I'm still not sure of what the ant and plant species are.
A new species of salamander from Costa Rica, Bolitoglossa chirripoensis, has been described!
KLANK, JEREMY, et al. "A new species of salamander of the genus Bolitoglossa (Caudata: Plethodontidae) from the highest massif of the Cordillera de Talamanca, Costa Rica." Zootaxa 5642.5 (2025): 427-450.
cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/31227704
This weekend I did some experiments with turmeric powder. Here are some images of the results, and the description of how to create these microscopic chemical landscapes is given below.
Turmeric powder is a fantastic material to play with. The powder has a high concentration of colored and fluorescent curcuminoids and volatile turmerone oils.
When you use a polar solvent to extract these compounds, what you get is a kind of fluorescent oily resin called a turmeric 'oleoresin'.
The curcuminoids are yellow at acidic and neutral pH, but they become bright red at high pH due to keto-enol tautomerization. There is a lot of cool things you can do with the curcuminoids in terms of photo/electrochemistry.
I have been playing with very simple chemistry under the microscope, and I have noticed that you can create some cool-looking micro-landscapes. During this process you can also see different types of physico-chemical processes happening in real time.
Procedure to do this:
- Place a few grams of turmeric powder into a glass container
- Add enough isopropanol to cover the material, and a bit more
- Mix
- Wait for the solids to settle
- Collect a bit of the isopropanol liquid from the top and place on a glass coverslip
- Wait for the isopropanol to evaporate.
At this time, you can see under the microscope that golden oil droplets have been deposited, and that the surroundings are also yellow. The drops are oleoresins, which consist of curcuminoids suspended in turmerones and other oily compounds. Thin curcuminoid films might also be forming in between these droplets.
Add a sprinkle of baking soda crystals (sodium bicarbonate) on top of the coverslip. You can blow on the coverslip if you accidentally add too much.
Add a small drop of water, and wait a bit.
At this time you can see that the crystals are dissolving under the microscope, but the colors are not changing. The water and oils are not mixing, and so you get this film of alkaline water surrounding the oil droplets, but nothing is yet really changing.
- After waiting a few minutes, add a drop of isopropanol.
Now the isopropanol will re-dissolve the oleoresin and mix with the alkaline water. The carbonate ions are now able to react with the curcuminoids, and when they do, they go into the ketone form and instantly turn red. Under the microscope you can see quite dramatic movements of yellow and rad streaking as well as turbulent movements of the baking soda crystals.
Wait some time for the liquids to evaporate again
You will end up with a landscape that combines yellow resins, red resins, sodium bicarbonate crystals, and several different patterns.
You can vary the parameters - the amount of sodium bicarbonate, the position and size of the drops, you can pre-mix the water and isopropanol, etc. Small changes can drastically affect the resulting landscape.
This weekend I did some experiments with turmeric powder. Here are some images of the results, and the description of how to create these microscopic chemical landscapes is given below.
Turmeric powder is a fantastic material to play with. The powder has a high concentration of colored and fluorescent curcuminoids and volatile turmerone oils.
When you use a polar solvent to extract these compounds, what you get is a kind of fluorescent oily resin called a turmeric 'oleoresin'.
The curcuminoids are yellow at acidic and neutral pH, but they become bright red at high pH due to keto-enol tautomerization. There is a lot of cool things you can do with the curcuminoids in terms of photo/electrochemistry.
I have been playing with very simple chemistry under the microscope, and I have noticed that you can create some cool-looking micro-landscapes. During this process you can also see different types of physico-chemical processes happening in real time.
Procedure to do this:
At this time, you can see under the microscope that golden oil droplets have been deposited, and that the surroundings are also yellow. The drops are oleoresins, which consist of curcuminoids suspended in turmerones and other oily compounds. Thin curcuminoid films might also be forming in between these droplets.
Add a sprinkle of baking soda crystals (sodium bicarbonate) on top of the coverslip. You can blow on the coverslip if you accidentally add too much.
Add a small drop of water, and wait a bit.
At this time you can see that the crystals are dissolving under the microscope, but the colors are not changing. The water and oils are not mixing, and so you get this film of alkaline water surrounding the oil droplets, but nothing is yet really changing.
Now the isopropanol will re-dissolve the oleoresin and mix with the alkaline water. The carbonate ions are now able to react with the curcuminoids, and when they do, they go into the ketone form and instantly turn red. Under the microscope you can see quite dramatic movements of yellow and rad streaking as well as turbulent movements of the baking soda crystals.
Wait some time for the liquids to evaporate again
You will end up with a landscape that combines yellow resins, red resins, sodium bicarbonate crystals, and several different patterns.
You can vary the parameters - the amount of sodium bicarbonate, the position and size of the drops, you can pre-mix the water and isopropanol, etc. Small changes can drastically affect the resulting landscape.
This is a stack of 7 images, you can click on the image to see the full resolution and guess what the subject is :D
The photos were taken using a Nikon D7500 camera connected through a T2 adapter tube with 2X magnification (NDPL-1(2X)). Microscope is the Swift SW380T. The objective is a 4x Plan objective.
For stacking the images together I use three tools: ImageMagick's mogrify to transform from the raw NEF files to .tif, Hugin's align_image_stack function to align the images, and enfuse to blend the images together.
