Sal
@Sal@mander.xyz
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Submitted 1 week ago to herpetology@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Insights into the Mechanism, Selectivity, and Substituent Effects in the Diels-Alder Reaction of Azatrienes with Electron-rich Dienophiles: An MEDT Studyarxiv.org ↗Submitted 1 week ago to chemistry@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
I have been very succesful with indoor peppers. With tomatoes I had too much plant and a few cherry tomatoes (from a supermarket cherry tomato’s seed)
- Comment on Elsevier 5 weeks ago:
That’s really cool, I will use it
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
There is a bit of humor and a bit of truth. I don’t have a garden and so when I was looking into whether it was possible to grow a pumpkin in a pot, most of what I found stated that the pumpkins need a lot of ground to have a strong and healthy root system, and a lot of sun, and so it is not recommended to grow them indoors. I thought that the plant would begin to grow but at some point the pot would not be able to sustain the root system and the plant would die. This has happened to me with many trees that I try to grow indoors - most recently my tamarind trees. They look perfectly healthy and then drop dead. Well, I am not certain of why the trees die but I suspect their roots rot.
But the humor is that I still don’t think it is a good idea to grow this plant indoors. It has taken over a lot of space! My original plan was to prune it and keep it small, but I noticed that even the farthest leaves are able to pull moisture from the pot with no problem, and so I am letting the plant grow to see what happens.
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
The sensors are from AZDelivery, these ones. They are connected to an arduino nano which reads the capacitance values and sends them over to a raspberry pi 5. The raspberry pi 5 is connected to a few other sensors (CO2, particle counter, air humidity and temperature all from Sensirion), and there is a 7-inch raspberry pi display that the pi writes images to. I was making a home air quality station but I decided to place everything around the pumpkin instead for now, to see if I could get something interesting out of that. But, so far most of them have not been practically useful.
- Comment on Elsevier 5 weeks ago:
Some time last year I learned of an example of such a project (peerreview on GitHub):
The goal of this project was to create an open access “Peer Review” platform:
Peer Review is an open access, reputation based scientific publishing system that has the potential to replace the journal system with a single, community run website. It is free to publish, free to access, and the plan is to support it with donations and (eventually, hopefully) institutional support.
It allows academic authors to submit a draft of a paper for review by peers in their field, and then to publish it for public consumption once they are ready. It allows their peers to exercise post-publish quality control of papers by voting them up or down and posting public responses.
I just looked it up now to see how it is going… And I am a bit saddened to find out that the developer decided to stop. The author has a blog in which he wrote about the project and about why he is not so optimistic about the prospects of crowd sourced peer review anymore: theroadgoeson.com/crowdsourcing-peer-review-proba…
It is only one opinion, but at least it is the opinion of someone who has thought about this some time and made a real effort towards the goal, so maybe you find some value from his perspective.
Personally, I am still optimistic about this being possible. But that’s easy for me to say as I have not invested the effort!
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
In the case of tempeh keeping the right ambient temperature (~30) and adding a bit of vinegar to the beans is the best way I have experienced to make it grow fast and healthy. The CO2 I only measure to check for stale air. The tempeh fungus breathes in oxygen and exhales CO2, and if you have a lot of tempeh in a small incubator the CO2 can get too high.
In some techniques for mushroom growing, the mycelium is grown inside of a tub. The fungus exhales CO2 into the closed tub and inhibits this high CO2 condition inhibits fruiting. The fruiting stage can be stimulated by using a fan to push out the CO2. In the case of tempeh one can surround the tempeh with fresh air to stimulate the tempeh to produce spores, which can then be ground with white rice to create a powder to inoculate a lot more tempeh.
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
Yeah, I have three moisture-in-soil sensors inserted around the plant. The idea was to use to them to control the irrigation, but they did not work out.
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
Hahahaha, woops, I had worse photos but none better 😂
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
My plan is to remove the petals from the freshest male flower available and rub that directly.
