A Question For The Lone Ranger

[The Lone Ranger]

Deciding what is and is not alive is, of course, a thorny issue indeed.


Still, prions have no metabolism; strictly speaking, they do not reproduce; they have no genetic material of any sort; they are not cellular -- by pretty-much every criterion, they don't fit the description of what we've agreed to call "alive."

Some people describe prions and other such things that occupy the boundary between what's clearly living and what's clearly non-living as "proto-life."

[beyelzu]

I like prions for my cutoff for non life.

I arbitrarily let genetic information and replication be my criteria.

Viruses are thus alive.

Prions are not alive.

I think while prions can be considered life like, they don’t make copies, they bump into and change confirmations. I think it is as to
Reproduction as conjugation is to biological sex.

[Ari]

Last night I couldn’t sleep.
Oow I know, I don’t know much about Prions, lets wander the wikipedia hyperlinks about them for a bit. Wikipedia, ‘did you know there’s an extremely rare, possibly genetic and untested for prion disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia where the disease robs the person of the ability to get a full night sleep until the last few months of their lives they end up with severe hallucinatory dementia before dying, maybe of the prion disease, maybe from the degradation of no sleep, eitherway it’s always fatal.’

Thanks FF and Wikipedia, thanks a lot!


Related I did notice that I’ve been using Prion to mean a miss folded protein but on reading noticed PrP stands for Prion Protein and Prion is the specific protein that’s being missfolded. Which leads to the question, are there other Proteins that missfold like this or are PrPs just extremely susceptible to it?

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Not a question. One of your various image uploads just prompted me to read about statocysts.

[erimir]

What kind of spider is this that was on the hood of my car while I was driving? I thought it was a bee just because it was fuzzy until I looked closer. I can't recall seeing a spider like this around here (in the Triangle, NC) before.

[ChuckF]

Where I come from (far from your big city Triangle lights, obvsly) we'd call that a jumping spider but I can't rightly say what name the evolutionists would call it by.

[The Lone Ranger]

That is indeed a Jumping Spider, specifically it's the Canopy Jumping Spider, Phidippus otiosus.

Spiders are members of the order Araneae in the class Arachnida, and Jumping Spiders are the members of the family Salticidae. As you can see from the picture, members of the Salticidae typically have one pair of large, forward-facing eyes which give them excellent vision and the ability to judge depth well. (Spiders have either 6 or 8 eyes, typically; in the Salticidae, the remaining eyes are generally much smaller than the 2 large, forward-facing eyes.)

Unlike most spiders, which use webs to capture prey, Jumping Spiders creep up close to their victims, then leap to grab and subdue their prey.


Phidippus otiosus is actually fairly common in the southeastern U.S., but it's pretty small and typically lives in trees. So, even though it's fairly common, it isn't encountered all that often.


As an aside, though it's hard to tell in the picture above, because the spider's pedipalps are blocking the view of its chelicerae, Salticids typically have quite large fangs. This allows them to inject relatively large amounts of venom to quickly subdue prey -- an important thing for a spider that doesn't web up its victims to subdue them.

[Crumb]

pedipalps are blocking the view of its chelicerae

I hate it when that happens.

[BrotherMan]

IT'S SO FLUFFY I'M GONNA DIE.

Agnes - It's so fluffy I'm gonna die! - YouTube

[ChuckF]

Originally Posted by Crumb

I hate it when that happens.

full frontal chelicerae or gtfo

[erimir]

My dad was amused by this, so he asked on FB, and their best guess was a zebra spider, but I knew it wasn't fuzzy looking enough. And it doesn't have the white area on the face.

I thought it was cute. Don't be fooled by the picture's lack of scale, it's less than an inch long, not tarantula size haha

[Corona688]

Originally Posted by erimir

Why do prion diseases seem to only affect the brain?

I'm aware that they can accumulate in other tissue, but it seems that prion diseases are really only a problem if they get in the brain.

Adding to what TLR mentioned, the brain is especially vulnerable to prions. Anywhere else, a cell that starts acting weird gets killed, digested, and replaced without fanfare, but brain cells aren't disposable. They replace themselves very slowly and live about as long as you do. Which is why the brain is protected by the blood-brain barrier. But this filter isn't fine enough to catch prions.

[viscousmemories]

Originally Posted by erimir

I thought it was cute. Don't be fooled by the picture's lack of scale, it's less than an inch long, not tarantula size haha

Yet still conceals FOOT LONG FANGS if I understood TLR correctly.

[MonCapitan2002]

Her is a new question to mull over. If someone threw a Samsung Galaxy S20 into a time portal that sent it to 15 March, 1920, would engineers of that time be able to reverse engineer it? Would they even recognize it as human made technology?

[The Lone Ranger]

My guess is: "no" and "yes".

That is, I think they'd have little trouble working out that it was human-built technology and not straight-up magic or anything like that. But I don't think it would be possible to reverse-engineer it, given the science and technology of the time.

Semiconductors were known to exist at the time, but I very-much doubt that, given the state of materials science at the time, it would be possible to analyze the workings of the device to figure out how it works. I have my doubts that it would even be possible to understand that it uses semiconductors to parse and analyze data.

It wasn't until the 1930s that physicists first began to understand how semiconductors and diodes work, allowing for their use in such devices as radar. As such, lacking that basic understanding or any viable theory to work with, I'm not sure that it would have been possible to work out that the device contains and uses semiconductors and diodes, much less how.


