[aethelflaedladyofmercia]

[narwhalsarefalling]

oh yeah have i ever told yall of the academic war i have been an unwilling soilder in for the past two years

[narwhalsarefalling]

okay SO. i have two professors that both teach this one subject, but different classes. they have different last names, so i didnt know this at first and espically since they are academic RIVELS at my school, but they are MARRIED. but for the past 8 years they have been in an academic WAR of geospatical sciences data. more accurately, the raster vs vector data debate. i am personally on the side of "both have their pros and cons and can be utalizied to the utmost efficency" but both professors are like, DEADLOCKED in insistanting one is better then the other

so, professor A is my mentor. i like him a lot, and he was the main person that taught me the most abotu Eris and ArcGIS. professor B is a professor i had one for class, and shes nice and knows a lot of little tricks about Eris programming but mostly relies on arcMAP because shes the raster data professor.

and THESE MOTHERFUCKERS. have written no less then 30 papers that is basically like a "re: re: re: re: re: re: vector data is better then raster fuck you" but like, Professionally. and they leave stupid notes in the footnotes that read "Reguardless of Professor A's opinions reguarding the efficency of Vector data, Raster data has a more efficant polygon computing rate and is the most commonly used program on interplantaring mapping" and its HILARIOUS

[narwhalsarefalling]

ive read all of their papers, and its basically like reading an email chain between a married couple arguing over the colors of the kitchen backsplash for their new home. its HILARIOUS. but obviously, because of their differnet last names and because they act like they HATE each other, NOT VERY MANY PEOPLE REALIZES THEYRE MARRIED

until like LAST WEEK

[narwhalsarefalling]

professor B publishes a paper that casually drops the word "husband"

and obviously all the students are like "oh i didnt know u were married!" because we read that shit like how white suburban mothers read People Magazine

[narwhalsarefalling]

and shes like "yeah, its Professor A"

[narwhalsarefalling]

and we all FLIPPED. THE FUCK. OUT

[narwhalsarefalling]

we thought the framed picture of the two of them on professor A's desk was ironic because hes that type of guy

[narwhalsarefalling]

like, you gotta undestand. these two have gotten into YELLING matches in hallways. these two refuse to go onto trips with each other. but apparently they have a system where they quite LITERALLY leave all of their work at work and drive home in seperate cars and literally NEVER mention work at home. it is SO funny

[shadow-of-a-dream]

[aethelflaedladyofmercia]

These Good Omens human AUs are getting really niche and complex…

[aethelflaedladyofmercia]

[brattylikestoeat]

[gravityjunior]

That's because pea flower tea works naturally as a ph indicator! It will turn magenta when mixed with acid (lemon juice) but will turn cyan green when mixed with something alkaline (baking powder, bleach etc.)

[harleydellarte]

i'm not putting bleach in my tea

[aethelflaedladyofmercia]

I have a pouch of this from Adagio Tea! They only sell it during the blue moon. It’s pretty good but sadly I have no lemon so… I guess I’ll have to find something alkaline to throw in instead?

[neurosciencestuff]

(Image caption: Researchers discovered a genetic marker that differed between spinal cord neurons that only had short connections (green) and those that had more long-range connections (purple). Credit: Salk Institute)

Researchers trace spinal neuron family tree

Spinal cord nerve cells branching through the body resemble trees with limbs fanning out in every direction. But this image can also be used to tell the story of how these neurons, their jobs becoming more specialized over time, arose through developmental and evolutionary history. Salk researchers have, for the first time, traced the development of spinal cord neurons using genetic signatures and revealed how different subtypes of the cells may have evolved and ultimately function to regulate our body movements.

The findings, published in the journal Science, offer researchers new ways of classifying and tagging subsets of spinal cord cells for further study, using genetic markers that differentiate branches of the cells’ family tree.

“A study like this provides the first molecular handles for scientists to go in and study the function of spinal cord neurons in a much more precise way than they ever have before,” says senior author of the study Samuel Pfaff, Salk professor and the Benjamin H. Lewis Chair. “This also has implications for treating spinal cord injuries.”

Spinal neurons are responsible for transmitting messages between the spinal cord and the rest of the body. Researchers studying spinal neurons have typically classified the cells into “cardinal classes,” which describe where in the spinal cord each type of neuron first appears during fetal development. But, in an adult, neurons within any one cardinal class have varied functions and molecular characteristics. Studying small subsets of these cells to tease apart their diversity has been difficult. However, understanding these subset distinctions is crucial to helping researchers understand how the spinal cord neurons control movements and what goes awry in neurogenerative diseases or spinal cord injury.

