Public service announcement:
If you happen to teach undergrads as a teaching assistant, you will be given a certain amount of latitude depending on the gig. Sometimes they’ll just have you taking notes on attendance and not otherwise be interacting with the students much, sometimes you’ll grade, give lectures, and have flexibility in attendance policies and rubrics. These tend to involve more work, but are also more rewarding.
When they assign you to high-responsibility postings, you’ll also have a fair amount of independence. Usually this situation arises because you’re teaching lab sections for a course with several hundred students in the lecture, and the professor has neither the time nor the inclination to read through everything that the students are doing with chemical titration or mineral identification or whatever. They’ll tell you what to teach, provide some slides and some worksheets, tell you what grade distribution to vaguely expect, and then let you do your thing. They’ll mostly hear about you if something goes really well, or really badly.
So here’s the thing. You will, absolutely, get in trouble for going off-book and giving the students an extra credit option to collect a large number of dead scorpions. But it won’t be that much trouble, especially if you play the naive grad student card, and it’ll take a couple weeks for the rumor mill to jump from students in your section to students in someone else’s section to another TA to the professor. So you’ll have plenty of time to collect all your ill-gotten scorpion gains, and explain to your students about stimulated emission and coherence in light and how scorpion chitin is capable of a weak phosphorescence. And sure, the powers that be can scold you a little bit, but for the rest of your life you’ll always get to be the teacher who collaborated with their class to build a scorpion-powered laser.
The kind of post that makes me realize the poster is more powerful than I will ever be, in dimensions of power I hadn’t even realized exist and will never fully comprehend.
biblical angels but their true form looks like the patterns in 90s arcade carpets
That’s just microbiology innit?
Obsessed with this answer.
FLORENCE — As early as 1595, descriptions of stains and discoloration began to appear in accounts of a sarcophagus in the graceful chapel Michelangelo created as the final resting place of the Medicis. In the ensuing centuries, plasters used to incessantly copy the masterpieces he sculpted atop the tombs left discoloring residues. His ornate white walls dimmed.
Nearly a decade of restorations removed most of the blemishes, but the grime on the tomb and other stubborn stains required special, and clandestine, attention. In the months leading up to Italy’s Covid-19 epidemic and then in some of the darkest days of its second wave as the virus raged outside, restorers and scientists quietly unleashed microbes with good taste and an enormous appetite on the marbles, intentionally turning the chapel into a bacterial smorgasbord.
“It was top secret,” said Daniela Manna, one of the art restorers.
On a recent morning, she reclined — like Michelangelo’s allegorical sculptures of Dusk and Dawn above her — and reached into the shadowy nook between the chapel wall and the sarcophagus to point at a dirty black square, a remnant showing just how filthy the marble had become.
She attributed the mess to one Medici in particular, Alessandro Medici, a ruler of Florence, whose assassinated corpse had apparently been buried in the tomb without being properly eviscerated. Over the centuries, he seeped into Michelangelo’s marble, the chapel’s experts said, creating deep stains, button-shaped deformations, and, more recently, providing a feast for the chapel’s preferred cleaning product, a bacteria called Serratia ficaria SH7.
“SH7 ate Alessandro,” Monica Bietti, former director of the Medici Chapels Museum, said as she stood in front of the now gleaming tomb, surrounded by Michelangelos, dead Medicis, tourists and an all-woman team of scientists, restorers and historians. Her team used bacteria that fed on glue, oil and apparently Alessandro’s phosphates as a bioweapon against centuries of stains.
In November 2019, the museum brought in Italy’s National Research Council, which used infrared spectroscopy that revealed calcite, silicate and other, more organic, remnants on the sculptures and two tombs that face one another across the New Sacristy.
That provided a key blueprint for Anna Rosa Sprocati, a biologist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, to choose the most appropriate bacteria from a collection of nearly 1,000 strains, usually used to break down petroleum in oil spills or to reduce the toxicity of heavy metals. Some of the bugs in her lab ate phosphates and proteins, but also the Carrara marble preferred by Michelangelo.
“We didn’t pick those,” said Bietti.
