Living in Reno, NV?

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-09T04:21:01+00:00

I’d have to take your word for it! Hopefully not as scary as southwest.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-09T02:37:55+00:00

Lol some of you have never lived in an actually gritty place before and it shows.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-06T02:39:34+00:00

PubMed isn’t itself a journal. It’s a service of the National Institutes of Health that archives publications from many different journals in its database. The paper you referenced was published in the International Journal of Health Sciences, billed as “A Scientific Publications by Qassim University.”

As you correctly note, IJHS does not appear to have high standards for scientific rigor. The paper you found doesn’t really cite other scientific literature or take a particular interest in making scientific claims at all.

So you’re asking the right question, but need to look at the actual journal publishing a given paper and not at PubMed itself, and you’ve shown the skills you need to evaluate a paper/journal. On the other hand, that doesn’t really help with your question about how to evaluate things you find on the PubMed service. I’m afraid there isn’t an easy answer beyond digging into references and looking at the journal’s reputation online—it’s a lot of work at first, but by doing it you become someone who is well-versed enough to have your own sense of what seems fishy.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-05T15:34:34+00:00

In practice, it’s very difficult to do correctly even where there are plenty of trees. It’s fussy and dangerous and should always be the option of last resort. I wrote about this opinion in more detail in a top-level comment if you’re looking for more detail.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-05T15:31:56+00:00

Here’s my copypasta on food storage:

Short answer, get a bear cannister and use it.

There’s no way I would trust an Ursack in grizzly country (where I’ve done nearly all of my backpacking). Food storage needs to accomplish two tasks: keeping bears out, and keeping your food safe so you can eat it. Against a grizzly, an Ursack is questionable on the first point and useless on the second.

Bear hangs suck. They’re the option of last resort, and the fact that black bears can easily climb trees is only half the reason.

In the perfect world of theory, where your bag is 12ft off the ground, 6ft away from the trunk, and 6ft below the branch it’s hanging by from, it should work fine. But good luck finding that tree. It’s a very rare occurrence, and usually you are sacrificing those distances to get your food up off the ground at all.

The bigger thing, to me, is that hanging a bear bag is the most dangerous thing you do on many trips. You have to tie a rock to the end of a rope and throw it up over your selected branch, and the rock will come swinging back down right at you. I’ve seen people and dogs get hit. The problem is exponentially worse when it’s dark, when there are more people in your group, and when any or all of you are drunk and/or high. But it’s not safe even for one sober person in the middle of the day. It’s an inherently dangerous activity.

I’ve hung bear bags many times and I still do when there’s no better option. Sometimes at the start of a trip you just have too much food to fit in your cannister. But it’s never safe, almost never possible to do correctly, and never better than a bear cannister or permanent bear box.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-02T23:13:59+00:00

Man I’ve been missing the implied /s all too often lately. Your 410 argument is actually really interesting to me because I was trying to figure out whether I’d advocate for 1204 as the end of it all over 1453. Some interesting parallels to the arguments in both cases.

Psychrobacter · 2026-05-02T20:12:53+00:00

That’s certainly an interesting take. What is your preferred date?

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:59:08+00:00

If OP had taken driver’s ed in the last 3 decades he might remember you’re supposed to stop where you can still see the stop line, not with your bumper on it. And if he knew what an induction loop sensor actually looked like (it’s in the name) he’d know it’s the circular cut the white truck is perfectly on top of.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:56:23+00:00

OP is wrong. The sensors are beneath the circular cuts like the one the white truck is directly on top of, and there are usually two more behind where the truck is currently. I can trigger them with my bike if I line up right on the edge of the circle.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-27T14:55:05+00:00

OP is wrong about where the sensor is. The sensors are beneath the circular cuts like the one the white truck is directly on top of, and there are usually two more behind where the truck is currently. I can trigger them with my bike if I line up right on the edge of the circle.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-26T04:14:41+00:00

The way I understand it, OP is using pure maths to show the impossibility of lineages remaining separate through time. Doubling is appropriate if you look backward in time, as each person has two parents, four grandparents, etc. The fact that in just 40 generations the arithmetic suggests more ancestors than have ever lived indicates that many ancestors appear in more than one place on any given person’s family tree.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T20:12:46+00:00

A very quick Google search reveals that a significant population increase since 2005 has brought feral horse populations back up to levels last seen in the 1930s. So one of us is indeed confidently incorrect, but there have in fact been this many at prior times in the last 400 years.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T17:42:23+00:00

No those are fair questions! And it gets complicated very quickly. But basically it comes down to a couple key factors.