“It’s been known for a long time that the cardinal classes, as useful as they are, are incomplete in describing the diversity of neurons in the spinal cord,” says Peter Osseward, a graduate student in the Pfaff lab and co-first author of the new paper, along with former graduate student Marito Hayashi, now a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University.

Pfaff, Osseward and Hayashi turned to single-cell RNA sequencing technologies to analyze differences in what genes were being activated in almost 7,000 different spinal neurons from mice. They used this data to group cells into closely related clusters in the same way that scientists might group related organisms into a family tree.

The first major gene expression pattern they saw divided spinal neurons into two branches: sensory-related neurons (which carry information about the environment through the spinal cord) and motor-related neurons (which carry motor commands through the spinal cord). This suggests that, in an ancient organism, one of the first steps in spinal cord evolution may have been a division of labor of spinal neurons into motor versus sensory roles, Pfaff says.

When the team analyzed the next branches in the family tree, they found that the sensory-related neurons then split into excitatory and inhibitory neurons—a division that describes how the neuron sends information. But when the researchers looked at motor-related neurons, they found a more surprising division: the cells clumped into two distinct groups based on a new genetic marker. When the team stained cells belonging to each group in the spinal cord, it became clear that the markers differentiated neurons based on whether they had long-range or short-range connections in the body. Further experiments revealed that the genetic patterns specific to long-range and short-range properties were common across all the cardinal classes tested.

“The assumption in the field was that the genetic rules of specifying long-range versus short-range neurons would be specific to each cardinal class,” say Osseward and Hayashi. “So it was really interesting to see that it actually transcended cardinal class.”

The observation was more than just interesting—it turned out to be useful as well. Previously, it might have taken many different genetic tags to narrow in on one particular neuron type that a researcher wanted to study. Using this many markers is technically challenging and largely prevented researchers from studying just one subtype of spinal cord neuron at a time.

With the new rules, just two tags—a previously known marker for cardinal class and the newly discovered genetic marker for long-range or short-range properties—can be used to flag very specific populations of neurons. This is useful, for instance, in studying which groups of neurons are affected by a spinal cord injury or neurodegenerative disease and, eventually, how to regrow those particular cells.

The evolutionary origin of the spinal neuron family tree studied in the new paper is likely very ancient because the genetic markers they discovered are conserved across many species, the researchers say. So, although they didn’t study spinal neurons from animals other than mice, they predict that the same genetic patterns would be seen in most living animals with spinal cords.

“This is primordial stuff, relevant for everything from amphibians to humans,” says Pfaff. “And in the context of evolution, these genetic patterns tell us what kind of neurons might have been found in some of the very earliest organisms.”

[prose-n-scripts]

[ewaneneollav]

“Why the fuck the little scroll bar has these little horizontal lines?!”
OK, i will tell you … this is to mimic little raised ridges
the ridges would provide friction with a finger, if it was a physical slider …
this intuitively tells you that the strange object is to be slid like a slider …
this is known as … “Skeuomorphic design”!
Thanks for listening. have a safe drive home everyone
[turns off the projector & leaves out the back door]
[gets in my car & puts the key in the ignition]
[turns key & my car explodes due to a car bomb, i die]

[cosmictuesdays]

[fluffygif]

Happiness is…the smell of earth after rain…

[help-im-a-medstudent]

18 months late but finally got to have a graduation ceremony

[avidcollectorofdust]

I think that one of the reasons I love Good Omens so much is that the characters are very rarely dignified. I mean, there was totally the opportunity, Pratchett and Gaiman could’ve gone the route of Crowley being an edgy demon with unresolved bitterness from falling, and have that consume his entire personality. They could’ve made Aziraphale always organized, always put-together, they could’ve made him the perfect image of what an angel is supposed to be.

but no, we get Anthony Janthony Crowley, a very uncool demon who yells at his plants because he heard it was good for them and no one told him otherwise, and Aziraphale, who’s introduced as the embodiment of too gay to function and has distinctly english vibes and no sense of keeping up with the times

[ds9-mug]

two times the mugs enacted violence on sisko and the one time o'brien stopped it 

S1E15 | Babel

[figuring-it-all-out]

Random Genderfluid Thing #703

Me (starting “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”): Oh there’s a shapeshifter on this show. I’m sure I won’t get overly attached.
Me (at the end of DS9 season one): I would die for Odo.

[filmjunky-99]

s t a r t r e k d e e p s p a c e n i n e