sam blake

Foxboro - UML BSE 2023 MSE 2024

[ꕤ @rakkofan]

i wake up, i cry over spilt milk, put all of my eggs in one basket, bite off more than i can chew, jump the gun, fly off the handle and then die on that hill

[Niko McCarty. @NikoMcCarty]

I'm a simple man. If I see a field trial of genetically-engineered trees, I read it.

A recent preprint reports the largest field trial to-date of American Chestnut trees engineered to resist a blight. And the results look promising.

For context: The U.S. was once filled with American Chestnut trees. There were billions of them, each with a natural lifespan of 500+ years.

In the late 1800s, however, an import of Asian
chestnut trees unintentionally introduced a hitchhiking fungus into U.S. nurseries. That fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, was first identified on an American chestnut tree growing in New York in 1904 by a forester at the Bronx Zoo, named Hermann Merkel.

The fungus spread through the U.S. in the early 20th century (its spores can float on the wind for several miles). By the 1950s, this fungus had infected basically every American Chestnuts growing in the U.S., killing at least 4 billion trees. (There are still some mature, intact trees in the U.S., but they are really rare. Maine has most of them, it seems, including one American Chestnut tree in Lovell that is 115 feet tall.)

When the fungus latches onto a tree (in a small wound), the fungus grows and colonizes the inner bark. It chokes the tree, forms cankers, and prevents it from growing outwards, thus cutting off phloem transport to tissues above the wound site. The fungus eats the tree using a chemical called oxalic acid.

In the mid-2010s, researchers at SUNY made a transgenic American Chestnut tree that can fend off the fungus. These researchers took a gene from wheat, called oxalate oxidase (or OxO), and spliced it into an American chestnut sapling. This gene expresses an enzyme that breaks oxalate into hydrogen peroxide and carbon dioxide, thus neutralizing it. And, importantly, the gene is driven by a promoter that expresses this protein in basically every tissue of the tree.

The OxO gene does not make the trees immune; it merely helps them tolerate the fungus. Trees can still get cankers and spread the fungus.

But anyway, onto this paper.

This is a two-year field trial of transgenic saplings vs. wildtype siblings. It is the largest such trial to date; prior papers used like 3 trees. Whereas in this study, 261 trees were inoculated with the fungus in three replicates. Transgenic trees (carrying the OxO gene) “consistently outperformed their [wildtype] siblings” and also Chinese chestnut trees. Every year, these researchers inoculated the trees and then, 90 days later, measured the lengths of cankers (or fungal growth) around the trees. The trees were planted in an orchard in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

The key result is that transgenic trees fared better than their wildtype siblings on basically every metric. They had smaller cankers, and also released fewer fungal spores from those cankers. Growth was normal, despite one year of fairly significant drought conditions.

This is a really promising sign for the American Chestnut, perhaps saved by genetic engineering.

[Ari Meirov @MySportsUpdate]

Nebraska HC Matt Rhule took 3 minutes today to talk about mental health following the tragic death of #Cowboys DE Marshawn Kneeland:

“Our generation of kids — my kids — they all just say, ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’m straight.’ You really gotta unearth it. … That young man scored a TD just a couple days ago, and to the outside world you’d think he’s at the pinnacle. But he was dealing with something — I don’t know what it was. But I pray for him, him and his family.”

Watch this in full... Incredible message:

[CERN @CERN]

CERN congratulates the winners of the 2025 @NobelPrize in #Physics 👏

John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, and John M. Martinis were awarded the #NobelPrize for their experiments with an electrical circuit, in which they demonstrated both quantum mechanical tunnelling and quantised energy levels in a system big enough to be held in the hand.

[Dr. Alex Zawacki @achillghost]

Grad school

[danny @dannethboi]

never mind

[henry @arithmoquine]

you don't make cigarettes obsolete by creating an alternative way to consume nicotine, you make cigarettes obsolete by creating an alternative justification to casually ignite and hold a tiny fire

[BURKOV @burkov]

No website decline leaves me feeling as satisfied as @StackOverflow. The people in this place detest you so much, they don't even try to hide it. They will reject your questions, prevent you from answering, and openly mock you in the comments. The toxicity level of these people surpasses any reasonable standard. Burn this place to the ground.

[Saturn Shuttle @Saturn_Shuttle]

Fun fact, the bible is *extremely* harsh towards fathers who abandon or otherwise disown their children

[Elsie @Meelsie143]

chuds in the replies saying irwin is the only one who they love because he wasn’t a propagandist

I guarantee if he was still around he would not be quiet about the climate devastation we’re facing

[Displaced Bostonian @Ironhead334]

The Anti-Mayo. He's the best.

[chamomile @nollywoodstemme]

firm believer that its possible to be sweet & compassionate, and also a relentless hater...
i've dedicated my life to proving this by example.

[SPORTS DRINK: Café & Comedy Club @SprtsDrnk]

sports mean a lot to a lot of people, myself included. i do think if you removed three professional sports teams from my city in my lifetime due to the whims of petulant billionaires, i would become the turbo joker

[Ryan Moulton @moultano]

This spirit is how agriculture was invented.

[noah kulwin @nkulw]

@jakebrodes I am toggling between 15 Wikipedia articles and a group chat argument about the 2007 NBA draft.

You are behind on work because you saw an Instagram reel about proper onion storage.

We are not the same.

[flaviusvalens @flaviusvalens1]

Weird-looking cigarette smokers with bad tattoos keep our nation's restaurant kitchens running. These people are the salt of the earth

[Count Dankula @CountDankulaTV]

Just Stop Oil are 100% a psyop funded by Big Oil to turn the entire public against climate activism.