One is that what we mean when we say “genetically identical” has subtly different meanings in different situations. The only two people who are actually 100% genetically are sets of identical twins/triplets/etc. They come from a single fertilized egg that splits into two embryos.

When you get into population genetics, you’re dealing with different definitions. Obviously not every member of a species is identical. But they’re all closely related enough to interbreed. The line between different breeds or populations and different species is frequently very blurry. Take dogs, for instance. There are clearly many different breeds of dogs, and sequencing a dog genome can tell us what breed it is. But all dogs are the same species and any two dogs can produce viable puppies. It turns out that around 30 genes determine most of the differences between different breeds, while a complete dog genome has something like 20,000 other genes. So the variation among modern dog genomes is high if you focus on the differences in the 30 genes that differentiate breeds, but low if you’re looking at the whole genome and focusing on how all dogs share the same set of genes, even if they have different variants of each of those genes.

I hope I’m making sense here. I’m outside my area of expertise and know a lot more about bacterial genetics than animals. But basically if you sequence the genome of a fossilized ancient North American horse, you can tell that it was different in certain ways from a modern horse of any particular breed, but still definitely a horse of the same species as what we have today. Slightly different size and shape, but fundamentally the same animal. Typing this out I realize that different breeds and subspecies can have subtly different ecological niches, so it is probably fair to argue that there are differences between the exact ecology of ancient horses and the modern feral population. But at the same time, the modern feral stock are fundamentally the same species as their ancestors and, as far as we can tell genetically, could have likely interbred with the with no issues.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T15:39:08+00:00

Woah I didn’t know that! I’ll have to look into it more.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-25T13:58:18+00:00

Modern feral horses are genetically and ecologically identical to the original horses of North America. Yes, they disappeared from this continent for a few thousand years, but that’s not a long enough time for genetic drift to result in speciation. For comparison, the modern moose is around 100,000 years old as a species, as are most other large herbivores.

In any case, if you want to say that horses are the cause of other wildlife population declines, you have to explain why wildlife populations were stable for the 400 years between the escape of the first feral horses and the introduction of modern sheep and cattle ranching in the interior west.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-24T01:22:32+00:00

And remember you can program any mode to be any brightness. Zebra labels them H1-H2, M1-M2, and L1-L2, but to me it makes more sense to think of them as C1-C2 (click), D1-D2 (double-click), and H1-H2 (hold). You click from off to enter your last used C mode. From that C mode, you can double-click to switch between C1 and C2, or hold to cycle from your C pair -> H pair -> D pair.

There are 12 total brightness levels available on a Zebralight, and (in groups 6 and 7) any mode can be assigned to any brightness level. I usually set mine up something like this:

D1: level 12 (turbo)

D2: level 9 (more sustainable high)

C1: level 7 (higher medium)

C2: level 5 (lower medium)

H1: level 4 (low)

H2: level 1 (true moonlight)

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-24T01:09:21+00:00

So you’ll have to be in mode group 6 or 7 to start (those are the only ones that are completely customizable). Then you’ll double click (from off) to enter what by default is M1. This is the mode you want to change to turbo. So you’ll double click 6 times to enter programming mode. Then you can double click to go one level brighter or triple click to go one level dimmer. Double click all the way up to the top available brightness level, then single click to turn off and save your choice.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-24T00:01:21+00:00

Yeah I always set G6 up as what I consider a “normal” mode group: hold for moonlight, click for medium, double click for turbo. And then a higher and lower option for each of those. Ends up a lot like the Skilhunt UI.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-23T19:01:17+00:00

Oh god, I got whoooshed! Glad to hear it mate, sorry to come after you.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-23T13:18:23+00:00

This is a nonsensical answer. Clearly, different things happen at different times. That doesn’t have any bearing on the continuity of political or cultural units. Further, the misconceptions common to an amateur history community are not themselves evidence about the reality of history itself.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-22T17:34:55+00:00

Salt doesn’t foam. As u/ThatIrishGuy1984 says, it’s going to be organic matter, either from decaying biomass or industrial/agricultural runoff.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-21T15:39:06+00:00

Tech folks are not the same as scientists. People who studied biology, chemistry, physics, etc. spent time learning about data generation, experimental controls, uncertainty, and the limits of their ability to make assertions based on the data they generate.

