Chapterhouse

Most people in the west probably don't know this, but China actually 'participated' in WW1! But as a backwards country with two governments at this time, why did they do so? Why did they align with the Americans, when Germany had influence within the country? Did China receive any benefits from becoming a victor? Today I'll answer these questions and more.

In 1914 China had promised to stay neutral in WW1. Before this point, China had only lost in wars against imperial powers, and few desired to take part in another potentially disastrous war. Besides, many warlords themselves held territory in China, and few would have left their holdings to die in europe when potential competitors could simply occupy their territory. In addition, different powerful warlords were backed by foreign powers from both sides, so there was little desire to participate in the global war at the time.

Germany, however, supported Zhang Xun, who attempted to revive the Qing dynasty, gambling that he would be able to create a German-aligned Chinese monarchy, even providing him with weapons. But Zhang Xun held little military power compared to other warlords, and by easily defeating him Japan-backed Duan Qirui could now call himself the defender of democracy. He reinstated the powerless president, Li Yuanhong, but he himself was appointed as leader of the cabinet. While the cabinet seemed to be engaged in fierce conflict with the President, in reality Li was pretty much alone in his struggle and was always at a massive disadvantage, despite his backing by the US. Primarily this was because Duan had the full power of the Wan clique behind him, while Li had few if any armies of his own.

The Americans wished for China to join the war on their side, promising to renegotiate some unequal treaties, and Li gladly agreed. Yet the Japanese, supporting Duan, soon began urging Duan to join the war too, seeking to secure what Yuan had promised them in the 21 lines. Seeing the Japanese support China's entrance to the war, the US changed its tune and ordered Li to oppose the war.

Of course, this opposition could not be held for long, and Duan used German submarines sinking a ship carrying Chinese passengers as an excuse to cut off all ties with Germany, then declare war.

Despite declaring war, China never sent any troops to Europe, instead providing the entente with over 140000 laborers to aid the allies in constructing works, clearing mines, and other dangerous jobs. In the end, Germany was defeated, eliminating its influence in China, and many hoped that all German interests in China, such as the entire province of Qingdao, could be returned to China. But things would not be so easy...

originally wanted to write a part 2 to my last post but too many things happened, so I'm going event by event here. Next post: the Treaty of Versailles and the 5-4 movement.

Many of you probably know a little bit about the history of early modern China---the fall of the Qing dynasty, the civil war, and the foundation of today's China. Yet there's more to the story of China's path to socialism.

Chinese warlords may be a familiar term for some, and for me as well, yet for the longest time I only knew that they existed, not much about who they were, or what they did. A while ago I finally decided to pick up a book written by Lai Xinxia on this period of history. He is a very reliable scholar---after participating in the Chinese revolution he was assigned to sorting the archives of the Beiyang era, and over fifty years gradually improved his draft until publishing the final edition of his book, "History of the Beiyang Warlords", in 2004. I have made a summary of it here to educate more people, something I have not spent as much time doing as I should have.

First, a definition. The Chinese term for a single warlord group is 系, which can translate to system, line, etc. The generally accepted english translation for this is 'clique', which I will use here. The english translations for the clique names seem to be based on location (province names) rather than abbreviations commonly used in Chinese. I will be using the Chinese versions here since I'm too lazy to find the english translations for all of them.

After the opium wars, many Qing officials realized the importance of self-strengthening and creating a modern army. Li Hongzhan, one of the many han officials who rose to prominence in the last years of the Qing empire, created his own army, the Xiangjun, with modern equipment and training methods. Eventually this unit proved instrumental in defeating the Taiping rebellion, and for a time there was hope within the empire that expanding the 'new army' would lead to the empire being able to resist foreigners and establish its sovereignty. The Empire also created two foreign affairs departments, Beiyang (north sea) and Nanyang (south sea) respectively. As an important Beiyang civil servant, Li Hongzhang was the forerunner of the powerful warlords who would come to control vast portions of China in the first few decades of the coming century.

Yet without changing society, the new armies soon fell to corruption, and by the time Japan declared the Jiawu war the Beiyang Fleet, a modernized fleet the Qing government had established, was largely corrupted, ineffectual, and quickly defeated by Japan despite strong patriotism and determined resistance by patriotic soldiers and officers alike.

Yuan Shikai was at this time only a minor officer, who at some point was stationed in Korea. Despite a minor incident in which he was reported to the government, many praised his effective training of his own army, with some westerners remarking that China would be saved if they had more units like his. Yet during the invasion of China by the eight powers, instead of going into battle he decided to withdraw to preserve his own strength, with the result that he took almost no losses while his sister units of the new army were completely crushed. After the ordeal, he then escorted Cixi back to the forbidden city, and won the affection of many in government with this action. One thing to note is that in 1895 Yuan Shikai began conducting military drills in Xiaozhan (little station) near Beijing, which many scholars consider to be the beginning of the Beiyang era.

