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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzbrain blowing orgasms
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    3 months ago

    There’s a specific life history strategy called semelparity, which is what you’re describing (breeding once then dying). To my understanding, this is incentivized if the chances of getting a second attempt to breed are too low, and so it becomes more evolutionarily advantageous to simply go all out on the first attempt



  • Not entirely true. Vaccines induce the adaptive immune system, which is slow but precise. Getting sick for real induces the innate immune system, which is god awful and you should not be relying on it. S. pneumoniae causes pneumonia because the innate immune system goes overdrive and kills you before it kills the bacteria. COVID-19 induces cell-innate inflammasome activation and leads to a cytokine storm, which then leads to even more damage to the lungs as the immune cells come in. Both diseases have effective vaccines that do not do anything close to this.

    Deadly diseases tend to be deadly not because of the microbe itself, but because the innate immune system overreacts and kills you in the process of fighting off the disease.

    Getting vaccinated diminishes the role that the innate immune system plays when you get sick, since the B cells responsible for producing antibodies for the disease are already mature. Having available antibodies also allows the immune system to rely on the complement system, which allows it to detect and kill invading microbes way earlier than otherwise.




  • Contramuffin@lemmy.worldtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlQuestion about instances
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    3 months ago

    Lemmy.world, by political ideology, is most similar to old Reddit. Namely, you’re most likely going to find generally-left-of-center people. Several other instances (namely lemmy.ml) are known for being significantly more left-leaning, basically hard communist.

    As is tradition for left-leaning people, there’s a lot of infighting. .world people think that .ml people are tankies. .ml people think that .world people are corporate bootlickers. Both sides accuse the other of heavy-handed censorship.

    Basically, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just your standard leftism infighting.



  • PI = principal investigator, or the leader of the lab. Also known as the professor. The closest comparison to regular jobs would be that the PI is the manager. They typically no longer do actual lab work and typically fulfill a role that is entirely managerial, so they’re often removed from and therefore entirely oblivious to goings-on of the lab. It’s a somewhat common occurrence for lab members to have a concern that the PI dismisses because they’re unaware of the severity of the concern, or for the PI to have a concern that lab members have already addressed



  • Here’s a fun game: describe your research/interest in a similar way that Fox/Republicans use to describe research. The more misleading it is from the actual research, the better.

    I’ll start: watch how tired mice get when they get sick

    (determine the mechanism of how microbial contact affects host circadian rhythms)