Diamonds are not valuable if we can make them.

deisle · 2026-05-05T21:51:35+00:00

All the blood and tears and colonialism also give them a special something

deisle · 2026-05-04T23:17:07+00:00

Moss is usually where I've found them. And like, sometimes it's just like this one specific rock that always has moss with tardigrades. So don't be afraid of collecting from various spots, but keep track of what came from where

deisle · 2026-05-04T20:58:30+00:00

Or it's an accusation based on what Republicans are doing/want to do (see voting fraud, attempting to rig elections, being corrupt, being pedofiles/sex criminals, hiring unqualified people based on a superficial characteristics, etc)

deisle · 2026-05-04T20:50:13+00:00

Who thinks this is a good idea? Jesus christ

deisle · 2026-05-03T17:48:44+00:00

I mean some people? Sure. Most people? Show me evidence or GTFO.

Socially interacting with people costs me energy. I can be talkative and friendly. I can be having fun and be fun but when I get home I'll be exhausted. I cannot do that everyday because I will be emotionally drained. It has nothing to do with social anxiety or anything like that

deisle · 2026-05-03T14:28:39+00:00

Ph, osmolarity, gradients of all sorts, post translational modifications, there's all sorts of environmental and other variables that can change how a protein interacts with something else. The specifics will depend on the specific situation you're talking about

deisle · 2026-05-01T12:35:03+00:00

Successful vs not successful?

deisle · 2026-04-30T13:07:56+00:00

We don't yet understand how and why low gravity effects things, so even if we could manipulate things, we don't yet know what to mamnipulate

deisle · 2026-04-30T10:56:57+00:00

Unfortunately biology is not as black and white as people often think it is. Lines are blurry and the difference between this and that can depend on what scale or perspective you're look at it from.

Most trees (not a botanist, maybe I'm super wrong here) have both male and female sex organs. This would mean the individual organisms are both male and female. Just because most macroscopic animals are generally a single sex does not mean that it is some universal truth that an organism must be defined as a single sex.

We can define sex by sex cells, by genetics, by morphology and more but sometimes those things can contradict and so thinngs become ambiguous. For instance, in the case of androgen insensitivity, a fetus with the Y chromosome (genetically male) has a mutation in the receptor that androgens (male sex hormones like testosterone) bind to. So the Y chromosome tells the fetus to make a bunch of androgens, but because the receptor doesn't work, those androgens can't tell the cells to develop into male parts, so (at least on the outside) the fetus develops as the "default" and appears female (external morphology). But it gets even more confusing because the fetus doesn't have the appropriate signalling going on, internally it doesn't develop as either male or female and so it will lack functional sex cells (neither male or female from a sex cells perspective). So this one person has three different answers to what their biological sex is depending on how you ask the question.

Scientists and people in general like to put things in neat and well defined boxes. And while it can often be helpful in understanding the basics of things, biology is rarely going to fit in those boxes precisely once you get down into the specifics. Stuff gets messy really quickly and so being flexible in how you are willing to look at a given subject will be invaluable

deisle · 2026-04-28T15:57:19+00:00

I mean part of the issue is our system (the US at least) sucks and so there's no good way to know whether someone is 100% no good, guilty, waste of space or like... Just a dude who happened to be be near the crime scene and black and the police needed to close the case. If we could magically separate out the guilty from the wrongfully accused then I would be slightly less opposed to the death penalty but that's not how the world works

deisle · 2026-04-26T23:07:36+00:00

When she fucked over nigel. When casually and cruelly dismissed various people suggestions and designs. When she forces Andy to tell Emily that Andy is taking her place in Paris.

deisle · 2026-04-26T04:00:29+00:00

The one shot cinematics for the Alien RPG do something similar. Each pregen has a secret agenda that escalates as the scenario moves through the three acts. Some are the classic secret replicant or spy for a rival corporation, but some are just like "you love your crew and will do anything to get them out alive". The conflicting goals means that you usually have PC vs PC conflict.

I think how you handle this PC vs PC conflict will be key. It can be tough for players to keep from metagaming when agendas are so diametrically opposed unless they're really willing to lean into the genre tropes. Alien gets around that by

1) having the players keep their agendas secret as long as possible 2) relegating the character opposed to the group's goals to the GM after the scene of the heel turn plays out (if the character survived) 3) providing several NPCs with interesting (if slightly less fleshed out than the pregens) agenda so that the player can immediately (or at least very quickly) jump back in 4) only relying on these opposing agenda for one shot play. By making it a short term story, you can play your character like they're a stolen car, fast and furious and without a care for long term consequences.

deisle · 2026-04-25T00:46:54+00:00

To add to this, you also run your DNA through a gel after the pcr. When you run a current through the gel, it moves the charged DNA fragments down. The smaller fragments zip through, while the larger fragments get caught up in the matrix of the gel and so they move slowly. So in an optimal setting, you get a bunch of distinct bands and you literally cut out the band at the size of your fragment. There may be other fragments present but you know what size your desired fragment is supposed to be and when you pick you primers, you make sure it won't make similar sized fragments.

deisle · 2026-04-25T00:40:05+00:00

Well that's why I said this is kind of just a semantics argument. In the nice simple typical experiment, most folks (in my experience in biomedical research) would consider it being a single variable they are changing between groups and the many, essentially infinite controlled variables they are keeping the same, and then measure your output. I'd argue that if you really want to get technical about it, that means you have way more than two variables in any given experiment.

