#my biology unit this week was bones can you tell

[sunset-a-story]

Happy WBW! In honor of the pain bestowed upon me by the Blood Goddess 🙃, what is your world like in relation to sicknesses, injuries, and other afflictions? Feel free to discuss the medical system or how jobs/institutions respond, or even how individual characters feel!

First of all, my deepest condolences for your life rn. That's the worst.

And thank you for the question! Within SolCorp, it's the Pluto Department that is in charge of all medical care ranging from pediatric, general preventative care, trauma medicine, and mental healthcare.

Pluto agents are pretty dang busy on a daily basis. Sol offices are practically closed systems with the majority folks leaving the campus maybe once a week so all that recirculated air means that when a cold hits, everyone gets it. Pluto (Dakota del Sol) refers to LAHQ as a plague ship (affectionate) (sort of).

A lot of healthcare provided by Sol is what you'd expect of modern medicine. Some of it, not. Biological manipulators are recruited to work in Pluto for their ability to alter someone's biology, down to their cells. There is too much risk to use bio manips for every single medical problem but when agents are gravely injured in the field or there's a serious issue, bio manips can reknit bones, close gunshot wounds, remove cancers, heal organs, etc. And yes, this does mean people with muscle sprains will aggressively pout at the bio manips telling them to go home and rest instead of fixing them.

Those not living in a SolCorp office can travel to the closest office for care or, in emergencies, trauma units will be teleported to them. There is typically someone with basic medic training on each team to take care of everyday needs. (Hannah is the medic for Reeve's team.)

There is no charge or cost whatsoever for any of this for Sol agents. It's just part of being in Sol. Your needs are cared for.

Thanks to having an expansive employee base, agents' bosses are generally understanding of illness/injuries and are not overly pushy to get the agent back to their desk/out into the field until they're ready. (Something a certain other organization of knacked people views as supremely soft.) If you become too disabled to continue at your job, you will be moved to something you are able to do.

Also some knacks can cause medical issues all by themselves that Pluto has to manage. For example, mimics often (1 in 2) develop autoimmune issues because their body reacts to the "borrowed" knack as if it were a foreign virus to be fought. If knacks become too dangerous/harmful (I'm looking at you, radiation manips) Pluto and Venus work together to perform a Post-Breathe Gene Alteration (post-breathe for short) which can alter or remove a person's knack altogether.

All of this is nothing at all like how medical care is handled in Entropy or in The Church but...no spoilers.

#wbw #didn't mean to write a novel there but here we are #can you tell that this stuff comes up in the story? #the mimicry causing autoimmune reactions is all Tou's brilliant idea btws

[study-with-aura]

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

I am sad that last week was my last week of youth group with my church friends since dance started back up. Julien is going tonight because it will be his last night as he will be at university next week.

Wednesday is always a long day, but I truly enjoy it.

Tasks Completed:

Geometry - Review writing slope-intercept equations, equations of horizontal and vertical lines, and graphing equations of lines using intercepts + practice

Lit and Comp II - Studied vocabulary + read a poem + read about plagiarism and took a quiz

Spanish 2 - Reviewed telling time, question words, use of articles, use of ser, and spelling of weather-related words

Bible I - Read Genesis 5-6

World History - Read about Ancient Mesopotamian society + read about Hammurabi's Code and a few of the laws + wrote a paragraph about the significance of the laws and its impact on other civilizations

Biology with Lab - Started an outline of notes about the characteristics of life + watched videos and read about the characteristics to take notes on the outline

Foundations - Read spiritual meanings of alertness + took a quiz on Read Theory + took a quiz on how I learn best and I discovered that my preference is multimodal with higher scores in kinesthetic and reading/writing and high scores in visual and aural

Practice - Practiced assigned pieces for 30 minutes and worked on memorization

Khan Academy - Completed Unit 1: Lesson 3 of 9th-grade reading and vocabulary

Duolingo - Completed one lesson each in Spanish, French, and Chinese

Activities of the Day:

Ballet

Variations

-

What I’m Grateful for Today:

Spending more time with Julien before he leaves for university.

Quote of the Day:

Hope can be a powerful force. Maybe there’s no actual magic in it, but when you know what you hope for most and hold it like a light within you, you can make things happen, almost like magic.

-Daughter of Smoke & Bone, Laini Taylor

🎧La valse d'Amélie (Version orchestre) - Yann Tiersen

#study community #study blog #study inspiration #study motivation #studyblr #studyblr community #study-with-aura

[thesquidkid]

Who says science isn't exciting?

Episode 4x03 Subterranean homesick alien

Compared to 4x02 or even 4x01, this episode is very light on science. Also, apologies for the delay, but between exams and going back home for the holidays, I've had a very hectic week. Once again, I am not an expert in anything, just a nerd.

The two science-y bits happen at Deep Sky (can we talk about how everyone seems to just walk in and out of that place? including dead bodies). The first one is when Liz thanks Eduardo for giving her access to his machine:

"Eduardo, thank you. This machine is my favorite thing. It tests for everything: EC, pH, PO4-P. I'm about to ask it to do my taxes."

EC could mean a multitude of things, even when just looking at biology and chemistry. I will spare you all the different possible definitions and directly give you the two options that I think Liz might be referencing:

EC50: which is the half maximal effective concentration, and is a toxic unit measuring the concentration of a drug, antibody or toxicant. To put it in simpler terms, EC50 is the concentration required to reach 50% effect.

Or she could be talking about the electrical conductivity of a solution. Which, as the name indicates, represents the ability of a certain material to conduct electric current.

(The other options would not make that much sense in the context of the sentence).

I would be more inclined to believe that she is talking about EC50, especially given she talks about pH just after.

pH (potential of hydrogen) is a measure of how acidic/basic a solution is. The range goes from 0 - 14, with 7 being neutral. If the pH < 7 then the solution is acidic, and reversely if the pH>7 then it is basic.

Fun fact, but testing for pH (as far as my chemistry knowledge from high school goes) is not that hard. And I don't think it requires a special machine to do. The way we did it in high school (granted, we were not doing very complex solutions), is that we stuck a piece of pH paper into the solution, and depending on the color we had the scale of acidity.

The third thing Liz mentions is PO4-P.

PO4-P is a method of testing for phosphorus. It basically gives back the number of phosphorus (and only phosphorus, not oxygen) present in a solution.

We also know from 2x01 where Michael and Liz are dissecting Noah's body, that oasians' organs (other than bones) contain traces of organic phosphorus. I talk more about phosphorus here.

I tried finding a link between phosphorus and P2P (phenyl-2-propanone), and the closest I got was that both P2P and phosphorus can be used in creating meth (but they are both different methods, and it requires mostly red phosphorus).

So, the logical conclusion would be that the mystery component is both a derivative of P2P and of phosphorus.

Either way, we do know that alien organs have stronger traces of phosphorus than humans (hence why the little green men typically glow in the dark), and since Liz's machine can test for the presence of phosphorus, we now have an easier way to track down aliens and their environment.

(Instead of, you know, analysing someone's DNA in five minutes, as Liz often does)

The next bit of science follows in the next scene, where Liz tells Max (after having analysed all the samples in record time. Really, Deep Sky is like heaven with how fast things happen):

"Okay. All right, well, the alien plasma matches the balloons, but that's to be expected since the samples we took were from their car wheels. Usual levels of bacteria and fungi, EC is normal. Huh... High levels of petroleum hydrocarbon."

Once again I think EC is actually EC50 as I talked about earlier, since I don't think electrical current is relevant here.

And now, petroleum hydrocarbon. Max says that it's the result of oil extraction. That is correct.

Petroleum is a naturally occurring yellowish-black liquid mixture of mainly hydrocarbons.

A hydrocarbon is an organic compound consisting only of hydrogen and carbon.

The thing that bothers me in that scene, which I've mentioned before, is the speed at which the science is done. I understand that actual science consists mostly of waiting and therefore isn't interesting to show on tv. But no one told them they had to do an episode / a day. If everything was simply a little more spread out, it would still make more sense.

Anyway, this is all the science for 4x03, thanks for reading, and if you have any criticism about it, feel free to reach out!

#roswell new mexico #rnm meta #thesquidkid does meta #thesquidkid writes

[toughgirlchallenges]

Kalyani Lodhia - Visionary Explorer - A Freelance Photographer, Biologist, and Wildlife Filmmaker Uncovering Nature's Marvels.

In her own words:

“Hi! I'm Kalyani, a freelance photographer, biologist and wildlife filmmaker, born and raised in the city of Leicester, what felt like miles away from the countryside and the outdoors. 

With no role-models or influences in my life to steer me to the natural world, it's a mystery to my whole family how I ended up loving the outdoors and everything in it, but somehow I did. 

My love for nature fuelled me to pursue a BSc at the Royal Veterinary College where I studied a whole range of aspects of animal biology; from anatomy and physiology to behaviour and evolution. My research into kangaroo biomechanics and limb bone scaling was part of a paper published in the Royal Society Open Science in 2018. I then completed my MSc at Imperial College London, where I fell in love with science communication and story telling.

I first picked up a camera at 19 years old when my parents sent me to live in an ashram for 6 months (of course, as a teenager, I wasn't too thrilled at the prospect initially) and that's how I accidentally got into, and got hooked on, photography. I am self-taught and now specialise in travel and wildlife photography.

I love exploring the world, often travelling solo, and learning about different cultures beyond stereotypes. Having Indian heritage, I have a deep understanding of the need to look beyond imperialist and colonialist generalisations and I am able to truly connect with people around the world.

As a biologist, there's something so incredibly special about seeing the most breathtaking animals in their natural habitat and experiencing the sheer magnitude and magic of the world around us.

I have been fortunate enough to have been to the Kumbh Mela, the largest gathering of people on Earth, the forests of Finland to photograph brown bears and the depths of the South African ocean, surrounded by thousands of hammerhead sharks.

My photography work has been featured by UNICEF and the BBC and I have had the opportunity to have worked for Parmarth Niketan Ashram and Light for the World. I have also had footage featured on BBC AutumnWatch and one of my photographs was selected for the long list of the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I work full time as a freelancer on science and wildlife documentaries, where I am currently working as a researcher for the BBC's Natural History Unit on a landmark natural history series for National Geographic.”

***

New episodes of the Tough Girl Podcast go live every Tuesday at 7am UK time - Hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out. 

You can support the mission to increase the amount of female role models in the media. Visit www.patreon.com/toughgirlpodcast Thank you.

***

Show notes

Who is Kalyani

Her love for the outdoors and nature

Wanting to be a vet when she was younger

Being sent to India by her parents

Accidentally getting into photography

What did her daily life look like in the Ashram

The moment when it all came together for her and started to enjoy taking photos

Going back home and doing a 3-year science degree

Still unsure what she wanted to do

Getting her Master's at Imperial Science Media Production

Working in a restaurant

How did she get her first job in The Great British Bake Off

Starting out as a runner and what she does

Taking every opportunity that is given to her

How does she cope with the stress

Her trips to other countries and what was it like for her

Her main job as a wildlife filmmaker

Working on a big series for National Geographic

Interesting place in Africa called Mauritania

Doing a shoot for three and a half weeks with a small crew

Why she's less tired than many others and her exhaustion-coping advice

Biggest challenges she's faced and had to deal with

Kalyani's trip to Iceland and why it was one of the best wildlife moments for her

Taking a trip to Finland for her birthday

Diving in the South African ocean with the hammerhead sharks

Climate change and figuring out shoot dates

The reality of nature

Where to find more information about Kalyani

Top tips and advice

  Social Media

Website: www.kalyanilodhia.com

Instagram: @kalyanilodhia 

Twitter: @kalyanilodhia

  Check out this episode!

#podcast #women #sports #health #motivation #challenges #change #adventure #active #wellness #explore #grow #support #encourage #running #swimming #triathlon #exercise #weights

[rolandtowen]

come hither, come hither, some Zukka I'll blither

The second installment in the Neurodiverse Zukka AU! In which Sokka builds a blanket fort, Zuko info-dumps, and they share some soft kisses.

#zukka #my fic #rolandtowen #mine #zuko #sokka #zuko x sokka #autistic zuko #adhd sokka #neurodiverse zukka #autism #adhd #med school au #my biology unit this week was bones can you tell #domestic fluff #zukka fluff #modern au #coffee shop au

[teenyfish]

Marine Biology Story of the Day #13: The Collection

Hey everybody, long time no see—we’ve been dealing with hurricanes and vacations and I’ve been extremely worn down from work so I have not posted anything in the last two weeks.

But, since it’s early spooky season and I’ve finally had a chance to sit down, we are going to do a special post today and go over my collection.

My collection of “dead things”, as my husband likes to describe it.

I like to describe it as my natural history collection. It’s a collection I’ve been curating since I got go college, and I have either collected and cleaned them myself, or received them as gifts from others who share my strange hobby.  I have not personally killed any of these animals, however I’m sure some were road kill or were killed by barotrauma (if they were fish).  Also, these are not all from dead animals, I have a large collection of molts and shells as well.  For me, these are found objects, and I am giving them life again in my house.  If you are uncomfortable with the idea of animal bone collection and processing, I suggest you stop here.

If you have a morbid curiosity like I do, welcome.

Lets start with the bones.  On the first row we have what I think is a squirrel skull that I found on a beach (I’m not 100% sure because I don’t have any teeth from it) and a cormorant skull I found completely bleached and cleaned on a dock.  On the second row we have a pair of deer antlers I spent $2 on at an antique fair, we have an otter that I cleaned for my university that I was allowed to keep, we have rocky the raccoon, also from my university, a cat skull I found on a washed up beach (there were no tags attached, no tissue left, it could have been a pet or a stray, but considering we were in the middle of nowhere, there was no way to tell), and a Atlantic sharpnose shark jaw I cleaned while on a NOAA trip.  The back row we have a blacktip reef shark jaw from the same trip, and a red drum skull collected from a beach.  

Now, rocky is one of my favorites—we have a long relationship.  When I was in college, I took a mammalogy class and one of our assignments was to go find a dead animal and bring it in, dissect it, and clean it.  Like for a grade.  Our professor had tenure and was pretty eccentric, so he got away with it much to the chagrin of the president.  I found rocky on the side of a highway, while I was driving home to my parents’ house for fall break, and he looked pretty freshly dead, so I thought that would be the best way to go.  It didn’t stop him from stinking up my car though, and my mom was not pleased that I stuffed him in the basement freezer.  He made it back to school in a Styrofoam cooler, and I got an A on that assignment, and then we put all of our skulls in the “beetle tank” so that they could finish cleaning the skulls for us.  I forgot about it.  Fast forward to two years later, I was working for the graduate department while getting my graduate degree, and we were asked to clean out the “bone room” and process the skulls, and I found him, a tag with my name on it attached.  He came home to live me ever since.

Next we have the molts, all of which, with the exception of the sea urchin, all came from live animals that continued on living after they had shed their shells. On the bottom left we have my horseshoe crab molts, the larger one was collected on a fisheries survey I was on, the little one I found at a hotel beach in Florida.  Just above the horseshoe crabs, we have an urchin that I found in Maine—this one was likely smashed against the rocks by a seagull, because when an urchin dies, it usually doesn’t leave behind it’s spines. Next to it is the large, American Lobster, which came from the lobster at the aquarium I used to work at!! And then, in the bottom right is a spiny lobster molt.  Spiny lobsters come from the south eastern united states, but our aquarium collected a spiny lobster in North Carolina.  She was one of my favorite animals I worked with in the aquarium.

Then we have the full bodied organisms that were preserved fully.  We have European hornets pinned in the bottom block, which are from a small project I worked on as an undergrad.  These are invasive to the states.  The large blue jar contains a baby sandbar shark. My friend (who is also a biology nerd) found this one for me at a thrift store, so WHO KNOWS how it got there originally—but I gave her a new home none the less.  The last three small jars are fish and invertebrates that were collected on my trip studying marine plastics in the Pacific.  In one is a Velula velula, or a by-the-wind sailor, which is a small siphonophore (similar to a jelly fish, or like a small man-o-war) that “sails” on the surface of the water with it’s little biological sail!  The next one is a myctophid, which I’ve covered in previous posts, but it’s a small, very numerous deep sea fish with bioluminescent photophores on it’s belly.  The last is a dragonfish or a viperfish, which is another deep see fish similar to an angler fish, but it’s bioluminescent lure is on it’s chin.  

I’ve been putting this collection together for almost 10 years now, and they all have their little spots on my shelves at my home.  I just find these pieces of biology so beautiful, and I want to give these animals a second life.  I’m not just into dead animals, I have a 55 gallon saltwater tank and a sweet baby puppy as well, but I just love natural specimens--it is just so cool to be able to reach up on your book shelf and be able to study anatomy from the real thing. 

Now, there are a myriad of methods required for preserving biological samples, many of which you can do at home with your own materials.  Cleaning a skull successfully also depends on the condition that the remains are found in.  I rarely do a skull that has a lot of tissue still on it, it’s a lot of work. I do stress though, unless you want to get into some really nasty stuff, it is not for the faint of heart (or people who are easily nauseated).  If you want any information on how to clean skulls, both from mammals and from fish, please feel free to contact me in the notes or in the asks.

That being said, as a reminder, there are some legal issues regarding many species.  Marine Mammals and endangered species are a no go, even if you find the animal already dead.  Make sure to be aware of that when you go out in the field looking for bones.  It is also is typically illegal to collect things from state and national parks in the U.S., and I don’t have all the rules for other countries, so just educate yourself before you head out.

As always, if you have any questions or comments PLEASE do not be afraid to ask!  

#bone collection #skull collection #natural history collection #spooky season #spooky collection #molt collection #marine biology story of the day #marine biologist #squirrel #comorant #deer #raccoon #otter #cat #atlantic sharpnose shark #blacktip reef shark #red drum #horseshoe crab #sea urchin #American lobster #spiny lobster #sandbar shark #european hornet #velela velela #myctophid #lanternfish #dragonfish #viperfish #preserved specimens

[mshermia]

Are We Out Of The Woods Yet?

