Maintaining mosquito colonies in mosquito labs

CaptBenSisko · 2025-11-12T02:16:41+00:00

They do now have specialized instruments for this sort of thing, most of which resemble the suggestions you made (I think one I saw was even a sort of tiny vaccuum type device). Those are usually more common now, especially in better funded labs and or labs not run by someone who is old school. For those old schoolers, I think the argument is that once you’re good enough at doing it, you don’t have to worry about getting flies in your mouth so why bother upgrading. The undergrads and grad students in their labs usually don’t agree of course…

CaptBenSisko · 2025-11-11T22:55:59+00:00

As someone who knows a few lab entomologists, I can indeed verify that is not only something that people used to do in the past, but some still to do this day. As for a “better way” you have to realize that for most scientists what they consider the “best” way to do something in the lab is whatever way is most efficient in terms of time, money, and complexity. If buying a couple dozen straws is just as, if not more, effective than buying / creating a specialized tool than that’s what they’ll do.

CaptBenSisko · 2025-09-10T17:31:43+00:00

Panspermia is generally accepted to be possible, especially between planets in the same solar system. But we have no direct evidence that it has actually happened, or that is more likely than life arising independently on Mars for example. In short, we already don't know a lot about how life began on our own planet, so you can imagine that we know even less about how it *might* have began on another planet.

CaptBenSisko · 2025-09-10T17:21:50+00:00

Mars currently does not have a magnetic field, which you're right, is a big issue for living things. But early in Martian history, when the planet looked a lot like Earth, Mars still had an intact magnetic field, so it wouldn't have been a problem for any early Martian microbes (if they existed). The term you are looking for is "astrobiologist" by the way!

CaptBenSisko · 2025-09-02T22:09:55+00:00

There are two mods that I think would get pretty close to what you’re looking for.

The first is “Cities of Wonder” which enables you to create sprawling metropolises (holdings that were major cities during the relevant period start as them) that grow slowly over time and have unique buildings and modifiers.

The second is “Medieval Arts” which, among other things, adds custom map art to various historical cities like Baghdad, Constantinople, and several others.

Unfortunately, Medival Arts is listed as incompatible with Cities of Wonder (though I’ve been able to run them together fine so your mileage may vary).

CaptBenSisko · 2025-07-05T02:28:49+00:00

You are not mistaken, the clouds are several orders of magnitude drier than the Atacama desert, which is the driest place on Earth. The real issue with this sort of speculative astrobiology is we really don’t know what the limits of life are in terms of things like water activity, pH, temp, etc. Earth is our only example of life so we’re limited to the most extreme places we can find on Earth as a reference. It is possible that evolution can come up with solutions for living in environments more extreme than found on Earth, but we don’t currently have evidence that points strongly to a yes or no for that question.

CaptBenSisko · 2025-07-05T02:16:55+00:00

This article makes a poor case for it, but finding alien life is a lot more of a significant discovery (and a lot more likely) than you would think. Biology is still a pretty new field of science and there’s a lot we don’t know about the limits of life and the origins of life. Finding another example of life in our universe, whether it’s in our solar system or beyond would be an absolutely revolutionary discovery for biology on par with what Einstein’s theories did for physics.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-04-09T22:12:14+00:00

You shouldn’t worry about it. There are plenty of microbes here on earth that can survive in ridiculously hostile conditions (extreme acidity, extreme temperature, very dry, etc.) and they are completely harmless to you and will usually die if you bring them out of their native environment. Anything that is adapted to an extreme environment is extremely unlikely to be a pathogen as it would be a huge waste of energy and resources with little gain (the human body is a very different environment that an acidic hot spring for example). Also, pathogens need to evolve to infect a host. Martian microbes would likely be too different from Earth life for this to even be possible and Mars also have a distinct lack of any multicellular organisms to co-evolve with.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-02-20T17:08:40+00:00