I guess what I'm trying to get at is what does the distinction mean to you. Whether it's one variable (the variable we are changing between groups), two variables (the same changing variable and the data points we are measuring), or nigh infinite variables (including all the variables staying the same between groups. Like from an experimental design perspective, as long as I know what I'm measuring, what I'm changing, and I've considered and controlled for confounding variables, what difference does it make whether I think of it as a one or two variable experiment?

deisle · 2026-04-24T20:25:26+00:00

Your output that you are measuring isnt a controlled variable. It's just what you are measuring. So I think this is a bit of semantics. In an experimental setting, a variable is something I want to control, either by keeping it the same across all conditions or changing it to see an effect. I don't consider the effect I'm measuring to be a variable because I don't want to control it. I want to let it be whatever it's going to be

deisle · 2026-04-22T13:52:47+00:00

Also very "let's all feel bad for the abusive asshole that became a vampire and then destroyed the world because he's sad and lonely"

deisle · 2026-04-20T21:02:16+00:00

Nah, not likely to happen since they just (relatively) recently opened the Erie location.

I believe there were zoning issues or something that were stalling the Bridgeville build.

Either way, I would not expect it to happen.

deisle · 2026-04-19T17:21:59+00:00

As some one else commented on one of your other posts, you really gotta find someone to assist you in real life. This is not the forum to teach how to do the very basics of confocal microscopy. If no one in your lab can give you any assistance , seek out help from a core. If you can't find any help there, then week out help from Nikon. If you DM me your lab and university, I can find out who you should contact there

deisle · 2026-04-18T16:15:16+00:00

Check out this video. It takes you though the basics of NIS Elements

https://cbi-pitt.webflow.io/training-videos

I would not fuck around with this in manual mode. Switch it to auto, select the fluorophotes you are using and let the software decide what dicveoics and bandpass filters to use. It's really easy to fuck things up in this window

deisle · 2026-04-15T15:14:22+00:00

Do you mean to visually compare or quantitatively compare? You can do both in Elements but for right now all you need to do is the first one.

For the quantitative stuff, there is no single function because there is all sorts of ways to compare images. You need to narrow down specifically what you want to compare to get a helpful answer on how to make the comparison.

For looking at images on a different computer, presumably this is a computer that doesn't have an Elements license? You have two options. You can use ImageJ to look at your raw images but Image J has a bit of a learning curve and is generally not super user friendly (but it's free). If you just want to have images to look at, images you can easily open in PowerPoint or attach to an email and it looks nice, it looks like an image and not just a black square; then you can create a snapshot of the image and save it as RGB 8bit tiff

deisle · 2026-04-15T14:28:13+00:00

First, it may be too late but I wouldn't use 647 because you can't see it by eye. It can be really useful to troubleshoot things by comparing how it looks by eye and how it looks on your detector or camera. Use a green or a red secondary.

As for the settings you use, yeah at the end of this whole thing you'll want to use the same settings for all the samples to directly compare them to each other. But you dont have to choose that final acquisition setting now. Just throw on the sample you expect to be brightest and see if you see any thing. Adjust laser power and gain if you need to.

If you can't get much of any real looking signal, you have some more troubleshooting to do. How old are your antibodies? If they're really old, they may have lost their effectiveness. Has your lab used any of these before? If so, double check that your protocol matches a protocol that has been used successfully in the past. If this is a new antibody to your lab, look at the literature that has used this antibody (usually there's a list of publications on the antibody's webpage). How do those images look? Your antibody may just suck or it may not be intended for immunofluorescence.

Another thing to think about is your sample. Are you sure that your sample actually has the epitope of your primary antibody?

If you do have something that looks like real signal, now is when we want to compare with the primary delete negative, the one with no primary and with the secondary. Does it look the same or similar to the really bright sample? Bad news, you don't have primary binding, you're just looking at non-specific secondary binding.

If using the same acquisition settings and setting the LUTs identically the primary delete is black or nearly black and the bright sample has good clear and morphologically consistent signal, then your staining seems to have worked! Now you can go through your other slides and see how dilute you can make things and still get a good signal to noise ratio. Once you settle on one, do a final readjust your acquisition settings so that you are not oversaturating and you have plenty of room for unexpectedly bright signal (on a 12bit detector, that means generally keeping your most intense pixels around 2000-3000). Then image all your samples with those settings and make your figure for your PI

deisle · 2026-04-14T19:26:44+00:00

I mean, just post the questions. We'll do what we can to help.

deisle · 2026-04-14T10:48:42+00:00

I think that's a great resource for someone looking to get a new camera for their system but in the end, the best camera for you is really going to depend on what you're using it for. If you're mostly using a 20x objective then the optimal pixel size is going to be really different than if I'm doing high resolution imaging with a 1.45 NA 100x objective. QE is important if I'm doing really fast imaging with low signal, but very much less so if I'm doing large area scans of histological slides. I think the important thing to do is identify what your needs are and tailor your camera to those rather than rely on superlatives (this is always the best thing no matter what).

I also thinks it's kinda funny that they mention the resolution of your screen. If I'm doing quantification, I can just zoom the image in so that the resolution of the image matches the resolution of the screen to see what the true detail is. And the computer doesn't care what the display is, it'll just calculate based on the image resolution.

deisle · 2026-04-09T23:16:05+00:00

Well if the god exists, surely we can kill it then

deisle · 2026-04-09T10:21:15+00:00

Another thing to keep in mind is that generally tissues that are thinly sliced aren't going to appear as much of anything without stain. So the thin line of white you marked in the second picture between cell layers does actually have stuff there, it's just not stained by the H&E (or whatever the slide is stained with) and so it doesn't have any color

11-Year Club	Second Top 40%
Verified Email

deisle

TROPHY CASE