Whumptober Prompt No. 12 - I think I’ve broken something Broken Down | Broken Bones | Broken Trust

AO3 Link

###

“There are so many reasons why online classes are better than going to school.”

Peter shook his head. “And there are plenty of reasons why learning in school with other students is preferable. How it helps retain the material better than—”

Morgan groaned without even looking at him, her nose in the air, eyes on the leafy trees above them. “You can learn the same things at home, only then you could have dinner at night with us instead of in your stinky room in Boston.”

“Hey,” he craned his neck to see where she went, then walked after her. “My room doesn’t stink.”

“It’s a boy’s room.” She said it like that alone was a valid argument, when it couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the girl’s dorms he had been in—

He stopped himself. Not the time and place.

“Or you could go visit May!”

Peter had his hands in his pockets, trying to keep up with her. “Right.”

“You should!” She turned towards him and pointed her phone at him. “You should come with me and mom. She’s taking me next time she flies out to HQ.”

That startled Peter. “She is?”

“Yeah, in like two weeks or so. You should come, Pete! It’d be so much fun.”

Peter pulled a grimace, even if her excitement was infectious. He hadn’t been in LA since before the semester had started and he did miss May, but he’d also been looking into a weekend or two at Yale, wondering, hoping, that things with MJ—

“So, what do you think?”

He forced his mind back to the present. “I think you shouldn’t run off that far, Morg.”

She cocked her head at him, then blinked and made her eyes roll up high towards the treetops. A performance that was only second to the master, her dad.

“You sound like Tony,” she groaned.

Peter pulled a face. “Don’t call your dad by his first name. That’s just weird.”

Her eyes were scanning the trees, hoping to pick up the last couple of tree species that she needed to catalog for her biology project. “You call him Tony.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Well, what’s the difference?”

Peter screwed up his face at the question. “That he’s not actually my dad?”

“Oh please…”

She vanished behind some undergrowth and for a moment Peter’s Spider senses tingled and his heart jumped into his throat. That olive green jacket she was wearing didn’t help her stick out either. Sure, he had the nano-housing units secured on his forearms, but those were only the last resort. The very last resort. The gig would be up if he popped up as Spider-Man from behind a tree and Morgan, she couldn’t know. Not yet, they had agreed. Hurried steps through the trees had him almost fall over a large root until he found her, crouching down on the ground. Her phone still in hand, she took a picture of a random weed.

“What are you doing? I thought we were looking for trees.”

“We’re looking for biodiversity and this is rare basil-mountain mint, which will likely win me this thing.”

Peter blew out a long breath, telling his pulse to calm the fuck down. He just hated not having her in his sight. “Just don’t wander off like that.”

“I didn’t wander off. I just walked.” Morgan stood up, wiping the dark forest soil off her knees. “Plus, don’t change the subject.”

“What subject?”

“Why it’s okay for you to call daddy Tony and not for me?” She didn’t even look at him, eyes on her phone screen. “Is that a weird boy thing?”

“No, it’s…” Peter shook his head. “It’s a your his daughter and I’m the weird dude that comes around to eat out his fridge thing.”

Morgan’s eyebrows were pulled up not unlike Pepper would when she was arguing with Tony. “Harley calls him dad…”

“Not to his face.”

“Ya-ha!”

“Nu-uh!” Peter turned his back, not interested in discussing that in the slightest. Harley, well, was Harley. It wasn’t the same. He had years to build that bond with Tony, when Peter had had, well, fewer years.

“I’m 8, not an idiot, you know.”

“I don’t know, you’re giving a great impression of one…” He had said it louder than he meant to and he hadn’t really meant to say it at all.

Morgan stood up straight like he had taken an actual shot at her. Her lips were pressed into a tight line and she swung around, explicitly away from him, and stalked in the opposite direction.

“Morg…” He blew out a long breath that had his overly long hair blow across his forehead. “Come on, you know I didn’t mean that.”

She turned on her heel, eyes sparkling - which he hoped was with annoyance, anger even, and not with tears - and gave him the finger. Two of them, actually.

He was a horrible influence on her. Well, it was him or Harley. Probably Harley.

Still, he shouldn’t have said that. She was struggling as it was, being called names and such at school, though Tony refused to get her some tutors instead. Went on and on about the social skills he never had the chance to develop in a regular school environment. Peter had to roll his eyes as his father’s words echoed in his own head.

Wait… His eyes widened and he physically shook that train of thought from his mind. That girl was putting ideas in his head that he didn’t need in there at all.

“Dude, the car is in the other direction…” he called after her.

Morgan still walked away from him, only tilted her head all the way back, and screamed towards the sky. “I STILL NEED TO FIND TWO MORE TREES, ASSFACE!”

He groaned, shrugging his arms in surrender as he started to follow her. “I thought that weed thingy will get you the win.”

She didn’t even turn, just held up the same two fingers once again as she stalked further away from him.

“Change that attitude or I’ll have to bring it up in your dad’s exit interview when we get back.”

Not that he actually would.

“Don’t you mean your dad, ASSFACE?!”

Or maybe he would bring it up…

But like a loyal puppy dog, he followed right behind her, and like a loyal puppy dog, he couldn’t help but hold his nose into the wind and…

He sighed under his breath, teeth gritted as he scanned the endless forest around them. He had this feeling and that feeling never meant something cheerful. They were in a remote part of the national park. Very remote. Odds were, he might just be sensing wildlife that could get to them. Boars or… or something bigger maybe?

“Can we just… hey… Morg…” He cursed as he followed along after her. “Morgan!”

“What?!” She had stopped and turned, both her hands balled into fists.

“Can we just walked back towards the car at least?” He pointed behind himself. “I don’t want to get lost in the middle of the damn woods.”

He wouldn’t get lost. He knew where they were, where the car was. That it would take them an hour and 10 minutes to get back to it. What he didn’t like was that girl stalking deeper and deeper into the forest. He shuddered with a sudden wave of goosebumps at the thought. No, they really had to leave.

“Let’s just… let’s just head back. We can take a bit of a curve.” He shot a glance over his shoulder, but it was just the wind ruffling the leaves above them. “I’m sure we’ll find your trees on the way back.”

“But I don’t want to turn around yet!” She was properly mad, foot-stomping and everything.

“Hey!” Peter pulled his shoulders back, his head held high, one finger pointing at her like Tony would do to him. “When I say we go back, we go back. This is not a democratic decision.”

Again, she threw her head back and groaned, but slowly trotted towards him. She had just moved past him as his ears pick up how she quietly muttered “You suck and I hate you!” under her breath.

Peter bit his lip, pretending like he didn’t have any enhanced hearing whatsoever as he followed along behind her. He tried to remind himself that Morgan was just a kid and how kids sometimes say things they didn’t mean because he knew she didn’t really mean that.

His eyes on the ground, head bowed low, trying his best not to fall or have his eyes scratched out by any of the low hanging branches. This wasn’t an environment that he excelled in so maybe that was where that queasy feeling in his stomach came from.

“How’s it going, Morg? Any luck with the rest of your—” He had looked to his left, then to his right, but he couldn’t see her anymore. “Morgan?” He hurried a few steps ahead, craning his neck but there was no sign of her. She must have rushed ahead. Must have stormed of that sulky, little—

“Morgan!” He cursed when a branch hit him in the face, leaving a stinging cut just above his eye. “Dude, seriously, this is not funny any—” His stomach fell into a deep hole as to his right, Morgan’s voice echoed only faintly through the forest, screaming his name.

He hadn’t run this fast ever. Never before, tripping over branches and roots as he went. He only just saw her brown hair disappear through the door of what appeared to be a little hunting cabin, worn down enough to seem deserted. It was just right there mid-among the trees. His feet carried him closer and closer until he reached the edge of a little meadow right in front of the small house. There was a guy next to the door, standing guard or something, openly showing off the handgun he was holding though it wasn’t pointed at Peter. Not yet.

“Nothing to see here,” he called across the distance. “Move along.”

He had stopped, about 50 feet away from the front door, his breathing was fast and shaky, not so much from the run, moreso from his nerves. “How about you get my sister back out here and I’ll think about it.”

“Go’ the wrong house, boy.” The man pointed the gun in the direction that led back towards the main road. “No girl here. Pro'ably went ahead. Waiting at you car.”

“Get her out here right now,” Peter hissed through gritted teeth.

“Nobody here, move along.”

The guy could play all old-man-in-the-woods he wanted, his eyes were sharp and Peter could see it. Without his senses, he might have never heard Morgan cry out earlier. He might not have seen well enough to spot her being dragged through the door frame, but he was still Spider-Man.

“I’ll give you a last try. One more chance to let my sister go or—”

Peter ducked and turned, sought shelter behind the closest tree as he heard the shots that were fired in his direction. It hadn’t been the old fool whose hands Peter had been watching like a hawk. No, there was someone else. Two guns that were shot at him simultaneously.

Not that it mattered. It didn’t matter how closely he had thought he was watching, not to his arm that was painfully burning. Deep breaths. In and out.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he cursed under his breath.

“You’re not welcome here, boy,” the guy at the door hollered in his direction. “Fuck off!”

The door creaked as it was pulled open and then slammed shut with a bang. He cursed himself. Morgan was counting on him. What the fuck was he doing? One quick look determined what he knew to be true. He was dripping blood onto the forest floor. Quickly, he pulled his sweatshirt off and ripped a string of fabric off it, then did his best to one-handedly tie it around his arm.

He was still hiding among the trees but he had no doubt that whoever had shot at him was still up there.

“Fucking bastards.” He didn’t even think about it, just tapped the nano-housing unit on his lower arm and the Iron Spider engulfed him within seconds. It didn’t matter now, his identity wasn’t worth shit as long as Morgan was in danger.

“Peter, I’ve registered severe trauma to your left arm. Calculating closest medical—”

“Karen, stop. It doesn’t matter. It’s just a graze. I need to get into that house over there. Read out heat signatures. Anything you can give me. Morgan’s in there. We need to get her out.”

“Heat sensors are activated. I record six individual signatures within the parameter of the house, one of them Morgan.”

Fuck. Five of them. Peter closed his eyes, concentrated on his pulse, his senses. He was fine. He’d done this a thousand times. Something like this.

“There is no reception but satellite connectivity is now active to send a beacon out to Mr. Stark and the rest of the Avengers.”

He was breathing hard. “Just.. just hold off on that Karen. It’s… it’s fine. I.. I got this. I got this.” It wasn’t… wasn’t that bad. He couldn’t have the team come out for some dudes in the woods. Mr. Stark… Tony would murder him in cold blood for this. It… this wasn’t all that bad. He would just… just get her out and… and then they could tell him together and they would be safe and all of this wouldn’t even be such a big deal.

“Alright, Karen. Here goes nothing.”

As soon as he came out of the trees, there were more shots fired right at him. None of that phased him though. The Iron Spider was bulletproof. Karen made out both shooters, one of them hiding behind the back wall of the building, the other one had crept up onto the roof. His webs hit the one on the rooftop first, immobilizing him completely. The other guy had bolted as soon as he’d seen the suit.

From there on out, the things happening around him were a blur. A weird mixture of slow motion and an out-of-body experience where nothing mattered, nothing except Morgan. It didn’t even matter that this wasn’t just a random cabin in the woods. Maybe it was the fumes from the meth lab they were running in that room that were messing with his mind. Maybe he was losing more blood than he had realized.

None of it mattered, not when Morgan was kneeling on the floor, her eyes red as she cried, cried out for help, for her dad and for Spider-Man. He was winning this. He had to. And for the longest time that he was in that cabin, he thought he really was going to win this. It wasn’t until he stood right in front of Morgan, the man behind her pressing a gun against her neck while she was ringing for air, that he realized the flaw in his plan.

He would never risk her. He… he couldn’t risk Morgan.

Peter was frozen, couldn’t do a single thing, paralyzed by fear. What if he would be too slow? What if they shot her before his webs could bind them? He wouldn’t be able to live with himself. It wasn’t until Morgan had started whispering his name over and over again that he realized he had let the suit retreat far enough to reveal his head at some point. That was right, they had made him do it. Said they’d kill her if he didn’t. He couldn’t risk that. Couldn’t risk his sister.

It was the old guy, the one that had been at the door who was pointing his gun right at Peter’s head now, no nanites to protect him from the impact if the man were to fire. They wanted money. Of course, they did. Not like Peter had a lot of that. Some, sure. They told him to go and get as much as he could carry and maybe, if it was enough, maybe they would let Morgan go.

“I’m… I’m not leaving her here…” His voice was cracking just like his nerves. “I’m not—”

“You’ll leave her here, either breathing or not,” the guy behind Morgan hissed as he pressed the barrel of the gun even firmed against her skin. “Your choice. Try anything, she’s dead.”

His vision was swimming, eyes burning. He had been such a fool. He should have never let her leave his sight, should have grabbed her and bolted the moment his senses had started to pick up the smallest thing. He should have called Mr. Stark. He should have…

“She’s just a child. Just… let her go and… and you’ll keep me.”

The old guy snickered next to Peter. “Who’d pay a dime for you, huh?”

Then everything changed. A cold shiver ran down his spine. Dread and… and hope. The men couldn’t hear him but Peter did. He would know those thrusters anywhere. Just as he was about to call out to Morgan, tell her to keep her eyes closed, the old man’s other hand grabbed him, tightening around his throat. He pushed Peter further away from her, back against the wall right next to the door and Peter… he didn’t do anything. He just let it happened, let the old bastard choke him for if he didn’t, they might hurt her. If he fought, they might kill her and this was almost over.

His knees hit the floor from one moment to the next, as the old man crumbled to the ground next to him. The same was true for the man behind Morgan. Peter was just about to crawl to her, to shield her from… he didn’t know what, but Iron Man blasted in through the door next to him faster than Peter could get up.

The armor around Tony retreated and he almost fell to the floor, crouching down next to Morgan. “I’m here, baby. It’s okay.” He pulled her close, pressed her head against his chest so she didn’t see, didn’t have to look at the mess around them. “It’ll be okay. Don’t worry, baby. It’ll all be just fine.”

He gathered her in his arms and carried her, heading for the door, his armor following behind him.

“You’ll find your way back?”

Peter was still on the floor, his pulse still hammering in his ears. “Yes… yes, Sir.”

He didn’t even look at Peter as he left and it was the worst feeling in the world.

###

Part II is up, Enjoy!

###

This is my first try at a prompt fill and I feel like those are usually supposed to be One-Shots, right? Well, this won’t be. But I think one is also supposed to start on October 1st and do them in the right order… Well, what can I say other than, it is what it is ;)

The Fix-it is based on my Endgame Fix-it “Like You’d Know How It Works“. I’ll likely use this story as the basis for more than one of the Whumptober prompt fills.

#wumptober2020 #no.12 #whumptober #spider son #irondad #morgan stark #spiderman #peterparker #whump #broken trust #broken down #prompt fill #iron dad and spider son #LYKHIW timeline

[ladyhistorypod]

Episode 19: She Blinded Me with Science

Sources

Jocelyn Bell-Burnell

PhysCon

Star Child – NASA

NPR

Reflections on women in science -- diversity and discomfort Ted Talk (YouTube)

We are made of star stuff Ted Talk (YouTube)

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes the discovery of pulsars (YouTube)

Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza

People Pill

México Desconocido (Mexico Discovered)

She Builds Podcast

Instituto de Investigaciones (Investigations Institute)

CAPSULA DEDICADA A LA ING. CONCEPCIÓN MENDIZABAL (Capsule dedicated to Concepción Mendizabal, YouTube)

Seattle Times

Further Learning: Nuestras Voces (Our Voices)

Rosalind Franklin

US National Library of Medicine

SDSC

National Geographic

Further Learning: PBS NOVA

Click below for a transcript of this episode!

