Author: nosoulnoproblems

ear:

specsthespectraldragon:

sleepycreekcrafts:

vetstudentlive:

lizziedoesvetschool:

I love hearing about what happens in human medicine. I follow a bunch of medblrs and I know I have a few following me too… I’m pretty sure it’s because we’re both fascinated/slightly horrified by what our sister profession gets up to 😂

I heard from a human doctor about something called scolomine races. Scolomine is a muscle relaxant that is usually used in surgery. Inject it and nothing happens for a bit. But when it takes effect, you essentially collapse in a heap.

I am in no way condoning this but what happened was a bunch of new grads working in a rural area had nothing better to do (cus the hospital was under stocked in everything except scolomine). One person stood on the side with a stop watch while the rest lined up. They injeceted themselves and ran. The last person to collapse was the winner.

Omg.

what the fuck

tolkienmemegirl:

Maglor – work in progress by Elena Kukanova

dopeluminarydreamer:

smallest-feeblest-boggart:

Parents Picking Their Child’s Name: Eh, I like the way it sounds. Sure.

Writers Picking Their Character’s Names: What genre is it? How old are they? Active or passive? Blood type? Country of origin? Is it a family name? What does the name mean? Is it pretentious? Is it not pretentious enough? Can it be used as a metaphor? What position was the planet to the stars at the exact moment of their birth? Is the name gay enough?

This is “can I make a pun out of every name in their family tree” erasure

botanyshitposts:

botanyshitposts:

scientists: we replaced a plant’s secondary cell wall with another primary cell wall, making them Squishy like animal cells, but a little thicker so the plant can still survive!!!

me: nice!! how did that turn out??

scientists: 

i’ve gotten a few responses here asking for some clarification on this paper and why making essentially squishy plants was important enough to make it into the plant science section of nature, one of the most influential journals in the world, and i’d be happy to oblige and break this down a little!!

so to start off, plants have two kinds of membranes around their cells, while animals only have one. one of these is called the ‘plasma membrane’, which is a soft, squishy kind of membrane that we have as animals that just kind of holds everything in. the other kind that only plants have is called a ‘cell wall’, which in plant cells surrounds the plasma membrane to basically hold everything in even more, and is really rigid and hard instead of squishy. the cell wall is made of a strong substance called ‘cellulose’, which you prob have heard of before, which acts as a really strong support structure to hold up the plant and protect the cells. the cell wall has a lot of different functions, but one of the main ones is structural; the pressure between the cell wall and the water inside the plant’s plasma membrane forming ‘turgor pressure’, which keeps the plant upright (when a plant needs water, it’s turgor pressure goes down, and there isn’t enough water in the cells to push against the cell wall to hold it upright. this is what causes wilting!)

now here’s the problem with cellulose: it’s a BITCH to break down. in settings where people are trying to make biofuels and renewable oils from algae and plant materials (and being successful in limited amounts!!), cellulose is the biggest thing keeping the process from higher efficiency, making it harder for those techniques to keep up with fossil fuels. but removing the cell wall altogether wacks out the plant’s turgor pressure, upon which a TON of natural processes and biological functions in plants are based (turns out that maintaining water pressure is really important when you dont have like, blood to keep stuff going!! or a heart to move shit around!!). so we need some kind of hard thing for the plant cells to push against to keep up hydraulic pressure, but it cellulose is too hard for efficient use in sustainable fuels. 

which brings us to this study. im sure u can tell where this is going now. basically, these researchers were like, ‘what if we just added a second plasma membrane?? so its like, thicker, but there’s no cellulose???’. 

this worked well. like, really well. i have made an annotated version of some of their results: 

so in conclusion: this is a really cool paper, and not only did it show that it could be done, but they actually identified a ton of genes and transcription factors that could be modified to make replacement of a plant cell wall possible by other people. 

this is a huge generalization, of course- they have way more data in the paper here if y’all wanna see it for yourselves– but overall??? this technology could be really big in increasing the viability and efficiency in biofuels and sustainable biochemicals to be used in stuff like cosmetics, fabrics, plastics, etc.