feralscienceguy
physics - chemistry - aerospace - bio - palentology - astronomy side blog to @ferallizard he/him
75 posts
Latest Posts by feralscienceguy
It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.
Sometimes you need to read something twice to get it. You might need to watch a movie three times to understand it. You might have to have that album on repeat for a week until the lyrics make any sense. You're allowed to engage with it and can keep engaging with it until it means something to you. People will see a painting at a museum and laugh about not getting what the big deal is but like you can come back, you can see it at another time, and maybe that next time it'll be different for you. I'm of the belief the "media literacy crisis" would solve itself if more people just sat down and did it again. Watched, read, played, listened, etc like I don't think people are getting more ignorant necessarily I just think we're not glorifying personally replaying things nearly as much as we should be.
Romanticizing studying/education
While I am not currently enrolled in college, something I found incredibly helpful when it came to studying and taking notes was fully romanticizing it. And by that I mean going all the way in— I would put on a classical music playlist and set my LEDs to a warm orange tone and pretend I was a young scholar in ye olden days studying by candlelight, and a couple hours later I’d have half a notebook filled with color-coded notes. Another time I put on some film noir jazz and rain ambience and imagined I was a tired, grizzled detective working tirelessly on a cold case that just wasn’t making sense. And sure enough, I would have pages upon pages of notes and work completed by the end of the night. It sounds really silly but I shocked myself with how well it worked, and I wanted to share my experience with it in case it can help anyone else!
This discovery deepens our understanding of quantum fluids and could inspire more efficient hydrogen storage and transport for clean energy.
Notes for drawing (and writing) insects
I do something like this almost yearly and it feels like it gets a little longer every time!
Personally I draw either cartoony stuff or hybrid monsters where none of this is mandatory, but here are some of the things I sometimes see missing or inaccurate in insect artwork that was meant to be lifelike, and even if you only do alien, monster or cartoon arthropods, or you don’t make art at all, you might still like to know some of these things!
First off, an insect leg pretty much always has 9 segments. #1, the coxa, is what attaches it to the body and can be a short little “ball” or a whole long piece, but almost always bends DOWN. The last five segments are almost always very short, forming a super flexible “foot” or “tarsus” ending in a set of claws and sticky pads. All spiders have this “foot” as well!
The foot is even still present on the claws of a preying mantis - growing right out of the “sickle” like this, and still used as feet when the mantis walks around or climbs. Basically ONLY CRABS have limbs ending in simple points!
Insects don’t just have side-to-side mandibles at all, but an upper and lower set of “lips” like a duck bill! In some, however, these parts can be very small or even fused solid.
Insects also typically have four “palps” on their head, an upper and lower pair, which evolved from legs and are used to handle food!
Most *FLYING* insects have ocelli, single-lens eyes in addition to their multi-faceted compound eyes! Some flightless insects can also have them but it depends on the species.
All legs and wings are always attached to the thorax!
Caterpillars still have six legs! They’re very small and up near the head. All the other “legs” are actually just suckers on its underbelly.
You will be forgiven for never drawing this but this is how many parts a mosquito’s mouth actually has. Every piece you can find in another insect’s mouth - the “upper lip,” the mandibles, the palps, etc. - are all present as different needles and blades!
The word “bug” originally referred only to one group of insects, the hemiptera, including stink bugs, assassin bugs, aphids, cicadas, bed bugs and water striders to name a few. One distinguishing feature of this group is that it did away with all those separate mouth parts - all “bugs” have just a single, hollow “beak” or “proboscis” to feed through!
The vast majority of insect groups have wings or at least members with wings, and all insects with wings have FOUR of them…..except that in beetles, the front wings evolved into solid, protective shields for the hind wings, and in true flies (which includes mosquitoes!) the hind wings evolved into tiny little knobs with weights on the end, called halteres, which the fly’s fast-paced brain uses to feel its orientation, altitude, speed, surrounding air pressure and other fine data making them quite possibly the most advanced aerial navigators on the planet. OTHER NOTES THAT DON’T NEED ILLUSTRATION:
Insects and other arthropods HAVE TRUE BRAINS in their heads, made of brain cells like ours. They can learn, memorize, and make decisions.
Insects do have males and females and obviously only females lay eggs. Fiction is always getting this wrong, but I guess it also does so with birds so whatever.
Of insects, only termites, ants, some bees and some wasps have fully evolved a eusocial colony structure with “queens” as we think of them. Of these, the termites are actually highly specialized cockroaches, and the rest (bees, ants, wasps) are the same exact group.
The scrabbling, clicking noise associated with insects is usually added artificially in nature footage for dramatic effect. While their movements likely emit some sort of sound, it’s probably no “louder” proportionately than, say, the sound of a cat’s fur as it walks. In other words it should not be noticeable; what kind of animal survives as a species if it clatters with every step??
Compound eyes do not see a bunch of identical little images. There is no advantage to any organism seeing that way. An insect sees one big picture just like you do.
Only some insect groups have “larvae.” Others have “nymphs” which resemble fully grown but wingless insects.
The only insects with a venomous bite are some true bugs and some flies. There are no beetles or roaches or wasps or anything else that inject offensive toxins through their mouth parts, as far as I know!
The only insects that lay eggs inside other insects parasitically are certain wasps and flies. There are also NO arachnids that do this.