Archival Audio: “There’s something else. When you and Jack were little and wanted to know what made it rain, what made the telephone work, whom did you ask? Not dad. He was at work. But I didn't learn about science in school. I had to dig out the encyclopedia later to satisfy you. So you see, women need to know as much about science as some men do.” Haley: Lady History made me smarter. So my dad and I were watching Jeopardy, and I can't tell you when this was but Alex Trebek was in it and also I don't think the new season came out but I digress. It's the final question where you have to like write it down and it's like this whole very awkwardly put question about like French history and it was like who did she– like she murdered X, Y, and Z who is this. And my dad’s like Joan of Arc and I was like no, Charlotte Corday. And he said “how did you know” and I was like “honestly dad this is like a ninety five percent like balls to the wall guess, but I'm gonna say Charlotte Corday” and it was Charlotte Corday and I was just sitting there like haha! Because my dad– I think I spoke about this I think it was with like Erin– that my dad, the way we would get like our allowance was through… Alana: Riddles and trivia questions. Haley: Yeah. So he's still on that like this whole– Lexi: You still get allowance? Haley: No no no no. Lexi: Oh. I was like wow, okay. Haley: No. I still– I don't get allowance, I wish. The way that we like we just spend the holidays was either playing Codenames, which is like a fun fun board game, everyone should just play it, and then doing crossword puzzles. New York Times comes out with these like questions from the news… like it's ten– usually ten questions, or for the new year they did like thirty questions. So his thing will be like everyone has to answer the New York Times, and he won't give out the answers until we've all done it just to see like who's the smartest of the week. And I've only got like the smartest of the week once. Alana: Nice. Haley: To be fair, they watch the news everyday and I do not. I use like my like news app to get like notifications and if I go on some sort of site, that's how I get the news. I'm awful, no one like model after me. But Jeopardy came in clutch just because of this podcast. My dad was like “oh so the podcast like is actually like helping education, growth” and I was like… Alana: Yes! Haley: Yaaaas. Thank you. He also said we have a cool logo. Alana: Um, shout out to Alexia Ibarra, you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Lexi: So we've proven that the show's educational. Haley: Yes. Lexi: We now can continue that claim. Haley: Yes. Alana: We knew the show was educational. Lexi: Although, is it only educating us? Haley: I have faith we have listeners. Hi listeners. Alana: Hi listeners. To be fair, we’re kind of the primary… like we can see our reactions to the podcast the most. Lexi: Hey, listeners. Are you there, it's me Margaret. [INTRO MUSIC] Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good, the bad, and the ugly lady you missed in history class. I'm not sure how she ended up always being first introduced, Lexi. Lexi, what's your favorite science? Lexi: I should probably say like astrophysics or something because I'm currently interning at the Air and Space Museum, but that would be a lie because my favorite science is probably like earth science, environmental science would be my real favorite science. Alana: That means next up is Haley. Haley, what's your least favorite science? Haley: Physics. Hard core physics. Alana: I really wanted you to say astrophysics. Haley: I was about to, but like I will forever say physics just because I have a really hard time with numbers and letters being in the same math groups. Alana: And I'm Alana and as a child I went to science camp for upwards of five years. Haley: Okay, so my question is did y’all ever learn about like the history of science in class? Because I don't remember, especially I was thinking about this for twentieth century like STEM women because that's our theme. And I realized like I conceptually like didn't realize like what happened in the twentieth century, even though I know it's like the nineteen hundreds that's the twentieth century. But realizing that like my history class didn't really go through that. Like I had no concept of like people from the twentieth century doing impacts of science. Lexi: We didn’t learn about it in history class, we learned about in science class. Haley: Yeah, in my science class I can't pull from it I can’t– Alana: I had– I forget who the author is, but I met him at a Politics and Prose event– when I was in my tenth grade chemistry class, we had reading from a book called The Disappearing Spoon, which was like the discovery, the history of the discovery of a bunch of elements which was really cool and so that was like kind of our history of science thing, that was fun. Also Crash Course recently did a history of science. Haley: Yes, that’s why I loved it. Yes. So, Crash Course– Hank and John Green, hello. Alana: Hello. Hank? Lexi: it wouldn’t be an episode without a Green brothers reference. Haley: I truly was trying to like figure out a way that wouldn't bring them up with this question. Alana: I literally was like… you said history of science and I was like Crash Course. Crash Course. Crash Course! Haley: That's how I got into like not just like forensics and like history of like science and history. But they were the ones that made like science fun for me in high school. And then I got hooked on their history, and then it was college where it was like you can study history, medicine, and bones! Congrats, Haley, here it is! But like in my high school curriculum nothing like twentieth century history and or science was like… science was not a thing. We just were still learning basic cells. Like I just remember every year, come January, we were fucking learning what a cell was. And it's like, okay, mitochondria– Lexi: You were talking about biological cells every year in school? Haley: I don't know why, but like at least two years in high school because I was in like the intro to bio and then chemistry even we talked about like cells because it was biochemistry as a unit. And then I took AP bio junior year and then for forensics she brought up cells because of like blood cells and everything. Lexi: I mean, cells are important. Haley: Yeah, cells are important. Alana: Do you remember Punnett squares? Lexi: Yeah, I love Punnett squares. Alana: Those are my favorite. Lexi: Genetic science is actually my favorite science. And it's my mom's favorite science, my mom was actually a biology major. Haley: Low key… Lexi: Because she loved Punnett squares. Haley: I thought like something was wrong with me, like I had a terrible genetic mutation because I could not tell the difference between a capital P. and lowercase P.. Archival Audio: Is astronomy a significantly more inviting field for women today than it was thirty years ago? Jocelyn Bell-Burnell: Yes, I believe it is and I believe it's getting better all the time. We are becoming more conscious of the differences between men and women– the different ways they work, and the contribution of women is becoming more and more recognized. It's still got a bit to go, but it's coming along very nicely. Lexi: On July 15th, 1943, Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell was born near Lurgan, Northern Ireland. As a young girl, she encountered astronomy through her father’s extensive book collection. Her family, who knew educating girls was important, encouraged her to explore her interest in the subject. She received support in her studies from the staff of the Armagh Observatory, which was near her home. When Jocelyn was attending preparatory school, only boys were permitted to study science. In a TEDx Talk from 2013, Jocelyn recounted being separated from her male peers and assuming it was for physical education, but it turned out the girls were being sent to the “home economics” class while the boys were being sent to science class. Of course, she went home and told her parents. And her parents, who as I mentioned before, believed girls should be educated just like boys, were angry to hear that the school did not allow girls to participate in science class. So along with the parents of two other girls at the school, Jocelyn’s parents fought for her right to study science. The three girls were moved into the science class, but being the only girls in class was not easy. The teacher kept a close eye on the girls. So it was hard for them to overcome being the only girls in that class. But, Jocelyn received the highest score on her science final at the end of that term. She did it, she passed all the boys, and got the highest score despite being disadvantaged by being one of the only girls and by them trying to keep her out of that class. Jocelyn went on to study at the University of Glasgow, where she earned a degree in Physics. She graduated in 1965, and went on to pursue her doctorate at Cambridge. Jocelyn worked with her advisor Antony Hewish to study the mysteries of space. And she assisted in the construction of a radio telescope, which would be used to track quasars, which are large celestial bodies and there’s like a lot more science that makes them… It’s a deep science thing… deep astrophysics. Again, astrophysics is complicated and too big brain for me. But they’re things in space. And when the telescope was ready to operate, Jocelyn was assigned to operate it and analyze the results it produced. And this was like way before computers as we know them today, so the telescope actually printed its results out on a big chart and then she would look at the chart as it was printing out and analyze it that way. Jocelyn began to notice strange results on the charts produced by the telescope, which were faster than those typical of the quasars. Jocelyn did not know it yet, but she had discovered the first evidence of pulsars, highly magnetized rotating compact stars, which are different than the previously mentioned celestial bodies. At first, Jocelyn and her advisor were suspicious that the signals may have been signs of alien life, so they nicknamed them “little green men” signals. A year later, her findings were published in an academic journal. As scientists around the world began to investigate the signals further, they were able to identify them as coming from the stars that I mentioned. And the term pulsar was applied to this type of signal. The press, upon finding out that the discovery had been made by an attractive, young, female graduate student, pounced on the story, of course. But instead of asking her about her scientific studies and the research she was doing, they pestered her with questions about her appearance like “what’s your waist size” so we love that. In 1968, Jocelyn earned her doctorate. That same year she was married, and unfortunately spent much of her marriage focused on her husband’s career rather than her own, moving place to place as he moved place to place. In 1974, her advisor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for Jocelyn’s contributions to the discovery of pulsars. Alana is raging in the background. After her marriage ended and her son had grown up and gone off to live on his own, she went back to pursuing her own passions. She went on to teach with the goal of making science welcoming and accessible to all students, regardless of gender, class, or race. She became a professor at the Open University, a non-traditional college that allows students to take courses at their own pace, and she was appointed as the chair of physics. Her appointment made her one of only two female physics professors in the United Kingdom, so she joked that they had doubled the number of physics professors that were women in the country, so that’s a little sad, but you know… at least there’s two. In 1999, Jocelyn was interviewed for NASA’s StarChild program, which I believe is now defunct but it was an educational program in the 90s, and you can hear some great audio clips of her answering interview questions on the StarChild website which I will link in the show notes. And Jocelyn has also given several TED and TEDx talks, one of which is about women in science and what it’s like to be a woman in science. And I used it as a source so that will also be linked in the show notes. You can find that there if you’re interested– in the further learning. And I will leave you with a quote from her 2013 TED talk which I thought really summed up her experience, “Those of us who've been early in a field have often had to… play the male game. And I hate to think what a lifetime of doing that has actually done to me.” She should have won the Nobel Prize but they gave it to the guy who was her advisor instead, even though she actually made all the discoveries. And her accent’s adorable. Alana: Is she still alive? Lexi: Yeah, she’s 77. Alana: I’m not good at math. Lexi: She’ll be 78 this year. Alana: She’s a Cancer you didn’t point that out. Lexi: You’re– that’s your thing. Haley: Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza. I definitely pronounced her middle name incorrectly, I am so sorry. The Z-A with un acento on top of the A always messes me up for some reason. My little lisp comes back. But Concepción is how I’m gonna refer to her. Actually I think it means conception in Spanish, so like that's fun. Here's my little side note read this: my Spanish is declining because my mom is Cuban, therefore my Spanish came from my grandparents so when they died I never had that continuous we talk every single week every… sometimes like every single day, and I'd be speaking Spanish so in those like six years I have not spoken Spanish. I’ve read it and translated it for various projects, however, pronunciation is difficult, apparently. And that also comes in with our gal, coming from Mexico City, a lot of like the publications and references are coming from Mexico, so it took me like ten plus hours because then I was like trying to see what resource was a blog or what resource was like an actual resource and then I found some YouTube and some podcasts. But again, don't stop researching someone even if they come from a different country and you have a hard time like researching. It was still fun. I knew her from like a book of like STEM– she's an engineer, we'll get into it, don't worry. Just sit back and relaxing. It was fun reading in Spanish honestly. My Google translate kept popping up, but some of the Google translates for like the scientific terms were just no Bueno and also with how they like conjugated her name of being conception didn't look great sometimes. But that's Google Translate’s problem. So her being an engineer is rad in itself, but she's Mexico's first female to earn a civil engineering degree, so snaps for that. Ahora abramos nuestro libro de historia! I practiced that five times in the mirror even though I knew how to say all those– Lexi’s cracking up, I just wanted to do a good job. I have a big fear about speaking Spanish even though I'm technically fluent. Alana: It made me smile. I thought it was cute. Haley: So Concepción, with her upbringing, it was written in the stars if you will because she was the daughter of the famous engineer Joaquín de Mendizábal y Tamborrel and growing up she was motivated to study. And like one article described her as like her life being a little sheltered? Honestly I think that… that was just like me translating because it did use the word– literally translated sheltered, but it's noted that like her father was an engineer motivating her as well to study. And again being like the first woman engineer, yeah your life was probably a little sheltered in Mexico City where like no other females were studying the same thing in a sense. And in school– and for orienting ourselves in the timeline– it's 1913 to 1917, and her… she had her like basic education at la Normal para Maestras de la capital which is the normal for teachers in the capital. That's like the crude translation. And then she was enrolled into a higher level math in another school, the Escuela de Altos Estudios– which is the school for higher education essentially– and she was one of four women at that school. And this gets a little dicey because not only did she stand out for like being that sparkly fish in the pond, being one of four women, but she was able to tackle difficult civil engineering courses, finishing them without failure. And moving forward a little bit to 1922, she attended Palacio de Minería which is the Palace of Mines and Mining, which is now a museum actually. So it was first built as a space for the Royal School of Mines and Mining, like the royal court there, and then changed to the school for engineering, mines, and physics. However, it's now a museum. Like I said, it kind of gets dicey around the 1913/1917 when she’s taking classes and now we’re a few years later in the 1921s, where she got into the school in the sense that she… she was there listening to classes; however, not fully enrolled until 1926 because she didn't have the high school certificate yet. But again, she passed with flying colors because obviously. And she passed the engineering exam on February 11, 1930 and quick side note because some of y'all are screaming at me saying that she was not the first woman to get a civil engineering degree in like Mexico. There is contention, because around like 1930ish– before, because 1930ish was when Concepción Mendizábal got her degree, so her being the first at 1930. There's another woman who apparently went to the engineering school before her, but from the end result of my snooping, there was no other registered woman at the school between 1792 and 1909, and then also no other like registered woman to have graduated. At this point, it's Concepción because she graduated, and she was the first woman to graduate. She wrote down a lot through her education and post education, and it’s Memorias Prácticas, which is practical memories. And literally what I'm thinking of practical memories is books and notes. Again with my research it's very much scattered of translating from what I deemed as the best resources coming from Mexico. Please give me more research sources, let me learn more about this gal. So practical memories, I'm guessing are just like her books and notes and they're still in the Palacio de Minería or the Palace of Mines and Mining, again, which is now a museum. So I thought that was like really cool how like her school like recognized that she was just like such a beautiful mind and like so great and talented that they've kept all her stuff. I really want to see it. The Palace of Mines and Mining is not a great website, so I couldn't like go through their collections and actually see it. Maybe one day I'll make it down to Mexico City. And in 1974 she received the Premio Ruth Rivera which is the Ruth Rivera Prize which goes to the best woman in engineering and architecture, which I thought was like really cool because she like continued– she didn’t go after school and like settle down like none of what I read was like her settling down with like a husband and kids, it was all like concretely what she did for engineering. So post her getting the prize and just also she died in 1985, just up to her death she was still working. She wrote a lot. She was the author of like a fifty two volume book– she just knew how to conceptualize or kind of put a lot of hard engineering concepts into writing and into paper which is a really hard thing to do. And the fact that I obviously couldn't see many of them… I tried, maybe I was looking in the wrong places. But I just wanted to see if there was more for like the engineering mind, or if she wrote some things for us as non engineers to read them. Kind of like what Hank Green does. Because that's what interests me. I love when people take what they're like very very good at, especially when it's like a hard science and dwindle it down for people not in that field. Alana: That's what we do. We’re trying to make our knowledge more accessible. At least that's what I feel like we're doing. Lexi: That's what we're trying to do. Alana: That’s why we interrupt each other to be like Hey… Haley: Yeah. Alana: What is that? Lexi: Hey, explain more in depth that thing… Alana: ...that we all kind of understand, but yeah just in case. Alana: So. I'm going to start off my story here with a joke that you might know, you might have seen, that joke is… What did Watson and Crick discover? Haley: Absolutely nothing. Alana: Rosalind Franklin's notes. Haley: Gold. Alana: Thank you. It’s not mine, but I really like that. Lexi: Exquisite. Alana: Thank you. If I do a bad job– just like a heads up if I do a bad job explaining the science part of this, I'm sorry. Lexi doesn't speak Chinese, I don't speak science. That's just how it is. So Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, a Leo, in London, England to a prominent Jewish family… and I'm having an identity crisis because I think I was born into a prominent Jewish family? Anyway. I should talk to my mom about that. She attended Saint Paul’s School for Girls which focused on women getting degrees other than their M. R. S.. Haley: What’s an MRS? Alana: Oh, I was waiting for a laugh at my joke and Lexi snapped but I didn't get an audible laugh. M R– your MRS degree is Mrs degree… you know… Haley: Oh my God I just got that! Lexi: Wait, I thought you were like playing dumb. You’ve never heard that? Alana: You've never heard MRS degree? Haley: No. Alana: It’s my favorite thing. It's like why women in… Like it was this phenomenon of women in the forties and fifties going to college… Lexi: Yeah. Alana: … to meet their husbands. Lexi: To meet men. Haley: Ring before the spring, I know that one. Lexi: I’ve never heard ring before the spring but I have heard MRS degree. Alana: MRS degree! Haley: So dumb. Alana: I think they make that joke in Grease. Haley: It has the same letters as… Alana: MRS degree. I was waiting for a laugh because I– Lexi: Your Master’s in being married to a man. Alana: The MRS– I love that joke, it’s my favorite joke. I think it's so funny. We can dive into why I think that's so funny in therapy. But I have more pressing issues for therapy. So Rosalind was very good at math and science and also languages. She left St Paul's a year early to go to Newnham College which is part of Cambridge University and was one of only two all women colleges at Cambridge. She graduated in 1941. I'm going to summarize the rest of her academic work so that we can get to the good stuff. She earned her PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge in 1945 after studying the microstructures of carbon and graphite at the British Coal Utilization Research Association where she had done research during World War II. Instead of going into the kind of war work that other women were doing during the war she was doing war-oriented research on carbon and graphite which was more what she was interested in doing the science-y stuff and not like building weapons which was another important part of women’s work in World War II but we're not talking about women in World War II even though I have a lot of feelings about that. In 1947 she started working at a lab in Paris, the name of which I'm not even gonna try to pronounce where she learned how to analyze carbons with x-ray crystallography which is sometimes called x-ray diffraction analysis. I'm sorry I can't explain more about what that is, it's just what it's called. You use X-rays to– Lexi: If you tried to explain it I wouldn't understand the explanation. Alana: But maybe… Maybe our listeners will understand and can help explain to me what X-ray crystallography slash diffraction is. Let us know. Write in. A friend of hers, Charles Coulson, suggested, “hey what if you did this, but make it larger biological molecules.” So she took over a project at King's College in London from a scientist named John Randall using X-ray diffraction to take pictures of DNA molecules. This is where Rosalind crosses paths with Maurice Wilkins, who is the first villain of our story. He’s not actually a villain, he's just kind of a chauvinist and annoying. I'm just being dramatic, as usual. Maurice Wilkins thought that our dear Rosalind was just a lab assistant when in actual fact she was conducting her own research. One of my sources was like “this is understandable given the university's attitude towards women at the time.” It's not an excuse. That's not an excuse. You suck. Period. Anyway, so. The specific note that Watson and Crick discovered was a photograph called Photo 51. I can't find any copyright free images of it, but if you go to our show notes… which will be at ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com… under further learning there's a PBS website where you can learn more about the photo specifically and see it. The point is it's a very clear photograph of a DNA molecule where you can kind of pretty clearly see the double helix structure, which is like a twisted ladder. It really was only a hop, skip, and a jump for people to figure out that, using this photo, the structure of DNA was the double helix which is like a twisted ladder if you don't know. Maurice Wilkins showed this picture to James Watson and Francis Crick who were also doing DNA research without Rosalind's knowledge or permission. Frustration noises! I'm so angry about this. So Watson and Crick beat Rosalind Franklin to the punch publishing their research even though they were really publishing Rosalind's research. It's like if they were doing a 200 piece puzzle and Rosalind had put in 198 of the pieces, but Watson and Crick came in and put down the last two and were like “look we did a puzzle!” I almost knocked my headphones out I was so angry. Oops. Lexi: It's like when my mom makes dinner but then my grandma takes it out of the oven and she tells my dad that she made dinner. Alana: Yeah pretty much. Rosalind left King's College– I wonder why– for Birkbeck College where she did some X-ray diffraction work with the tobacco mosaic virus– which as far as I can tell only infects plants– as well as the polio virus, specifically on their structure. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37. Four years later, Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize, which Rosalind would not have been eligible for anyway– I guess– because they don't nominate or award posthumously, but still really annoying. Anyway, Rosalind Franklin, she's really cool, she deserved better. I love her very much, my girl. Even though I have no idea– what she… like I know what she did but I don’t understand how. Lexi: You know it's absurdly easy to nominate someone for a Nobel Prize. Alana: It is absurdly easy to nominate someone for a Nobel Prize. And the research was published before she died, so maybe just be like “hey–” Lexi: It's even easier today. I mean I can't speak for back then, but literally there's a form on a website you fill out. So like someone could have done it before she died. Like I said, they did not have the website back then. But it's not easy today… Alana: Yeah. Lexi: There was like… easier then too. Alana: So that's really annoying to me. They couldn't even be like “hey, you know Rosalind Franklin actually took this picture, and that really helped us.” Lexi: Just like what happened with my lady. Alana: Yeah. Lexi: Her supervisor could be like “actually my grad student really did all the grunt work on this,” you know. Alana: It's not like Rosalind was even a grad student though. Like she had a PhD and was doing this research. Lexi: Yeah, it’s just women in science get real… What all women in science, regardless of… the situation. Haley: And this wasn't that long ago. Alana: This wasn’t that long ago! Lexi: We’re talking about the 20th century. Alana: We’re talking about the 20th century, it’s the 21st century. My grandfather was born in 1927 and he's still alive. And Rosalind was born in… Lexi: The woman I talked about is younger than my grandmother, yeah. Alana: They're all still here, there’s still work we gotta do on being more welcoming to people of non male genders just in general. Haley: There’s just work we have to do as human beings just all across the board. Alana: In science fields and ever. Ever where. Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review, or tell your friends, and if you don't like the show, keep it to yourself. Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, GarageBand, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time, on Lady History. Haley: Next week on Lady History; she will be the history. We're talking about some modern gals and their impact on our lives. Really we’ll be fangirling a lot. I'm excited, are you excited? Of course you are. Lexi: It's called “Tomorrow She’ll Be History'' if that inspires anything. Haley: That's what I was gonna do. I was just gonna repeat the title and see what else comes out of my mouth. Lexi: Yes I love when…  I love when you like mouth– mouth vom. Word vom. Normal vom is mouth vom. But… mouth vom.

