“No, maybe that wasn’t it. Words precede and surpass me, they tempt and alter me, and if I am not careful it will be too late: things will be said without my having said them. Or, at the very least, that wasn’t the only thing. My entanglement comes from how a carpet is made of so many threads that I can’t resign myself to following just one; my ensnarement comes from how one story is made of many stories. And I can’t even tell them all— a more truthful word could from echo to echo cause my highest glaciers to crumble down the precipice.” - Clarice Lispector

  • 54 Posts
  • 1.64K Comments
Joined 3 年前
Cake day: 2023年12月9日
  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoScience Memes@mander.xyz•Ecosystem servicesEnglish
    163·
    1 个月前

    Vultures have been shown to reduce the spread of dangerous infectious diseases at scale.

    4 paragraph quote

    From this perspective, each vulture species features peculiar skin microbiota compositions, likely involved in singular protective mechanisms of which characterization is yet highly desirable, acknowledging the potential implications under diverse applicative fields. Altogether, state-of-the-art knowledge pinpoints that the cutaneous microbiota constitutes a barrier of microbial, physical, chemical, and immunological nature for the skin [25]. Skin microorganisms represent the first physical barrier against exogenous microorganisms of environmental origin [25]. Here, pioneering microbial specimens promote physical hindrance against the secondary colonization of pathogenic specimens, aside from establishing direct connections with the host, aimed at regulating the differentiation process of keratinocytes [26]. By employing various mechanisms of resistance to colonization, such as competition for nutritional resources, direct inhibition, and/or interference with environmental survival [25], cutaneous microbiota enable, de facto, a microbial barrier that protects from the myriads of pathogenic microorganisms encountered in necrophagic activities [4]. Intriguingly, health-promoting strains of the Staphylococcus genera adopt fine mechanisms to antagonize pathogenic strains of the same genera (e.g., quorum sensing, antibiotic production, etc.) [27,28,29].

    …

    Vultures contribute significantly to maintaining ecosystem homeostasis. Part of their food intake is released as nutrients through their feces, promoting a cycle of nutrients that supports a healthy ecosystem [90]. From this perspective, efforts in the characterization of the fecal microbiota would elucidate the ecological service necrophagic birds provide to other animal species. Furthermore, vultures have been recognized for their public health benefits, primarily because they can efficiently dispose of vast quantities of inadequately managed carcasses, thereby maintaining adequate levels of hygiene in the ecosystem [5].

    The pivotal role of the vultures’ unique ability to contain pathogens is attributed to the microbiota associated with the different anatomical districts of their bodies, with the cutaneous microbiota as the main actor [4]. Unlike other animals, vulture skin microbiota is the most populated in terms of microbial abundance and biodiversity. This is likely due to dietary style, since carcasses carry diverse and more specialized microbial communities, interfering with skin microbial development. It can be hypothesized that the taxa identified derive from the dead animal body, such as Methanobrevibacter smithii present in the intestinal district of the dead animals, or from environmental sources like, for example, Xanthomonas spp. and Actinobacillus pleuropneumoniae [4].

    Genes identified in the facial region include elements correlated with putrescine [47], one of the main molecules produced in a decomposing carcass, confirming the influence that the carcass microbiota has on the assembly of the host’s microbiota. Further support for this hypothesis comes from the extensive functional diversity observed in microorganisms residing in the facial region. It has been observed that these range from producers of antimicrobials to normal intestinal bacteria and bacteria linked to plants and soil [4], agreeing that there is a significant influence from the environment and carcass on the composition of the facial microbiota. In this regard, determining the carcass microbiota would be necessary for further evaluation of this hypothesis.

    https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12029367/

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.English
    6·
    1 个月前

    No, don’t listen to my opinions, disagree with them vehemently that is fine.

    What you need to stop doing is conflating having an inconsistent, unexamined belief system handed to you by the society around you and the cues you took from it with not having a belief system which is literally impossible as a sentient human trying to make sense of the world around them.

    I was kind of switching into a classist tone in my frustration and you are right to point it out, fair enough and genuinely that is a shitty thing to lean into I am sorry, I recognize education is extremely unequal and not knowing things is not a fair basis to judge people on… however please recognize that a lack of your awareness of parts of you does not mean those parts do not exist.

  • supersquirrel@sopuli.xyztoFediverse@lemmy.world•Block lemmy.ml if lemmy feels tirening.English
    72·
    1 个月前

    The developer for Piefed.Social’s main front end app that they develop literally has censorship baked into the code with hardcoded instance blocks that are not obvious to the user or even a new instance creator who doesn’t look to far into the details…

    So what are you saying is, your bubble is nice and you aren’t willing to confront how or why the bubble looks as unchallenging to your belief systems as it does :)

    https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/72685299

    https://lemmy.pobierz.net/post/1293

    I discovered this after upgrading our instance yesterday, which also upgraded all frontends to their latest versions as well. After I did, our Tesseract frontend stopped working and I noticed immediately as it’s been my primary for a while. Initially I thought it was an API version mismatch, but no, it was much worse.

    Someone pointed out that the developer of the frontend added an explicit hidden and unmodifiably blacklist which includes any and all instances to the left of Kissinger. There’s a commit which also explains their specious reasoning about our instance specifically, as it seems we’ve been on their shit list for a bit longer than that.

    This instance and its admin staff encourages identity politics, groupthink, mob mentality, and extremist solutions to societal problems. Users who advocate violence are not moderated so long as the admins agree with the target. Caution and critical thinking are advised when interacting with this instance or its users.

    When you use tesseract to connect to one blacklisted such instance , you just get a message informing you that Tesseract is “incompatible with that instance” which leads one to think of a technical issue, like an API mismatch, rather than the dev being an opinionated coward.

    Isn’t it funny how all the software developed by turbolibs, like Piefed and Tesseract, end up with hidden control mechanisms from developers who think they know better than everyone else? That they don’t just think they deserve to tell you what you should think, but they should manipulate you to think it? Isn’t it funny how libs go on about how bad it is to support lemmy due to the ideology of the devs behind it, and yet lemmy has 0 opinions as a software? It does make one think…

    Anyway, I forked - it as one does - and disabled the blacklist, but since this is a massively ideologically compromised software, I’ll doubt I’ll keep this frontend up after Lemmy 1.0. I think we’ll bring up mlmym again now that someone’s maintaining it again.