Image ID: a diagram of different types of blood and their colors. Bit of a long description, sorry.
1.) Most things have hemoglobin, which is red. The iron in hemoglobin is what bonds with oxygen.
2.) Some mollusks and arthropods have hemocyanin. It works best in cold environments with low oxygen pressure. Hemocyanin is blue when oxygenated and clear when not, and has copper instead of iron.
3.) Some marine worms and brachiopods have hemerythrin. Hemerythrin has a much lower affinity for carbon monoxide than hemoglobin. It’s a pinkish-violet when oxygenated and clear when not, and binds to oxygen with iron.
4.) A few marine polychetes have erythrocruorin. This one kind of sucks at binding with oxygen. The colors are also a bit fucky, when the blood is undiluted it appears as a light red, but when it is diluted it looks green. Erythrocruorin also uses iron.
5.) Artificial oxygen carrier! Coboglobin! Sources on color are notably varied and a little bit fucked up. The first set, amber when oxygenated and clear when not, from what I’ve read is probably the most accurate? But this is for fictional sci-fi so who gives a shit. The second set is pink when oxygenated and amber when un-oxygenated. End image ID
I encourage everyone to straight-up color pick from these if you want. Credit me if you want to, don’t if you don’t, i don’t even know how accurate the stuff after the grey line is. I just wanted to find out wtf blood was.
Great diagram!
I’d add that the blood may also contain pigments other than respiratory ones, which may affect the color in different ways. There is a New Guinean skink (Prasinohaema virens) that has green blood, despite using haemoglobin like (almost!) every other vertebrate, because it’s full of biliverdin (which is what makes gall/bile green), probably for immunitary reasons.
It’s also possible to have pigment-less blood: crocodile icefish have none, and their blood is completely clear. Of course this allows to carry much less oxygen, and is only apt for very slow metabolism.
We’ve been losing power due to winter storms lately so my partner 3D printed me a tealight “to fill in for tumblr when you’re offline”
anyway this should be official merch imo
If you’re wondering why I will not leave this site and why I love it so much: after this went around, I got a message from Tumblr asking if they could make it official merch and then they did. I said go for it, and donated the .stl file because I want to help the site stay afloat. It went live yesterday I think, and it’s even prettier and better than this original design (they definitely put work into it which was very exciting).
But I want to say something else. They asked for suggestions on where to get these made, and I gave them the names of a few mass production companies, but I also gave them the name of my small local guys. I didn’t expect them to go there, it’s probably more expensive to use a smaller local shop, but I know it would mean more to them. And I was immediately told they’d check in with them, and then that’s just what happened.
They went with my little guys.
So if you’re wondering about the price, it’s because Tumblr staff just… Listened and cared. They listened to the people who said they wanted one of these, and then they not only asked me but listened to the answer when I suggested supporting a business local to me. That’s invaluable to me.
Also it’s important to me that you know this comes apart so you can use just the dumpster to put things in. My prototypes are full of jellybeans.
This is why aliens don’t want us in their Starfleet.
Are you fucking kidding this is why aliens should be begging us to join their Starfleet. The precision?? The CONTROL?? The absolute mastery this driver has over their 20+ ton of steel is superhuman. This person could weave a mothership through an asteroid belt without making a single scratch on the hull. Foh “aliens don’t want us” aliens should be sucking our dicks.
Research in the jungle of New Guinea reveals two species of birds that carry a powerful neurotoxin.
“These birds contain a neurotoxin that they can both tolerate and store in their feathers,” says Knud Jønsson of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who worked with Kasun Bodawatta of the University of Copenhagan.
The bird species have each developed the ability to consume toxic food and turn that into a poison of their own.
The species in question are the regent whistler (Pachycephala schlegelii), a species that belongs to a family of birds with a wide distribution and easily recognizable song well known across the Indo-Pacific region, and the rufous-naped bellbird (Aleadryas rufinucha).