Then the restoration team tested the most promising eight strains behind the altar, on a small rectangle palette spotted with rows of squares like a tiny marble bingo board. All of the ones selected, she said, were nonhazardous and without spores.
“It’s better for our health,” said Manna, after crawling out from under the sarcophagus. “For the environment, and the works of art.”
Sprocati said they first introduced the bacteria to Michelangelo’s tomb for Giuliano di Lorenzo, Duke of Nemours. That sarcophagus is graced with allegorical sculptures for Day, a hulking, twisted male figure, and Night, a female body Michelangelo made so smooth and polished as to seem as if she shone in moonlight. The team washed her hair with Pseudomonas stutzeri CONC11, a bacteria isolated from the waste of a tannery near Naples, and cleaned residue of casting molds, glue and oil off her ears with Rhodococcus sp. ZCONT, another strain which came from soil contaminated with diesel in Caserta.
It was a success. But Paola D’Agostino, who runs the Bargello Museums, which oversees the chapels and which will officially reveal the results of the project in June, preferred to play it safe on Night’s face. So did Bietti and Pietro Zander, a Vatican expert who joined them. They allowed the restorers to give her a facial of micro-gel packs of xanthan gum, a stabilizer often found in toothpaste and cosmetics that is derived from the Xanthomonas campestris bacteria. The head of the Duke Giuliano, hovering above his tomb, received similar treatment.
Then, in February 2020 Covid hit, closing the museum in March and interrupting the project.
Sprocati took her bugs elsewhere. In August, her group of biologists used bacteria isolated from a Naples industrial site to clean the wax left by centuries of votive candles from Alessandro Algardi’s baroque masterpiece, a colossal marble relief in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome of the Meeting of Attila and Pope Leo.
The bacteria strains got back to the Medici Chapel, which had reopened with reduced hours, in mid-October. Wearing white lab coats, blue gloves and anti-Covid surgical masks, Sprocati and the restorers spread gels with the SH7 bacteria — from soil contaminated by heavy metals at a mineral site in Sardinia — on the sullied sarcophagus of Lorenzo di Piero, Duke of Urbino, buried with his assassinated son Alessandro.
“It ate the whole night,” said Marina Vincenti, another of the restorers.
The Medicis were more accustomed to sitting atop Florence’s food chain.
In 1513, Giovanni di Lorenzo de Medici became Leo X — the first Medici pope. He had big plans for a new sacristy for the interment of his family, including his father, Lorenzo the Magnificent, the powerful ruler of Florence who largely bankrolled the Renaissance. Il Magnifico is now buried here too, under a modest altar adorned with Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child, flanked by saints that also had their toes nibbled by cleansing bacteria. But back then his coffin waited, probably on the Old Sacristy floor. He was soon joined by Leo X’s brother, Giuliano, and his nephew, Lorenzo, the Prince to whom Machiavelli dedicated his treatise on wielding power.
“You had coffins waiting to be buried,” said D’Agostino. “It’s kind of gloomy.”
Pope Leo X hired Michelangelo to design and build the mausoleum. The pope then promptly died of pneumonia. In the ensuing years, Michelangelo carved the masterpieces and then ran afoul of his patrons.
In 1527, with the Sack of Rome, Florentines, including Michelangelo, supported a Republic and overthrew the Medicis. Among the ousted princes was Lorenzo di Piero’s sometimes volatile son, Alessandro, whom many historians consider a real piece of work. Michelangelo couldn’t stand him, and when the Medicis stormed back, it was Michelangelo’s turn to flee.
In 1531, the Medici Pope Clement VII pardoned Michelangelo, who went back to work on the family chapel. But by that time, Alessandro had become Duke of Florence. Michelangelo soon left town, and the unfinished chapel, for good.
“Alessandro was terrible,” said D’Agostino.
Alessandro’s relative, known as the “bad Lorenzo,” agreed and stabbed him to death in 1537. The duke’s body was rolled up in a carpet and plopped in the sarcophagus. It’s unclear if his father, Lorenzo, was already in there or moved in later.
“A roommate,” D’Agostino said.
In 2013, Bietti, then the museum’s director, realized how badly things had deteriorated since a 1988 restoration. The museum cleaned the walls, marred by centuries of humidity and handprints, revealed damages from the casts and iron brushes used to remove oil and wax, and reanimated the statues.