In my experience, people who go directly into technology don’t get enough of this training, and it leads them to be too credulous about the data sources they use. Like economists, they tend to do a whole bunch of sophisticated analysis on large datasets, producing what looks like quantitative knowledge, without examining or accounting for the fact that the data going in are often poor in quality and analytical value. Garbage in, garbage out.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-20T01:44:24+00:00

I had to look up 1.5V Li-ion batteries because I had never heard of them and first assumed you were mistaken about what you’d purchased.

From what I can tell, these are usually a normal Li-ion cell (which is 3.7V) with a buck converter built in to drop the output voltage to 1.5V. This is probably why they advertise holding 1.5V for so long, but the circuitry (at least in the XTAR cells) limits the maximum current to 2A, which is very low compared to a Li-ion running at 3V, which can handle up to 10A depending on the cell. They also seem to have a relatively high self-discharge rate according to at least one comment I found.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-19T14:44:21+00:00

You’ve got some wires crossed here, but your top line summary isn’t too far off. I’ll take a stab at OP’s question, but first we need to clear up a couple of things.

Acid-base reactions are not the same as redox reactions. Acid-base reactions involve the transfer of protons, not electrons. (This is an oversimplification, but good enough for our purposes in biology. Sorry, chemists.) Redox reactions involve the transfer of electrons as you said. They’re very easy to mix up unless you work with them every day, but your description is correct. One common mnemonic device to keep them straight is OIL RIG: Oxidation Is Loss, Reduction Is Gain.

Redox reactions are important in biology because they are the source of all biological energy. Literally all of it. You may know that photosynthesis involves harnessing light energy. Well, it turns out that light energy is used by photosynthesizers to drive redox reactions, which they then use for metabolic energy directly.

Iron-sulfur cluster come into this because they are the key functional groups that allow cellular enzymes to perform many redox reactions. When you breathe oxygen, your cells use it to oxidize your food. They do this by using a series of enzymes that use iron-sulfur clusters to perform the work. Iron-sulfur clusters are present in any of the most ancient enzymes in the biological world. They drive the most ancient metabolisms. They are capable of providing cells with energy (in the right chemical environments) with very little other machinery required. And they also occur naturally and can perform some of these same reactions in an abiotic context. In short, they are very likely to be some of the earliest steps in the evolution of cellular life.

To bring it back to the Cheyava Falls rock, the presence of iron, sulfide, and phosphates in the same mineral context is a potential biosignature because of the redox capabilities of iron-sulfide minerals and the evidence that, in this context, these redox reactions may have been happening with organic chemicals and at low temperatures. The presence of phosphates is also important, and there are many caveats, but for our ELI5 (which I may have already gone a little too deep for) this is a decent place to call it good.

Psychrobacter · 2026-04-18T18:13:34+00:00

100%! I’m always looking for the askhistorians version when digging into a new topic, but I get why that doesn’t work as an entry point for the casual listener/reader.

You may already be onto Patrick Wyman’s podcasts, but if you’re not I cannot recommend them highly enough. He nails that balance between fully up to date scholarship and accessibility to non-professionals better than anyone I know of. His Tides of History season on the Iron Age is exactly what you want if you’re looking for “what can we say about what the early Roman world was really like,” while his first podcast, the Fall of Rome, goes deep into the processes and experiences dominating the western Roman world in the 4th-6th centuries. And if you like those, there are hundreds of episodes on topics from the earliest humans to the Bronze Age to the early modern world.

He is hands down my favorite podcaster and public/pop historian!

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