The output .tif file was post-processed using rawtherapee in order to increase local contrast and tune some other parameters.
The process of focus stacking a set of images is rather simple in Linux. The programs above can be installed via the package manager. Then, you copy the raw files to focus-stack into a folder, and run the following sequence of commands:
(1) Convert from RAW to TIF:
mogrify -format tif *NEF
(2) Align images
align_image_stack -a aligned_ -v -m -g 10 -C *.tif
(3) Focus stack
enfuse -o result.tiff --exposure-weight=0 --saturation-weight=0 --contrast-weight=1 --hard-mask aligned_*
Below are the images used for the stack after alignment, for reference:
This specimen came from a slimy film of algae that grew in one of my algal cultures. I think that it is a Nostoc. Objective is 40x/0.65
This image was taken through the 100x oil objective and a 2x camera adapter projecting the image into a Nikon D7500. The sample is a leaf from one of my plants (Dioscorea elephantipes, but I don't think this picture would look very different for other plant species)
The edges of he leaf were already yellowish brown. Here is a photo of that area with much less chlorophyll:
And here is a photo through the 40x objective using oblique illumination:
If you want to see some really fantastic photos of plant stomata I recommend having a look at Rolf Vossen's photographs here: https://microscopyofnature.com/stomata
I am looking through his documentation trying to understand how he managed to get those images. They are spectacular.
This is a photograph of a small trichome on the surface of a seedling through the 40x objective. Not sure if it is a happy trichome looking up at what it will become or a sad trichome looking down 😆 I liked the colors and the scene, reminds me of a painting.
Here is a photo through the 10x:
I prepared a 1:200 dilution of red blood cells using a ~1% NaCl solution. The imaged region contains 4 nano liters of the diluted sample. This image was taken using a 40x objective.
A count is performed by counting the number of red blood cells in a few of these sections, averaging the result, and then converting back to red blood cells per microliter by multiplying times 200 (dilution) and dividing by 0.004 (sampled volume in micoliters).
For this particular sample I estimated 3.8 million red blood cells per micro liter of blood.
I tested a few different types of hemocytometer/Neubauer chambers from China and I can recommend this specific one:
There are some even cheaper alternatives but the lines are very difficult to see.
Best of luck raising funds! 👍 Pinned for extra visibility.
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:
AND
More likely....
And this concludes my little investigation 🧐
I find it strange that they are out-bidding each other like this when there are over 8 days left. I am not too experienced with bidding, but I thought that the normal strategy was to maybe place a placeholder bid if there is no activity, but more generally one waits until the last second to set a reasonably high bid. Going on a 1v1 with fast out-bidding over a week early seems bad for everyone except the seller. Perhaps someone can explain.
Someone needs to explain to Musk how to debug with the JSON so that the ipv6 GUI does not overflow into the git API front-end
If the timing is right, I would bring a mushroom grow bag with mushrooms sprouting.
If not... probably my radiacode gamma spectrometer and some of my radioactive items. Maybe a clock with radium painted dials and a piece of trinitite. I think that there are many different points of discussion that can be of interest to a broad audience (radioactivity, spectroscopy, electronics, US labor law story of the radium girls, nuclear explosions, background radiation.... etc). As a bonus I can bring a UV flash light and show the radium fluorescence. Adults love UV flash lights.
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 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 😁
Expatriate/expat
Maybe it is not a popular opinion. And perhaps calling it "bigotry" is too far. But I work in a different country from where I was born, and I consider myself an immigrant. I have however seen this trend of referring to educated professionals as "expats" to distinguish us from people who immigrate to escape conflicts and/or poverty. I don't agree that this distinction is necessary or valuable, and I feel uncomfortable when I am described with that term. If I am called that, I usually chuckle and let people know that I'm an immigrant!!
Password hashing occurs server-side. Even without removing the hashing step an admin can intercept the plaintext password during login. Use unique safe passwords.
An admin can intercept the jwt authentication cookie and use any account that lives in the instance.
Private messages are stored as plaintext in the database
Admins can see who upvotes/downvotes what
These are not things that are unique to Lemmy. This is common.
To avoid having to trust your admin, run an instance.
Really cool! I'm excited to learn more about you and the project!
What's the format? Should we submit questions beforehand, or will you process questions that arrive at the start time? I've never participated in an AMA 😅
My view is: I don't like this cultural element, and I am glad that I live in a country without it. But if I am a visitor from abroad I would not resist the local culture and try to impose my own values. If I am aware of this cultural element and I dislike it, my options would be to either avoid restaurants and other tipping situations as much as I can, or simply account for the tip when making my financial decisions, and pay it.
If I live in the country then it is different, because then I am more entitled to be a driver of change. Personally, my approach would be to support businesses with explicit no-tipping policy, and to refuse receiving tips myself.
Well, good thing that you prepared well in advance and have already built a nice alternative.
Reddit is done
I think that for mid-levels of fame you can find a mixture of musical skill and self-marketing/entrepreneurship.
But as you go up the ladder of fame you get to the rungs where money is used to pay for an artist's exposure. The artist becomes an investor's asset and the "skill" of building fame arguably belongs to the investors / management team. And it is not so much skill as much as it is the power of capital to purchase attention.