I store the previous set of male flowers in a cup with a bit of water in the fridge :
If I don’t pick a male flower, the next day it looks like this:
I did this in case that the male flowers would stop coming out when the females came. But I think my worry was not warranted… because the plant is swarming with male flowers. That’s why I have begun cooking them.
I am still not sure of whether I will pollinate a single flower to try to grow a large pumpkin, or if I will go for multiple pumpkins.
- Comment on "A pumpkin is not a house plant" they told me... 5 weeks ago:
The bottle is a carbon dioxide tank. It is connected to a regulator that can open/close the valve to let CO2 out. During the day it brings the CO2 level under the leaves to around 800 - 1000 parts per million (ppm). Usually the level in the air is closer to 400 - 500 ppm, and fast growing plants can grow faster with some extra CO2 in the air to build into sugars during photosynthesis. At least in theory… For me it is an experiment in CO2 regulation as I have measured and decreased CO2 levels in the past (when growing mushrooms and tempeh) but I had never actively delivered it, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to learn.
It turns out pumpkin flowers are very fragrant, and the odor is very pleasant, but I am not good at describing smells with words, sorry… To me it smells like a mixture of a rhododendron flower and a pumpkin. I recently went to a wedding in which they served ricotta stuffed zuccini flowers (very similar flowers) and the cook clearly knew what she was doing, in that case the zuccini flowers still had some of the fragrance and this made the dish taste very special. In my attempt I filled the flowers with some curry rice and then pan-seared them in butter, and all the fragrance went away in the process. So the flower was just a vessel with the soft texture of a petal and the taste of browned butter. I did not succeed in keeping any flower flavor. It was a quick-and-dirty experiment… I would like to learn more about cooking with flowers while keeping some flavor.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to houseplants@mander.xyz | 31 comments
- Comment on !dataisbeautiful@mander.xyz, for beautiful data! 5 weeks ago:
Thank you being around, bringing this nice community here, and helping with the federation!! 😁
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to archaeology@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to scicomm@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Submitted 3 months ago to physics@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Submitted 4 months ago to chemistry@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on 4 months ago:
From the title I thought that the UV opsin itself was also performing the pressure sensing function… Which would be fascinating to me, as I have worked with viscosity and pressure-sensitive fluorophores in the past (BODIPYs and DCDHF), and I would love to see living things making use of this molecular sensor design.
But I now see that it is a different molecular sensor that is also present in the UV sensing cell:
Our results indicate that the ciliary opsin required for detecting UV light is not essential for pressure sensation.
So, today is not the day we find pressure-sensitive fluorescent sensors in a living organism, but that is still a fascinating finding. I will have to read more about those “TRP channels”, the “ultimate integrators of sensory stimuli”. They seem like a very interesting class of bio molecules that I still know too little about 😁
Really nice work, thanks a lot for sharing it here!!
- Comment on 4 months ago:
That is amazing! Thanks for sharing!!
- Arboreal or terrestrial: Oviposition site of Zhangixalus frogs affects the thermal function of foam nestsonlinelibrary.wiley.com ↗Submitted 4 months ago to herpetology@mander.xyz | 0 comments
- Comment on mycology 4 months ago:
I think that they are referring to Paxillus involotus
It is quite an interesting mushroom. It was considered “safe to eat” for a long time, but it contains an antigen that a human’s immune system can learn to attack.
The antigen is still of unknown structure but it stimulates the formation of IgG antibodies in the blood serum.
I once looked into whether this immune response builds up over many exposures, or if it is a random event that has a probability of happening for each exposure. I don’t remember finding a convincing answer… If it is a random event, then eating this mushroom could be considered a “Russian roulette” mushroom that will usually provide a nice meal, but, if unlucky, you may experience the following:
Poisoning symptoms are rapid in onset, consisting initially of vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and associated decreased blood volume. Shortly after these initial symptoms appear, hemolysis develops, resulting in reduced urine output, hemoglobin in the urine or outright absence of urine formation, and anemia. Hemolysis may lead to numerous complications including acute kidney injury, shock, acute respiratory failure, and disseminated intravascular coagulation. These complications can cause significant morbidity with fatalities having been reported.