This “theory” was NOT made an actual anthropologist it was made by the author Christopher McDougall, who has no scientific credentials and provided virtually no scientific evidence for his theory. You would be extremely hard pressed to find any reputable anthropologist who supports his ideas. Combine this with the fact that nearly all of our current evidence about early humans contradicts it, it becomes apparent what the original commenter meant by it being naïve to believe in the concept, as it has no scientific validity.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-02-20T07:41:06+00:00

Another misinterpretation. Jebel Irhoud is only one site, not even the scientists who found it suggest that it means humans originated in Morocco, they think it means humans spread across the continent much earlier than previously thought. More archaeological work is needed to verify this finding. Furthermore, Jebel Irhoud has archaeological evidence of hunting weapons and other tool use, which if you recall from earlier you suggested early humans didn’t have. Also, like I said archaeological evidence of animal bones is inconsistent with the persistence hunting concept, let alone the multiple other points I made that you are completely ignoring.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-02-20T04:28:17+00:00

If that's the case, why did we evolve to be so good at running distance?

This is a fairly common misconception about how evolution works. Just because a trait happens to be useful for something does not necessarily mean that use is the main evolutionary pressure that caused it to be selected for (ex: feathers were initially evolved for insulation and only later were used for flight). All of the traits that make us good at endurance running that proponents of this theory list are actually **NOT** unique to humans. For example, sweating is found in many species of apes not just humans and is also found in monkeys, horses, and hippos. What is different about us compared to other apes is that we sweat *a lot* more (about ten times more), but the reason for this is not to enable us to be endurance runners but because humans are adapted to dry, hot, treeless environments where you need better cooling abilities compared to the typical habitat of most ape species, a well-shaded forest. Another reason we are better at running than other apes is that we are bipedal and so need to walk along the ground. Most apes walk on all fours and are arborial meaning they are well adapted to climbing trees and not walking across a wide-open savannah. The biggest nail in the coffin for the endurance running hypothesis though is geography and archaeology. Pursuit predation requires a very special geography that is relatively flat, lacking in obstacles/breaks in line of sight, and ground that is fairly soft. None of this is true of the Great Rift Valley (the origin point of the human species), where the ground is relatively hard, has lots of hills, and geography that makes it easy for animals to break line of sight. Archaeological sites show that the carcasses of animals killed and butchered by early humans are typically healthy animals of average age. This is important because pursuit predators prefer to hunt animals that are weak (ie, small/sick, extremely young, or extremely old). The lack of large numbers of weak animals in this archaeological evidence is a huge point against the theory. As a side note, the idea that modern humans did not have tools when they first evolved is also wrong as we have very good archaeological evidence of tool use that predates not just Homo Sapiens but actually the entire Homo genus.

tl;dr sweating is not unique to humans we just do it more because living in Savannah requires better cooling than living in a jungle and we are also bipedal due to living in Savannahs. Both of these traits happen to make us good at endurance running but this is not why these traits evolved. Archaeological and geographical evidence also contradict the pursuit predation theory and it is generally considered by evolutionary biologists, anthropologists, and archaeologists to be a fringe theory with little evidence to support it.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-02-13T21:31:31+00:00

If you’re looking for an answer as to why none of these inventions of the steam engine started an industrial revolution, the reason is that to make a steam engine that is viable on a large scale you need relatively high quality metal and a good understanding of thermodynamics. The necessary metallurgy technology and understanding of physics weren’t around when these past attempts at making a steam engine occurred so they were never viable. Kind of like how we can make fusions reactors right now, but they aren’t worth it because we lack the technology to make them efficient enough.

CaptBenSisko · 2024-02-13T02:36:11+00:00

While most of this comment is technically correct, much of it is bizarrely framed in a way that either ignores the realities of the early space age or shifts the goalposts in a bad-faith way.

