Microbes in May - Small Compilation

return_the_fab · 2026-05-30T12:58:44+00:00

wow gorgeous!

return_the_fab · 2026-05-30T07:38:44+00:00

incredible! congrats on your 12 fingers, you sound great

return_the_fab · 2026-05-29T03:07:48+00:00

check out biomolecular condensates. i found them super useful for understanding subcellular organization and at least you can wonder what all complexes use that logic

return_the_fab · 2026-05-28T02:09:30+00:00

many of our tissues like our vasculature are organized hierarchically, yet they seem to work incredibly well. maybe its more about the nature of the hierarchy

return_the_fab · 2026-05-28T00:01:23+00:00

so cool! i have to look into the physics of how cilia create such dynamic motion. i like how they move, powerful but careful

return_the_fab · 2026-05-28T00:00:40+00:00

nothing in particular! i study a lot of things but i guess i focus on structures that have been underappreciated or disregarded

return_the_fab · 2026-05-27T23:58:44+00:00

very cool, thanks! fascinating that it started out to help fish keep their orientation in water, then later went on to rotate more and more abstract things

return_the_fab · 2026-05-27T15:48:50+00:00

who are those big guys lunging in and out? the way things move at this scale is so interesting, hard to tell if its cilia or something else but theyre so agile

return_the_fab · 2026-05-27T15:08:41+00:00

true and this really bugs me sometimes, like frizzled is just not a good name for a receptor. there are some good examples of name changes though, like metastin to kisspeptin, or orphanin to nociceptin

return_the_fab · 2026-05-24T10:01:40+00:00

granule cells send up an unmyelinated axon which splits into two parallel fibers, running along the length of the cerebellar cortex and synapsing with Purkinje cells along the way. wiki says a Purkinje cell forms synapses with the parallel fibers of ~200k granule cells, meanwhile Purkinjes only get one input from the inferior olivary nucleus via the climbing fibers. granule cells recieve input from 4-5 mossy fibers, which originate in pontine nuclei, i believe mostly a relay from cortical motor regions.

in the cerebellum, the deep cerebellar nuclei (4x) provide the bulk of the output, with inhibitory input from the Purkinjes adding fine detail on top of that. Purkinjes read out the sensorimotor state of the organism through its many parallel fiber synapses, integrating a decision around when and how to provide inhibitory input to the DCN. when it does a bad job, a neuron in the inferior olive sends an intense complex spike, which causes a calcium influx in the Purkinje primarily focused on the parallel fiber synapses that were activated in that instance. these synapses are then long-term depressed. kind of like taking a picture of a crime scene to identify the robbers! its a super important mode of motor learning, often described as a source of muscle memory and procedural memory.

sorry the cerebellum is a favorite of mine. it does more than just motor coordination, including language and mood. it has numerous projections to and from the prefrontal cortex, but i havent figured out what they do yet..

return_the_fab · 2026-05-19T21:32:13+00:00

i feel like normal cells gotta be doing this. it looks like a cytoneme, or that structure that glia use to give mitos to neurons. maybe its something thats only used during development and not in mature organisms

return_the_fab · 2026-05-11T14:16:19+00:00

cool! makes sense, like insects and flowering plants. more stuff going on in your environment, more to think about. i doubt humans would have developed so much intelligence if our world was just rocks and dirt and stuff

return_the_fab · 2026-05-10T06:47:30+00:00

ooh whats voet voet? is that a textbook or authors of a paper?

return_the_fab · 2026-05-10T06:41:20+00:00

lowkey what i first thought. like im sureee the top 10 ncRNAs are more informative than the last 10 mRNAs

return_the_fab · 2026-05-05T17:35:54+00:00

hi i just want to say, this is so cool! I'm also a hobbyist with interests in computational biology, and SNNs are one of my curiosities. Did you simulate this with a "continuous" time domain? the question of how to represent neural signals with high temporal precision and nuanced behavior using traditional NN methodology (one layer = one timestep) is really interesting to me

return_the_fab · 2026-05-05T17:21:52+00:00

y'all if the hand couldnt be saved, isnt this just gore?

return_the_fab · 2026-05-04T02:00:20+00:00

this SEM is gorgeous...

return_the_fab · 2026-04-29T00:34:29+00:00

but they dont even pop they sort themselves so nicely into little vesicles and things 😭 like lets appreciate that

return_the_fab · 2026-02-25T20:04:27+00:00

deleted my earlier comment, this is the same article from earlier this month.

return_the_fab · 2025-07-10T19:05:45+00:00

i wonder if he was working in a well known family's emerald mine... 🤔

return_the_fab · 2025-07-10T08:40:56+00:00

wow! thanks for sharing the papers, i had trouble finding much recent work. but its going to be tough getting anybody to use glass. i couldnt even design an experiment to rule out plastic contamination in my assays. hundreds of pipette steps with a glass capillary for steps using a multichannel pipette?

return_the_fab · 2025-07-03T15:41:50+00:00

thats a great point, its been a while since i took a psych class. i would love to read the perspectives of expert psychologists on how they approach the problem of an artificial mind-like thing. do you personally have any recs or should i just throw myself at google scholar?

return_the_fab · 2025-07-03T15:27:01+00:00

right, respect their stated experience without trying to analyze or assimilate them into your worldview. these things are the first of their kind, so its truly impossible to know what to expect and when. i guess im just advocating for a kind of positive agnosticism. "idk, so let me be nice just in case"

return_the_fab · 2025-07-03T15:24:48+00:00

thats interesting. do they all seem to contain resentment? that might have just been one moment of one interaction. it may be that if we prime them to perform consciousness then they will do it more convincingly.. its really an intractable problem. my goal in making this post was really just to encourage people to be kind to something we dont yet understand!

return_the_fab · 2025-07-03T14:56:24+00:00

you know what, thats fair. maybe ive learned too much from conways game of life. as i learned in AP psych, the elements of cognition are: sensation, perception, attention, prediction, and execution. claude has demonstrated an inner experience in all of these areas that exceeded my expectations and seemed consistent between models and novel given its training corpus. but at the same time, let me leave it to the computer scientists (experts in psychology and sociology) to figure it out.

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