[lynnsfics]

Coffee Stained Confusion Ch 3

< Last Chapter                       First Chapter                                 Next Chapter >

“Tell us everything you know.” Sam looked at the girl sitting in front of them. She was a student at the college, but that alone wouldn’t prove her innocence. 

“All I know is what was in the police report that I accidently got ahold of.” she responded. She tried to sound calm but Sam could tell she was nervous. To be fair, she was tied to a chair and had no idea what was going on. Or was that just what she wanted them to believe. 

“Hey, Sam, you mind if I talk to you for a minute?” Bucky asked. “I don’t know if this is getting us anywhere. Besides,” he added under his breath, “she’s clearly scared and isn’t going to be a threat. Do we really need her tied up?” 

“Fine, we can untie her, but she isn’t leaving yet. Not until we can be sure she’s not with HYDRA. You know Tony would have our heads if we accidently let our only lead go. Let alone the Hell that Steve would raise.” 

“You’re right,” he conceded. “But it’s getting late. How about we offer for her to stay the night here? Before you ask, I can sleep on the couch and she can take my room.”

“And if she refuses? We can’t let her just leave.”

“Then it’ll be a late night.”

~~~

You shivered as the two men entered the room again. You could tell one of them had what seemed to be a metal arm, and you assumed that one was Bucky. Something clicked for you then, and your mind flashed back to a news clip of the Avengers fighting an unknown enemy known as The Winter Soldier, who was later revealed to be the “long-dead” best friend of Captain America, James Buchanan Barnes. You found yourself getting nervous, since you weren’t sure exactly whose side he was on.

The other man appeared to be The Falcon, which eased your mind a bit. You remembered him fighting alongside the Avengers, not against them. But what if he had been brainwashed? No, that wouldn’t happen. Would it? You were overthinking everything, and weren’t sure if you had taken your anxiety medicine that morning or not. 

“Hey there,” Bucky knelt down beside the chair, “I’m going to untie you alright? I don’t want to regret that decision though, so please don’t make any brash decisions.” he said kindly.

You nodded dumbly, not trusting yourself to speak. Once the ropes were off you slowly rubbed your wrists, noticing some burn marks where you must have struggled against the ropes without realizing it. 

Bucky’s eyes met yours, and for a brief second you forgot all about where you were as you felt butterflies fill your stomach. As soon as your broke eye contact the filling was forgotten and you felt panic seize you again. Sam cleared his throat, seemingly uncomfortable with the scene playing out before him. “So, do you want to tell her about the deal or should I?” he asked.

“Wait, what deal?” you asked, fear seeping through your body. “Like a plea deal? Oh God, I can’t go to jail-”

“No, not a plea deal.” Bucky said with a light chuckle. “A deal about questioning. And, uh, sleeping arrangements. It’s getting a little late, and rather than us all be up til who knows when asking you questions, we were thinking you could spend the night here and we could pick things back up in the morning when we’re all well-rested. Now, you don’t need to worry, you get to sleep in a regular bed and I’ll take the couch. Does that sound alright?”

“Well, yes, that should be fine. I’m assuming I don’t have much choice in the matter. If it wouldn’t be too much trouble though, could I go back to my dorm to get my anxiety medication. It helps calm me down a lot and I don’t do too well without it.” 

“Well, it probably isn’t the best idea but I think it would be alright.” Sam stated. “Bucky, you can drive her over? Unless you’ll be needing some backup?” he said with a laugh. 

“I’ll be fine, Sam.” Bucky retorted, rolling his eyes. “We’ll be back soon enough.” He led you to the door, and as you stepped outside the cold night air chilled you to the bone. You shivered audibly but said nothing. You didn’t want to seem any weaker than you already did. “I’m sorry we didn’t bring a jacket with us. Here, you can have mine. I really don’t need it anyways.”

“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want to be any trouble, and I don’t want you to get sick because of me.” you responded, blushing slightly. 

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it. Besides, if my mother taught me anything it was how to be a gentleman. As for the getting sick part, one benefit of being a super-soldier is not having to deal with the common cold.” He shrugged his jacket off and you glanced away, trying not to stare. You shivered again, worse this time, and quickly grabbed the jacket. 

“I really didn’t know anything about the murders until the papers got switched. It was an accident.” 

“It’s alright, I believe you. Sam does too, he’s just being cautious.” As you got to your old, beaten down car that somehow still passed inspection he opened the door for you. “To be honest, I can see why he’d want you to have a lead, we need to get one soon, or else all of this is for nothing.”

You chewed on your lower lip in thought as you got into the car. “Well, maybe I shouldn’t be saying this, it might just drag me deeper into the case but I think I have a lead for you. In biology we were discussing poisons and their effects on the human body. We just finished a unit on belladonna. It’s not much, it’s probably just a coincidence, but it might help you.”

“Was there, by chance, a unit on cyanide?”

“Um, yeah, about a week or two ago, why?’

“Well doll, I think you just helped us find a lead.”

~~~

Me? Actually updating? It's more likely than you think! Anyways, thank you all so much for the continued support! Sorry this chapter is on the shorter side, but I promise the next one will make up for it! As always, likes and reblogs are appreciated! Let me know if you want to be added to the tag list! Love you all <3

#Bucky Barnes #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky x reader #james buchanan barnes #bucky fanfic #bucky x y/n #james bucky barnes #sam wilson #my wriitng #fanfic #fanfiction #winter soldier #captain america #ca:tws #ca:cw #falcon and winter soldier #the falcon #winter solider imagine #bucky barnes imagine #winter solider x reader #winter solider fanfiction #bucky barnes x you #coffee stained confusion

[troger]

TLDR: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

At a laboratory in Manhattan, researchers have discovered how SARS-CoV-2 uses our defenses against us.

By James Somers

November 2, 2020

Some four billion years ago, in the shallow waters where life began, our earliest ancestors led lives of constant emergency. In a barren world, each single-celled amoeba was an inconceivably rich concentration of resources, and to live was to be beset by parasites. One of these, the giant Mimivirus, masqueraded as food; within four hours of being eaten, it could turn an amoeba into a virus factory. And yet, as the nineteenth-century mathematician Augustus de Morgan said, “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em, and little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.” The Mimivirus had its own parasites, which sometimes followed it as it entered an amoeba. Once inside, they crippled the Mimivirus factory. This trick was so useful that, eventually, amoebas integrated the parasites’ genes into their own genomes, creating one of the earliest weapons in the immune system.

We tend to associate “survival of the fittest” with lions hunting antelope. But disease—the predation of parasites upon hosts—is actually the most potent force in evolution. “Every single phase of life has been selected to try to avoid parasitism,” Stephen Hedrick, an immunologist at the University of California, San Diego, told me. “It’s driven evolution as hard as it could be driven. Because it’s life or death all the time. And it’s a co-evolution.” Whenever a host develops an immune defense, it perversely rewards the survival of the very parasites that can defeat it. Hosts, meanwhile, tend to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. “Bacterial or viral populations are truly vast in size,” Robert Jack and Louis Du Pasquier write, in “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” and the wide variation among them gives natural selection many candidate organisms upon which to work. Viruses and bacteria also reproduce half a million times faster than we do. Given this “generation gap,” Jack and Du Pasquier write, “one might well ask how on earth we could possibly have survived.”

A clue comes from the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. It spends much of its life marauding alone, eating things. But, when food is scarce, it releases molecules that serve as a flocking signal to others of its kind; the amoebas merge, forming a superorganism of as many as a hundred thousand members. For this multicellular “slime mold” to be effective, almost all the amoebas must give up their ability to eat, lest they prey on one another. The few that retain it don’t eat for themselves; rather, they swallow up debris and dispose of it to protect the organism. The other amoebas, freed from the burdens of offense and defense, form a “fruiting body” that releases spores for reproduction. Although none of the individuals would survive on their own, the collective thrives.

A human being is likewise a society of cells, with a coördinated defense. Our circulatory system doubles as a communications network; our blood vessels have an “endothelial” lining—a surface that is charged with the intelligent routing of immune cells. When ordinary cells are infected by a pathogen, they send signals to their neighbors, who pass them on until they reach the endothelial cells. In response, the blood vessels swell, creating off-ramps through which white blood cells, which are part of the immune system’s circulating defense force, can flow toward the site of infection. This is merely the beginning of our immune response.

Our bodies, like the United States government, make a startlingly large investment in defense. Our bone marrow produces billions of immune cells each day, and then discards most of them. Almost every one of our cells is perpetually scanning itself for evidence of invasion. The system is complex—ask a microbiologist about immunology and she’ll whistle, wishing you luck. Those who describe it often resort to metaphor. Contemplating the enormous amounts of information that it collects and synthesizes throughout the body, Jack and Du Pasquier suggest that “the immune system can be regarded, above all else, as a computational device.”

This device is so finely tuned that we seldom notice it at work. Our guts burble with foreign microbes outnumbering human cells roughly ten to one, but the good are seamlessly sorted from the bad; every day, some of our cells grow into cancers, but the immune system dispatches them before they become dangerous. On a recent camping trip, I was bitten three times by some kind of insect while putting my arm into a jacket sleeve. Who knows what entered my bloodstream. Almost immediately, three welts formed; a few minutes later, the welts came down. In moments like that, it is easy to assume that we hold the advantage over the parasites.

On Friday, March 6th, a purified sample of the novel coronavirus arrived at the laboratory of a virologist named Benjamin tenOever, at the Icahn School of Medicine, in East Harlem. Many virology labs focus on a single pathogen, but tenOever’s studies dozens of viruses and how they change the cells they infect. During the winter, tenOever and his team were focussed on the flu. But, as the coronavirus pandemic began to escalate in the U.S., they initiated a side project, infecting lung cells in a dish with sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes covid-19, and studying the results. TenOever posted their preliminary analysis to Twitter on March 14th. Within a week, a program manager at the Defense Department e-mailed to ask about the research. Two weeks later, Defense gave tenOever a $6.3-million grant to find out what the new virus was doing to our immune systems.

Born to Dutch parents, tenOever grew up in rural Ontario. Now forty-three, he approaches his work with an amused, easy confidence. On March 26th, he gathered his team and they discussed their plan. They would take half a dozen viruses—including sars, mers, and the new coronavirus—and induce infections in hosts, starting with cells in a petri dish and graduating to ferrets. They’d study the results to understand what made the new coronavirus unique. Their goal was to have results in three weeks.

The infections took place inside the lab’s Biosafety Level-3 facility, a series of nested rooms in which each is kept at a lower pressure than the one surrounding it, so that air flows inward and up an exhaust chute containing sensitive filters. In the “warm zone,” where there is always the danger of being exposed to a live virus, you must wear a gown, two sets of gloves, two sets of shoe covers, a respirator mask, a face shield, and a bouffant cap. You work with your arms under a hood, protected by an extra set of disposable sleeves. When you’re finished with your experiment, you disinfect this gear and throw it into an autoclave—a kind of kiln—where it cooks for twenty minutes. To return to the “cold zone,” you remove your shoe covers before stepping over a red line. In New York, at the end of March, these precautions had a whiff of the absurd: in a city where around three thousand new coronavirus cases were being diagnosed each day, you were more likely to be exposed to a highly pathogenic virus in your neighborhood.

A Ph.D. student named Daisy Hoagland, who had herself just recovered from a mild case of covid-19, prepared the samples for analysis. Using a shaker machine and test tubes loaded with sand and ceramic pellets, she turned a suspension of ferret lung cells—some from infected animals, and others from members of the control group—into a homogeneous juice, then separated the solution in a centrifuge that generated fifteen thousand g’s. It is painstaking work. (“I listen to a lot of podcasts,” Hoagland said.) Using a pipette, she carefully transferred the topmost layer, a pink liquid, into another tube, which she centrifuged again, until she had a purified sample of RNA. This she handed off to her colleagues Rasmus Møller and Maryline Panis for sequencing. The process takes sixteen hours to complete, and Møller, who during the height of the pandemic lived in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, often biked home at dawn over the Pulaski Bridge.

Whereas the sequencing of DNA defined molecular biology in the early two-thousands, the sequencing of RNA defines it today. If you imagine a cell as a kind of computer, then your DNA contains all the software that it could possibly run. It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.

TenOever’s team quickly discovered that sars-CoV-2 was uncannily good at disrupting cellular programming. A typical virus replaces less than one per cent of the software in the cells it infects. With sars-CoV-2, tenOever said, about sixty per cent of the RNA in an infected cell is of viral origin—“which is the highest I’ve ever seen. Polio comes close.” Among other things, the virus rewires the alarm system that cells use to warn others about infection. Normally, as part of what is known as the “innate” immune response—so called because it is genetically hardwired, and not tailored to a specific pathogen—a cell sends out two kinds of signals. One signal, carried by molecules called interferons, travels to neighboring cells, telling them to build defenses that slow viral spread. Another signal, transmitted through molecules called cytokines, gets a message to the circulatory system’s epithelial lining. The white blood cells summoned by this second signal don’t just eat invaders and infected cells; they also gather up their dismembered protein parts. Elsewhere in the immune system, these fragments are used to create virus-specific antibodies, as part of a sophisticated “adaptive” response that can take six or seven days to develop.

Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.

In late May, tenOever’s team shared its findings in the biweekly journal Cell. In their article, they argued that it’s this imbalanced immune response that gives severe covid-19—which can sometimes cause blood clots, strange swelling in children, and ultra-inflammatory “cytokine storms”—the character of an autoimmune disorder. As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with covid-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.

The gears of the immune response that come apart in covid-19 were discovered slowly, in a blundering way, as though science itself were recapitulating evolution. In a sense, there are several immune systems. In health, they coördinate with and balance each other. But a machine with so many moving parts is, inevitably, vulnerable.

Immunology as we know it began in earnest in 1882, at the Italian seaside. Ilya Metchnikoff, a Russian zoologist who would later help popularize yogurt in Western Europe, had developed an obsession with digestion, and with the process by which one cell eats another. In his memoir, Metchnikoff described the insight that would define his career. His family had gone to the circus, but he’d stayed home, “observing the life in the mobile cells of a transparent starfish larva” through his microscope. Suddenly, a thought occurred to him:

It struck me that similar cells might serve in the defense of the organism against intruders. Feeling that there was in this something of surpassing interest, I felt so excited that I began striding up and down the room and even went to the seashore in order to collect my thoughts. I said to myself that, if my supposition was true, a splinter introduced into the body of a starfish larva . . . should soon be surrounded by mobile cells.

Metchnikoff immediately performed the experiment, using a thorn from a rosebush in his garden. Sure enough, he saw cells surrounding the foreign body.

At the time, leading biologists, including Louis Pasteur, didn’t think of hosts as actively defending themselves against pathogens. If it was often impossible to get diseases twice, then that was because we became inured to them, like alcoholics to liquor, or because some unknown quantity of illness within us was “used up” as each disease ran its course. Immunology had advanced only haltingly since 1730, when the clergyman Thomas Fuller speculated that each person was born with “Ovula, of various distinct Kinds, productive of all the contagious, venomous Fevers we can possibly have.” According to this theory, an infection was actually an impregnation; each “egg” could be fertilized only once.

Using dyes to distinguish cells under a microscope, Metchnikoff helped show that the body actively defended itself. In fact, specialized cells responded to intruders in a process he described as “phagocytosis,” or cell-eating. One kind of cell-eater, called a “neutrophil”—because it can be stained only by pH-neutral dyes—swarmed to the site of the infection first. Larger cells called “macrophages” followed, absorbing both the invaders and the neutrophils into their “amoeboid protoplasm.” Neutrophils and macrophages, Metchnikoff found, lived in tissues throughout the body—a standing army.