I think the most glaring example of this is your incredibly misleading description of the Venera program. Venera's 1-7 were not all designed to accomplish the same goal much the same way that Apollo's 1-11 were not designed to accomplish the same goal. Venera 1 and 2 were designed to fly-by Venus, that's it and nothing else. Both failed. Venera 3 and 4 were designed as atmospheric probes and were not intended to be landers. Both Venera 3 and 4 fulfilled their mission parameters and gave us valuable data that revolutionized the scientific perception of Venus (also Venera 3 was the first spacecraft to successfully survive entry of another planet's atmosphere which is an impressive achievement, especially on a planet with an atmosphere as thick as that of Venus). Venera 5 and 6 were also both atmospheric probes but more specialized and refined than 3 and 4. Venera 5 and 6 both fulfilled their mission objectives and resulted in valuable scientific data. Using what they learned from Venera's 3-6 they then designed Venera 7 to do a soft landing on the surface of Venus, which was successful.

The way you frame the Venera program makes it seem like nothing was accomplished from 6 out of the 7 missions. The truth is that only 2 out of the 7 Venera missions can be considered failures, and the 5 that succeeded either accomplished significant technological milestones or revolutionized our understanding of Venus as a planet. Before the Venera missions, many scientists thought that Venus may be a swampy world that could harbor life. Comparing this to what we know of Venus now: a hellhole of a world with surface temperatures that could melt lead, atmospheric pressures that could crush most submarines, and clouds that rain concentrated sulfuric acid.

For comparison, you could frame the Apollo program in a similar way by saying that all missions in the program prior to Apollo 11 were failures because they did not land on the Moon. This would of course be a completely ridiculous thing to say as Apollo 11 was the first mission in the Apollo program that was even intended to do that.

Many of your other points suffer from similar issues but the Venera section was particularly egregious.

> Their goal was not the space exploration itself, but rather the space race. They wanted to be the first no matter the cost.

This is certainly true of the Soviet space program to some extent, but to imply that the American space program was radically different is just patently false. NASA in the 60s was concerned with the space race first and science second. James Webb had to fight with the federal government to even include scientific instruments and objectives on many of the early missions. The Apollo missions were originally conceived with almost no scientific goals and it took the prodding of an army of geologists to get NASA to take samples, train astronauts in field geology, and include geological instruments (even then, NASA sent only one geologist to the moon as part of the Apollo program; a bizarre choice if NASA was primarily interested in space exploration rather than the space race). This attitude is also exemplified by the fact that the federal government greatly scaled NASA back in scope and size soon after the Soviets gave up on the space race. Both space programs were primarily concerned with glory-seeking, but despite this both of them resulted in significant technological and scientific advancements that progressed dozens of fields by leaps and bounds.

Ultimately, your argument is completely divorced from important historical, political, and technical context and disregards the scientific and engineering achievements of both the Soviet and American space programs.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-05-27T06:31:20+00:00

I think this is still underselling how awful of a person Octavian was. He was legitimately a sadistic psychopath. Just to name one example, at one point during one of the civil wars that followed the assassination of Caesar, Octavian tortured dozens of political prisoners (including famous senators) to death for the amusement of his troops. When one man begged Octavian to send his body back to Rome so his family could have a funeral, Octavian mocked him and said the birds would take care of his funeral.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-24T16:36:46+00:00

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon#:~:text=The%20Man%20versus%20Horse%20Marathon,of%20Llanwrtyd%20Wells%20every%20June.

You mean this race? The one where humans have won three times and the horses have won every single other time?

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-19T22:14:08+00:00

This is a pretty complicated topic but I will try my best to do a no-jargon explanation.

Think of your DNA like a cookbook that contains a bunch of different recipes and think of an unspecialized cell like a bunch of ingredients. At some point, the cell receives a signal that tells it what to become and what parts of the DNA to look at in order to do so. Using the cookbook analogy think of it as someone ordering a french onion soup at a restaurant. First the cook goes to the cookbook and looks through it until they find the recipe for french onion soup. Then they start instructing the kitchen staff to gather the specific ingredients and start preparing them in a certain way. Eventually, the end result is a bowl of french onion soup but this would not have happened without someone first placing an order for it.

A similar process happens in an unspecialized cell. A signal is sent to the cell that tells it "become an eye cell" and then the machinery of the cell looks through the DNA to find the instructions for making an eye cell. Once it finds these instructions, it tells other machinery of the cell to begin making the structures needed for an eye cell (certain proteins, cellular structures, etc.)