That having been said, if it came charged (and wasn't password protected), it surely wouldn't be that difficult to figure out some of its basic functionality. That would make it fairly obvious that it was human-built technology. But once it was disassembled, I very-much doubt the technology and science of the time would be up to figuring out how it was constructed [some of the materials used to build it did not yet exist] and how it functioned.

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Further question: Given that time traveling phone, how much quicker might we expect the first smartphone on the market? 1985? This?



https://www.wired.com/2010/06/alt197...de-in-the-70s/

[Ari]

Playing with my iphone for a bit, this could totally get used in one of those ‘monkey paw’ type stories. If I say just suddenly tripped and accidentally dropped my iPhone into a time portal, those on the other side could quite easily tell it’s a clock, a still and motion video camera, a calculator, a stop watch, a flash light, and a music player. For awhile at least.

Then eventually the battery would die or it would do a quick restart and take all of that away without a passcode. So even if they did charge it back up, it would now only display a still image and the wrong time.

[lisarea]

Nicolas Negroponte dropped off a bunch of Android tablets in a couple remote Ethiopian villages once, and the kids there not only figured out how to use them, but the developers had for some reason disabled the camera and put other security measures in to limit the capabilities, and the kids ended up hacking it. It was intended as a literacy experiment, to see if they could learn how to read on their own, but they went beyond it on their own.

It wasn't a scientific study or anything, and I'm pretty sure you just have to take his word on most of it, BUT it is impressive what kids can figure out with all that brain plasticity. Hell, they learn languages, which is way harder than any manmade system.

[lisarea]

What kind of snake is this? I thought I kind of knew, but now I think I was wrong.

snake.jpg

It was crossing a pretty high speed road right around a corner, so I pulled over to try to move it before it got run over, but by the time I got over there, it had made its way to the grass.

Son's girlfriend took the picture, so don't complain to me about it.

Bonus question that I looked up and think I'm right but just to check: I told son's girlfriend that I didn't think Colorado has any venomous snakes other than rattlers, so it didn't really matter that I couldn't positively identify it apart from "not rattlesnake." Is that correct?

[The Lone Ranger]

It's hard to be absolutely certain from the picture, but it appears to be a Gopher/Bull Snake (Pituophus catenifer). It might possibly be a Great Plains Rat Snake (Pantherophis emoryi), but the pattern and coloration look wrong.

Great Basin Gopher Snakes (Pituophus catenifer deserticola) usually have darker patterns than your specimen, with less of that slightly orangish hue. On the other hand, Bullsnakes (Pituophus catenifer sayi) typically have pretty-much exactly that coloration. So I'd say it's almost certainly a Bullsnake.

Prairie Rattlesnakes (Crotalus viridis), Western Massasauga Rattlesnakes (Sistrurus catenatus), and Midget Faded Rattlesnakes (Crotalus organs concolor) can all be found in Colorado, and are the only snakes found there that are remotely dangerous to humans.


Fun fact: Colorado (like most states) has a few species of rear-fanged snakes -- such as Night Snakes (Hypsiglena torquata jani) for example -- that are technically venomous, but considered harmless to humans. (Their fangs are short and in the rear of the mouth, and their venom is quite weak. Even if one manages to bite a human, get through the person's skin, and inject venom, the venom is too weak to cause a reaction unless the person is unusually susceptible.)

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I saw some bio science nerds talking about this article and I figured it might be of interest to nerds here: Science without Validation in a World without Meaning - American Affairs Journal

[JoeP]

Originally Posted by lisarea

Son's girlfriend took the picture, so don't complain to me about it.

That's an amazing hedge.

[Sock Puppet]

These little buggers are all over our yard in the summertime, but they're normally very skittish, bolting to the nearest cover as soon as you step near them. There are other, smaller critters that are most likely geckos (and yet another that are locally called "bluebellies"), but these handsome devils would make cooler-looking kaiju. East San Francisco Bay Area, CA, about 30 miles southeast of the SF/Oakland Bay Bridge.



I found this guy/gal hanging onto the stucco of the house out back, and he was remarkably cooperative, allowing me to get really close for a non-zoomed-in picture. Then I cropped the excess background to reduce file size - so at least this is as high-res an image as I could make without any significant effort. He's a good 3-4 inches, excluding the tail.

Is there enough detail in this pic to identify the species, or at least a couple likely candidates? I should've gotten a profile while I was at it, but a certain pup was demanding my attention. You can see the pair of raised ridges that run from his head to his butt and taper off down the tail, but they're much more dramatic in profile. I'll see if I can find another cooperative one later.

[The Lone Ranger]

It's definitely a member of the genus Sceloporus; members of this genus are commonly called "Spiny Lizards." That one appears to be Sceloporus occidentals, commonly called the Western Fence Lizard.

Sceloporus graciosus, commonly called the Common Sagebrush Lizard, looks rather similar, but is usually more mottled in appearance, and is typically found further inland than your specimen.

In both species, the males have bright blue bellies during the breeding season.

(If you have one in hand and it's a male, it's pretty easy to tell them apart. Male Sceloporus occidentalis have orange or yellow patches on the undersides of their legs; male Sceloporus graciosus lack those patches.)



Here in the East, we have the very similar Eastern Fence Lizards (Sceloporus undulatus). They've long been one of my favorite lizard species.

[lisarea]

I couldn't get a good picture of it because it was high up and moving pretty fast, but WHAT IS THIS?

whatisthis.jpg