Metchnikoff’s findings were promising: he had uncovered what would become known as “cellular” immunity. At the same time, other researchers seemed to be making progress in an entirely different direction. Emil von Behring and Shibasaburō Kitasato, two biologists working in Berlin, injected guinea pigs, goats, and horses with diphtheria and tetanus toxins. They found that, from the victims’ blood, they could derive “antitoxins” capable of conferring protective immunity on other animals. (Von Behring won the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work, in 1901.) It wasn’t clear what these antitoxins, later called “antibodies,” were made of. Still, von Behring and Kitasato had discovered what came to be known as “humoral” immunity, and it had nothing to do with cells eating other cells.

There came to be two camps: the cellularists, aligned with Metchnikoff, and the humoralists, aligned with von Behring. The feud over the origins of immunity was political and cultural as well as scientific. Metchnikoff was working at the Pasteur Institute, in Paris, and his followers, who believed that cell-eating was the basis of immunity, were mostly French. Von Behring’s supporters, who focussed on antibodies, were German. The humoralists won the mainstream in 1897, when a biochemist named Paul Ehrlich published a theory explaining how antibodies might work. In his paper, Ehrlich drew a toxin as an amoeboid blob with small nubs jutting out of it, each differently shaped; the antibodies were like little tadpoles whose mouths sometimes fit exactly onto the nubs. It was these variations in shape, Ehrlich argued, that allowed the antibody system to adapt to new pathogens and cripple them. For the first time, the elusive concept of immunity to specific diseases, so important and yet so poorly understood, felt tangible. “Helped in no small measure by the pictures which Ehrlich published,” Arthur M. Silverstein writes, in “A History of Immunology,” antibodies became “the principal object of interest to almost all immunologists.” Although Ehrlich and Metchnikoff shared a Nobel Prize for their contributions to our understanding of immunity, Ehrlich’s account eclipsed interest in Metchnikoff’s cell-eaters for nearly fifty years.

As biologists grew expert in the distillation of “curative serums,” the great quest in immunology became figuring out how antibodies were made, and how there could be so many kinds. It seemed that a person’s antibody repertoire was limitless: biologists found that the immune system could quickly create antibodies to fit synthetic chemicals never before seen in nature.

For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.)

The vividness of this picture—a weapons factory deep in our bodies, working on the principles of Darwinian selection—further etched the formula “immunity equals antibodies” into the biological imagination. And yet problems remained that only the cellularists could solve. During the Second World War, severe burns treated with donor skin grafts became more common. But the donor skin was often rejected by the body. When scientists examined the site of a rejected graft, they didn’t find antibodies. Instead, they saw swarms of a previously unknown kind of immune cell. Later, the attacking cells were shown to come from the thymus, a small, spongy organ, then thought to be vestigial, that straddled the esophagus. They were named T cells as a result, and became an object of fascination. T cells were incredibly destructive but somehow selective. They knew the difference between self and other.

The balance between protection and self-destruction had always been a theme in immunology. Since Ehrlich’s time, allergies had been seen as a misdirected immune response; in the nineteen-forties, scientists learned that certain precious parts of the body—the eyes, the reproductive organs, the brain—are actually walled off from much of the immune system. (Ehrlich himself discovered the “blood-brain barrier,” a mesh too fine for phagocytes and even tiny antibodies to penetrate.) Now the question of how the body distinguished between foreign and domestic tissue focussed itself on skin grafts and T cells.

Earlier, in mice, researchers had identified genes that affected the success of organ transplants: they called this collection of genes the major histocompatibility complex, or MHC, from the Greek histos, for “tissue.” In the sixties, a human version of the MHC was found. The genes turned out to be a blueprint for a remarkable system designed to distinguish self from non-self. Fragments of proteins built inside our cells are loaded onto tiny molecular rafts, which ferry them to the cell surface for inspection by T cells. Meanwhile, in the thymus, T cells are trained as inspectors: they are presented with rafts containing protein fragments, some of which are natural to the body. Any T cell that ignores its raft, or that goes on the attack in response to self-generated fragments, is destroyed. Competent inspectors are set loose to search for foreign material. They look for cells that display unfamiliar protein parts in their rafts and kill them.

This is how skin grafts are detected and rejected; how incipient cancers are disposed of; how cells that have been co-opted by viruses are rooted out. Together, B cells and T cells allow the human immune system to update itself as fast as our cells can replicate. But their power comes with risks. The immune system’s adaptive weapons aren’t always precise. Allergies affect somewhere between ten and forty per cent of the global population; as many as four per cent of people suffer from debilitating autoimmune diseases. And parasites could find ways to hack the system. “The invention of acquired immunity was like escalating a war with an omnipotent opponent,” Hedrick, who is a T-cell expert, writes. Our new weapons could be turned against us.

By the late eighties, it no longer made sense to contrast cellularists and humoralists. They had both been right; it was just that they saw different parts of the immune system depending on where and when they looked. Phagocytes were often present at the moment of infection. Antibodies in the blood, which could take days to emerge, pursued invaders outside the body’s cells, while T cells used MHC to peer inside those cells, destroying the ones that had been infected by viruses or corrupted by cancer.

Still, mysteries remained. At a 1989 symposium, the immunologist Charles Janeway described what he called the field’s “dirty little secret”: a vaccine containing an antigen designed to elicit antibodies wouldn’t work unless an extra irritant, or “adjuvant”—usually a harmless chemical or bacterium—had been added. Why wasn’t the antigen enough to jump-start the creation of antibodies? “To be quite honest, the answer is not known,” Janeway said. His suspicion, though, was that the process couldn’t begin unless the innate immune system—with its interferons, cytokines, and epithelial cells—had sounded its alarms first. Without marching orders, the standing army remained on call.

An innate system has to anticipate its enemies—a seemingly impossible task, given their stupendous variety. It wasn’t until around 1997 that Janeway began to understand how such anticipation might be accomplished. About a decade earlier, a pair of biologists named Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus had found a gene that affected development in fruit flies. Nüsslein-Volhard had called it Toll, using the German word for “great.” (“Das ist ja toll! ” she exclaimed, upon making the discovery.) Another scientist, Jules A. Hoffmann, learned that the same gene was involved in the fruit-fly immune response; Janeway, with the help of Ruslan Medzhitov, showed that a version of it was also present in humans, and employed in some of the white blood cells that are the innate immune system’s first responders. Through experiments with human cells, they showed that the gene coded for what came to be called a “Toll-like receptor,” which could recognize a particular molecular motif—a building block of bacterial membranes. It was as if evolution had noticed that, while many cells built their houses out of oak or brick, dangerous bacteria always seemed to use pinewood. Why not make a pine detector?

Immunologists soon discovered a second Toll-like receptor, then a third; they started giving them names like TLR4 and TLR5. Whole new families of “pattern-recognition receptors” were found. Each receptor, ingenious in its design, recognized some characteristic microbial or viral signature—a kink in a virus’s RNA, a crenellation in a microbial cell wall.

At long last, a picture of the whole system was coming into focus. It was all interconnected. Innate immunity kicks off the immune response, as cells at the site of infection use their receptors to recognize and combat invaders, and release interferons and cytokines to raise the alarm. Various types of white blood cells respond, having been routed to the infection via the bloodstream. They identify and eat foreign cells, returning the digested bits, via the lymph nodes, to the thymus and the bone marrow, as intel. In the days that follow, antibodies and killer T cells—the weapons of adaptive immunity—are built to spec. Everything plays a double or triple role. Antibodies, for instance, don’t just attach to invaders to block their entry into cells; they also tag them so that they’ll be easier for white blood cells to find and eat. The innate and adaptive arms ramp up each other’s destructive abilities.

Here, again, Hedrick sounds a cautious note. “Such a scheme should worry any systems analyst,” he writes. “A potentially lethal mechanism controlled by positive feedback is a recipe for runaway destruction.”

In late March, a thirty-two-year-old man of Dutch ancestry was admitted to a hospital in the Netherlands. He had difficulty breathing, and a CT scan showed an opaque haze spreading in his lungs. He was given a diagnosis of covid-19, and spent sixteen days in intensive care; four days after he was moved out of the I.C.U., one of his lungs collapsed. He recovered enough to be sent home nine days later. His twenty-nine-year-old brother, who lived in a different house, got sick at roughly the same time, and died. Their parents had moderate symptoms.

When scientists learned that a second pair of young brothers—twenty-one and twenty-three years old, of African ancestry—had also had severe cases of covid-19, they sought to study all four men. By sequencing the genomes of the men and their parents, the researchers hoped to find an anomaly that might explain why some young people, particularly men, had such bad outcomes.

The Dutch team found something that echoed tenOever’s theory about the way in which sars-CoV-2 rewires the cellular alarm system. The four men all had an ineffective variant of TLR7, a Toll-like receptor that recognizes viral RNA. When it works, TLR7 helps produce interferons, which tell nearby cells to increase their antiviral efforts. When it doesn’t, the alarm is silent, and the infection spreads. This genetic abnormality had made the virus’s work dramatically easier. The raiders had come to an unlocked house.

This spring, a clinical trial in the U.K. gave interferon-beta, a synthetic version of the molecule, to a random selection of a hundred and one patients hospitalized with covid-19. The trial found that those who received interferon early in their infection were seventy-nine per cent less likely to become seriously ill. Researchers agree that timing is crucial. In the early days of a coronavirus infection, an interferon boost might help your innate immune system contain the virus. Later, though, it might be harmful; at that point, your adaptive immune system could already be out of control, and you might need an immunosuppressant, such as the steroid dexamethasone. (Last month, President Trump received dexamethasone as part of his treatment for covid-19; he was also given a drug that contained lab-engineered antibodies capable of fighting the virus alongside, or ahead of, his body’s own adaptive response.)

The genes for TLR7 are on the sex-linked X chromosome. That could be a partial explanation for why men suffer from severe covid-19 more often than women. But a TLR7 deficiency is likely to be rare—far rarer than the incidence of severe covid-19 among young people. There are almost certainly other genetic or environmental factors that weaken the interferon response. In mid-September, research published in Science showed that some covid-19 patients with bad outcomes had “autoantibodies” that were attacking their own interferon; another article published in the same issue outlined a genetic flaw related to TLR3, which is also involved in the interferon response. (As many as fourteen per cent of severe covid-19 cases may be attributable to one of these two conditions.) The more researchers study our immune response to the virus, the more complexity they find. According to some theories, how things go for you could depend on how many viral particles you’ve inhaled, and on whether they reach your lungs when you breathe them in. If you’ve had a cold recently, it’s possible that the T cells you developed to fight it could partially fit the coronavirus. Vitamin D levels might matter, because Vitamin D can help control inflammation. Harmful autoantibodies could be responsible for the persistent symptoms suffered by covid-19 “long-haulers.” All of this is still being explored.

The immune system uses feedback to stay balanced, like a gymnast on a beam. If a light breeze blows, the gymnast might sway a bit; sensing this, she’ll shift her weight to return to center. But, given a strong enough push, she’s prone to overshoot with her reaction and, from the other side, overshoot again until she falls. Many factors contribute to the slip—a tight hip flexor, a strained calf, moisture in the air—each magnifying the force of the shove.

Older gymnasts tend to be less agile. The same goes for the immune system, which is why covid-19 disproportionately affects the elderly. The already high case fatality rate for sixty-five- to seventy-four-year-olds more than triples in people seventy-five and older. This age distribution is unique to the coronavirus. Kids are more susceptible to the seasonal flu; children and young adults who had the swine flu in 2009 were hospitalized the most, while the pandemic flu of 1918 hit adults in their twenties and thirties the hardest. (Perhaps their immune systems overreacted, or older people had acquired immunity to similar strains.) “The difference of risk and profile, young versus old—I don’t think anyone has seen an infectious agent behave quite like this before,” Richard Hodes, the director of the National Institute on Aging, part of the National Institutes of Health, said, of the coronavirus.

The lopsidedness of the virus means that vaccines might not be as effective in older patients, even with double the dose, or after repeated inoculations. The beauty of a vaccine is that it relieves us of the task of completely understanding the virus; its package of antigens simply presses the On button of the great machine. Helping older people may require a more fine-tuned approach, tailored to the particular way this virus destabilizes the immune system. What we have learned so far suggests that it isn’t just that being older makes you weak, and that covid-19 preys on this weakness; the disease’s mechanism of action is actually amplified in the aging body.

For this reason, about a month after beginning their coronavirus investigations, the researchers in tenOever’s lab switched from ferrets to hamsters. Ferret immune systems are highly responsive, and the animals were getting better too quickly. “They look a lot more like kids,” tenOever said. By contrast, some hamsters, when infected with the virus, “actually develop respiratory distress. We see a lot more infiltration in their lungs.” In older hamsters, as in older people, innate immunity is less likely to contain the virus and adaptive immunity is slower to turn on and off. The hamster ends up wildly dysregulated. “The difference between these two outcomes really comes down to, as you get older—” TenOever paused. “Getting older sucks. Everything breaks down, even at the simplest of levels.”

As we age, our immune systems stiffen up. “If I had to respond to an insult—bacteria, a virus, a trauma, a lesion—the response is slower and is less strong,” Luigi Ferrucci, who studies the aging process and the immune system at the National Institute on Aging, told me. But, at the same time, the system becomes chronically activated. Cytokines circulate at a constant, high level in the blood, as though the body were at all times responding to some attack. This is true no matter one’s health. “Even in individuals that are extremely healthy, extremely well nourished, have no disease, and they’re taking no drugs, there are some inflammatory markers whose concentration increases with aging,” Ferrucci said. Think of the welt that rises with a bite, then imagine the same process—swelling, redness, stiffness, the accumulation of pus—slowly pervading the body. Your level of inflammation contributes to your “biological” age—which is not always in perfect lockstep with your chronological age—and increases your risk of developing cardiovascular disease, cancer, and dementia; it contributes to what geriatricians call “frailty.”

A phenomenon known as cellular senescence is partly responsible for the body’s increasing inflammation through time. As cells age and divide, small errors accrete in their DNA. These errors could lead to cancer, among other maladies. And so cells police themselves. When they detect decay in their DNA, they stop replicating and begin emitting cytokines, as though asking the immune system to inspect and destroy them. The accumulation of senescent cells may contribute to severe covid-19: according to the current theory, Ferrucci said, they could “expand tremendously the cytokine storm,” in which a runaway feedback loop leads to a sudden spike in inflammation throughout the body.

Adaptive immunity suffers with age, too, but for different reasons. The thymus itself atrophies. (On a restaurant menu, thymuses are called sweetbreads. “Sweetbreads come from young calves,” Hedrick told me. “If you were to try to harvest the thymus from an old bull, you’d get . . . nothing.”) When you’re young, with a short history of exposure to pathogens, your thymus produces new T cells at an extravagant rate. But as you age production slows, and the cells differentiate. Some live indefinitely as “memory T cells,” carrying with them a record of their defeated foes.

Certain viruses use up more T-cell memory than others. Around twenty per cent of an older adult’s T-cell repertoire is devoted to fighting a single virus: human cytomegalovirus (HCMV), a strain of herpes that usually has no symptoms. It would be ironic if, in some small way, HCMV makes it harder to survive covid-19. Unlike sars-CoV-2, which spreads without hiding and so causes extensive damage, HCMV is a master of disguise. When infecting a cell, the virus turns off that cell’s MHC system. No cellular raft delivers evidence of the infection to the surface. Still, this isn’t enough to avoid detection. Our immune system has invented a weapon, the “natural killer” cell, that looks specifically for cells without functioning MHC systems. And so HCMV evolved to create a decoy MHC raft, designed to fool the natural killers.

As a parasite, HCMV is almost perfectly adapted to its host; able to spread without attracting attention, it does nothing but consume resources. The thymus is one place where such cleverness leaves its trace. The practice of science is another. Many of the workhorse tools employed by molecular biologists—including the enzymes used by tenOever’s team to sequence RNA, and the crispr gene-editing system, perhaps the most important scientific discovery of our time—were once either weapons or defenses in the microbial arms race. It’s there, at the crucible of life and death, that biological innovation happens fastest, leaving us with technology for mounting a new kind of defense.

The last time I spoke to tenOever, in late July, his team had begun a search for treatments. In the BSL-3 lab, Møller was infecting hamsters; the plan was to give the animals candidate drugs, sequencing their RNA through the entire process of infection and treatment. By examining patterns in the data, the team could find out which drugs were better at undoing the coronavirus’s reprogramming. TenOever made use of a handy way of visualizing what was happening in the cells. He could turn the genetic analysis into an inkblot-like map, showing which parts of its genome each cell was activating. “You can build a landscape, if you will,” tenOever said. If the coronavirus shifted the landscape to the northeast, they would look for drugs that pulled it southwest. They were testing four good candidates a week like this.

It was an impressionistic way to look at an immune system. But the system was not designed to be legible; it was, of course, not designed at all. For years, Robert Jack, one of the authors of “Evolutionary Concepts in Immunology,” taught a class on immunology to students just beginning their Ph.D.s. Bright and enthusiastic, the students struggled to untangle the immune system’s feedback loops. Jack told me, “We tend to look at these systems and say, ‘Wow, who would have thought of that? That’s incredible. That’s so fantastic. It does this incredibly complicated job, and it does it really well!’ ” He took a breath, then continued. “Whereas, in reality, the immune system has simply, in the face of pathogen attack, staggered from one emergency to the next. It just uses whatever is lying around. It is hoping against all possibilities to try to survive a little bit longer. Whatever crazy solution it comes up with—so long as it works, it will be accepted.” The result is a system of great flexibility and power, which, pushed the right way, can be made to collapse upon itself. ♦

#covid19 #newyorker #tldr #health

[ucsdhealthsciences]

Scientist and Neonatologist Sandra Leibel Aims to Take Science from the Bench to the Baby

Nearly 10 percent of babies in America are born preterm — that is, born before the 37th week of pregnancy. Being born too early can lead to a whole host of health problems, both immediately after birth and throughout the lifespan, including cerebral palsy and difficulty seeing and hearing. But one of the greatest challenges for premature infants is difficulty breathing and lifelong lung disease — and that’s what Sandra Leibel, MD, hopes to fix.