“We were really surprised to find these birds to be poisonous as no new poisonous bird species has been discovered in over two decades. Particularly, because these two bird species are so common in this part of the world,” says Jønsson. The findings appear in the journal Molecular Ecology.
#hey concavenator I have more weird biology for you!
:D
The only other poisonous birds I knew of were the pitohuis, which seem to be loosely related to these species, all being in superfamily Orioloidea. Interesting that, despite having arisen multiple times, they seem to be all from New Guinea.
I wonder if it’s related to whatever food source they’re getting the poison from? Since the linked article suggests that isn’t definitively known yet. Perhaps both groups of birds started feeding on whatever it is - probably a beetle? - and started evolving mechanisms to cope with the poison in their diet, and this led to utilising it?
Most likely. Apparently there’s more poisonous birds than I thought!, and poison seems always derived from their diet. The batrachotoxins in pitohuis (famously found in poison-dart frogs, but those are South American) has indeed been found in New Guinean beetles too. The linked paper mentions a hypothesis that the toxins of pitohuis, too small an amount to kill large vertebrates, might be more a defense against feather lice than predators.
Turns out that Mediterranean quails are seasonally poisonous, too – only when migrating northward! Quail poisoning is even recorded in the Bible as a divine curse (Numbers 11). Source of the toxin uknown, but almost certainly from plant food.
The spur-winged goose definitely derives toxins from beetles it eats, and other species (bronzewing pigeons, ruffed grouse) from plants. Some woodpeckers rub crushed ants on their feathers to cover themselves in formic acid.
Huh. I did not know bronzewings were poisonous! But I guess that makes sense, half the things they’re supposed to eat are definitely poisonous. (The list of things they are not supposed to eat includes ‘my dad’s garden before it even sprouts’, but we can’t really blame them for that, they were here first.)
Research in the jungle of New Guinea reveals two species of birds that carry a powerful neurotoxin.
“These birds contain a neurotoxin that they can both tolerate and store in their feathers,” says Knud Jønsson of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who worked with Kasun Bodawatta of the University of Copenhagan.
The bird species have each developed the ability to consume toxic food and turn that into a poison of their own.
The species in question are the regent whistler (Pachycephala schlegelii), a species that belongs to a family of birds with a wide distribution and easily recognizable song well known across the Indo-Pacific region, and the rufous-naped bellbird (Aleadryas rufinucha).
“We were really surprised to find these birds to be poisonous as no new poisonous bird species has been discovered in over two decades. Particularly, because these two bird species are so common in this part of the world,” says Jønsson. The findings appear in the journal Molecular Ecology.
#hey concavenator I have more weird biology for you!
:D
The only other poisonous birds I knew of were the pitohuis, which seem to be loosely related to these species, all being in superfamily Orioloidea. Interesting that, despite having arisen multiple times, they seem to be all from New Guinea.
I wonder if it’s related to whatever food source they’re getting the poison from? Since the linked article suggests that isn’t definitively known yet. Perhaps both groups of birds started feeding on whatever it is - probably a beetle? - and started evolving mechanisms to cope with the poison in their diet, and this led to utilising it?
Research in the jungle of New Guinea reveals two species of birds that carry a powerful neurotoxin.
“These birds contain a neurotoxin that they can both tolerate and store in their feathers,” says Knud Jønsson of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, who worked with Kasun Bodawatta of the University of Copenhagan.
The bird species have each developed the ability to consume toxic food and turn that into a poison of their own.
The species in question are the regent whistler (Pachycephala schlegelii), a species that belongs to a family of birds with a wide distribution and easily recognizable song well known across the Indo-Pacific region, and the rufous-naped bellbird (Aleadryas rufinucha).
“We were really surprised to find these birds to be poisonous as no new poisonous bird species has been discovered in over two decades. Particularly, because these two bird species are so common in this part of the world,” says Jønsson. The findings appear in the journal Molecular Ecology.
