#taking some random internet guys word over peer reviewed science

[fishybehavior]

I’m sorry but I have to laugh that the people calling other people sheep are also the folks who will take a random internet persons word most of the time instead of looking it up, just cause it sounds about right

My guy look it up from a credible source or everyone will take advantage of you *smh*

[kassebaum]

SanversWeek Day 7- Soulmate AU

Today’s offering was written by my wife who wanted to get in on the action :)

Alex wasn’t sure if she believed in soul mates… Yes she had the ‘mark’ like all humans did (hers being on her upper arm) but she just wasn’t sure how much she believed that there was someone out there for everyone. She was 28 and had never been in love… Sure she had had flings with guys at college. Most people experimented with ‘non-soulmates’ when they were younger, the older generation always then saying that when you find your soulmate it’s like fireworks in your entire being and the world just seems… right… But Alex had never felt that. She did get mildly excited once when a guy she had been dating announced that their marks ‘fit’ and they should announce that they were soul mates. But one look at his crooked spiky symbol next to her smooth flowing lines proved that he was indeed… just high.

She thought back to those compulsory lessons at school which explained the meaning behind the marks everyone had from birth: ‘birthmarks’ or ‘soulmarks’ as they were called. No one really knew their origins, whether humans had evolved them over the eons, or if an alien race had decided to meddle in the human genetic makeup, taking it upon themselves to provide humans with an easy answer to life (and love).

There were however, enough people out there with anecdotal evidence of finding their own true love, that a high percentage of the population believed it. Some spent their entire lives searching for that one person to share their hopes and dreams with… To share their life with… and the sad truth was that some never found it.

But there were also those that refuted the claims that their fate was already decided, and they went off script; purposefully ignoring other people’s marks and trying to find love the way their ancestors did: by trial and error.

Alex pulled up her sleeve to look at her own mark; dark bruise purple lines swirled across her upper bicep, ending sharply at invisible edges which supposedly would map exactly to those of her true love… her soul mate… Teachers explained it as one half of a puzzle piece, that the mark reflected your soul and that both were incomplete until they found their perfect partner.

Alex contemplated one day finding that perfect fit and sighed… just because people believed in a thing didn’t make it true. Alex was a scientist; she required proof, evidence, peer reviewed data, not just coincidental stories that spread across the internet like wildfire. If she believed blindly in the ability of a random patch of coloured skin to decide who she could love then she was no better than those who believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Earth was flat!

She huffed and pulled her sleeve back down so she could finish getting ready, she was already a few minutes late to meet Kara before they both headed in to work. A short breeze and a thud showed her how late she actually was and that her super sister had gotten bored of waiting.

“Hey!” the perpetually bubbly superhero announced, alongside thrusting a steaming hot coffee at Alex and a bag of one donut (the rest having been consumed en-route).

“Hey…” Alex sighed out as she grabbed the bag with its sugared treat and started gulping the coffee.

“Are you OK?”

“What? Yea I’m fine, don’t worry” Alex tried to brush off as she grabbed the last items she would need for the day.

“You thinking about your mark again?” Kara pushed, sweeping her cape out behind her before sitting on one of the kitchen stools.

“Only a little…” Alex murmured. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine, there’s no real proof for any of it anyway, and you don’t even have one!”

“But that’s because I’m not human… It’s OK to believe in something Alex… I believe there’s someone out there for everyone, but that doesn’t mean you have to be bound by whatever your skin looks like, I think people find their soulmate despite the ink on their skin… Not because of it…” Kara stood up and hugged Alex fiercely.

“I keep telling you Kara, it’s not ink… It’s a natural pigment in the skin combined with abnormal blood vessels showing through the tissue, not actual ink…” Alex tried to protest underneath the intense cuddling currently squeezing the breath from her lungs.

“Well it looks like ink to me!” Kara stuck out her tongue and gave her sister another bone crushing hug. “Right! Let’s get to work, do you want a lift?”

“No it’s OK, I’ll take my bike, see you there?”

“Sure” Kara smiled before jumping out of the same window she had flown in by.

Alex locked it securely behind the superhero before heading out her apartment and doing the same to her front door. She tried to push the thoughts of soulmates and birthmarks out of her head and sped to work on her Ducati, letting the cool breeze calm her mind.

Nine hours later and Alex was back on her bike, this time shooting off to a potential alien crime scene which had initially been secured by fellow DEO agents. She arrived however, to discover members of the NCPD all over the alleyway where it appeared that a human had been murdered. She flashed her FBI badge at the young cop guarding the entrance and after a sternly raised eyebrow when he started to stammer a protest, was swiftly let through.