I agree with you that this is probably unrelated to the “generally similar to humans” comment. I feel like this fantasy is a combination of the above fact mixed in with the fact that the Fungi belong to the Opisthokonts, which places them closer to animals than plants, and so they share some interesting cellular characteristics with us. This places them closer to animals than plants, but “generally similar to humans” is perhaps a bit of a stretch ^_^
But, it is just a meme about a guy being hyped about mushrooms. Hopefully people don’t expect memes to be super accurate 😁
- Comment on The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice: A couple in the U.S. got a call from relatives who were being held ransom. Their voices—like many others these days—had been cloned 4 months ago:
I have heard of scams like this one happening to people I know for many years now in Mexico, but without AI. In its most basic form the scammer does not need to know who they are calling, because the scam relies largely in volume and the psychology of fear.
The victim picks up, someome screems something along the lines of ‘mom/dad please help’, and then the “kidnapper” takes the phone away and says that they have taken their daughter/son hostage and that they must not hang up the phone. They do this to several numbers until someone takes the bait and freaks out, often revealing additional information (like their kid’s name) in the process.
With AI the scammer could spend the time and collect information to make the scam more believable. But I don’t think that the voice is the bottleneck for these scams. Those who have experienced this (including my mom, uncle, grandma, and acquaintances) say that in the moment of shock they really do believe they hear the voice of their family member.
The AI method makes a more sophisticated class of these attacks easier to perform, but it is still a sophisticated attack that requires gathering data, and the execution will still require some form of a performance. Or… At least that’s what I think
- Comment on Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job 5 months ago:
Fair enough. I just looked it up and if the scale in this image is correct, I agree that the size of the hole looks small in comparison. I also looked at the security video of the crash itself and it is frustrating how little we can see from it.
Since this was such an important event and there seems to be a lack of specific pieces of essential evidence - either because of bad luck or because of a cover-up - I understand the skepticism. And I am not a fan of blindly believing any official narrative. But, without any context, if I see that photo and someone tells me that a plane crashed into that building, I would find it probable simply because the shape is so similar to the photo of the Bijlmer accident that I’m familiar with. A plane crash seems to me like a very chaotic process, so I don’t have a good expectation of what the damage should look like.
Maybe I’ll look for a pentagon crash documentary some time.
- Comment on Why were so many people believers in the conspiracy that 9/11 was an inside job 5 months ago:
I don’t have much of an opinion on this topic, I haven’t really looked into it.
But as soon as I saw this image, the El Al Flight 1862 which crashed in the Bijlmer in Amsterdam in 1992 immediately came to mind. The shape of the hole is very similar!
This image shows the likely position of the Bijlmer plane during the crash:
The image you posted of the Pentagon seems to me consistent with what I have seen of the Bijlmer accident, and so the shape of the hole and the absence of wings in the photo does not persuade me personally that no plane was involved.
- Submitted 5 months ago to herpetology@mander.xyz | 1 comment
- Mechanisms of extracellular electron transfer in anaerobic methanotrophic archaea - Nature Communicationswww.nature.com ↗Submitted 5 months ago to [deleted] | 0 comments
- Comment on Indeed it is. 5 months ago:
Essentially, yes.
Whether the term “molecule” technically includes or excludes a piece of metal is a bit more tricky. I lean towards “no” more than “yes” because there are some important differences between what we generally call a “molecule” and how we think about a glassy or a crystalline solid. But I think both positions are arguable. If we are not being pedantic, then essentially yeah.
- How Small-scale Jet-like Solar Events from Miniature Flux Rope Eruptions Might Produce the Solar Windarxiv.org ↗Submitted 5 months ago to astronomy@mander.xyz | 0 comments