#also question for science

[bluecoffeebeanz]

modern au where Aki’s swords are just wall decor 🥲

[yellowymellon]

EXCUSE ME WHAT??? HALOVIANS DONT HAVE A HALO IRL???

Edit: so you're telling me Sunday had the ena halo before he even joined the order? His fate is truly predetermined

[spirk-trek]

absolutely surreal to see william shatner seduce a man on the 1960s space show (don't worry there's a woman possessing his body)

[eye-of-the-hawk]

My apologies, ma’a—doctor. 😳

[fluffypotatey]

ok this is super irrelevant but

this was just a thought floating in my head bc i’m writing a Hanahaki au in a relatively modern setting and started thinking, “so what would this disease fall under if you were to study it?”

[transingthoseformers]

Meltdown 🤝 Mandroid

Becoming Not Quite Human through their own experiments and being cool antagonists

[randomtheidiot]

If I ate myself, would I gain weight?

[raventrigonsdaughter]

Hmmmm thinking about Agathario wenclair crossover fic happening after wednesday season 1 and canon divergence with the ending of aaa... i have many thoughs

[calkale]

i cannot wait to get out of school so i never have to be around kids using ai for their work again 😐

[brb-on-a-quest]

For all intents and purposes, assume you have nothing going on right now that you particularly need a fully charged phone for.

[bumblingbabooshka]

Since Tuvok is a lieutenant at the beginning of the series [one step above Ensign] despite being with Starfleet for a significant amount of time [He was an academy instructor for sixteen years and has known Janeway for twenty* - since her very first command] and is promoted to "Lieutenant Commander" instead of "Commander" I wonder when exactly he switched from the Science track ['Flashback'] to Security, which he's in in canon. *It's stated that they've known each other nine years and twenty years in two different episodes, which to me is a 'pick your canon' continuity error like Janeway saying Tuvok is 'almost at 3 digits' on his birthday but later he says he's already over a hundred Note: I'm not a hundred percent on the rankings for Starfleet since I know they are a bit inconsistent and some positions are phased out etc

[saintl-y]

FIRST ROUND OF REFS!

Figured I'd do rounds of Refs so for the first round, went for Benrey and Gordon. We've got Benrey as he is and then Benrey with no Helmet [Xenrey will be later shshs I'm tired]

Ask me questions about my designs please I'm desperate.

[collectiveclams]

The best part about having an older sister who is a competitive powerlifter is sending her scenes of ppl in media lifting then having her judge them.

[captainbuzzard]

was clearing out my phone's gallery and once again realized how much art i never posted here, so here's a stijn strongbody!

[ID: a digital line drawing of Stijn Strongbody, a middle aged Japanese man with four sheep's horns, and, barely visible before the canvas cuts off, four arms. he holds a pencil in one hand as he looks off to one side with a good-natured, contemplative expression.]

[underthehedge]

CTVT and a weird niche theory I fell down the rabbit hole about - giant transforming retroviruses???

This is a story about how a single line on a wikipedia page sent me down a rabbit hole of finding one scientist's fringe theory that's juuuust plausible enough to make me question everything while almost certainly being absolute fucking bunk.

Some background

So, on parts of tumblr at least we all know about Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour, aka The Immortal Cancer Dog. For those who don't know, it's a cancer dogs get, usually on their junk, that unlike most other cancers, isn't made up of their own cells. The cells are actually all descended from this one dog or wolf that lived like 11,000 years ago and are, arguably, all technically that one dog. A dog that became a single-celled infectious disease.

We have a wealth of genetic, histological and observational evidence for this. As in, we know it what population of canids it came from, we know it's got a weird chromosomal structure compared to normal dogs, we know it's genetically distinct from the hosts. We also know it's not the only one out there: There's a similar thing in Syrian hamsters and also the famous Tasmanian Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD).

Which made me pause when I was reading something on wikipedia about the devil facial tumour and saw a line mentioning that it was now known to be caused by a giant virus, much like CTVT. Which...huh? Oh I hadn't heard that afore.

Giant viruses

Ok so giant viruses are a thing and they're fuckin cool. They're a relatively recent discovery and comparatively huge, i.e. bigger than a bunch of bacteria. They were only discovered in 1981 and we still don't know an enormous amount about them but they're big and have large genomes and because of the way viruses are they're not easy to detect unless you're specifically looking for them.

They show up under microscopy (sometimes) and you can find them with genetic probes but you gotta already be looking for them to see that really. Current research though basically says they're more common than we think, just overlooked, and there's software out there that scans through genomic data to find sequences that might indicate their presence. There's even a possibility that one group might be involved in some cases of pneumonia in humans, though I need to stress that that's extremely not confirmed right now.

The "wait, what?" moment

So I mentioned that it was a line in the wiki article for DFTD that had me going "wait, really?", the line in question was this:

A study found evidence for an infectious agent resembling a giant virus that was capable of turning heathy cells into cancer cells. It was found to be a huge retrovirus with similar viruses being found in human and canine cancer cells.

Big If True.

So of course I check the source, which was a 2020 paper by Lusi et al. titled "A transforming giant virus discovered in Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumour: Stray dogs and Tasmanian devils opening the door to a preventive cancer vaccine".

Hang on, CTVT not DFTD? This is where some alarm bells went off because uh, as mentioned at the start, we know a shit ton about CTVT. Including the fact that it's all one specific dog. Which doesn't fit at all with the idea that it's caused by a virus transforming host cells into cancer cells.

So what fucking gives? What is this research that fully overturns decades of pretty conclusive research to the contrary?

Is this another case of Dr Barbara McClintock? Who spent decades being ridiculed by the scientific community over her wild theory that was, in fact, 100% right even if it seemed to fly in the fact of all prior evidence?

Or is this a Dr Donald I. Williamson situation wherein a scientist with appropriate training is just wildly but extremely vehemently wrong?

[shy-forceghost]

I know they were busy saving the world and all of that, but we really got robbed of some interactions between Yasmine, Ava and Beatrice just ... being nerds together.

Imagine the potential: Yasmine blasting out fun history facts and then Beatrice complementing by bringing up a whole linguistic analysis; Ava just listens in awe before adding the most mind-blowing dystopian theory based on a sci-fi book she read.