In 1911 the Xinhai revolution erupted and the imperial system which had existed in China for millennia was overthrown. While this was a bourgeoisie revolution, it nonetheless pushed history forward greatly in China. Yet at this point many of the revolutionaries were politically naive, including Sun Zhongshan, the leader of the new Republic of China, and believed that their country could not succeed without existing figures of authority in government. This, combined with Sun's own lack of political experience, led to the new government electing Yuan Shikai as its first official president. The Tongmenghui, Sun's revolutionary party, decided to engage in parliamentary politics, and slowly began to lose its revolutionary characteristic.

Yuan was not content with merely being president and being constrained by the majority-tongmenghui (which around this time had rebranded itself as the Guomindang, 'party of the national people') parliament. So after a few years of rule and forcing through laws that increasingly gave him power, he finally declared himself emperor of the Chinese Empire and disbanded parliament. Before this, he had also secretly signed a humiliating treaty with Japan to win support secretly in 1915. This will become important later...

Yuan's move was met with opposition from almost everyone in China, even including monarchists, who wanted the former Qing empire on the throne. His own subjects were also unhappy, as their potential position as Yuan's successor was now only available to his children. After a few short months Yuan died from sickness, and democracy returned. Yet...

During Yuan's monarchy, Sun Zhongshan had advocated for a Second Revolution. Working in the south and gathering the support of revolutionaries and local warlords, he managed to establish a southern government. Yet he controlled very few armies himself, with only a few fleets in the navy supporting him. Most of the armies fighting for the southern republic were warlords who only opposed Yuan for their own gain and cared little for progress in China.

In the North, after Yuan's death splits began to appear in the previously cohesive Beiyang bloc. The Wan clique, led by Duan Qirui, and the Zhi clique, lead by Feng Guozhang. While Duan advocated for using force to unify China and defeat the southern government, Feng wanted a peaceful reunification, more because he was opposed to Duan than any other reason. To resolve their conflict, they appointed a third party, Li Yuanhong to take on the role of the president of China.

At this point, Zhang Xun, a staunch monarchist, led his army into Beijing with the pretext of mediating a negotiation between the Wan and Zhi cliques. Instead, he seized power with his 'pigtail army' and promptly reestablished the Qing empire, with the child emperor Puyi (who had been treated well and allowed to stay in the forbidden city by the revolutionaries) as its leader.

Of course this did not last long, with all the Beiyang warlords coming to oppose him. Duan Qirui gave himself the title of creating democarcy three times with his defeating of Zhang Xun, and the Wan clique at this point became the dominant player on the Beiyang stage. Yet the country was still divided into north and south, and tensions between the two cliques were growing more heated by the day.

(part 1 concluded)

Preface: this is not white apologia, I am not white, I am a pure asiatic mongoloid barbarian. With that being said----

There seems to be a sentiment that is largely a holdover from the liberal beliefs about 'bad apples' in our gene pool or whatever. Some people seem to think that we could solve all our problems by not allowing these bad apples to have children. It seems pretty straightforward, right? Parents pass traits to their offspring, you get rid of the bad parents, and you won't have the offspring having bad traits.

Well.... aside from that being borderline eugenics, it's also bullshit. Not completely bullshit, but pretty much bullshit.

AS FAR AS WE KNOW, BELIEFS ARE NOT HERITABLE. This means that if your parents were bloodthirsty fascists, you are not necessarily a bloodthirsty fascist. Heritable traits are generally much simpler (and by simpler I mean comparatively simpler--- even things like eye color needs hundreds of genes, each thousands of bases long, to be coordinated) than behavioral traits. Which means, aside from a few very, very basic instincts OUR BELIEFS ARE LEARNED AND NOT INHERITED FROM OUR PARENTS. While parents can influence your beliefs heavily as an environmental factor they don't just magically give you ideas when you're born.

So there. It feels good to want to murder bad people but just know that until we fundamentally restructure society, killing them will just be like trying to fill up a river by draining it with a sponge.

Ah, lungs. The thing that everybody has a pair of. Or, well, most people. But it just sounds better with 'everybody', don't you think?

Today we'll be talking about, you guessed it... lungs. Those wonderful sacs that help us breathe air and not die.

I'm sure we all know what lungs are, what they look like, and what they do. They're in our chest, and suck in air when we breathe in, then expel it when we breathe out. What more is there to them? Not that much, it turns out, but I'm digging all the shit out to make this post longer.

For starters, the lungs aren't exactly static. They want to collapse inward all the time. If they did this, it would be very bad, and when they do this, as some kinds of injuries can cause, the results are indeed very bad and painful to even think about.

But, luckily for us, your chest is attached to your lungs (at least, I hope they are). And the chest wants to expand. So a fragile balance is maintained, with the lungs and chest in equilibrium. A thin layer of fluid, kind of like water between glass, keeps the two parts of the lungs attached to each other.

So how do we breathe?

When we breathe in, the chest expands. This makes the pressure inside our lungs decrease relative to the atmosphere, so air outside flows inward. When we then breathe out, pressure in the lungs increases, which forces some of the air out. Note that there's no way for our lungs to distinguish between fresh and old air, so only a portion of the air breathed in will actually be absorbed by our blood. In addition, it's not possible to force all the air out of your lungs, as I'm sure many of you have tried. This is probably a good thing.

