Little Vases

Homestuck is the best webcomic ever made.

This is because Homestuck took full advantage of its medium. It’s a webcomic, it doesn’t have the same limitations as a normal comic. It was more like an event than a book. Even when people go back, read all of homestuck years after today, it won’t be the same. Homestuck is and always was about the community. The frantic fanart drawing, discussions, theory crafting, all of it.

For me, the ending felt off because Homestuck’s thing was that it was always ongoing. There was always another twist waiting around the corner, always some hidden meaning.

This time there isn’t anything. We did it. They did it. The game is over.

We won

Top 10 Most Uncomfortable Physics Facts

While physics can show us amazing things about our universe, it doesn’t always agree with how we think things should work. Sometimes, physics can be very counter-intuitive, and often unsettling. So, here’s my list of physics facts that can be a bit unnerving.

10: Weight doesn’t matter

If it wasn’t for air resistance, everything would fall at exactly the same speed. If you let go of a hammer and a feather from the same height at the same time  on the Moon, they would hit the ground simultaneously. 

9: Gyroscopic precession

It doesn’t matter how much you know about physics; gyroscopes are weird. The way they seem to defy gravity makes you rethink everything you know about physics, despite being fairly simple toys. Still, it’s all just Newton’s laws of motion.

8: Neutrinos and dark matter

We like to think that we can interact with most of the world around us, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Neutrinos and dark matter are passing through your body right now, as if you weren’t even there. The fact that 65 billion neutrinos pass through each square centimeter of your body every second is weird enough, who knows what we’ll learn about dark matter.

7: Photons are particles

Light travels like a wave, but can only interact like a particle. It can interfere and have a frequency, but it can only take and give energy in discrete quantities. It behaves like nothing else in our macroscopic world, and can be very difficult to imagine.

6: Electrons are waves

We’ve established how photons act like waves and particles, but surely massive particles act normally. Nope! Even electrons have wave-like properties. In fact, everything acts like a wave! Except these waves come in discrete quantities, which we’ll call particles. This won’t get confusing.

5: E=mc^2

Einstein’s most famous contribution to physics states that matter is simply another form of energy, which has very profound consequences. A wound-up Jack-in-a-box would weigh ever so slightly more than a released Jack-in-a-box, due to the potential energy stored within.

4: Time is relative

The core of special relativity states that time passes differently for different observers. If you took a trip to Alpha Centauri at 99% the speed of light, everyone on Earth would see the trip take 4.4 years, while you would only experience 7.5 months. Time travel is real!

3: The (not so empty) vacuum

Something can be created from nothing, as long as it goes right back to being nothing quickly. In seemingly empty space, particles pop in and out of existence all the time as a result of the uncertainty principle. Not to mention, space is inflating at an accelerated rate due to “dark energy”. To the vacuum, the law of conservation of energy is more of a suggestion.

2: c is the fastest speed

Another important point in special relativity is that nothing could ever go faster than light. This doesn’t sit well with a lot of people, but the math doesn’t lie. To even get something with mass to travel at the speed of light would require infinite energy. Even if you somehow get around this, there are just too many mathematical problems with superluminal travel. Like it or not, the universe has a speed limit.

1: The cat is dead and alive

How could it not be this? The nature of quantum mechanics allows for objects to take on two seemingly contradictory states in a ‘superposition’. An electron can be in two places at once, or in a more extreme example, a cat can be both dead and alive. Of course, this weird property goes away once someone makes an observation. It’s as if there are tiny physics trolls messing with nature whenever we’re not looking.

Of course, there’s plenty more unsettling physics facts, like the space-bending nature of general relativity, or the “spooky action at a distance” that is quantum entanglement, but these are my top 10. I’d like to hear any unsettling physics facts you think I’ve missed, though!

trying to get your story together like:

You have the power to heal others. You are a villain.

In a horrible twist of fate, you and your worst enemy are soulmates. Tell the story of how you two reluctantly fall in love.

God, this was such a beautiful movie

Castle in the Sky

Infectious bacterial diseases and where to find them

Is an immunization for stress on the horizon?

Can probiotics fend off mood disorders?

It’s too early to say with scientific certainty, but a new study by CU Boulder researchers suggests that one particular beneficial bacteria can have long-lasting anti-inflammatory effects on the brain, making it more resilient to the physical and behavioral effects of stress.

