodes]

Someone contributed to my project?!

I wasn't even expecting someone to contribute, what?

I made an issue, that was really just targeted towadrs myself because I use Issues as like the project's to-do list, so I wasn't expecting someone to be like "Oh I can do this if you want" LIKE BRO WHAT I mean yes please?!

The issue was to make a dark and light mode for the to-do app, and he did it perfectly! He so cool, cool dude alert! I was going to do it eventually when I learn more React because I was confused how to translate the Javascript code, that I had in my head, into React...

Anyhoo, he did an amazing job, so erm like checkout what he did: LINK 🐸

(Also I made an issue for someone to make a 'How To Contribute' .md file, so if you're good with your html/markdown and writing skills, you should like... checkout that too? 💗)

[sapphicnunnery]

entomology question!!

a while ago I was doing a bunch of research on mantids, and I was kinda fascinated my ghost mantids, and discovered that apparently we don’t really know what causes their coloration. But, like, really?? Because all of the information I could find was kinda old, and there was some speculation about it being environmental, like humidity or temperature or something, but has there been any new research???? Or does anyone have any anecdotal evidence from their own mantids??

Here’s some pictures of their color variation/range, just to show some examples

[anglerflsh]

>"write about the contribuition of a female archeologist" >picks out someone from the 30s whose internet presence is almost nonexistant except for a few articles all in russian with a 2005 kind of website graphic that I then have to painstakingly translate in order to understand, and whose work revolves around a tecnique of dating that preceeded carbon-dating and that isn't even used at all anymore >you can't even find her most popular book in english at all. There is one anglophone article on one random journal that even mentions her.

[traxanaxanos]

A while ago I commissioned @starfleetspacecadet​ and they did this fantastic piece of Seven hanging out with the Wildmans! (Or, Seven assisting Samantha with some hands-on xenobiology research and Naomi doing her best to also assist). It’s wonderful, please gaze upon it.

I’m trilled to pieces with it! :)

[writeouswriter]

I missed making blackout poetry, so, here’s one created from the opening page magazine reviews of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.

[Image ID: A blackout poem with the background superimposed with two silhouetted figures looking out at a starry sky. The poem reads:

It is an eminently majestic achievement,

past, present, and future,

we exist,

framed by the wonders of the cosmos

and the vastness of space.

End Image ID]

[gxlden-angels]

I think it's so funny when Christian flat out reject the concept of being intersex like oh so me and about 2% of the population aren't real but you expect me to believe homeboy's gonna come back after (holy) ghosting us for over 2000 years?

[langernameohnebedeutung]

playing as a Drow is fun

[yasu-kun]

２月１０日HBD（遅くなった）ｏｒｚ

Thank you for reading further!

I've seen many misinformation about "Science Sans" about his birthday and about his original creator, so here are some facts about "Science Sans"

The origin of Sci's "canon" birthday on February 10th shares the same birthday as my persona (Yasu-Kun)

If Science Sans came from an alternate/pre-timeline of Undertale as a scientist (eg. TalkingSoup's version or "Sciencetale" RP version) → "Scientist Sans"

If Science Sans branched out from Undertale's timeline/universe as its own AU (doesn't become as Classic/Undertale!Sans in the future) and be any role related to science not limited to being a scientist (eg. psychologist, doctor, time traveller) → "Science Sans"

You *could* say I'm the original creator of "Science Sans" after inventing many ideas for the AU community ("Yandere"/Evil!Sci, Sci-Ko and his alters, Japanese!Sci, Doctor!Sci etc.) — especially if basing him on my version with his birthday on February 10th

There's so many people who created "Scientist Sans" before I joined the fandom, but I'm one of the earliest creators who created their own version of "Science Sans" (often ships with Underfell Sans) along with others back long ago when the scifell community on Tumblr was very active (2016+)

However, anyone can own their version of "Science Sans" or "Scientist Sans" (eg. Crayon Queen is the owner of her CPAU version of Sci)

As long as people don't credit the wrong creator of my version of Sci (especially on his birthday on Feb 10th), I recommend crediting "Science Sans" to the AU Community

You can credit me as the owner of my version of "Science Sans" (from UnderDespair or any other AUs/scifell/oneshots I created him with)

Thanks for reading and hope I shed a lot of light on Science Sans!

[gothicprep]

twitter terfs are some of the dumbest and most obnoxious people on the planet. they seriously ding my faith in other women. “god, maybe we are all actually dumb.”

someone shared a photo of magaret hamilton with the caption “she’s so t-girl coded” and because I’m a normal person who isn’t perpetually seething with rage, I interpret this to mean commentary on her fashion sense by the standards of 2020s eyes. and looking through that lens, I sort of see it – round frame glasses, long sleeve dress, standing next to thousands of pages of code. she’s at least serving gay icon in that one. and we all know that you don’t need to be gay to be a gay icon.

terf twitter reaction is “iMpLyiNg ThAt A wOmAn In ScIeNcE WaS aCtUaLly BoRn MaLe Is JuSt TeXtBoOk MiSoGyNy.” like can you fucking calm down and learn what a playful joke is?