Extracts from Alan Weisman, The World Without Us, 2007. The book considers the material aspects of human civilization and how long they would last, unattended. If humans were to vanish from Earth, if all maintainance and repairing work ceased, what would happen to what we leave behind?
(The book went on to inspire two speculative documentaries, Life After People by History Channel and Aftermath: Population Zero by National Geographic, emphasizing different aspects of it. They were neat.)
Chapter 2: Unbuilding Our Home
No
matter how hermetically you’ve sealed your temperature-tuned
interior from the weather, invisible spores penetrate anyway,
exploding in sudden outbursts of mold—awful when you see it, worse
when you don’t, because it’s hidden behind a painted wall,
munching paper sandwiches of gypsum board, rotting studs and floor
joists. Or you’ve been colonized by termites, carpenter ants,
roaches, hornets, even small mammals.
Most of all, though, you are beset by what in other contexts is
the veritable stuff of life: water… moisture enters around the
nails. Soon they’re rusting, and their grip begins to loosen… As
gravity increases tension on the trusses, the ¼-inch pins securing
their now-rusting connector plates pull free from the wet wood, which
now sports a fuzzy coating of greenish mold… When the heat went
off, pipes burst if you lived where it freezes, and rain is blowing
in where windows have cracked from bird collisions and the stress of
sagging walls. Even where the glass is still intact, rain and snow
mysteriously, inexorably work their way under sills. As the wood
continues to rot, trusses start to collapse against each other.
Eventually the walls lean to one side, and finally the roof falls
in…
While all that disaster was unfolding, squirrels, raccoons, and
lizards have been inside, chewing nest holes in the drywall, even as
woodpeckers rammed their way through from the other direction…
Fallen vinyl siding, whose color began to fade early, is now brittle
and cracking as its plasticizers degenerate. The aluminum is in
better shape, but salts in water pooling on its surface slowly eat
little pits that leave a grainy white coating… Unprotected thin
sheet steel disintegrates in a few years. Long before that, the
water-soluble gypsum in the sheetrock has washed back into the earth.
That leaves the chimney, where all the trouble began. After a
century, it’s still standing, but its bricks have begun to drop and
break as, little by little, its lime mortar, exposed to temperature
swings, crumbles and powders.
If you owned a swimming pool, it’s now a planter box… If the
house’s foundation involved a basement, it too is filling with soil
and plant life. Brambles and wild grapevines are snaking around steel
gas pipes, which will rust away before another century goes by. White
plastic PVC plumbing has yellowed and thinned on the side exposed to
the light, where its chloride is weathering to hydrochloric acid,
dissolving itself and its polyvinyl partners. Only the bathroom tile,
the chemical properties of its fired ceramic not unlike those of
fossils, is relatively unchanged, although it now lies in a pile
mixed with leaf litter.
After 500 years, what is left depends on where in the world you
lived. If the climate was temperate, a forest stands in place of a
suburb; minus a few hills, it’s begun to resemble what it was
before developers, or the farmers they expropriated, first saw it.
Amid the trees, half-concealed by a spreading understory, lie
aluminum dishwasher parts and stainless steel cookware, their plastic
handles splitting but still solid… The chromium alloys that give
stainless steel its resilience… will probably continue to do so for
millennia, especially if the pots, pans, and carbon-tempered cutlery
are buried out of the reach of atmospheric oxygen. One hundred
thousand years hence, the intellectual development of whatever
creature digs them up might be kicked abruptly to a higher
evolutionary plane by the discovery of ready-made tools…
If you were a desert dweller, the plastic components of modern
life flake and peel away faster, as polymer chains crack under an
ultraviolet barrage of daily sunshine. With less moisture, wood lasts
longer there, though any metal in contact with salty desert soils
will corrode more quickly. Still, from Roman ruins we can guess that
thick cast iron will be around well into the future’s
archaeological record, so the odd prospect of fire hydrants sprouting
amidst cacti may someday be among the few clues that humanity was
here…
In a warmer world… drier, hotter desert climates will be
complemented by wetter, stormier mountain weather systems that will
send floods roaring downstream, overwhelming dams, spreading over
their former alluvial plains, and entombing whatever was built there
in annual layers of silt. Within them, fire hydrants, truck tires,
shattered plate glass, condominia, and office buildings may remain
indefinitely, but as far from sight as the Carboniferous Formation
once was.