The findings, if replicated in clinical trials could ultimately lead to new probiotic-based immunizations to protect against posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and anxiety or new treatments for depression, the authors say.

“We found that in rodents this particular bacterium, Mycobacterium vaccae, actually shifts the environment in the brain toward an anti-inflammatory state,” said lead author Matthew Frank, a senior research associate in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. “If you could do that in people, it could have broad implications for a number of neuroinflammatory diseases.”

Anxiety, PTSD and other stress-related mental disorders impact as many as one in four people in their lifetime. Mounting research suggests that stress-induced brain inflammation can boost risk of such disorders, in part by impacting mood-influencing neurotransmitters like norepinephrine or dopamine.

“There is a robust literature that shows if you induce an inflammatory immune response in people, they quickly show signs of depression and anxiety,” said Frank. “Just think about how you feel when you get the flu.”

Research also suggests that trauma, illness or surgery can sensitize certain regions of the brain, setting up a hair-trigger inflammatory response to subsequent stressors which can lead to mood disorders and cognitive decline.

“We found that Mycobacterium vaccae blocked those sensitizing effects of stress too, creating a lasting stress-resilient phenotype in the brain,” Frank said.

A previous CU Boulder study, found that mice injected with a heat-killed preparation of M. vaccae and then placed with a larger aggressive male for 19 days exhibited less anxiety-like behavior and were less likely to suffer colitis or inflammation in their peripheral tissues. For the new study, published in the journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity, the researchers set out to determine what exactly M. vaccae does in the brain.

Male rats injected with the bacterium three times, one week apart, had significantly higher levels of the anti-inflammatory protein interleukin-4 in the hippocampus — a brain region responsible for modulating cognitive function, anxiety and fear — eight days after the final injection.

After exposure to a stressor, the immunized animals also showed lower levels of a stress-induced protein, or alarmin, called HMGB1, believed to play a role in sensitizing the brain to inflammation, and higher expression of CD200R1, a receptor key for keeping glial cells (the brain’s immune cells) in an anti-inflammatory state. As in the first study, the immunized rats exhibited less anxious behavior after being stressed.

Mood-modulating microbes

“If you look at the field of probiotics generally, they have been shown to have strong effects in the domains of cognitive function, anxiety and fear,” said senior author Christopher Lowry, an associate professor in integrative physiology. “This paper helps make sense of that by suggesting that these beneficial microbes, or signals derived from these microbes, somehow make their way to the hippocampus, inducing an anti-inflammatory state.”

M. vaccae was first discovered on the shores of Lake Kyoga in Uganda in the 1990s by immunologists who realized that people who lived in the area responded better to certain tuberculosis vaccines. They later realized that the bacterium found in the lakeshore soil had immune-modulating properties that were enhancing the vaccine’s efficacy. Researchers set out to study it in lung cancer patients and found that, while it did not prolong life, it somehow improved mood.

M. vaccae is not commercially available but is the subject of numerous ongoing studies.

Lowry, who has been studying it for 17 years, envisions a day when it or another beneficial bacteria could be administered to people at high risk of PTSD – such as soldiers preparing to be deployed or emergency room workers – to buffer the effects of stress on the brain and body. It could also possibly be used to prevent sepsis-induced cognitive impairment, he said.

Meanwhile, he is working with researchers at University of Colorado Denver on a study exploring whether veterans with PTSD can benefit from an oral probiotic consisting of a different bacterial strain, Lactobacillus reuteri.

“More research is necessary, but it’s possible that other strains of beneficial bacteria or probiotics may have a similar effect on the brain,” he said.

Fuck Up

Why do I always fuck up? No matter how much I try I always fuck up in some way, and I'm sure that everyone around me is getting sick of it... I should have just stayed up late, that way I wouldn't have missed the flight...I'm sure she's getting sick of me, who wouldn't? I'm a goddamed failure. What do I do? What if I don't get to see her? I'm going crazy about her, and yet I couldn't muster the strength to wake up at 2:30?? What the fuck is wrong with me?? She probably feels the same way, God, I just hate myself sometimes... I know self pity isn't attractive, but what else can I do when I can't even fix this on my own? She probably thinks I don't love her... but I do, I'm so crazy about her, and yet I missed the goddamed flight. I don't deserve her.