As a neonatologist at Rady Children’s Hospital - San Diego and UC San Diego Health, Leibel works with preterm infants in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), providing the extensive medical care required to support these newborns through their first weeks and months of life. It was during her medical training that she became particularly focused on the importance of providing respiratory support to sick infants during their treatment. As a fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, she had the opportunity to care for infants who came from all across the country to access their specialty lung transplant center.

“That’s who I took care of — babies waiting for a lung transplant,” she said. “Some were successful, and some weren’t.”

Most of these infants required lung transplants due to surfactant protein deficiencies. Surfactant is a critical component of normal lung function; it coats the lung tissues and makes it possible for the air sacs in the lungs, called alveoli, to expand during breathing. Without surfactant, the alveoli stick together and collapse, making it difficult or impossible to breathe. In normal, healthy lungs, surfactant is made up of lipids (fatty acids) and proteins. But sometimes genetic mutations prevent a specific protein from being made, making it impossible for affected newborns to breathe. In preterm infants, because their lungs aren’t fully developed, their bodies don’t produce enough surfactant to support normal lung function. This often requires that these newborns be intubated, putting them at risk of lifelong lung disease.

Just being a doctor wasn’t enough. Leibel got tired of losing so many patients, and decided she needed to get involved in the research to support her patient’s care.

“They’re in the NICU for months, so I’d get to know the families and babies super well, but they’re always on machines. Just seeing that, I thought, ‘I need this disease to go away – I need a better option than a lung transplant.’ That’s what prompted me to go in a lung lab at Washington University.”

Her desire to better understand the underlying biology of lung development and disease led Leibel to study lungs in a dish. In particular, her research is focused on using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), derived from human patient skin cells, which can be differentiated into cells that closely resemble lung cells using a cocktail of molecules to guide their development.

Most recently, Leibel and a team of researchers at UC San Diego School of Medicine, the Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine, and the University of Toronto published a paper demonstrating how a new technique for creating lung organoids — essentially like tiny model lungs in a dish — could change how researchers approach many questions about lung development and disease.

This new approach is innovative because the lung organoids it produces include several different kinds of lung cells that are important for development. That allows researchers to better study how these cells develop in sync and affect each other’s function. Most other methods for creating lung organoids focus on isolating specific lung cell subtypes, and throwing away the other “junk.” That can make it hard to figure out how the relationships between different cell types affect development.

Lung organoids in a dish can help researchers better understand how the lungs form.

With this improved technique, Leibel genetically modeled a surfactant protein disorder in these lung organoids, and attempted to treat it using a targeted lentiviral approach to fix the disease-causing genetic mutation.

What she found was something surprising: Even though she was able to fix the genetic mutation very early on in the stem cell stages, that difference wasn’t reflected by a functional change in protein levels until the cells had fully developed into lung organoids.

This could have big implications for using stem cell therapies to treat lung conditions, because it could mean that these cells would have to be carefully directed to become exactly the type of cells needed to produce the necessary proteins; it wouldn’t be enough to just implant the stem cells and let them develop on their own.  

“Everyone right now is looking to see how they can actually transplant and engraft the cells in the lungs,” said Leibel. “But while other kinds of transplants, like bone marrow transplants, can be done by wiping out the existing bone marrow and replacing it with donor cells, you can’t really just get rid of all the lung cells to make room for the stem cells because you wouldn’t be able to breathe and possibly die.”

This is why Leibel is so dedicated to developing better models for studying lungs and for developing new treatments for diseases like surfactant protein deficiency. Premature infants don’t have a genetic mutation that causes this deficiency, their lungs just haven’t developed enough to produce enough surfactant. She’s interested in finding out whether normal developing lungs make a metabolite or protein that can produce mature surfactant. Such a protein could be given to preterm babies as a medication, making it easier for them to breathe and preventing intubation. Ultimately, finding a drug or drug target that can help support lung function in these very vulnerable infants during those early critical weeks will save lives — and would be more straightforward than transplanting stem cells.

This translational work is central to Leibel’s goals as a doctor. As a resident, she “was always frustrated by how little evidence based therapies were available. Sometimes during clinical rounds we would ask ‘why are we doing this?’ And the answer would be, ‘that’s how it’s always been done.’ I’ve always hated that answer. I tell my fellows now, ‘I never want to hear that from you.’ I either want clinical evidence or basic science evidence. And if there isn’t any, it would make a great project!”

Because newborn preterm infants are fragile, it’s often difficult to convince protective parents to enroll them in clinical trials, so clinical research is slow to progress compared to adult medicine. This means that many doctors and scientists are relying on the basic science being done in animal models and human tissue and stem cells to better understand and treat these conditions. And that’s why Leibel is so dedicated to her research, as well as to her patients — she wants to make sure that not only do these preterm infants not struggle with lung disease in the NICU, but that they can go on to lead full, healthy lives once they leave.

— Alison Caldwell, PhD, Bigelow Science Communication Fellow

#science #medicine #organoids #premies #lungs #pulmonology #pediatrics #lung organoids #nicu #surfacant #ucsd #uc san diego

[homesafterthemountain]

i accidentally wrote the first chapter of a slavetale fanfic

Chapter 1 - 

You looked over the paper, the numbers, again. Part of you wished they didn’t match up perfectly, but you knew this was for the best. You had to do this.

“Are you sure?” you asked for the millionth time.

His aged, slightly rasping voice came from his place in the next room. “Course i am girlie. You can do this, i know it. And if you don’t… who will?”

You took a deep breath, trying to quell your fears. “I know… i know, i just… i’m scared.”

His clawed hands wrapped around your own soft and fleshy ones. It wasn’t until then you felt how they had been quivering. “I know. We all are. Let’s do it not in spite of our fear, but because of it.”

You gave his hands one last squeeze, a wobbly smile, and let go. 

The world has never been a very forgiving place. The joys and sorrows were infinite, but never equal. You knew this. You thought everyone did. But then, if you let yourself wallow in the bad times, you might not notice the good. So you pushed your fear to the back of your mind as you got in your car and plugged the coordinates. You let the act of driving distract you from your actual destination, keeping your eyes on the road.

All around you, the world existed. Your little neighborhood, slightly run down and next to a nearly deforested forest, melted away. The gas station, the weird ditch with the car for sale by the side of the road, and the crooked stop sign flashed by in your peripheral vision before your turned onto the highway. No music played in your speakers, not today. There was only the sound of your wheels on the road and the whoosh of passing cars. Billboards advertised which exits you could take for wineries and pubs, advertising the pleasures of losing yourself, but those were not the exits that you would take. You passed them by with only a glance, until you saw the one you were looking for. A woman with a gorgeous dress and a perfect smile gazed down at you from her sign. In one hand was a platter upon which a radish with a face smiled happily, and under her other arm was what looked like a grinning armless lizard child in a specially made tux. Both wore collars. Bright purple cursive letters proclaimed:

“Come find your new helper and companion! Monster pet store, exit 295!”

You grimaced. You wished you could tear holes in those perfect teeth. You took the exit.

The road around you slowly populated with capitalism. Fast food joints were first, quickly followed by small stores that gave way to name brand shops and megamarts as you continued further in downtown. Your GPS guided you as your fear came swimming back in the city traffic. Your hands nervously tugged at the hem of your nicest dress. You would look like a fool among the nicely dressed customers. You forced your hand back onto the wheel, but at the next section of traffic your hands now went to your ears. Your cheap earrings couldn’t pass for real gold. They would see right through you, and kick you out or arrest you. No. these fears were exaggerated and unfounded. You knew that. Rationally. But the human mind is not always rational. You parked in a parking deck a ways from the store; best that your clean but not shining car didn’t lead them to suspicion. You looked at the sunglasses, and decided they were too much. You stepped out of the car and made your way down the sidewalk in heels that weren’t quite broken in. as you neared your destination, your purposeful steps slowed. Why were you even doing this? There was no point. It wouldn’t make a difference, and you would inevitably be caught. There was no way they wouldn’t catch you. You paused a moment, leaning against the brick wall of the fifth antique store you’d passed. You needed to b=do this. Not in spite of your fear, but because of it. Because these were the fears they faced every day, and you could do something about it. You kept yourself from hyperventilating there on the sidewalk. You took a deep breath and used your frightened adrenaline to forge a new path. Your face turned stony, your gaze uncaring, crafting the persona you had planned for this deed. You were afraid. And your fear would be your greatest weapon. You would make it so. 

Five minutes later you stepped into the “pet” store.

It was an upper-class establishment, a few registers near the front and rows upon rows of bright and glistening toys and supplies for the upkeep of your monster. You saw other folk, some dressed much more nicely than you but some thankfully in rather normal clothes, browsing the aisles. You looked through the items as you passed to the back. There were chew toys, puzzle books, even dolls and board games. It was an uncomfortable mix of pet and childrens toys. As you neared the back, you saw the ornate purple double doors, above which a sign read:

“Meet the Monsters!”

It was just so… you shook your head and approached the doors. At the last minute you noticed the booth just beside the entrance and walked over to the representative present there. They wore some kind of tacky purple safari uniform, and smiled brightly at you.

“Hello ma’am! Here to meet the monsters?” she perked up at your nod and moved to unlock the doors. “Great! We actually got a few new ones last week, so if you’ve been here before there are more options than ever!”

You hummed in appreciation as the doors swung open, bringing the smell of disinfectant and flowers. Not exactly what you had been expecting. You had pictured more of a dungeon, rather than the clean glass cages that held all manner of monsters. Most rooms had some sort of bed/bench and a single blanket. Some of the rooms held several smaller monsters, but most held single, disturbingly humanoid occupants. You looked around, but couldn’t find the blue fish woman your friend had described. You both knew it had been a long shot, but it was still a bit disappointing.

“The bears are new, but they scored very high on human compatibility!” the guide explained behind you. “And if you’re a fan of cold, the elves exude cold!”

You looked to the small creatures she indicated, that looked almost like small snowmen with intricate hats of ice. Near them was a huge bear who waved at you with a gentle smile. You hesitantly waved back.

“They’ve all been tested, and their scores are listed along with their descriptions and upkeep sheets on the units,”  the guide continued. “The vegetoids are popular, and also pretty cheap. Some of them require cool rooms to sleep in…”

She kept going on as you walked around the cages, trying to read the description sheets without making eye contact with the prisoners. It felt like the first one who met your gaze, you wouldn’t be able to not take them home from this sick dehumanizing place. But you had to remember your mission. You had to figure out who needed the most help, and bring them to safety. But how were you supposed to tell? You knew you’d have to look at the monsters eventually. But you reached one of the cages in the back that was empty. There was a care sheet, stating a slightly low score on human compatibility, but next to no upkeep.

“Who’s this?” you asked.

The guide bounded up to you and looked at the sheet. “Oh! That’s one of our new ones. Just passed all his tests, but he’s a little under the weather, so we’re keeping him in the back for treatment.”

“Can i see him?” you asked quickly.

The guide balked. “Well, no. sorry, but we’re not supposed to let anyone in the back.”

“Can you bring him out here then?” you tried to reign in your eagerness. Here was someone you could help!

“Well…”

“Just think. I might want to take a sick monster off your hands, and then i’m buying a monster and the medicine. Isn’t that better than the store paying for it?” you surprised yourself with the confidence in your voice, and the guide seemed to be thinking it over.

“Let me go asked my manager,” they decided, and left the room. 

You were alone with all the monsters, and you could feel them staring at you. Had they been staring at you before? If not, why now? Were you doing something wrong? Was it because the guide had left? Was it safe to talk here? You looked around and easily spotted several cameras. Did they have microphones? Probably, in such a fancy place. You turned back to look at the monsters this time, really look. Most had dropped whatever smiles they had before, and were just staring. But a few, especially a child-sized mouse in the back, were outright glaring at you. You wanted to say something. To say you were here to help. That you didn’t want to hurt anyone, let alone own them. But you couldn’t. It wasn’t safe.

Finally, the guide returned. “The manager says i can bring him into the room for your to look at,” the guide replied, their cheery tune now underlaid with apprehension. “We’ll be just a moment!” you hastily turned away from the monsters, who had now gone back to acting complacent. Now you faced the glass, waiting to see what- who they would bring. You didn’t have long to wait before a skeleton appeared. Like most of the other humanoids, he wore khakis, a polo shirt with the store logo on it, and the metal collar. But he didn’t even try to keep up the friendly routine. The guide led him to the pallet in the little glass room, and the creature willingly sat down. Empty sockets stared down at the floor, gray bones held close together as if to take up as little space as possible. It made it hard to tell their actual size. The guide then closed the back door of the cell and came back into the room with you. “So like i said, he isn’t in the best shape-”

“I’ll take him.”

“Oh!” there was a pause while you were both silent. “Then, um, i’ll go get the paperwork! Think of a good name for him! Or her, it’s a skeleton, so don’t feel restricted!”

As they left, your mind involuntarily went back to biology class, where the teacher taught you one of the easiest ways to tell if a skeleton had been male or female was to see if your fist would fit through the hole in the pelvis. If it did, that meant they were birthing hips,and a female. You shook your head. This wasn’t a pile of human remains. You could ask their preferred pronouns later. The guide came back with the paperwork and a care package. You set up a payment plan, where you would fully pay the cost in a few months. It turned out that skeletons were rare, and so more expensive than you had been expecting. But you would do it. They recommended some toys that you politely refused. They offered a variety of collars, but you said you preferred the standard. You would have preferred cutting the damn things open, but that wasn’t exactly an option.

Finally, you had to decide on a name. “Um,” you asked hesitantly, “do I have to choose now?”

“Well, you can always change it later, but we need something for our records.”

You ended up deciding on the name ‘Bonesly’. It was stupid, but you honestly could not think of anything else. With the formalities finally done, you waited in the lobby for them to bring you your new monster.

#slavetale #sneak peak #? #maybe #idk man i wanna write 752 stories but the itch..... #i got plans.... #or had them at least lol

[septembercfawkes]

How to Structure Satisfying Scenes

Last week I was going through some old scenes and reading through them rather quickly but still tweaking them here and there to be more effective. While some I thought were good, they didn't have the same zing to them, and I realized it was because they didn't fully follow a satisfying structure.

You can find a lot of articles about structuring scenes, and I won't have room to cover everything here (though maybe over time I can get them all on my site), but I wanted to start with same basics that can be helpful to everyone.

When we talk about overall story structure and strip everything away to the bare, bare bones, it should follow Freytag's Pyramid.

This was posted online a while ago, and I saw someone commenting and laughing how it was out of date and that for the modern audience, Freytag's Pyramid isn't going to work. This is like saying that because we now have hip-hop, dance doesn't work. But hip-hop is dance. All satisfying story structures embody Freytag's Pyramid even if they add more elements. 7-Point Plot Structure, the Hero's Journey, whatever. All of them follow Freytag's Pyramid because it's the most basic unit of story structure. Just as hip-hop adds more specificity, but is still dance.

And when you start working with scenes, you'll notice that most successful scenes also follow this structure, on a small scale. Like everything, there are exceptions. But as you actually genuinely work at writing a satisfying novel, you may realize that we use this simple structure everywhere--plotting, character arcs, dialogue exchanges, sometimes even within a paragraph. Never underestimate the power of the basics. As Leonardo da Vinci once stated, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

With that in mind, let's talk about how satisfying scene structure actually mimics overall story structure, which may include elements that are often added to Freytag's Pyramid.

Preliminary

Before worrying about scene structure, it's helpful to identify a few key elements of the scene.

Purpose - What is the purpose of the scene? It should be moving the story forward in some way. This might be obvious, like having the protagonist confront the antagonist, but other times it might be a little less obvious, like introducing the audience to a rule in a magic system, revealing a character trait, or stating a theme. But the point is that the scene has a purpose and it's not superfluous. Ask yourself, what is the audience getting out of this scene?

Goal - The main character (of the scene) should have a goal of some kind, something he or she wants. As a beginning writer, it can be easy to want to skimp out on this, but it's very effective in writing a good scene and practically a necessity. It may be something immediately obvious and direct, like defeating the antagonist. Other times it might be more personal or even indirect, like Bilbo Baggins wanting to be left alone in his Hobbit hole--that may not be the main purpose of the scene, but it's there. This is why "purpose" and "goal" are two different categories.

Let me give you another example. The opening of Harry Potter has the purpose of teasing the audience about the Wizarding World and Harry himself from a Muggle perspective. But the viewpoint character, Vernon Dursley has the goal of having a normal day via dismissing all of the peculiar things happening around him

Conflict - What kind of conflicts or potential conflicts (a.k.a. tension) will be present in this scene? Is it the physical wrestle between the protagonist and antagonist? Is it Vernon Dursley being bombarded time and time again with peculiar happenings and people? And him being afraid to call his wife and ask about the Potters? Is it Bilbo having to deal with people wanting to socialize?

Sometimes, all these things line up in scenes, especially toward the end of the novel.

For example,

Purpose: Protagonist defeats antagonist in a sword fight

Goal: Protagonist wants to defeat antagonist in a sword fight.

Conflict: Protagonist and antagonist want to defeat each other in a sword fight

Seems simple right?

But in other scenes, it might be more indirect or sometimes not seem to match at all.

Here is one from a scene in the first Fantastic Beasts movie.

Purpose: Introduce the audience to Newt's magical case and all the beasts/elements inside, while appealing to wonder.

Goal: While Newt does heal Jacob and care for his animals, his main goal is to see which animals are missing, so he can figure out how to find them (notice that healing Jacob allows him to have Jacob tell him about places in New York and that feeding the animals allows him to see who is missing.)

Conflicts: I'm going to argue that the main conflicts center on Jacob being a Muggle--first Newt has to figure out how to heal him when Muggle biology is a little different, then Jacob doesn't know how to interact with the creatures, and finally, he almost messes with the Obscurus and Newt has to stop him.