Another cop was crouched on the ground beside the body whilst another spoke to an inconsolable man a few metres away. Between the tears, Alex’s ears picked out the words “Soulmate!” before he broke down completely and was gently led away and out of the alleyway.

Alex approached the woman crouching on the ground, a woman who was definitely not a member of the same top secret government agency as Alex.

“Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing at my crime scene?” She demanded, already furious that the NCPD had seemingly encroached on a DEO case.

The woman didn’t jump at Alex’s words but instead rose smoothly to her feet and turned to face her, confidently looking the agent up and down before replying.

“Anyone ever tell you all you feds are the same? It’s like you all watched the same bad movies together at Quantico.”

“Who are you?” Alex asked; a little annoyed that her agent status left the cop completely un-phased.

“Detective Maggie Sawyer, NCPD Science division” Maggie flashed her badge as she spoke, and as she did so, the sleeve of her leather jacket rode up ever so slightly… enough to reveal a small part of a distinctive purple birthmark.  

“We handle all cases involving aliens and things that go bump in the night… Showed you mine… show me yours…” She challenged Alex, seemingly unaware that she had revealed her soulmark in addition to her badge.

A few seconds passed before Alex could process the words Maggie had spoken, her mind had fixated on the mark, to show someone your mark was considered quite intimate and Alex almost blushed at the innuendo of the Detective’s words before composing herself and answering.

“Agent Alex Danvers, FBI” She flashed her own (fake) badge.

However, Detective Sawyer had noticed the pause and smiled, she personally didn’t believe in birthmarks determining your soul mate so never made any real effort to hide hers (that combined with the slightly awkward position of it being on her forearm meant that it was often on show).

“How about we work together on this one?” She asked and offered her hand (the one with the marked wrist) to the agent.

Alex paused for a beat before gripping Maggie’s hand in her own, very carefully avoiding contact with the other woman’s mark as she nodded her agreement.

Alex and Maggie spent another hour directing other agents and cops collecting evidence before calling it a night. The body was collected to be transported for an autopsy, but so far it was inconclusive as to whether an alien had been responsible, everyone was hoping that the examination would provide more data.

Alex took a breath and offered her hand to Maggie “It was good working with you”

Maggie gripped it back firmly, Alex felt her heart skip a beat and a small shock shoot up her arm as she felt her index finger graze one of the smooth purple lines that made up Maggie’s mark.

“Same here, I’m finished for the night now, do you fancy grabbing a drink with me? I know a place…”

“O…K…” Alex stuttered out, thinking that maybe there might be something to this soulmate thing after all… And if not, well it was only a drink…

[crisprandcas-blog]

Let's Go Exploring! #4

Note to readers: Let's Go Exploring is now a newsletter! Want to get our link collections and semi-coherent ramblings straight to your inbox? You're in luck! SIGN UP today!

Hello readers! It has been an eerily beautiful March week (thanks climate change, I guess), our respective science projects have been full of ups and downs lately, and we are ready to sit down and scream into the internet for a while. 

This week, we have been re-reading the Two Bossy Dames back-catalogues to Improve Ourselves, and came across this ask:

I used to think of myself as a creative person. Then I ended up in a field where I consume other people's awesome creative output all day, and in a city whose main industry is Big Smart Ideas. Now I'm stuck feeling like I need Big Smart Ideas and Awesome Creativity to be worthwhile, but at the same time I'm paralyzed by the fact that my crappy little initial efforts aren't going to be as great as the work I see around me every day. What's the point of putting a lot of work into something crummy? As ladies who also consume culture professionally, how do you keep that from paralyzing your own creativity?

Which had this answer:

We are not competition for these people. We are their colleagues. Their work informs ours, and (we flatter ourselves slightly), one day ours will inform theirs. There’s room for all of this and way more besides! Whatever your field of endeavor is, you’re practicing it right alongside of a bunch of other people, and yeah, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel, but we bet you could do a bang-up job refining its design and rebalancing it.

Read the whole thing OBVS but basically we want to share this advice because it helped us so SO much in even contemplating starting a science link roundup/newsletter/writing team. We aspire to Dame Sophie and Dame Margaret levels of excellence and insight! In particular, the message offered by this answer is that you have a new perspective to offer just by being your unique self. Sure, other people may be making a similar thing as whatever it is you want to be producing, but you can add to the collection of amazing work by DOING amazing work.

