A Series of Tubes

A model of gene regulatory networks using the mathematical model for recurrent neural nets from computer science. It's such a great way to describe how a cell 'knows' things. every single celled organism or cell in a body contains within a complex information processing chemical network of gene-regulating proteins. One way to think of it is that every individual cell integrates information like a neural network. Good read, there are newer papers on this subject, but I'm not sure if there are better ones.

Really great description of the american sprawl. These issues eat away my soul every single day, and this guy wrote about it in 1973.

Some of my favorite excerpts:

The invention of the personal automobile, and destruction of public transportation, was a triumph of capitalist drug-peddling; suddenly, all at once, everyone’s personal mobility became dependent on a single, new commodity, gasoline. Without it, we are unable to function, since urban sprawl and suburbanization now means we can’t even walk to work if we wanted to.

“The typical American devotes more than 1500 hours a year (which is 30 hours a week, or 4 hours a day, including Sundays) to his [or her] car. This includes the time spent behind the wheel, both in motion and stopped, the hours of work to pay for it and to pay for gas, tires, tolls, insurance, tickets, and taxes .Thus it takes this American 1500 hours to go 6000 miles (in the course of a year). Three and a half miles take him (or her) one hour. In countries that do not have a transportation industry, people travel at exactly this speed on foot, with the added advantage that they can go wherever they want and aren’t restricted to asphalt roads.”

You’ll observe that automobile capitalism has thought of everything. Just when the car is killing the car, it arranges for the alternatives to disappear, thus making the car compulsory. So first the capitalist state allowed the rail connections between the cities and the surrounding countryside to fall to pieces, and then it did away with them.

These splintered cities are strung out along empty streets lined with identical developments; and their urban landscape (a desert) says, “These streets are made for driving as quickly as possible from work to home and vice versa. You go through here, you don’t live here. At the end of the workday everyone ought to stay at home, and anyone found on the street after nightfall should be considered suspect of plotting evil.” In some American cities the act of strolling in the streets at night is grounds for suspicion of a crime.

No means of fast transportation and escape will ever compensate for the vexation of living in an uninhabitable city in which no one feels at home or the irritation of only going into the city to work or, on the other hand, to be alone and sleep.

https://lemmygrad.ml/comment/1364150

It was a well thought out and organized description of advertising, as a form of information transmission and a form of propaganda from someone working in the industry.

The simplest and fairly well thought out idea behind OceanGate's failure. With demos!

A sort of museum style tour of some jet engine compressors at a repair shop.

A well organized description of how a GriGri works, and when it fails. Based on good physics, not a lot of math in the video itself.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1167257

A good recent video from Hard is Easy on the GriGri belay device

Using florescent markers, the researchers are able to track pairs of DNA loci in 3D, showing the interaction between distantly spaced parts of the genome. Implications in gene expression as enhancers and promoters for genes may be very far away from said gene.

Paper: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adf5568

Sadly no SciHub :( https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adf5568

secure DM if you want the paper.

An interesting paper describing a eukaryote native RNA-guided endonuclease, like CRISPR. Seems less efficient at the moment, but it the scientific community gets behind it and starts developing the methods, it may superseded the efficacy of CRISPR in eukaryotic cells.

The Paper:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06356-2

(unfortunately not available on SciHub https://sci-hub.st/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06356-2 )

If you want a copy of the paper, secure DM (matrix).

Pretty neat mini series about aluminum tube fixturing and welding used to build a custom cargo bike.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/573825

Yeah I know he has hundreds of thousands euro of equipment

https://youtu.be/Ie3uTHq4LSE

This is a really great course, taking you from a beginner in neuro-science, to a high level. It's probably worth having some background in biology, but the first few chapters do give a very brief review of some relevant topics, like genetic techniques. I haven't finished reading it yet, but I find myself picking it up all the time.

Pre-print describing their project to map out every connection in the adult Drosophila brain, parsed by AI and reviewed by experts. They also link to the viewer https://flywire.ai/ Which is openly accesable and can be used to explore the fly brain.

WEHImovies and a playlist of interesting molecular-biological animations. Evolutionary selection operates int the realm chemistry and physics, and these videos offer a fantastic insight into that relationship.

Succinct intuitive introduction to antenna theory.

Description of the Nuremberg trials, a direct account.

Fun demos of CRTs with a brief explanation of the purpose of the different grids.

Straight forward demonstration of electron wave-particle character.

Communication protocol of a dialup handshake depicted with a spectrogram.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/500500

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/319324

Source: https://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html?m=1

Interesting piston engine design that runs on compressed air. Very simple, and prototyped in the home shop.

Pretty neat low-fidelity closed-loop control robot made from cheap parts. It's all in the code.

cross-posted from: https://diode.zone/videos/watch/e5c80ea3-7c9c-4feb-9afd-d03bcf58c49f

It's a vibrating robot that draws using closed loop feedback. This video was made possible by my patrons, [https://patreon.com/scanlime] Project files: https://github.com/scanlime/wiggler

Huygens Optics demonstrating an interesting experiment that really challenges your incorrect intuitions about optics and quantum mechanics.

A discussion about the ethics of scientific journals, with compelling arguments. Giving some love to https://sci-hub.st/

Awesome diagrams. They create an apparatus for tracking the field of view of a jumping spider to study what it's looking at.

How to move a building by hand. or Trying to understand local dialects

Vacuum florescent displays, a really nostalgic subject, and great macro photography of the technology.

Very interesting exploration of politics, ethics, and human nature. He present information in a very level way without too much editorializing. This video is very approachable and level headed.