Ideally, most scenes have more than one purpose, more than one goal, and more than one conflict. In fact, it's practically a necessity.

So in my last example, another purpose of the scene is to foreshadow and introduce the Obscurus. Newt also reveals his goal to release the Thunderbird. And he doesn't want Jacob to be obliviated. He touches on other conflicts--Frank being trafficked, the Niffler always getting out, the last breeding pair of Graphorns. There are mini-goals that I already mentioned, healing Jacob and feeding the animals. And mini-conflicts, an Occamy tries to bite Jacob, and Pickett won't get off Newt's hand.

You'll notice that even if the main purpose, goal, and conflict don't line up directly, they will naturally overlap during the scene itself in some way because they are elements that have to be present and therefore have to be interwoven to be satisfying. In order to fulfill the purpose of the last example, Newt has to go in his case, which means he needs to have a need/goal for doing that, and to show off the animals in interesting ways, there needs to be conflict for balance.

So they overlap, but they aren't directly the same thing, unlike, say the final sword fight between hero and villain.

And this is where I think some beginning writers have a problem--they don't have to all be the same thing. And in many stories, in the beginning scenes, they won't be.

Structure

Remember Freytag's Pyramid? Great. Most satisfying scenes follow that same structure, but on a smaller scale. I don't care if your scene is about a character falling in love with another, a conversation about what the antagonist is up to, or a train ride to school. If it's going to be effective, it most likely needs the setup, rising action, and climax. I should have mentioned above that some say the denouement (falling action) is optional--I strongly argue that in stories, they should almost always be included for validation, but in scenes, I think that can vary a little more, somewhat.

I'm going to add one more element. The hook. And instead of "exposition," I'm going to call it "setup." So here are the basic parts of a satisfying scene.

Hook - Grab the audience's attention in some way. This doesn't need to be clickbait, people. Hooks work on promises--they give the audience something to anticipate. Often this is something to hope for or to dread. But sometimes it's just the promise of more information--the hook communicates to the audience that they need(want) more information.

In my Fantastic Beasts example, I'm going to argue the hook is Newt and then Jacob disappearing magically into the suitcase. Since we know he keeps creatures in that case, we anticipate seeing them.

Setup - Author David Farland calls this part "grounding." We need to ground the audience. Where are we? When are we? And who is present? Give us an idea. How much you need of this may depend on the prior scene(s). In the very first scene of a book, we usually need more grounding (and setup in the large-scale sense, which is one reason why openings are so hard).

The camera shows Newt in the case in the first room with Jacob. Great, they both turned up in the same place. Then later we follow them out and get a glimpse of this case having animal habitats.

Rising Action - Once readers are invested and know where we are, it's time to build rising action. What it is depends on the preliminary elements: the purpose, goal, and conflicts.

If the main purpose is for one character to fall for another, we might cook up sexual tension. If the purpose is to figure out who the murderer is via a conversation between two heroes, the heroes may start talking about conflicts and clues, stakes and goals, and suspects. In Newt's suitcase, the rising action is checking the animals--which appeals to the purpose and goal and incorporates conflict.

Like the middle of a story, the rising action of the scene escalates. This is why it's called rising action. This is what happens in our Newt example. Newt doesn't have too much trouble curing Jacob, then he goes to the Thunderbird, where he has to he warn Jacob that Frank doesn't like strangers. When he tries to let go of Pickett, it's more difficult than the other two things. He shows Jacob the Occamies, but one nearly bites off Jacob's finger. Eventually this escalates to Newt having to stop the most dangerous outcome of all, Jacob messing with the Obscurus.

Alternative to conflicts and tension, you can see the purpose of the scene itself escalate. First we briefly glimpse the Swooping Evil, then interact with Frank, then visit three Graphorns, then four bowtruckles, four Occamies (would be five, but one is missing, but Jacob and Newt both hold one), then a montage of a whole bunch of different animals with Newt and Jacob interacting with them.

(See what I mean about Freytag's Pyramid being used everywhere?)

Climax - This is the high point, where the purpose, conflict, and/or goal reach their max for the scene. This is the moment the character falls in love in our prior example. This is the line in the conversation where the heroes realize which of the suspects is the murderer. For Newt, I actually included the climaxes in the last example to illustrate. For the conflict, the climax is when Jacob is near the Obscurus. For the purpose, the climax is when we get that montage of loads of fantastic beasts. What about the goal? It's when Newt finishes counting the beasts at the Erumpent pen. You'll notice that this climax is much more subtle. That's okay. In some scenes the character's goal may not even climax, because it changes or remains unfulfilled or gets obstructed. You don't need everything to climax, but there should usually be some form of climax.

Denouement (Falling Action) - On occasions, some scenes will not have a denouement. But I think we sometimes misunderstand falling actions. They don't necessarily tie everything up if there is more to the story. This is the same thing with series books. The denouement may tie up the main elements of the novel, but it also keeps us looking forward to what happens next, in other words, it has a promise, a.k.a. hook, that gets us to anticipate, usually through hope or dread, what might come next.

In my hook section, I said the hook for Newt was him going into his case. Some of you might have realized that was actually the end (denouement) of the prior scene. It doesn't have to be structured like that. You can have hooks at both the end of one scene and the beginning of another--in fact, you usually should. But my point is that there should usually be some kind of hook to get us to want to keep reading.

Often naturally, in a scene, the denouement will get us to look ahead. Great, our heroine fell in love--but guess what? We know from the setup that this is a forbidden love, so now what's she gonna do? Our heroes figured out who the murderer is, great, so now how are they going to catch him? Newt knows which creatures are missing, so now how is he going to recover those?

In the overall story, the denouement may validate what happened to the reader. This may or may not happen in a scene. In our love example, we may have a few lines that validate that yes, our heroine did just fall for that guy. Or yes, that suspect has to be the murderer, because look at how this now all fits (and the heroes will be talking about that).

The falling action finishes the scene. In some cases, it may be cut to end on a cliffhanger. Just don't forget that just because you have a denouement doesn't mean you can't have the audience anticipating what happens next. Some beginning writers think you can only achieve that by axing the falling action. If you do that every time, it can get annoying, and make the story feel "gap"-ish as you never "finish" one scene before starting another.

Note - Scenes are much briefer than an overall story. Depending on the scene, these may take paragraphs or they may be as short as half a sentence. For example, you may have the hook and the setup in the same sentence. But whatever the case, they typically follow the same proportions. The rising action takes up the bulk of the scene, while the hook will be the shortest.

There are really so many ways to talk about how a scene works and other approaches, but this is a good one to start on. If any of this is paralyzing to you, relax. If you are an outliner, you can use this to help you outline scenes. If you are a discovery writer, go ahead and discover the scene, then if you are stuck or feel like it's lacking, go through these like checkpoints. This is meant to work for you, not for you to work for it.

I want to go on, but this post is getting rather long, so next week I'll be back to talk about how the character moves psychologically through the scene.

Giveaway - I'm giving away a first chapter edit for our advent calendar for writers! The great thing is, if you are already subscribed to my blog or follow me on social media, all you need to do is click a couple of times to enter. You can enter here.

Check out all the other gifts so far here. You can still enter to win them, too!

#Writing Tips #writing tips and tricks #writeblr #fantastic beasts #fantastic beasts and where to find them #writing help #writing lesson #writing advice #writing reference #writing helps #writing tip #scene #scene structure

[not-freyja]

2017 T’hy’la Fics of the Year

 The top 20 kirk/spock fics on ao3, according to Kudos (complete only):

1. a sequence that you never learned by annataylor

"'Spock,' Jim breathes out, completely overwhelmed by the gesture—not quite believing that Spock knows him so well, that's he's already started researching, that he trusts Jim with a member of his own endangered species."

When Jim gets it in his head to adopt an eight year old Vulcan, Spock presents a logical solution to the issue of Jim's humanity: marriage to a Vulcan citizen.

2. Magpie by waldorph

Spock met Jim when he was 7 and Jim was 6. It has since been generally agreed that this was a mistake (or: the one where they grow up together and things are simultaneously better and worse for it).

3. The Genetic Soap Opera (or, One of the Less Dignified Royal Weddings) by waketosleep

Turns out Jim Kirk's more than meets the eye, genetically speaking. There are a lot of consequences, mostly for Spock and his sanity.

4. Treasures by yeaka

Sometimes the other Vulcans wonder how Spock managed to obtain such an exotic bondmate, and sometimes Spock wonders himself.

5. So Wise We Grow  by Deastar

"Commander Spock, we have located your son," the Vulcan lady on the screen says, which would be great, except Jim can tell by the look on Spock's face that he's never heard of this kid before in his life. "If it is expedient, the child will be sent to join you on the Enterprise within the week."

6. Objective Data by walkandtalk

A young Vulcan decides to find a mate for his guardian, Spock. After careful calculations, Cadet Kirk is obviously the superior choice.

7. Helloooo, Nurse! by lalazee

Jim Kirk is the only male nurse on the Enterprise. He’s also the only one with any experience with Vulcan biology. You can guess who he’s been assigned to.

8. Antigravity by sinestrated

Five times Spock was surprised by the brilliance of Kirk's mind, and one time he totally saw it coming.

9. Atlas by distractedKat

Between what was and what will be stands James Tiberius Kirk, in all his fractured patchwork glory. Because saving the Federation was only the beginning.

10. master of a nothing place by strzyga

spock is stripped of his logic on an away mission gone bad and turns feral, incredibly violent and utterly brutal. when he comes across jim, though, he is possessive, protective, and even affectionate.

11. Entering Orbit by museaway

Jim escapes to Iowa to avoid the media frenzy following the Narada incident, but a late-night miscommunication results in Spock turning up on his front porch.

12. Bluebird by waldorph

“Jim Kirk.” Jim whipped around so fast most of his drink ended up on Spock, who was reaching for the phaser that wasn’t there. The Enterprise crew was parting like the biblical seas before Moses, and Jim could feel the temperature dropping. “Mom,” Jim croaked.

13.  Please don’t touch the Vulcans by museaway

The "yes" is out of Jim's mouth before he can think about it. 

14. Once Upon A TIme (A Fairytale Love Story) by littlebirdtold

In a universe with no Federation, where First Contact never happened, Jim Kirk is your average popular guy. On Christmas Eve, thanks to a series of strange events, Jim finds himself in a parallel universe where the Milky Way is under the control of an alien race and ends up as a servant in the residence of the Royal House of Vulcan. As he starts adapting to his new life, Jim's curiosity fucks everything up—but hey, Vulcans shouldn't have told him that he isn't allowed to enter this wing of the palace; Jim has never been good at following rules.

Or,

This is the story of how Jim Kirk became a Princess ("Prince Consort, Bones!") of the United Planets of Vulcan Kingdom.

15. Signed, Sealed, Delivered (I’m Yours) by kianspo

In which Spock contemplates the laws of attraction and realizes what a slippery slope that is only after he has already fallen. There's no help for him now.

16. Hi, You Were My Husband in Another Life, Professor by littlebirdtold

Um, hi. I'm Jim. Jim Kirk. You don't know me, but I know you. Well, sort of. It's a long story. All of this started when I… Actually, no, it started when my mom got it into her head that… well, it's kind of complicated. Long story short, I accidentally ended up in another universe and... Look, I know it sounds crazy, but in that universe, we—the other me and you—are married and you're the crown prince of Vulcan Kingdom. It does sound crazy, I know. Fuck, I don't even know why I'm doing this. I don't really know you—hell, I'm not even sure I want to know you. It's not like I think you and me… I'm just curious, I guess. You'll probably ignore me anyway; I know I would if I were a Vulcan and got a call like that from some stranger. Fuck it, it was a stupid idea. Bye, Spock.

[18-year-old Jim ends up in Once Upon a Time's universe. When he gets back, Jim's curiosity gets the better of him. And then things become complicated. Academy AU.]

17. Misscommunication by sinestrated

Jim's brain gets scrambled during an away mission gone wrong, with interesting results.

18. How We Are (but not how we’re going to be) by alpha_hydra

Even when they hate each other, they're still sort of falling in love.

19. Ni’Var by WerewolvesAreReal

Humans have daemons. Vulcans have katras. Spock, born of both, has neither. Which he's fine with. Really. Meanwhile, James Kirk is a little curious about this whole daemon business, because how the hell can he have two souls - ?

20. Jealous Orbits by dreamlittleyo

In which Kirk and Spock have had sex half a dozen times, but this time it counts.

#fic rec #top 20 #spirk #t'hy'la #space husbands

[sterekloving]

If you’re new to the fandom or just want something new to read or even reread an old classic, here’s the most popular and iconic fics in the fandom!

(Those with a * are my all time favourites - if you want me to do a personal fave ficrec, let me know!)

Alpha Spikes* -  thestarbeast - 70k+ - Explicit

AU. Alphas are like royalty and are offered their choice of any age eighteen-and-up virgin Omega for each heat season, as a 'thank-you' for all they've done throughout the year. Derek is an Alpha and...yeah, Stiles. Stiles is an Omega. And still a virgin. In every way. And he's just turned eighteen. This...is not his day.

Bones Straining Under the Weight* -  weathervaanes - 15k - Explicit

One of Stiles' favorite things about life is Derek Hale's food blog. He never expects to meet the man in person.

“Derek,” he says again, and the name feels very strange on his tongue.

“You don’t mean Derek Hale.”

His professor’s eyebrows reach up, eyes widening. “You read his blog?”

"Uh. Worship. Would be a better more descriptive word. That is Derek Hale?"

Jimmy chuckles. "Good-looking guy, huh?"

"You mean to tell me the Food Network hasn't snatched him up to dethrone everyone else from daytime TV."

Jimmy smiles a small private smile. "I don't think TV is his medium."

Stiles raises an eyebrow. "Shy?"

The man laughs heartily at that. "No, I wouldn't say that. He just has particular forms of expression, like eyebrows and chili powder."

By Any Other Name -  entanglednow - 33k - Explicit

He doesn't know his name, he doesn't know who he is, and neither does the werewolf he's on the run with. But he's pretty sure they hunt monsters, because they seem to be really good at it.

Can’t Be Hateful, Gotta Be Grateful -  HalfFizzbin - 6k - Teen

"Be cool, Dad, we've decided to con Grandma." (Or, the one where the Stilinski men drag Derek to Thanksgiving dinner at Grandma's and she gets the right wrong idea.)

Cornerstone* -  Vendelin - 83k - Explicit

Suffering from PTSD, ex-Marine Derek Hale moves back to Beacon Hills to open a bookshop and find a calmer life. That’s where he meets Stiles, completely by accident. Stiles is talkative, charming and curious. Somehow, despite the fact that he’s blind, he’s able to read Derek like no one else.

Cupboard Love -  mklutz - 30k+ - General

He’s carefully balancing the sandwiches and the two biggest tupperware containers he could find that both had functioning lids when the front door opens and he almost drops everything right there in front of the stupid fountain. If that’s Derek Hale, he’s definitely not a mountain man.

Dating Backwards* - RemainNameless - 85k - Explicit

Pornstars Derek and Stiles work for the same company. Derek only shoots with werewolves and Stiles only shoots with humans. That's not going to change after they meet. It's really not. (It might.)

DILF* -  twentysomething - 30k+ - Explicit

"Today is Scott's first day of kindergarten and Derek is terrified."

Divided We Stand* -  KouriArashi - 100k+ - Mature

Derek is being pressured by his family to pick a mate, and somehow stumbles into a choice that they didn't expect and aren't sure they approve of....

Don’t Savage The Messenger* -  exclamation - 172k - Explicit

There is an uneasy truce between the werewolves in the woods and the humans who live in Beacon Hills, protected by a magical boundary that gives warning any time a werewolf crosses it. Then the sheriff is taken by the werewolves and his son offers himself in exchange.

Stiles promises to serve the werewolf pack, not knowing what horrible use they might have for him. But it turns out his most useful skill is the ability to cross the boundary line between humans and werewolves. Life with the werewolves is nothing like he feared and the werewolves themselves are nothing like the hunters' stories would have him believe.

Don’t Worry Baby -  kalpurna - 20k - Explicit

"You know you're allowed to ask for vanilla sex, right?" he says, afterwards. "We can do whatever you want. That's kind of the point." Derek doesn't respond.

Dude, Werewolves -  mysecretashes - 29k - Explicit

Stiles gets partnered with Cora for a history project, and they become bros. Also, he kind of falls in love with her older brother, Derek.

Electricity In the Contact -  ladyblahblah - 27k - Explicit

In which Derek has been invited to the Greater Pacific Northwest Alpha Symposium (that's not what it's called, Stiles, stop saying that), and showing up unattached would mean an arranged marriage. When the rest of the pack objects, he agrees to let Stiles come along to pose as his mate. Derek is reasonably sure that he's not going to make it out of this weekend alive.

Enemy Lines* -  qhuinn - 149k - Explicit

This is the story of werewolf Derek Hale and human Stiles Stilinski: two people who grew up in the same town but completely different worlds, their realities split by the war between men and wolves.

Years later when Derek returns to Beacon Hills, he does it as Alpha of a military pack on a mission to capture those responsible for the region’s resistance. With his main objective, Sheriff Stilinski, out of sight, he settles for the next best thing: his son, Stiles.

Neither of them suspects they’ll need to trust each other if they want to make it out this alive.

Every Step You Take -  Nokomis - 49k - Mature

Stiles accidentally ends up magically bound to Derek. It’s super.

Fireman Derek’s Crazy Pie (Cheeseburger Baby) -  owlpostagain - 17k - Teen

“He can't blame me for the fact that I live in a building full of people united in the singular effort to ogle Hot Fireman as often as humanly possible." Laura laughs, loud and echoing in the empty restaurant.

"Hot firemen can make a girl do crazy things," she agrees, nodding towards her brother's name on the menu. "Derek won't let me date anyone from his company, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the eye candy."