Only certain bees, wasps and ants have stingers on their abdomens. These are modified from egg laying appendages, so it’s also only ever the females.
The only other kind of “sting” in any insect is a venomous hair or spine, mostly seen in caterpillars.
i could never associate myself with any other form of academic aesthetics than chaotic academia. this is literally the only 'aesthetic' i can abide by, because why are there so many books scattered on my bed, i sleep alone on a whole queen size bed but cannot fit in because after a whole day of studying,books.are.everywhere.
and for some odd reason i refuse to arrange them, it somehow makes it harder for me to find them so i just don't, i have the tendency to make the most important notes on scraps of paper??? though i end up collecting all of them and now i have a stash of notes only i can understand because they are so damn context less.
i always wanted to associate myself to dark academia, because omg i wanna be mysterious so bad, but omfg when i start speaking :D there's literally no stopping me.
my hands, ALWAYS STAINED WITH INK, like i'm EMBARASSED so so embarassed, that i'm a legal adult with pen stains on my clothes, blankets, pillow covers, body and what not.
it is not as pretty or put together as it seems when you study, but it's fun, there's fun in learning i literally just had a mental breakdown over physics but it's a privilege, a privilege that the only thing i'm stressing over is acads, we should probably enjoy the process of learning more than raving over the outcomes, hopefully that makes the process more enjoyable and well, easier to an extent.
anyway, it's 5:20 PM and am off for a nap, b-bye :3
Do you think in like, an urban fantasy setting, with a modern lab and chemistry knowledge you could brew super specific potions? Imagine getting a C on your lab final for Potions 238 because you didn’t balance your equation correctly and accidentally added 4 mols of salamander blood when you only needed 2. You lose points for incorrect titration, leading your potion of invisibility to last 10 minutes instead of 20. Would you treat each magical component as its own element/ compound or would you have to break it down into organic molecules? What does “enchanted” MEAN in terms of reactance!!! These are the real questions!!
As a former nerdy child (and current nerdy uni student) I love how you don't grow out of it, I love that ✨real scientists✨ remain genuine nerds: there's a sheet of paper stuck to the wall above the coffee machine in my internship mentor's office that shows an increasing linear function where x = amount of consumed coffee and f(x) = number of published papers. The researchers here regularly joke about electrons and syntheses and whatnot. Internship mentor told us all today about a science meme he'd seen the other day. It's amazing :')
Me after spending hours in the lab only to get a .05% yield
If you're feeling anxious or depressed about the climate and want to do something to help right now, from your bed, for free...
Start helping with citizen science projects
What's a citizen science project? Basically, it's crowdsourced science. In this case, crowdsourced climate science, that you can help with!
You don't need qualifications or any training besides the slideshow at the start of a project. There are a lot of things that humans can do way better than machines can, even with only minimal training, that are vital to science - especially digitizing records and building searchable databases
Like labeling trees in aerial photos so that scientists have better datasets to use for restoration.
Or counting cells in fossilized plants to track the impacts of climate change.
Or digitizing old atmospheric data to help scientists track the warming effects of El Niño.
Or counting penguins to help scientists better protect them.
Those are all on one of the most prominent citizen science platforms, called Zooniverse, but there are a ton of others, too.
Oh, and btw, you don't have to worry about messing up, because several people see each image. Studies show that if you pool the opinions of however many regular people (different by field), it matches the accuracy rate of a trained scientist in the field.
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I spent a lot of time doing this when I was really badly injured and housebound, and it was so good for me to be able to HELP and DO SOMETHING, even when I was in too much pain to leave my bed. So if you are chronically ill/disabled/for whatever reason can't participate or volunteer for things in person, I highly highly recommend.
Next time you wish you could do something - anything - to help
Remember that actually, you can. And help with some science.
On National Poop Day, we share ancient poop! Can you guess which animal made this well-preserved mess? A giant ground sloth! This specimen was found in Mylodon Cave in Chile. Bones of giant ground sloths have been found near those of early humans, hinting that ground sloths and early humans used the same caves, though not necessarily at the same time.
Periodic Videos on YouTube discusses the creation of the element darmstadtium and pays a visit to where it was discovered.
This Zenith Movie was taken on Sol 4001 (2023-11-07) at approximately 8:04 LTST and a solar longitude of 145.03°. (What is this?)
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Diamonds are a scientist's best friend—if they're studying Earth's inner layers! Natural diamonds form in the Earth’s molten mantle, far deeper than humans have ever drilled. In this video, mineralogist Kate Kiseeva, assistant curator in the Division of Physical Sciences, explains how tiny crystals captured within these diamonds give scientists a direct window into our planet's inner structure.
ALCOHOLIC MOUSE
医生Lophēlē 🏥
biologists will be like this is a very simplified diagram of a mammalian cell
chemists will be like this is a molecule
Galaxies
Unimaginably huge collections of gas, dust, stars, and even planets, galaxies come in many shapes and sizes. Some are spirals, such as our own galaxy, others are like squashed balls, and some have no shape at all.
From the book Knowledge Encyclopedia Science! (DK)
spider eye arrangements
NATIVE CARBON DIOXIDE FOUND ON JUPITER’S MOON EUROPA
Caecilians’ teeth are so metal. Nothing you will expect from what looks like a gummy worm when it has its mouth closed.
'do you think you're superior for not using AI in your work' thank you for asking! yes i do
NASA Data Sonification: Black Hole Remix
In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center. (source)