We are trying to add to the collection of science-themed commentary already made excellent by the likes of Ed Yong, Erin Barker, Liz Neeley, Carl Zimmer, Peter Aldhous, and many others, and trying to inject our own background, experience, and humor into it. We started this for ourselves and for a few close friends, so we don't have to continually remind ourselves that this isn't a competition, but it does occasionally bubble to the surface of our self-conscience brains. "How many twitter followers do we have today?" is a question Cas finds herself asking far too often, for example.

When that question rises up of its own accord, what she tries to ask herself instead is "What have I written today that I'm proud of?" In fact we both think this is a question that everybody should ask themselves (possibly in a form more tailored to your particular choice of extracurricular content creation) instead of focusing on how many people have thumbs-up'd or hearted their stuff lately.

The above was written entirely for our own benefit, but we hope it helps you in your own endeavor to greatness, whatever form that takes!

The Links

Crispr reads:

This week, WIRED excerpted a book called Deadliest Enemy: A War Against Killer Germs. I haven't read the book, but the WIRED article is a quick read about what we can expect from a post-antibiotic world, and a reminder about why it's hard to regulate antibiotic use. (One problem: it's difficult for doctors to refuse anxious parents a prescription they don't think is necessary, especially when it seems basically harmless and might even help.) The article opens with a story about the bacteria found in the 4-million-year-old Lechuguilla Caves, which have genes that make them resistant to common antibiotics. This is cool but scary: cool because biology, wow! Scary because it's a reminder that a lot of bacteria already have all the tools they need to escape our attempts to get rid of them. Antibiotics were a miracle, no doubt, and they changed the world, but fighting bacterial infections will continue to be a war waged in every generation. Hopefully we'll be waging that war with effective antibiotics, but you never know.

On that note: the graphic novel Surgeon X is a cool comic about post-antibiotic London. It's not perfect, and I'm going to let it play out for a few more issues before I decide whether I'm totally sucked in, but I love the timely concept and the social commentary. Read it and have Thoughts? Let me know!

Very related to antibiotics: yesterday was World Tuberculosis Day. Many of us, me included, think of TB as a disease of the past. Only Victorian ladies in novels get consumption! (Side note - did you guys know that tuberculosis shaped Victorian fashion for decades? Looking ill was totally in!) But it's definitely still a very present disease -- 1.8 MILLION people died of TB in 2015, and drug-resistance is really f***ing us over in this case. Luckily we're a lot more knowledgable about what TB is caused by and how to treat it nowadays... no more eating the liver of a wolf boiled in wine! A common treatment of the past was shipping people off to the "fresh air" -- which probably did actually help a lot in some cases. They would travel to places like Colorado (mountain air, fewer people) and live in sanatoriums, where patients lived in semi-isolated huts. This week I learned that many of those huts that were used to house TB patients in Colorado have been turned into tool sheds and art studios! So cool.

And finally: Why surgeons make good artists. George Butler draws surgeons at work and talks about the similarities between art and surgery. Great artists make me jelly.

Cas reads:

Oh hey y'all. Did you need a reminder that coding is the most useful skill you can learn today or tomorrow, but preferably yesterday? Well, let WIRED give you one anyway. Why yes, WIRED, I should be learning to code in my "spare time". Many, many people have told me that programming is the path to the future. Let me complain about this for a hot second: I actually like to code. I've taken a few intro programming classes and I find it fun, satisfying, and completely unapplicable to my day-to-day work. I could 100 percent design a project in my field around messing with with the mass amounts of data available to scientists. I could 200 percent improve my job prospects by doing so. But I work and read all day in order to make sure my project is moving forward and I'll have a satisfying story by the time I'm thinking about graduating... and this doesn't require any computer skills beyond basic command of word-processing and access to the right computer tools. The thought of learning to competently code simultaneously makes me prematurely tired. To be honest, in my free time I'd rather be doing what I am right now: reading random things on the internet and writing about them. 

But yes, coding is the way of the future. So: people who HAVE learned to code when they didn't need to- how did you do it? What motivated you? Was it fun? Tell me your inspiring stories! Somebody give me a good kick in the butt! (I promise I'll thank you later.)

ANYhoo, moving on: National Geographic did an article about how weird small things look. Look, phage! 

And speaking of phage, this is an AWESOME book about them. It's hand illustrated AND free. Download it today! Or buy it for a lot of money... I'm seriously considering it as coffee-table-topping material.

More small things: Ernst Haeckel drew a lot of microscopic animals in the 1800s/early 1900s and MAN are the prints beautiful. He also drew bigger stuff but I like his depictions of the crazy diversity of protozoa best.

Something not so small: the gender bias in academic peer review. Especially in men against women... duh.

Randomness from the week: flat-faced bunnies!  Really cold leaves! Lego tape!

And we're done! Thanks for reading, and keep exploring!