biancs

hi 🐢

[E me ka🩺 @Emeka3345]

I'm either preparing for an exam, taking an exam,recovering from an exam, or realising I'm already late to study for the next exam

[morale◾ @moraleDmaestro]

medical students on Sunday night after prioritizing their happiness throughout the week.

[caroline @carolrcorrea_]

O método de estudo que eu precisava pra hoje

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

You can smell rain better than a shark can smell blood. 200,000 times better. Your nose picks up the compound behind petrichor (that smell after rain) at levels so tiny it's like finding one teaspoon spilled across 200 Olympic swimming pools.

That compound is called geosmin. It comes from soil bacteria. And the word "petrichor" itself didn't exist until 1964, when two Australian scientists, Isabel Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, published a paper in Nature trying to figure out why rocks smell after rain. They took the Greek words for stone and "the blood of the gods" and stuck them together. Blood of the stone.

When soil stays dry for weeks, certain plants leak an oil that the clay soaks up like a sponge. At the same time, soil bacteria called Streptomyces start making spores (tiny survival pods that can sprout into new bacteria later) and give off geosmin while they do it. The smell just sits there in the dirt, waiting.

Then rain hits. A 2015 MIT paper figured out the physics of what happens next. Raindrops land on dry soil and trap tiny air bubbles in the soil's pores. The bubbles rise up through the raindrop and pop out the top, flinging thousands of tiny droplets into the air. Each one carries a piece of the oil, some bacterial spores, and some geosmin. Wind does the rest. Light rain releases the most of these droplets. Heavy rain releases very few, which is why a drizzle smells more than a downpour. MIT estimated that rain across the planet throws between 10,000 and 800,000 trillion bacterial cells into the air every single year.

In 2020, scientists in Sweden and the UK published a paper in Nature Microbiology that explained why this smell exists at all. Streptomyces bacteria only release geosmin when they're about to die and make spores. The smell is a bacterial ad. It attracts tiny 1.5mm bugs called springtails, which eat the bacteria. Springtails have evolved enzymes that let them survive the antibiotics Streptomyces produce to kill everything else. In exchange, the bacterial spores pass through the springtail's gut alive and stick to its body, hitching a ride to new soil. This deal has been running for about 400 million years.

Same molecule, different stories. Geosmin is why raw beets taste like dirt. It's why catfish and tilapia taste muddy when raised in bad water. Acid breaks it down, which is why every recipe for muddy fish starts with vinegar or lemon juice.

Your nose catches all of this at parts-per-trillion. You're smelling a 400-million-year-old conversation between soil bacteria and the bugs that eat them.

[the pitt med student⚕️ @robbys_toupee]

Med school is all fun and games until you have a random pain somewhere in your body and your brain generates a list of 10 Deadliest Differentials.

[Michael Justus @mhjrad]

Did it hurt? When you memorized every brachial plexus branch and then never used that information once?

[John-Joe Reilly @jayjayaah]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the best histopathology report in the history of the world. End of discussion.

[(✿◠‿◠) @GyriGoddess]

one benefit of medical school is that it lowers your definition of a holiday, simply sitting in your room without any upcoming exam can feel like luxury

[Pricci @Pricci0]

Med student at 3am studying how lack of sleep leads to dementia and cognitive decline

[JP @pathphamwarrior]

"just know the suffixes"
Erythromycin, vancomycin, streptomycin, and clindamycin all belong to different classes btw

[picard 🇻🇦🇹🇷 @jeanluccpicard]

Exam setup.

[𝓛𝓾𝓱𝓪𝓮𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓷 @luhaenten]

In your twenties there may be love. It's very important to ignore this love and pursue a Masters instead.

[Qira 🎀 @Qira_997]

NGL BEING EXTREMELY BUSY EVERYDAYS REALLY HELPS YOU TO BE MENTALLY STABLE