No memorial will mark their burial, though the roots of
cottonwoods, willows, and palms may occasionally make note of their
presence. Only eons later, when old mountains have worn away and new
ones risen, will young streams cutting fresh canyons through
sediments reveal what once, briefly, went on here.
***
Chapter 3: The City Without Us
Under
New York, groundwater is always rising… Whenever it rains hard,
sewers clog with storm debris… With subway pumps stilled… water
would start sluicing away soil under the pavement. Before long,
streets start to crater. With no one unclogging sewers, some new
watercourses form on the surface… Within 20 years, the water-soaked
steel columns that support the street above the East Side’s 4, 5,
and 6 trains corrode and buckle. As Lexington Avenue caves in, it
becomes a river.
Whenever it is, the repeated freezing
and thawing make asphalt and cement split. When snow thaws, water
seeps into these fresh cracks. When it freezes, the water expands,
and cracks widen… As pavement separates, weeds like mustard,
shamrock, and goosegrass blow in from Central Park and work their way
down the new cracks, which widen further… The weeds are followed by
the city’s most prolific exotic species, the Chinese ailanthus
tree… As soil long trapped beneath pavement gets exposed to sun and
rain, other species jump in, and soon leaf litter adds to the rising
piles of debris clogging the sewer grates.
The early pioneer plants won’t even have to wait for the
pavement to fall apart. Starting from the mulch collecting in
gutters, a layer of soil will start forming atop New York’s sterile
hard shell, and seedlings will sprout…
In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town,
the freeze-thaw cycle moves indoors, and things start to seriously
deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract;
joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, rain
leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If
the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now… with no firemen to
answer the call, a dry lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead
branches and leaves piling up in Central Park will spread flames
through the streets. Within two decades, lightning rods have begun to
rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering paneled
offices filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of
flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even
poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, and starting to buckle.
Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s
growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at
walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air
pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in
increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.
Within two centuries… colonizing trees will have substantially
replaced pioneer weeds. Gutters buried under tons of leaf litter
provide new, fertile ground for native oaks and maples from city
parks. Arriving black locust and autumn olive shrubs fix nitrogen,
allowing sunflowers, bluestem, and white snakeroot to move in along
with apple trees, their seeds expelled by proliferating birds… as
buildings tumble and smash into each other, and lime from crushed
concrete raises soil pH, inviting in trees, such as buckthorn and
birch, that need less-acidic environments…
In a future that portends stronger and more-frequent hurricanes
striking North America’s Atlantic coast, ferocious winds will
pummel tall, unsteady structures. Some will topple, knocking down
others. Like a gap in the forest when a giant tree falls, new growth
will rush in. Gradually, the asphalt jungle will give way to a real
one.
***
Chapter 7: What Falls Apart
(context: this chapter describes Varosha, a city in Cyprus evacuated in 1974 after the Turkish invasion, and left abandoned until 2019)
[Two
years after abandonment] Asphalt and pavement had cracked…
Australian wattles, a fast-growing acacia species used by hotels for
landscaping, were popping out midstreet, some nearly three feet high.
Creepers from ornamental succulents snaked out of hotel gardens,
crossing roads and climbing tree trunks… Concussions from Turkish
air force bombs, Cavinder saw, had exploded plate-glass store
windows. Boutique mannequins were half-clothed, their imported
fabrics flapping in tattered strips…
Pigeon droppings coated everything. Carob rats nested in hotel
rooms, living off Yaffa oranges and lemons from former citrus groves…
The bell towers of Greek churches were spattered with the blood and
feces of hanging bats.
