incirrata

[incirrata]

my personal pick for most underrated animal is the european legless lizard, which i think is often taken to just look like a normal and rather plain snake, but if you're familiar with reptile anatomy at all it looks more like some sort of bizarre heraldic fantasy creature than basically anything else on earth

[incirrata]

frantically sending emails to work out grad school logistics so I can commit before the billion dollars of frozen federal funds works its way down to rescinding acceptances. would have done this last week but then someone I knew committed suicide. but I guess I'm just supposed to keep dealing with things. fucked up.

[incirrata]

one more year until people stop dying

[incirrata]

Inka Essenhigh (American, 1969) - Ghost Pipes (2024)

[incirrata]

Dissolving in Light - Sasha Hartslief , 2020.

South African , b. 1974 -

Oil on canvas , 24 x 20 in. 61 x 51 cm.

[incirrata]

DAVID HOCKNEY

[incirrata]

Artem Rohovyi (Ukrainian, 1988) - Symphony of Branches

gouache on paper

[incirrata]

Brambly Hedge by Jill Barklem

[incirrata]

Lily Seika Jones aka Rivulet Paper (American, b. 1989, San Antonio, TX, USA, based Seattle, WA, USA) - Thistle, 2022, Paintings: Watercolor on Paper

[incirrata]

Some of the amazing biological watercolors by David Goodsell, who paints cells, organelles, and tissues literally molecule by molecule. The whole set of pictures is published as The Machinery of Life.

Bacterium Escherichia coli, with cell membrane and wall in green, cytoplasm in blue and magenta, and nucleoid in yellow and orange. Detail in the white square magnified on the right, showing the base of a flagellum. The yellow rope-like objects are strands of DNA, being replicated and transcribed to mRNA by orange enzymes. The pink curls are mRNA filaments, fed to purle ribosomes for protein synthesis. Full caption in the link.

To follow, the whole lifecycle of secreted proteins in a eukaryotic cell:

Left: In the nucleus, strands of DNA carrying the relevant gene (7) is attached by RNA polymerase (8) which creates the corresponding sequence of messenger RNA (9). Right: mRNA is carried by proteins through a nuclear pore (7) into the cytoplasm.

Left: mRNA is carried to the ribosomes (1) attached to the endoplasmic reticulum (green). The ribosomes "read" the mRNA sequence and assemble the corresponding aminoaid sequences (polypeptides) which are then brought into the ER; here they are folded into proteins and bound with sugars. Right: The mature proteins (in this case antibodies, 9) are packed into vesicles. Misfolded proteins are tagged by ubiquitin (6) and degraded in the proteasome (8).

Left: The proteins are carried by vesicles through the cytoplasm, navigating between the filaments of actin (3) until they reach the Golgi apparatus (green), where they are further processed. Right: The proteins are packed into membrane-bound vesicles, "tagged" by specialized receptors (1), by cages of clathrin (2).

Left: The vesicles travel again through the cytoplasm, dragged along the path of microtubules (6) by kinesin (5). Right: Eventually the vesicles merge with the cell membrane and the proteins are secreted into the external environment.

The whole thing as a single picture:

More:

Influenza virus budding from a cell

Synapse discharging acetylcholine into a muscle cell (at bottom)

[incirrata]

feel like I only make personal posts when there are problems with my life so updating you all with the fact that things are really good right now. have two very exciting grad school options that I'm deciding between and also a prospective romantic relationship situation that will, even in the best case scenario, be something short-lived, but which is already a very nice thing in my life.

I do hate the fact that, when things are going well, I become less on tumblr and less attuned to what's going on in all your lives. it makes it clear that I've never really managed to build, well, actual friendships on here—I don't really know how to do that on the internet, it must be said—just a subset of people who know strange details about my life nobody else does, and vice versa, but not people I know how to help or sustain a connection with. I hope for good things for all of you, though.

[incirrata]

damn, your comment about where did the carbon come from has got me wondering why the earth's crust is so... ordered, if you see what I mean. like, you don't have just tiny particles of elements that happened to react with each other, in a random mostly-homogeneous mix--you have large areas of the same type of rock, large veins of iron or whatnot, and so on. like going with like, to an extent.

too lumpy and solid to combine and homogenise? or it combined and then separated due to different densities and varying levels of heat? I have no idea where planets came from, I only live on one.

[incirrata]

I have a deep suspicion of using metaphors in science education in general and each new chapter I read of my geology textbook is trying hard to outdo itself with a metaphor that's not even meaningful enough to be misleading—just something incredibly stupid. today's:

Glaciers resemble bank accounts. Snowfall adds to the account, while ablation—the removal of ice—subtracts from the account.

so helpful for all the readers unable to comprehend the really difficult abstract concept of things becoming greater or smaller except when made to think about a bank account.

[incirrata]

Bats getting glamour shots

[incirrata]

I think I might know where I want to go to grad school but it’s not at the place my best friend just also got in (diff program same school). fuck. that one’s also a good program and it might be worth it. this isn’t fair.

[incirrata]

now I know what the fuck they get up to on espn 8, I guess.

I’m in the Newark airport and a restaurant tv is showing quidditch like the kind where they run around on the ground with sticks between their legs and the rules must be less absolutely stupid I suppose. I feel like I’m actually losing my mind. there’s commentary.

[incirrata]

I’m in the Newark airport and a restaurant tv is showing quidditch like the kind where they run around on the ground with sticks between their legs and the rules must be less absolutely stupid I suppose. I feel like I’m actually losing my mind. there’s commentary.