Salamander

  • 356 Posts
  • 447 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: December 19th, 2021

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  • Thanks a lot for sharing! It has been nice thinking about this topic again.

    When I wrote my response I was hyper-focused on the concept of “antenna-like” resonances due to the wavelength of the radiation, so it was interesting to read about the 500 Hz resonances that I assume are due to natural frequencies of tiny hairs or other oscillators in bees. I did not even consider these.

    I have in the past heard about some micro-wave and also IR-assisted chemistry. It does make some intuitive sense that the excitation of particular modes that displace molecules or groups of molecules along a reaction coordinate might help speed up a specific reaction pathway, but I remember a few years ago that the data was not there to support that. I believe a professor at my university was doing some experiments in which the reactants are placed within a cavity that is resonant with such a mode in an attempt to increase reaction rates via some cavity enhancement. From what I can see they have not published on this topic yet, but it seems to be related to this concept: https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jcp/article/154/19/191103/565904

    I am very curious about your LoRa bee sensors. What kind of sensors are you using?










  • Thanks a lot for looking into this!

    While the iPSC technology has not yet advanced to a stage where therapeutic transplants have been deemed safe, iPSCs are readily being used in personalized drug discovery efforts and understanding the patient-specific basis of disease.

    I am not super familiar with the topic, but I have been told of some successful animal studies on implanting the organoid tissue into the animals from which the stem cells were derived.

    This other article from 2013 lists a few concerns, and I think this is the closest to what you were looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3931018/#sec3

    Yeah, that covers nicely what I was wondering about. Especially the reason 1 (embryonic proteins not present during immune system education) and reason 2 (epigenetic changes). I can appreciate that these mechanisms might possibly cause issues, but I would be curious to learn the actual magnitude of their impact.

    Yamanaka named iPSCs with a lower case “i” due to the popularity of the iPod and other products.

    Oooh, that’s why! I do think iPSC looks nicer than IPSC. Not a big apple fan, though



  • How did I miss that?!

    My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above…

    I still can’t find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.


  • I have banned multiple of those accounts for DM spam. Banned a new one just now.

    I’m not sure this is a bot. I suspect it might be a real person who doesn’t realize how they’re coming across. Initially, I thought it might be a strategy to get attention, but if that were the case, I’d be surprised by their persistence with a strategy that isn’t very effective.

    I suppose it is kind of effective if we are making posts about them… Hmm…

    I prefer not making too many assumptions other than to assume no malice. But of course the DM spam will not be tolerated.




  • Salamander@mander.xyzMtoScience Memes@mander.xyzChat, is this true?
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    2 months ago

    EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

    Hah, sure, let’s investigate 🕵️‍♂️

    The term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user ‘Mxn’.

    The description of the edit is the following:

    Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

    If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

    This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ in September 16, 2018. I don’t have access to the citation so I don’t know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

    If you check the history you will find that the same ‘Mxn’ fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

    So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

    I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as ‘Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl’ more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

    I find it highly unlikely that:

    • User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

    AND

    • This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

    More likely…

    • Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
    • Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

    And this concludes my little investigation 🧐


  • Always exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!

    I have searched for the “Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)” theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don’t think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.

    About the: “third state”. Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don’t agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some “third state”.

    Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.


  • Interesting! I wonder if it is already technically feasible to culture tooth-like pieces from the patient’s stem cells. Instead of extracting and carving a tooth, it would be cool to grow the tissue in some kind of structured 3D matrix. Patient gets to keep their canine then.

    That said… Do you know if tissue grown from a patient’s own stem cells is generally not rejected by the immune system? I am not sure if cells need to differentiate within the body to get labeled by some molecular markers that make them immunocompatible, or if having the same genetic makeup is good enough.




    • In the general case, I think that we would not be able to tell. Unless the programmers explicitly program into the simulation the tools for us to interact with the external world, we would not be able to collect evidence of something external to the simulation. We are limited.

    • I am agnostic to whether we live in a simulation or not, but I don’t think that this hypothesis brings a lot in terms of answering existential questions. We could live in a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation inside of a simulation… meaning that there is an infinite depth of simulations when we choose to consider this possibility. In my view, being the first rung of existence or being a million simulations deep is the same. Discovering that we are in a simulation just shifts the existential question one universe higher.

    • I have been reading some texts about theories of how the brain thinks (predictive coding), and it seems like what we experience as “consciousness” might be the result of our brain simulating what our next sensory experience will be. So, in that sense, we are all experiencing our brain’s predictive simulation.



  • Ooh, cool! 😁 That detector seems to be working only in “Geiger mode”, which means that it can count the number of X-rays/Gamma particles but it does not estimate their energy. So, the dedicated devices are still better in that they allow you to identify the source of the radiation by measuring the counts and the energy distribution simultaneously.

    It probably would not be too difficult to build the open gamma detector into something like a pinephone. I don’t think that has been done yet.