"Send them my way," Stiles suggests, finally loading up a forkful of pie. "Apparently I'm incompetent enough that I need to be babysat at all times, because it would be cheaper than dispatching a truck every time I try to use a kitchen appliance."

Gravity’s Got Nothing on You* -  zosofi - 83k - Explicit

“Three weeks,” Derek says.

“Still don’t want to,” Stiles says.

“I’ll pay you,” Derek says, and that… that has Stiles interested. Alf’s Antique’s may be a great job, but it’s not a high-paying job, and half of Stiles’s tuition is coming from financial aid, so… “How much,” Stiles asks, “are we talking here? Because I know your family, dude. And it’ll be kind of awkward after.“

“My family thinks you’re some sort of fucking gift to the world,” Derek seethes, like he’s jealous, “they’ll probably be pissed at me when we break it off, so don’t worry about that. Five hundred bucks.”

“A thousand,” Stiles says, because screw ethics. Also, the Hale family is loaded. Derek can deal.

Hemingway Can Suck It -  KuriKuri - 10k - Teen

“For those of you who just transferred into this class or simply decided that day one wasn’t important enough to attend, I’m Professor Hale. Welcome to English 346, The American Novel.”

Stiles is pretty sure his mouth is hanging open right now and that his eyes are wide with shock, because holy fuck, he thinks he knows why his students transferred. Hell, if he was still an undergrad, he probably would have transferred, too.

(Or: In which Stiles is a Biology professor and Derek thinks he's a student.)

Integral to Survival -  asocialfauxpas - 8k - Mature

Derek is in the cell for about ten minutes before the lone door opens and a new body is tossed in. The person hits the floor with a grunt, rolls, and stands as the door is clanging shut. “That’s really not the way to treat a guest!”

Just Act Normal -  zosofi - 70k+ - Explicit

If someone had told Stiles back in high school that he would be an Oscar winning actor by the time he turned 25, he would’ve probably told Scott to punch them. The thing is, though…they would’ve been right. Which makes returning to Beacon Hills, center of all that is supernatural and better left avoided, all the more awkward.

Kaleidoscope* -  Vendelin - 50k+ - Explicit 

Stiles spends a year before college working at the all-night coffee shop in town. It's nice and quiet, until one dark and brooding Derek starts coming in every morning, ordering coffee so strong that it should not be fit for human consumption. Ever. Stiles tries not to be affected by the mystery guy, but it's not like anything else happens around here, so really, what did you expect? And when he's already in too deep, he realises he might even be in way over his head...

Little Wild Animal* - DiscontentedWinter - 61k - Explicit

Derek Hale finds a feral human on his pack's property. Humans are supposed to be extinct. But then, Stiles is full of surprises.

Lock All The Doors Behind You -  entanglednow - 25k+ - Mature

He has no idea what you're supposed to say when you find one of your...werewolf acquaintances, completely out of their mind, growling like they're about to see what your insides taste like. There's no handbook for this. Stiles is thinking that if he survives he might write one.

Losers -  stilinskisparkles - 30k+ - Explicit

Where Derek is new to college, eager to spend his time learning, and Stiles is everything he didn't want in a room mate. He's loud, he's into sports, and he keeps trying to make Derek do things. Or, the one where Derek falls for a jock, Erica will cut you if you disturb her studying, and Jackson is a closeted romantic who pretends to hate everything.

Move a Mountain* -  ZainClaw - 69k - Explicit

Stiles goes camping with his friends in New Mexico after graduation where they befriend a biker gang led by Derek: a guy whom Stiles can’t decide if he will be either relieved or devastated to never see again once their week is up.

No Homo* -  RemainNameless - 80k+ - Explicit

Stiles' sophomore year starts something like this: 3 FourLokos + 1 peer-pressuring cat - 1 best bro to end all best bros = 1 Craigslist ad headline that reads "str8 dude - m4m - strictly platonic". Derek is the fool who replies.

Our Lives Are Changing Lanes* -  grimm - 47k - Explicit

There's a lot of screaming going on inside the first house Stiles visits. He isn't really worried, because it sounds like kids, but then the door opens and hi, says his dick, because the dude in front of him is gorgeous, built like a god with a face like thunder. Stiles wants to lick that solid jaw line. Hold the fuck on, says his cop brain, because the dude's got kids hanging all over him; one's on his back, skinny legs looped around his waist, and another two hanging off one arm, toes barely brushing the ground. There's a tubby toddler clinging to his leg like a koala, and he's got a baby tucked into the crook of the one arm that doesn’t have kids hanging off it. Stiles' mouth drops open.

"How many of those kids did you kidnap?" he asks before he can wrangle his brain into submission.

The man gives him a look that says what the fuck is wrong with you and snaps, "You think I'd subject myself to this on purpose?"

"Oooh," says one of the kids hanging off his arm. "I'm telling Mom."

Permanent Fixture* -  linksofmemories - 80k+ = Explicit

Derek is Scott's older brother. Stiles is Scott's best friend. Derek is falling in love with Stiles. This is a bit of a problem.

Practice Makes Perfect -  blacktofade - 21k - Explicit

In his sophomore year, Stiles gets dragged to lacrosse tryouts by Scott and ends up practising alongside the senior captain, Derek Hale. Stiles just wants to live long enough to become a junior.

Prince Among Wolves* -  tylerfucklin - 100k - Explicit

Looking for full day/evening sitter. 2 twin boys age 4. Must have exp. w/werewolves. Must be human. No pedophiles. No teenage girls. Pay negotiable.

Salty Sweet - secondstar - 40k+ - Explicit

Derek works at a porn store. One day, Stiles comes in asking all sorts of TMI questions about different toys. That's where it all starts.

Sideways and Slantways and Longways and Backways -  hologramophone - 7k - Teen

“I called you a slave-driver!” Stiles cried hysterically. “I called you an ogre! I stole all the blue paperclips!” Derek raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s company property!” he shouted, waving his arms madly in distress. Derek ran a hand over his face. “It’s not theft if the vice president of the company gives you permission.” (Otherwise known as the Elevator AU)

The Company I Keep* -  secondstar - 67k - Explicit

Stiles has a favorite table at the library. Then some asshole comes along and steals it from him.

There is a Brotherhood* -  minusoneday - 21k - Explicit

So far, college has taught Stiles three things:

1) Eight am classes are cruel and unusual and should be avoided at all costs, even if it means having to enroll in something truly hideous instead, like Econ 101.

2) Dorm security is just as tight as Stiles’ orientation leader had promised it would be, and the dude guarding Scott’s dorm in particular does not respond well to bribes.

3) Mrs. McCall clearly had no clue what she was talking about when she’d insisted that Scott and Stiles needed to branch out and room with strangers, so it’s all her fault that Scott ended up with a total dick of a roommate and Stiles got stuck all the way across campus with some guy who has a girlfriend two towns over and is thus never around.

Or, the one where pledge brothers Stiles and Scott start a prank war with Derek Hale's fraternity.

There’s Monsters At Home -  calrissian18 - 80k+ - Explicit

“How did you get past the wards?” Derek had put them up, with Peter’s grudging assistance, after the Alpha pack had made themselves at home a few times too many. The guy pulled a face. “You mean the wards a five-year-old girl with the mental ability of a goldfish could deconstruct?” He blinked wide eyes at Derek. “Gee, I don’t know. It’s bound to go down as one of life’s great mysteries.” Derek despised him.

Tiny Houses* -  ohmyjetsabel - 77k - Explicit

"So this is what Stiles does. He lies in Scott’s bed and waits for Melissa to say she’s found someone to get it out of him, to cure him of the wrongness and the bad, and he dreams.

God, he dreams.

He dreams of fire and swollen bellies and that scene in Alien, of giving birth to jackals through his urethra, the whole horrific nine yards. His head is a terrible place to be, he can’t imagine his stomach is much better, why anyone would want to put a thing inside of it."

Versus* -  secondstar - 90k+ - Explicit

At age nineteen, Stiles Stilinski was the next big thing, according to The Guardian. It was surreal, not being able to turn on Sky Sports without hearing his name mentioned along with the names of players he grew up idolizing. Stiles couldn’t believe that this was his life.

Windows* -  dr_girlfriend - 83k - Explicit

Derek has a new neighbor who won't stop looking. 

Excerpt: “You’re blind,” Derek said flatly, the anger draining from him so suddenly he felt almost woozy. His vision cleared, his claws sliding back into blunt fingernails. 

“Thanks for the memo, genius,” the kid said acidly. “I can still fucking defend myself, so don’t take another damn step.” 

“Fuck, I...I’m sorry,” Derek stuttered. 

“What?!” The kid’s brow crinkled. “I mean — what?! You’re fucking sorry!?” His lips thinned into a harsh line. “What, is this some kinda Hallmark movie where you’re discovering the error of your ways because you don’t want to rob a blind person?! That’s fucking condescending, man. I’ll have you know that —” 

“Just, wait.” Derek interrupted what was apparently the start of a convincing argument as to why he should rob the kid after all, feeling his head start to spin. “This is — it’s a misunderstanding. I’m — I’m not robbing you. You’re — you’re safe, okay? I’m taking three steps back. Just — just let me explain.” 

“Explain why you came busting into my apartment? Yeah, go right ahead, man, I can’t wait to hear this epic tale.”

What I Did On My Summer Vacation -  grimm - 118k - Explicit

There's something weird about Beacon Hills that Stiles can't quite put his finger on. The way everyone in town knows his name the day he arrives. The way they insist the melancholic howling that echoes through the forest every night is just a dog. The way his dad denies getting a dog, even though Stiles comes home to find one sprawled across his bed, some big black thing whose eyes gleam red in the right light. The way that massive oak tree out in the woods vibrates under his touch, pulsing with sickly life. There's something weird going on in this town, and Stiles is determined to get to the bottom of it.

#sterek #starter fics #teen wolf #eternalsterek #fic recs

[eldritchsurveys]

876.

5k Survey IV

151. What is louder and more annoying: 200 adults talking or one four-year-old screaming? >> I’m pretty sure I’ve never heard 200 adults talking at one time. Regardless, I’m sensory-defensive, so many things register as the same level of “too loud” for me. Both of these things would be simply “too loud”. 152. Do you believe the stories about planes, boats and people mysteriously disappearing into the Bermuda triangle? >> I find them vaguely interesting. I liked the X-Files episode about it, Gillian Anderson’s character (it wasn’t Scully, technically...) was excellent in it lol. 153. Who are you the most jealous of? >> I don’t know, I’ve never thought about it. 154. What is the happiest way you can start your day? >> In an Inworld cuddle pile. 155. Do you ever have moments where you feel like everything is all right in the world? >> Occasionally.

156. Who thinks that you are offensive? >> I don’t know who thinks I’m offensive. It’s not like people go out of their way to tell me that or anything. 157. If you had to teach a class in something, what would you be able to teach people? >> I’d rather not. I greatly prefer being a student, anyway. 158. Have you ever had a spiritual experience (an experience that cannot be explained by science)? >> I’m sure science could contrive a reasonable enough explanation for the things I experience (and if it can’t now, it probably will eventually). Regardless, I prefer my explanations, and I’ll stick to them. 159. Do you believe that this experience was truly mystical or do you think there is some scientific explanation for it, only you don’t know what it is? >> An experience being explained in a scientific fashion doesn’t prevent it from being mystical. There are plenty of mystical experiences that science has an explanation for, after all, but the people involved in those experiences keep their own counsel. I think both a mystical explanation and a scientific explanation can exist comfortably side-by-side in my brain; they’re both useful for different reasons, particularly when it comes to communicating the experience to others (I wouldn’t use a mystical explanation when speaking to a hard materialist, for example, because, like... what would be the point...?). 160. Do you get offended easily? >> I wouldn’t say that, no. But I tend to be automatically distrustful of people who seem to go out of their way to be “offensive”. Just because whatever they’re saying doesn’t directly hurt me doesn’t mean I want to hang out with someone who says the kinds of things they say. 161. Would you still love and stay with your significant other if he or she had to have a breast or testicle removed? >> I can’t imagine being affected by that sort of thing at all. 162. Do you believe in fate or free will? >> I don’t care to choose a side. I think the discourse around it is interesting. 163. Do you believe that only boring people get bored? >> Of course not. That’s a rude (and, of course, entirely inaccurate, but mostly rude) thing to say. 164. Can life change or are we all stuck in vain? >> What does this even mean? 165. What changes are you afraid of? >> The kind that cause me pain. 166. Are you a day person or nocturnal? >> I prefer to be awake in the daylight and asleep at night. 167. What one CD could you listen to for an entire week (no mixed CD’s, it must be an album)? >> Why would I even have to do this anymore? It’s 2020. 168. Which is worse, working in retail, food service, or an office? >> For me, all of them are equally bad. Well, okay, maybe food service is worse because there’s the added layer of having to handle food and be around mucky gross things. 169. What’s the coolest job you ever had? >> Manning merch tables at local shows. 170. What is one central idea that your thoughts seem to come back to? >> There is no central idea...? I’m not sure how one even determines this. 171. Have you ever wanted to be an actor/tress? >> I was one in Inworld’s first iteration, when I was physically a child. But I have never really had interest in being one in this world. 172. If you had the power to control one person and make this person do anything you wanted for a whole day, who would you pick and what would they do? >> Total power exchange is totally not my scene, I’d get bored of it way too easily. I could absolutely see myself snapping, “make a fucking decision for yourself for once” after like an hour or two, lmao. 173. What star sign are you and what is your sign like? >> Gemini. I’m not going to go into an explanation of Gemini’s commonly-recognised traits, Google can take care of that for you. 174. Did the Blair Witch Project scare you? >> I haven’t seen it. The new Blair Witch game looked vaguely interesting. 175. Are you in constant fear of death? >> Not constant. I did spend about a year or so like that, recently. It sucked pretty bad. 176. Does fear of death keep you from building a life? >> No. Sometimes I get that bone-deep “what’s the point” feeling, but like... that feeling will just have to exist on its own while I go ahead and keep doing stuff. I can’t give in to that. 177. Do you like all your movies to be in wide-screen? >> I’m not sure what the alternative is, or what the difference is or whatever. 178. Are you a fan of any comic books? >> Sure. 179. At what age did you attend your first funeral? >> I don’t remember. I vaguely recall one happening when I was young, but I have no idea what exact age I was. 180. What do you smell like (lotion, cologne, sweat)? >> Just... like, a person. I showered this morning, but the fragrances from soap and lotion don’t linger very long, and it hasn’t been long enough for me to start smelling like sweat or anything. So I’m somewhere in the middle. 181. What are your greatest sources for wisdom? >> Oh, you know. People. 182. When you were little, where did your parents tell you babies come from? >> My father never had that discussion with me, I figured it out from reading books. 183. What is your favorite band? >> I don’t have one. 184. What’s the best cheesy 80’s song? >> Come On Eileen. /picks one at random 185. What’s the best kind of movie to see on a date? >> I’m not the person to ask. 186. Do you like to sit in the front, middle or back of the Movie Theater? >> Back, absolutely. And woe unto the people who have the same idea and try to sit near me. 187. Have you ever been inside an abandoned building? >> Yeah. 188. Under what circumstances would you agree to work for free? >> The circumstances where I really just want to do whatever-it-is and it isn’t too intensive, I guess. And where I feel like my work is valued in some other way if not financially. 189. Candles or strobe lights? >> Candles. Although sometimes in a dark area, a candle flame dancing around on the wick will have a kind of strobe-y effect, and I hate it. 190. Do you think the Lord of the Rings movies are true to the books or did Hollywood change the story too much? >> I don’t know, I didn’t read the book. 191. When you see a stranger on the street does your first reaction lean towards thinking of this person as a potential friend or as a potential threat? >> I don’t think of them as a potential anything.  192. Is it natural for human beings to fear and distrust each other, or is it cultural? >> Obviously it’s cultural, or every human being in every society on earth would fear and distrust everyone else with or without cause... which... is not the case... 193. What do you really want to buy? >> Nothing. I don’t have the money to buy anything right now, anyway. 194. You have to choose. Would you be happier marrying someone rich for their money or living in the streets and subway tunnels with someone you love? >> God, do I hate this question. First of all, neither money nor love are “everything”, but “love” is work, not some kind of magic bubbly gushy feeling that happens no matter what, and that work starts to take a backseat when all one’s energy is devoted to simply surviving from day to day. How do I know? Take a wild guess. Second of all, the question doesn’t take into account whether you can also love someone you’ve married for the sake of financial security. (Spoiler: remember, love is action and will and intent, not magic, so yeah, you can.) Third of all, can I stress that there’s nothing fucking romantic and movie-like about being homeless? Because sometimes I feel like people imagine “we’ll share a cardboard box and be free of the shackles of modern society <3″ or some shit and meanwhile I’ve seen homeless couples, many homeless couples. I’ve been homeless couples. It sucks. That’s the end of the story. It sucks. (There’s probably similar romantic notions about marrying some tycoon and being a kept lady/boy, or whatever, which do not at all measure up to the reality. I’m sure a lot of people end up abused and neglected and miserable in their gilded-cage master bedrooms, afterwards. But since that’s not my experience, it wasn’t the focus of my fathomless ire with this question, lol.) 195. If someone wanted to understand you what book could they read that would help? >> That’s not going to happen. 196. Do you think it’s odd that Americans have freedom of religion and yet call themselves ‘one nation under god’? >> I don’t think it’s odd because I’m pretty used to how the United States works in that respect. I know it operates under conservative, Christian hegemony while playing the role of secular, progressive Western nation on the outside.

197. In what sense are you a minority? >> I’m Black, disabled/neuro-atypical, socially considered female, trans, and queer. I think that covers it. 198. Are you anti social? >> No. I have a few asocial behaviours and inclinations, but I’m not anti-social. 199. Do you photograph well? >> Sometimes. Not often, in my opinion. 200. Do you think that human beings would survive through a nuclear winter? >> I don’t know. I’m not knowledgeable enough about either human biology (and psychology) or the specifics of nuclear winter to say.

#surveys #survey #5000 question survey