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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 2nd, 2023

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  • From the research paper:

    (Glowing red spider silk strands

    a) Comparison of wt and mRFP-modified major ampullate silk fibers rolled on a capillary glass (scale bars: 550 µm).

    b) Strong red fluorescence can also be seen in the major ampullate gland (scale bar: 277 µm).

    c i) The genomic implementation of mRFP into the major ampullate silk was confirmed by amplifying the mRFP DNA sequence extracted from the spider’s leg. Only those spiders with red fluorescent silk (scale bar: 138 µm) showed the mRFP sequence-derived signal in the agarose gel.

    C ii) Total-RNA was extracted from the glands, reverse-transcribed, and subjected to R-TqPCR and a melting curve analysis showing a peak at 83°C and 87°C based on a small and a large, amplified fragment.


  • I think it’s 100% a didgeridoo, but one that has been molded into a shape superficially resembling a saxophone.

    As a longtime didg player, I can tell you that the thing that makes this absolutely worth every penny is not how light it is, the paint job, etc, but the fact that it can hit so many “hoot” notes (what they call “trumpets”), and that each hoot note is tuned to be in the same scale as the main drone.

    Most didgeridoos have only one, or maybe two hoot notes, but I watched some other videos of these things being played, and I’m seeing four or five hoot notes, in addition to the main drone.

    At that point, it’s starting to grow beyond the realm of wind percussion instrument, into something that can play melodies.


  • I think it’s more accurate to say that a brain refusing to bring up a certain memory, is what makes it a repressed memory. “Recovering” a repressed memory can happen as part of trauma therapy, or it might happen by itself years later.

    Trauma itself causes incredible changes in the brain, in some very non-intuitive ways. The brain has a number of different strategies for protecting the person, the “self”, from unnecessary suffering, and it doesn’t let go of those defense mechanisms until “it” feels safe to do so.

    Honestly, out of all of the ways that the brain can respond to trauma, repressed memories is one of the simplest and easiest things to understand.

    The fact that false memories can also be demonstrably created… Well, that muddies the waters a bit, it makes things more complicated to sort through, but it’s entirely reasonable to assume that there is a mechanism for memory repression, and there’s also a mechanism for creating false memories.