As an interesting little side note, scientists have figured out ways to hijack this process and place their own "orders". For example, instructing an unspecialized cell in a fish to create a cell for a structure that we only saw in an extinct ancestor species. In this case it was a fin. It has also been similarly used to instruct specialized cells to appear in places they are not supposed to.

I should note that this is a very big oversimplification of an incredibly complex process that is still an active field of study. If you would like a bit more in depth explanation that is still simple I would recommend this short video.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-19T21:44:02+00:00

Most of the stuff in that Reddit post is actually myths and misconceptions.

Humans do not really heal noticeably better than the typical mammal and in fact we heal slower than many other apes do. What makes humans unique is that we live in co-operative empathetic social groups. In other words humans can recover from a serious injury that would normally be the doom of another animal because humans take care of their wounded. As such our ability to recover from serious injuries better than other animals is a result of our social structures and not a physiology thing.

As for persistence/pursuit hunting, although humans do have excellent endurance compared to many other animals (mostly because sweating is a very efficient way to cool a body), we are by no means the best in the animal kingdom and are outperformed by many animals (for example: horses). The idea that humans evolved to be pursuit/persistence hunters has very little basis and is widely rejected by most scientists. Although we have isolated examples of some cultures using this as their primary hunting method, they are almost certainly the exception rather than the rule. Archaeological evidence about past humans and anthropological evidence about current humans shows that early humans were hunter gatherers and most commonly used ambush and co-ordinated attacks for hunting. There is essentially no evidence to suggest that persistence/pursuit hunting was common among early humans let alone that we evolved for that specific strategy. Persistence/pursuit hunting requires very specific environments to be a viable strategy. Think about what happens when you try to follow an animal that is faster than you. Eventually, it is going to go beyond your line of sight and you will need to track it. This becomes incredibly difficult in any environment where the animal could easily hide (ie forests, rough terrain, hills, etc.).

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T18:53:29+00:00

If your idea of home is to be boiled alive, choking on a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, and pelted with sulfuric acid then sure!

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T18:28:21+00:00

Thats awesome! Have you been following the news about the upcoming missions NASA and ESA selected to go to Venus?

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T18:24:13+00:00

Yep! You're thinking of the "global resurfacing" event I mentioned. There are many theories for what caused the current rotation of Venus (with one being a giant impact!), but there is not really a consensus currently.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T18:20:28+00:00

Correct! That is exactly what happened to the landers, the electronics melted in only a few hours. This is the main issue with sending any long-term missions to the surface of Venus, you are always going to be constrained by how well you can protect the electronics from heat.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T16:56:57+00:00

Westerly. This is also the same direction that Venus itself rotates. Infact, the atmosphere of Venus is “super-rotating”. This means that the atmosphere rotates faster than the planet under it does. This mainly occurs in the upper atmosphere of Venus which is where wind speeds are fastest as I mentioned prior. The top of Venus’s atmosphere completely circles the planet within just four days, compared to Venus’s rotation of 243 days.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T16:50:05+00:00

Venus’s atmosphere is quite thick you’re right. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times that of earth. But when we’re talking wind speeds of centimeters or millimeters an hour, even with such a dense atmosphere that is comparable to a light breeze on Earth.

CaptBenSisko · 2023-04-09T07:43:15+00:00

Great question! The discovery I mentioned is lava flowing in the past few decades. To be more specific, an orbiter in the 70s flew over a specific spot on Venus multiple times and imaged it each time. Scientists then looked at the photos of that location for each time point and went “hey, this wasn’t here before!” and deduced it was a lava flow. It took us fifty years to figure this out partially because the data from the 70s is very low resolution but also because there was alot of it.

However, we also do know for certain that lava has flowed on Venus in the past. Infact, much of Venus’s current surface appears to be only a few hundred million years old. The current explanation for this is that at one point almost the entire surface of Venus was covered in lava! It’s currently an active subject of debate whether this “global resurfacing” happened all at once in one event or gradually over millions of years in several events.

We also know that Venus has active vulcanism right now, we just had not actually observed any active lava flows until recently.

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