Salamander

  • 174 Posts
  • 125 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
Cake day: December 19th, 2021
  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoChemistry@mander.xyz•Chemistry lab safety: gloves or no gloves
    0·
    2 months ago

    It depends. In my experience: in an academic laboratory I have been able to use common sense.

    For example, gloves go on when working with strong acids/bases. The statement:

    gloves apparently only give researchers a false sense of security that can dull the sense of touch and prevent you from recognizing chemical exposure

    Does not apply as much when you are working with such corrosive agents, because you really should never be in a position where spilling 4 M HCl into your hands would go unnoticed.

    When working with large quantitites of oils, even if non-hazardous, gloves go on and they will probably get oil in them.

    When working with cell cultures, the goal is often to not contaminate the cultures. Some people prefer to wash their hands thoroughly and not use gloves, and they have been working at it for many years and they seem to do just fine. It’s a risk mitigation strategy - if the cultures have antibiotics and fungicides, risk is already not too high.

    In an industry setting it is different. Companies often comply with specific standards and health and safety regulations. While the individual can use common sense, the people in charge of ascertaining compliance (sometimes ‘EHS’, Environment, health and safety personnel) aren’t necessarily chemists themselves, nor should they need to be aware of the identity of the transparent liquid in the flask that you are holding. So, generic rules are often set in place not only because of their practical utility but also to simplify enforcement. In some cases external auditors can come in (announced or not) and verify compliance - this, again is much simpler when the rule is ‘lab coat behind yellow line, gloves always on when touching a container with a liquid’ than having to interview each person to understand what they were touching without gloves and to understand their philosophy of why they chose to do so.

  • Salamander@mander.xyzOPtoLichen@mander.xyz•Isolation and microscopic observations of LichenEnglish
    6·
    8 months ago

    Thanks! Today I collected a tiny piece of the lichen and set up a new experiment to grow the algae!

    The lichen organism consists of a combination of different species combining into one — a form of symbiosis. Generally, the lichen consists of at least one species of fungus, known as the mycobiont, and at least one photosynthetic alga or a cyanobacterium as a symbiotic partner, known as the photobiont. It is possible to have more complicated mixtures, not necessarily only two.

    The fungus grows on a surface and then undergoes a process of lichenization. In this process, it can capture its companion from the environment (it may arrive via arthropod activity, such as through saliva or feces), and then produces structures within which they reside, as shown in the diagram below.

    Lichen Structure
    Source: New Phytologist

    This relationship is beneficial to both organisms because the lichen can “mine” nutrients like phosphorus and also provide protection, while the photobiont can make use of light to produce sugars for the fungus.

    It is difficult to cultivate these by picking one from the wild (except perhaps if you bring the lichen along with the surface it lives on), because this state of symbiosis is strongly adapted to the surface the lichen grows on and it has gone through a developmental history that is not easy to replicate from a small fragment.

    One way to grow a few specific species of lichen is through a process of re-synthesis. This process consists of first growing the fungus and the algae separately, and then re-combining them to create the lichen.

    Lichen Re-synthesis
    Source: BMC Genomics

    I still have not gotten to the point… but I have read about it and I think I now know how to do it. I need to make an agar plate like the ones I showed in the post that contains nutrients, but then place a thin regenerated cellulose or cellophane membrane on top of it that allows nutrients to flow slowly, but that the fungus is unable to penetrate, forcing it to only grow in a plane. After it has grown for a couple of days, the algae can be added in a specific ratio for the fungus to capture and become a lichen.

    Hope this explanation helps clarify!

    Here is also a very nice video on lichens: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GOgiJlHkcY

  • Salamander@mander.xyztoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What is the smallest hill you would die on?
    4·
    9 months ago

    Our relationship is built on tiny hills to die on. Of course, it is always playful 😜

    She will use a common grammatical construction in Spanish (“a por”) that became technically correct in Spain (where she is from) long after the conquest. I am from Mexico, where that construction is not used (we don’t insert the “a” before “por”). So, when she uses “a por” I act like I don’t understand and argue that it is not in the spanish her ancestors taught mine.

  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Chat, is this true?English
    4·
    11 months ago

    How did I miss that?!

    My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above…

    I still can’t find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.

  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Chat, is this true?English
    43·
    11 months ago

    EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

    Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️‍♂️

    The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.

    The description of the edit is the following:

    Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

    If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

    This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

    If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

    So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

    I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

    I find it highly unlikely that:

    • User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

    AND

    • This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

    More likely…

    • Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
    • Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

    And this concludes my little investigation 🧐

  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience@mander.xyz•Cellular Consciousness: Life Does Not End With the Death of the Body.
    4·
    11 months ago

    Always exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!

    I have searched for the “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don’t think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.

    About the: “third state”. Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don’t agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some “third state”.

    Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.

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