it fucks with your ability to make ATP bc whoops now it’s adenosine-5’-diphosphate-arsenate instead
helloooOOOOOO???
fuck you takes your energy storage away
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Can’t even powerhouse your own cells anymore! It’s fucked!
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Finally reading this paper for real and. One it’s a great paper but two it’s also extremely good and fun to read the authors’ academic shade toward Piers Morgan. The combination of academic jargon and colloquial speech is always always a fun reading experience. See: my favorite footnote so far
My other favorite footnote is one where they talk about their data collection methods (i.e. observations from within communities), and they quote an earlier Black linguist from 1998
“I hear this kind of speech daily in the African-American community in which I have lived for over a decade, and the one in which I grew up. When the weather is not too harsh, I can sit on my front stoop and collect examples” (Spears 1998)
And they accompany it with this footnote. Favorite part of social sciences.
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There’s an incredibly lethal neurotoxin produced by a species of little dinoflagellates. It’s called maitotoxin and it looks like this.
From 1996 to 2015, there was a group trying to synthesize it in the lab through non-biological means, (supposedly) just for the challenge of it and not because they wanted to produce large amounts of extremely lethal neurotoxin.
Maitotoxin is about the largest molecule I feel comfortable with. Anything bigger than this is biochemistry (derogatory) but anything this size or smaller is organic chemistry (affectionate).
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The transparent background is unfortunately not terribly visible. But also jesus christ so many carbon rings. what.
I also did some googling and found out this is also an algae bloom dinoflagellate! Wheee!
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: today i learned that our workplace has a pair of Jim Henson puppets
From the company? From the guy? Who knows! There’s no documentation! They definitely look the part though and I’m gonna email someone cuz im curious, will report back
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learned about these guys
Every year, in the Costa Rican village of Boruca, men dress in garish masks and costumes to reenact their ancestors’ battle against colonizers 500 years ago. In the ritual, Spaniards are depicted as bulls, while the Borucans depict themselves as devils, to reclaim a slur the Spanish once used against them.
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as a sometimes attempting puppeteer i am Highly Invested in this update
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“…in the 1980s, village authorities built a bullfighting arena in the village to attract tourist income. But a group of women in the village objected, and destroyed the arena. Bullfighting isn’t Borucan; it was brought to Costa Rica by the Spanish colonists.”
metal as fucccccccck 
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I learned you can watch every episode of The Joy of Painting on Youtube
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I often have this on in the background while working or studying ahaha, Bob Ross gently murmuring about landscapes and paintings is very soothing
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found out about kuru (prion disease transmitted by cannibalism) which has an incubation time of ten to FIFTY YEARS? Kuru (disease) - Wikipedia
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: yeah prion diseases are FUCKED
Fatal familial insomnia is another fucked one
Description of FFI
Tech there’s also sporadic fatal insomnia but they both do the same thing
FFI is a prion disease passed genetically in about 70 families worldwide that generally occurs between 45 and 50. It’s pretty much what it says on the tin, you gradually lose the ability to have restful sleep until it kills you
All prion diseases are fucked and largely incurable but this one is particularly fucked to me imo since its just this grim reaper hanging over you and making each sleepless night feel like a death knell
Prion diseases in general are fucked. You’re telling me a protein misfold can chemically force other proteins to also get weird and fucked up and kill you??? Who let this happen???
Diseases like this are cool and fascinating and i want them 50 billion miles from me immediately please
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Physics and/or chemistry! :D
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: some fucked up future biochemist saw the obelisks and went “lmao i can go smaller” and made Infectious Proteins
Not RNA
Just a Single Protein
Biochem is ridiculous
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Further supporting my hatred of biochem. Molecules were never meant to self-replicate, let alone wriggle around in the soup, let alone send and receive emails (this is a joke)
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: you’re right and you should say it
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actually so goofy how little we know about the body. like fuck if we know what prions are actually good for 
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TIL that while the English dub of FFVII Rebirth made the baffling decision to pronounce Cait Sith incorrectly, the Japanese dub actually gets it right! big ups to the JP voice director for giving a shit about Gaelic :)
decided to say a bit more about this in the interests of keeping posts here informative:
the cat-sìth (or, in Irish, cat sì) is a fairy from Celtic mythology that looks like a big ol’ cat. since it mainly crops up in Scottish folk tales, there’s speculation that it might’ve been based on the Scottish wildcat, but it does also appear in some Irish tales. the name is pronounced like ket shee.
here’s a picture of Scottish wildcats from Wikipedia, because they are super cute:
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