A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
What? Prions suddenly being in dirt instead of a human being doesn't kill them, there's a whole thing with Mad Cow and soil from the UK as i recall. Part of why they're so fucking horrible is that you practically can't kill Prions.
Obscenely high temperatures are required.
The rich should be turned into fuel pellets instead.
Composting is a specific set of chemical processes that take place in a hot, highly oxygenated environment with the proper mix of nutrients for microbial growth. It is not comparable to ordinary decomposition in soil.
Composting can destroy prions, but it might be different to ensure you’ve destroyed all of them. Read more here: https://www.beefresearch.ca/fact-sheets/can-composting-destroy-bse-prions/
PS: I think it’s not good to joke about killing people, even shitty people.
To be fair, nobody said you had to kill them.
Just cut off parts as needed for food, or bury them in a deep composting pit.
At that point, they might die, but that's on them for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.
PS: I think it’s not good to joke about killing people, even shitty people.
Then it's time to stop joking
Who’s joking about it?
This is a war, people die in war. If our enemy doesn’t want to die, let them forfeit their “power” and surrender.
You actually literally can't kill prions, they aren't alive, they're basically the virus debate's bastard older brother with a rap sheet that's just a list of all the people they've sent to the hospital, and then followed up bankrupting the hospital because literally everything that victim touched has to be scrapped because hospitals usually don't have the tools required to break down prions enough for it to be safe to keep anything that might have gotten the patient's prions on it.
Misfolded proteins if I remembered right, and Auroclaves (and tools that can survive it) probably ain't cheap.
The rich should be turned into fuel pellets instead.
Until the process is started with them alive, it's fine
Ugh. I hate being that guy, and I realize it's a meme, not science, but I can't leave it alone.
Composting doesn't get rid of metals, so you'd need a way to deal with them if you wanted to be safe.
I’ll bring the magnet.
Especially if the compost is used for mushrooms. They have tendency to absorb heavy metals from the ground so you have to be careful where you pick them from and what kind of compost you use if growing at home.
Most plants that we eat are excellent at taking up heavy metals too - potatoes and herbs especially.
I got it. Force the rich to eat each other until the problem solves itself.
No, it would increase concentrations. You need to get the rich to launch themselves into the sun
So.
We force them to eat each other until their concentrations are high enough to extract the metals for industrial uses.
That's a feature.
We force them to gorge on themselves until there's one, inbred, leaded rich guy left. Then we put it on display as a warning to everyone else
We're halfway there; many of the rich want desperately to strap themselves on top of a million tons of explosives in the shape of a penis. All we have to do now is convince them that there are poor people with money on the sun, and they'll trip over each other to be the first to steal from the poor sun-people.
also doesn't remove prion diseases
Not that I disagree with you, but it doesn't make sense that they are stable in soil given that they are proteins, and those are relatively quickly decomposing in soil.
(Don't) Ask me how I know.
Prions are quite stable, and also they don't need to stay in the soil for long, just enough to get reconsumed. Supposedly that's how CWD (chronic wasting disease, not coarse woody debris), is spread among deer.
Edit: in context with composting, overall temps would be higher in such a pit but not by much. Its anywhere from room temp to 140F/60C. Prion destruction is a lot higher temp wise. As for bacteria in the pile, maybe? It might be more likely to become meaningfully degraded in a compost pile instead of normal soil.
As for cwd prion bio accumulation, it's been hypothesized but not demonstrated (like grass picking it up from the soil itself). It's spread in saliva and indirectly from the environment which is probably why you shouldn't feed deer in areas with cwd and explains a lot of the spread. Also apparently the scrapie prion can endure for 16 years. Wtf.
How do you know the acronym CWD -> coarse woody debris? That's not one most people are aware of
I'm an ecology major and that came up a lot in the papers I read. It largely shows up in forest ecology papers, which should have an overlap with chronic wasting disease, considering that deer populations have had this for a while and deer play a huge role in forest ecology.
First time my senior seminar class encountered it in an assigned paper, we all asked why that particular acronym.
It's been largely a meme in that seminar class as a result.
a quick look at wikipedia will show you are wrong
"In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment."
Mortician here!
Recomposition (or Natural Organic Reduction) is already legal in several states: California, Washington, Vermont, Oregon and Colorado!
As of right now, I think the compost is only allowed in national and state parks, but they're doing testing on farms to check if there's dangers to us consuming the crops and it's been very successful and safe.
Most diseases and viruses can't survive the composting heat and the plants are thriving. It uses 87% less energy than cremation and burial and stops embalming fluids from leaking into our ground water. I'm really glad this is an option.
There's a scam company that claims you can put cremated remains in the ground and grow a tree... yeah, cremated remains turn into concrete when wet and the heat of cremation denatures nearly everything beneficial for plants. We constantly have to tell people not to put cremated remains on plants or the plants will join the family member that passed...
With the disclaimer that I don't know anything about your field....
IMO, if eating food that was nourished by dead humans was inherently unsafe, I believe we would have had significant issues well before now. I have no doubt that when agriculture was new, cemeteries and areas where people have died and left to decompose, would have been used to grow food and if it created any problems, I think we would have seen issues before now.
Again, I'm not a farmer, mortician, scientist, or any other preceived or direct authority on the subject.
How is that supposed to remove lead and mercury from the food supply? If you use that as fertilizer, the heavy metals will still be in there, and likely get picked up by your crops…
Make sure to have some rolly polies in your compost heap to eat the rich 🍽 those little guys can remove heavy metals from the corpses of the bourgeoisie 😋
Better to phytoremdiate with sunflowers or other hyper accumulators, and then landfill the biomass
Dig a hole. Fill the bottom with a billionaire corpse. Plant a tree on top and finish filling the hole. Take a breath of fresh air.
Diggy diggy hole...
As long as the compost is made safely. Gotta be, like, heated, industrial-scale composting. If you just throw a congress critter into the backyard mulch it's still gonna be pretty risky.
Notice how everyone knows what is needed to be able to eat or mulch a person, but no-one is directly mentioning the part about killing being required.
I don't know why we need euphemisms for this. Genuinely I'm asking, not presenting an opinion.
It would be very crass indeed to talk about killing the rich, but the cold hard fact is that if psychotic people are leading the entire planet to get properly fucked, it's the moral thing to do to get rid of them somehow.
Obviously humanitarian values hold that one shouldn't kill needlessly.
I guess "eat the rich" reminds us of what we need to do and why; because the poor are hungry for the resources the fucked up rich people are hoarding. It's also very clearly implied that we could kill the rich, but that we're willing to avoid it if our hunger gets sated some other way.
In other words "hey rich assholes, we're not violent people, but unless you start making this more fair, this is going to end up in a situation in which we will have to resort to violence, and there's a lot more of us than there are of you".
Or as Percy Bysshe put it more eloquently a few centuries ago in a political poem (thought to perhaps be the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance.)
Stand ye calm and resolute, Like a forest close and mute, With folded arms and looks which are Weapons of unvanquished war.
And if then the tyrants dare, Let them ride among you there; Slash, and stab, and maim and hew; What they like, that let them do.
With folded arms and steady eyes, And little fear, and less surprise, Look upon them as they slay, Till their rage has died away:
Then they will return with shame, To the place from which they came, And the blood thus shed will speak In hot blushes on their cheek:
Rise, like lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew Which in sleep had fallen on you: Ye are many—they are few!
Just don't eat the brains. It wouldn't be very filling anyway.
Well. The folk punks always knew that we all are just compost in training.
Composting doesn't get rid of prions or heavy metals unfortunately.
Unconditional support for comrade broccoli! 🫡