Sheets of sand blew across avenues and covered floors… Now, no
bands, just the incessant kneading of the seathat no longer soothed.
The wind sighing through open windows became a whine. The cooing of
pigeons grew deafening.
Varosha, merely 60 miles from Syria and Lebanon, is too balmy for
a freeze-thaw cycle, but its pavement was tossed asunder anyway. The
wrecking crews weren’t just trees, Münir marveled, but also
flowers. Tiny seeds of wild Cyprus cyclamen had wedged into cracks,
germinated, and heaved aside entire slabs of cement…
Two more decades passed… Its
encircling fence and barbed wire are now uniformly rusted, but there
is nothing left to protect but ghosts. An occasional Coca Cola sign
and broadsides posting nightclubs’ cover charges hang on doorways…
Fallen limestone facing lies in pieces. Hunks of wall have dropped
from buildings to reveal empty rooms… brick-shaped gaps show where
mortar has already dissolved. Other than the back-and-forth of
pigeons, all that moves is the creaky rotor of one last functioning
windmill.
In the meantime, nature continues its reclamation project. Feral
geraniums and philodendrons emerge from missing roofs and pour down
exterior walls. Flame trees, chinaberries, and thickets of hibiscus,
oleander, and passion lilac sprout from nooks where indoors and
outdoors now blend. Houses disappear under magenta mounds of
bougainvillaea. Lizards and whip snakes skitter through stands of
wild asparagus, prickly pear, and six-foot grasses. A spreading
ground cover of lemon grass sweetens the air. At night, the darkened
beachfront, free of moonlight bathers, crawls with nesting loggerhead
and green sea turtles.
***
Chapter 10: The Petro Patch
If, in
the immediate aftermath of Homo sapiens petrolerus, the tanks
and towers of the Texas petrochemical patch all detonated together in
one spectacular roar, after the oily smoke cleared, there would
remain melted roads, twisted pipe, crumpled sheathing, and crumbled
concrete. White-hot incandescence would have jump-started the
corrosion of scrap metals in the salt air, and the polymer chains in
hydrocarbon residues would likewise have cracked into smaller, more
digestible lengths, hastening biodegradation. Despite the expelled
toxins, the soils would also be enriched with burnt carbon, and after
a year of rains switchgrass would be growing. A few hardy wildflowers
would appear. Gradually, life would resume.
Or, if the faith of Valero Energy’s Fred Newhouse in system
safeguards proves warranted—or if the departing oilmen’s last
loyal act is to depressurize towers and bank the fires—the
disappearance of Texas’s world champion petroleum infrastructure
will proceed more slowly. During the first few years, the paint that
slows corrosion will go. Over the next two decades, all the storage
tanks will exceed their life spans. Soil moisture, rain, salt, and
Texas wind will loosen their grip until they leak. Any heavy crude
will have hardened by then; weather will crack it, and bugs will
eventually eat it.
What liquid fuels that haven’t
already evaporated will soak into the ground. When they hit the water
table, they’ll float on top because oil is lighter than water.
Microbes will find them, realize that they were once only plant life,
too, and gradually adapt to eat them. Armadillos will return to
burrow in the cleansed soil, among the rotting remains of buried
pipe.
Unattended oil drums, pumps, pipes, towers, valves, and bolts will
deteriorate at the weakest points, their joints… Until they go,
collapsing the metal walls, pigeons that already love to nest atop
refinery towers will speed the corruption of carbon steel with their
guano, and rattlesnakes will nest in the vacant structures below. As
beavers dam the streams that trickle into Galveston Bay, some areas
will flood. Houston is generally too warm for a freeze-thaw cycle,
but its deltaic clay soils undergo formidable swell-shrink bouts as
rains come and go. With no more foundation repairmen to shore up the
cracks, in less than a century downtown buildings will start leaning.