“Come and see,” Bietti said, pointing, Creation-of-Adam-style, at the toe of Night.
But the cleaner the chapel became, the more the stubbornly marred the sarcophagus of Lorenzo di Piero stood out as an eyesore.
In 2016, Vincenti, one of the restorers, attended a conference held by Sprocati and her biologists. (“An introduction to the world of microorganisms,” Sprocati called it.) They showed how bacteria had cleaned up some resin residues on Baroque masterpiece frescoes in the Carracci Gallery at Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Strains isolated from mine drainage waters in Sardinia eliminated corrosive iron stains in the gallery’s Carrara marble.
When it came time to clean the Michelangelos, Vincenti pushed for a bacterial assist.
“I said, ‘OK,” said D’Agostino. “‘But let’s do a test first.’”
The bacteria passed the exam and did the job. On Monday, tourists admired the downward pensive glance of Michelangelo’s bearded Dusk, the rising of his groggy Dawn and Lorenzo’s tomb, now rid of the remnants of Alessandro.
“It’s very strange, especially in this time of Covid,” Marika Tapuska, a Slovakian visiting Florence with her family said when she learned that bacteria had cleaned up the sarcophagus. “But if it works, why not?”
Need Tumblr to understand that you are a marine biologist only if you study lads and urchins in the seas and oceans. If you study hooligans and whippersnappers in a lake or river you are in fact not a marine biologist, you are a limnologist.
Are there any benefits to being a limnologist?
The benefits to being a limnologist are limnited
*squints*
You're making that one up.
Guess what! Bain-Marie is originally an alchemical term! The "Marie" in question is actually Maria Hebrea, the 1st century Jewish magician considered histories first alchemist. The entirety of western chemical science is built on her work. Every time you melt chocolate with boiling water you're participating in a 2000 year old alchemical practice by placing it in "Mary's Bath."
The Bain Marie, alternately known as Balneum Mariæ, as seen in John French’s 1651 work The Art of Distillation.
That says dilfilation. They’re making dilfs?
Anonymous asked:
did u know that fire is shaped the way that it is bc of gravity and if it werent for gravityitd be an orb
bunjywunjy answered:
yep! here’s what a match looks like burning in microgravity, it’s WILD
I got curious and looked into this a bit and so I can offer you all this magnificent sentence:
“Peter is one-of-a-kind,” offers Richard Axelbaum, a frequent collaborator and the Stifel & Quinette Jens Professor of Environmental Engineering Science at Washington University in St. Louis. “He’s so creative at applying the knowledge he’s acquired over the years and using it to inform experiments to study flames in microgravity.”
that sure does sound like a unique type of guy, Richard, thank you. let’s go now to the guy himself, Peter Sunderland, to see what he has to say:
“Astronauts love fire,” Sunderland says—meaning that, in general, they’re all quite worried about it and keenly interested in the outcomes of flammability studies.
yeah that tracks
In bonobo societies, all bonobos frequently engage in sexual contact with other members of the community, regardless of sex. Female bonobos in particular are quite promiscuous with both fellow females and males; thus, bonobo society is matrilineal or matrifocal. Since the patriline of each member is unknown due to female bonobos having many sexual partners, the female bonobos take communal care of their collective young, and the male bonobos take on other community-care roles instead. It is theorized that this leads to lower levels of violent conflict, as opposed to chimpanzee, human, and other primate societies that are patriarchal, since male members of these societies must find ways to identify their offspring which inevitably leads to violent, controlling behavior toward female members as well as violence & competitive behavior toward other males who may pose a threat to their social statuses. Bonobo societies are extremely peaceful in comparison to other primate societies.
The feature musical film Mamma Mia! (2008), directed by Phyllida Lloyd, shows an example of what a matrifocal society, resembling the structure of bonobo society, could look like for humans; where several females care for a child whose exact paternity is unknown, and instead of violence resort to prosocial behavior (joyfully singing and dancing) in order to resolve conflict. In this essay I will attempt to
Anonymous asked:
There's a poem called "The Sciences Sing a Lullabye" which is pretty dear to me
