Microglossum Viride

This NPR interview with with Angela Saini about how race science never really left the global scientific consciousness is super interesting! I’m gonna read her book!

so the current main character of twitter are the algae tanks that are meant to function as "liquid trees" if u wanna call it that and people are very mad at them despite them being a cool and potentially useful concept. before anyone gets mad on this post in case it gets Literally Any Notes, notes:

algae is really really good at producing oxygen. more efficient than trees actually. it already produces like, grain of salt bc im getting a few diff numbers here from google, 50ish percent of the oxygen on earth. dw shes good at this.

no the scientists dont want to REPLACE trees thats just a shitty headline. the actual potential uses of these are plopping them down in places where you cant put another tree for whatever reason (including "theres a tree right there and it needs space"), in addition to trees bc as stated its Even Better at oxygen making, or when youre waiting for the trees to grow bc. they take a while.

if the tanks are as efficient as the scientists claim, one tank=two 10 year old trees. thats good! nice supplement to trees while youre waiting for them to grow and shit.

the one pictured also is a bench with solar lights and ports to charge your phone. thats nice!

apparently no maintenance isnt hard u just remove some of the algae once a month (which can then be used as fertilizer!) add some water and boom ur good 👍

stop saying "trees are free and require no maintenance" thats just false. the cost and maintenance are worth it!! but they do in fact have Cost And Maintenance. many good things in society are like this! please appreciate the work that goes into trees actually ty

again. not replacing trees. In Addition To. Alongside. Friends. <3.

ANYWAY, with those common things no one on twitter seems to understand out of the way, honestly im frustrated but (mostly) not ANGRY at the ppl not understanding that stuff. like, if u read past the headline u would know it, and i really wish yall would, but hey at least i understand being mislead by that awful fucking headline. i get it!!

what i am fucking pissed about is the people calling it ugly and saying no one wants slime tanks fuck you i DO want a slime tank

"but ohhh it looks like SLIME and DYSTOPIAN and blah blah blah" fuck YOU that slime is my BOYFRIENDS and i LOVE THEM. look at that gastly green color! it looks straight out of a mad scientists lab! its BEAUTIFUL!

i love algae and they are my friend and my lover and i will not stand for this fucking slander. you are all just too fucking weak to see the beauty in their hard work. you are blinded by tree propaganda, and just like bee propaganda you forget that there are OTHERS working day in and day out too. i love trees and (i LOOOOOVE bees btw) but do NOT forget the hard work done by algae.

if these things are as efficient as they claim then YES AMAZING LOVE IT, throw the cool slime benches hither and thither! mayhaps decorate them with a lil cool etched art (without compromising the efficiency) or some Fun Facts about how cool algae is and how NO THEY ARENT TREE REPLACEMENTS THEYRE TREE FRIENDS!!! THEY ARE FRIENDS!!!!!!!!! i would love nothing more than sitting at a bus stop under the green glow of my algae friends and i have been on this fucking train since i first saw cool concept art of this shit like a decade ago on tumblr. you CANNOT convince me giant green tanks of slop are anything BUT perfection.

and if anything i think they should fucking lean in to the slime thing. make some that look like giant test tubes. get nickelodeon to sponser a couple. teenage mutant ninja turtles crossover. stop listening to the fucking normies trying to convince you that Slime Bad and think of the fucking posslimbilities. EMBRACE THE SLIME.

to all my researchers, students and people in general who love learning: if you don't know this already, i'm about to give you a game changer

connectedpapers

the basic rundown is: you use the search bar to enter a topic, scientific paper name or DOI. the website then offers you a list of papers on the topic, and you choose the one you're looking for/most relevant one. from here, it makes a tree diagram of related papers that are clustered based on topic relatability and colour-coded by time they were produced!

for example: here i search "human B12"

i go ahead and choose the first paper, meaning my graph will be based around it and start from the topics of "b12 levels" and "fraility syndrome"

here is the graph output! you can scroll through all the papers included on the left, and clicking on each one shows you it's position on the chart + will pull up details on the paper on the right hand column (title, authors, citations, abstract/summary and links where the paper can be found)

you get a few free graphs a month before you have to sign up, and i think the free version gives you up to 5 a month. there are paid versions but it really depends how often you need to use this kinda thing.

Microbiology!

[ID: a banner made of emojis of microscopes, bubbling flasks, and DNA, with different bacteria emojis from a combo emoji scattered between them. /End ID]

It's not the best "microbiology" art, but it has a very interesting background. Two bacteria from two different clinical cases were inoculated on the TSCB medium. This metallic blue spilling bacterium is of course Pseudomonas aeruginosa. The yellow one (positive reaction on TSCB medium) is Vibrio metschnikovii isolated from chronic UTI in a dog. It was an unusual microbiological diagnosis. But what can you do when even your dog has a better holiday than you? Problems with urination (in this dog) began just after returning from the Mediterranean, the owners and the dog intensively used the charms of warm and salty water.

Pterocarpus Angolensis is a tree native to South Africa. It’s also commonly known as the bloodwood tree due to the fact that when it’s chopped or damaged, a deep red sap which looks eerily similar to blood, seeps from the tree. In fact, the purpose of the sap is to coagulate and seal the wound to promote healing, much like blood.

Microbe masterpiece by Mehmet Berkmen and Maria Penil

CRISPR was already on thin fucking ice as a serious name for a biotech technique and now they made up CRISPY-BRED are you joking