… When oil, gas, or groundwater is pumped from beneath the
surface, land settles into the space it occupied… Lower the land,
raise the seas, add hurricanes far stronger than midsize, Category 3
Alicia, and even before its dams go, the Brazos gets to do again what
it did for 80,000 years: like its sister to the east, the
Mississippi, it will flood its entire delta… flare towers,
catalytic crackers, and fractionating columns, like downtown Houston
buildings, will poke out of brackish floodwaters, their foundations
rotting while they wait for the waters to recede.
… Below the surface, the oxidizing metal parts of chemical alley
will provide a place for Galveston oysters to attach. Silt and oyster
shells will slowly bury them, and will then be buried themselves.
Within a few million years, enough layers will amass to compress
shells into limestone, which will bear an odd, intermittent rusty
streak flecked with sparkling traces of nickel, molybdenum, niobium,
and chromium. Millions of years after that, someone or something
might have the knowledge and tools to recognize the signal of
stainless steel. Nothing, however, will remain to suggest that its
original form once stood tall over a place called Texas, and breathed
fire into the sky.
I cannot really describe the feeling I get from reading these portions in particular, only that it’s the strongest I ever got from any book. It’s certainly not one of joy: I don’t want humans to disappear – in fact, there are a lot of humans among my family and friends – and I don’t want human civilization to vanish, after the unspeakable effort it took to put together, with all the promise that, despite everything, it shows. It’s not one of sadness or fear, either. I suppose it’s just one of awe, of terrible grandeur, similar in kind to what I feel when considering the alien horror and beauty of evolved life, its sheer multi-layered complexity, or the unthinkable vastness of geological time.
hey for everyone who wants some good news!!! a federal judge has just required a texas county trying to issue a book ban similar to florida’s to replace all removed books WITHIN 24 HOURS. this is a great change of pace with the amount of book bans getting passed lately
Some more details from the court order:
This order is a preliminary injunction - this means that the case isn’t over and books aren’t ordered to be permanently returned, just that they have to be returned at least until the case is over. This doesn’t diminish what a good result this was, though! First, it means those books will be available while the case is ongoing, and second, one of the factors a court considers when granting a preliminary injunction is likelihood of success on the merits.
It’s not just that the books have to be returned! The judge also enjoined the county from removing any OTHER books while the case is ongoing!
In the bad news, the court dismissed the portion of the plaintiff’s complaint trying to restore the libraries’ access to OverDrive (an e-book lending system) as moot b/c the library system is now using Bibliotheca (a different e-book lending system). This sucks, b/c Bibliotheca doesn’t provide e-book access to all the books at issue (see previous posts about how much existing e-book lending laws and practice suck). However, the court dismissed the claims relating to OverDrive without prejudice (meaning the plaintiffs can file the same claims again) and clearly lays out what the plaintiffs would need to include in a new pleading - specifically naming the books at issue that are not available through Bibliotheca - in order to be likely to clear a motion to dismiss.
Obligatory cheer line: “The Court follows our many sister courts in holding that there is a protected liberty interest in access to information in a public library.”
Not relevant to any of the underlying issues, but very funny: The defendants’ attorney attempted to engage in Shenanigans! during litigation by donating the books in question to a “in-house checkout system” (that patrons do not know about and cannot see what books are available) so that he could argue the claims with regard to the physical books was also moot and tried to keep the fact that he done this anonymous by claiming attorney-client privilege. (The court said: lol, no. On both fronts.) (Also, that’s why the order specifies that the books have to be added to the catalogue and it has to show they are available for checkout. Because Shenanigans! have already been attempted.)
Likewise, I think it is VERY important for tumblr to know that some of the books in question are picture books referred to by the lawsuit and the court as the “Butt and Fart Books.” It is important to remember, as dangerous as these people are, the are also Extremely Silly and Embarrassing. I also propose, from now on, referring to them as “The Butt and Fart Book Banners.”
There’s no point in restoring access to OverDrive, because the company that made the e-book lending system is no longer supporting it and is closing it later this year in favour of their new Libby system. So I wouldn’t consider that one bad news purely because the library was going to have to shift systems no matter the legal outcome.