Inside the lungs there are big tubes. I forgot what they're called. They branch off into smaller tubes. They lead to alveoli, which is like the only word I remembered from that chapter of vanders. These little sacs are connected to little blood vessels. When blood passes them with high carbon dioxide (relatively, it's still not that much compared to oxygenated blood) and low oxygen, diffusion happens. Carbon dioxide goes from high concentration to low concentration, oxygen does the same, and the net result is carbon dioxide in your lungs and oxygen in your blood.

What stops the alveoli from collapsing? A thin layer of fluid that's filled with lipids and stuff that also lubricate it, ensuring that air doesn't only go to large alveoli, which would lead to all the smaller ones collapsing. Even if a couple small ones collapse or get blocked off, the body can adjust blood flow to make sure blood is only going to where it can be properly oxygenated.

That's about all I have to say about lungs. If any of this information ends up causing some sort of damage to you, I am not liable.

Make sure to check it out and leave a comment, or kudos or something!

This story starts in Guantanamo Bay in 1962 where an American prisoner is being tortured. Anyways they transferred him to Ohio, where they locked him up in a top secret base.

Anyways they say to this prisoner guy "we will set you free but only if you stay in this room with no toilet for 7 days." And he goes "ok sure" even though he really likes toilets.

So he goes in there with microphones and cameras and shit and he sits there for five days, just like pooping in one corner and eating in the other. Then on the sixth day something horrible happened. When the researchers went to check on him the lack of toilet had transformed him into a toilet. Upon closer inspection he was bone chillingly saying 'skibidi dop dop dop yes yes' over and over again.

One researcher went into the room. However the skibidi toilet, as they called him, bit her so the others immediately sedated the toilet. When she was dragged out, she was unconscious for seven hours. When she finally awoke all she could say was "SKIBIDI OHIO FANUM TAX FORTNITE RIZZLER GYATT", which terrified the other researchers.

So they decided to kill the skibidi toilet. One shot it with a rifle but the toilet bit him too and he started screaming "SKIBIDI OHIO FANUM TAX FORTNITE RIZZLER GYATT". The next researchers rushed it and one finally killed the toilet by flushing it, but not before everyone in Ohio was screaming "SKIBIDI OHIO FANUM TAX FORTNITE RIZZLER GYATT".

While the skibidi toilet has been defeated for a long time, a new generation of Americans may see its return...

Mukuro Angry

Mukuro point

Mukuro salute

Do your part, troopers!

Her eyes are blue because of a heavy melange addiction.

I'm going to have to make like 100 more of these... Wish me luck!

Maybe I'll write this, maybe I won't...

I'm experimenting with masking and lighting with these pictures. They're for my upcoming one shot collection(?) Children of Doom, which takes place shortly before the second killing game in Heretics of Doom. The picture in the description is Sietch Jabberwock (aka Sietch Despair), where the Museum Despair live on the desert planet Rakistan. I tried to capture the inviting look of a home at night, with the blurry window glow and barely-visible silhouettes. To make this, I first drew the scene normally, then added the blur-glow to the windows, then applied a mask at around 90% opacity. Finally, I used the soft eraser to create the warm glow effect. I hope it doesn't look too bad.

Sietch Jabberwock is carved into sheer rock, rendering it invulnerable to sandworm attacks. It is, located many kilometers southwest of Rakinel, the largest city on Rakistan. It is also east of the Western Dune Sea, where few dare to venture unless they are properly equipped for fear of being consumed by the sandworms that live there. On ceremonial occasions the Museum Despair travel to the Dune Sea to pray to their Divided Goddess.

This is Chiaki Nanami, one of the Museum Despair, performing a ritual with a water basin. Water is very rare in Rakistan, ok? You can see the gray stillsuit mask hanging from her neck as well as part of the suit itself showing through the robes. They are ceremonial in this case, but when out in the desert similar robes are worn to protect the stillsuits and wearers from direct sunlight. Generally, they are made of extremely reflective fabric.

Finally, we have here a mural of a sandworm, the god/goddess that the Museum Despair worship. They believe (correctly) that portions of their leader's consciousness are trapped within the worms, and they often pray to these fragments to grant small wishes, good harvests, and to watch over them and their children.

Here we have Anfash. His real name is actually Leroy LeBlanche, but he hasn't told anybody yet. Nobody knows what he looks like, since his face is permanently obscured by his hoodie and bandana.

The truth is, he wasn't really much of a fascist or an anarchist---he just spent so long fighting for his survival that he got good with weapons and combat. Because everyone around him despised him, he was desperate to lick the boots of Adolfa Hitlero, the Ultimate Fascist, when she showed him even a little affection.

Unfortunately, she took advantage of him and mostly used him as a tool to get rid of her enemies, and made him brand himself as an 'anarcho-fascist' to align with her ideology. After he went to Hope's Peak Academy and befriended Pavel Arkhangelsky, however, he realized the exploitative nature of his relationship and cut ties with Adolfa.

This should be some parable about how centrism is not effective and is a dying form of appeasement to the right, but honestly I just had him die because he was pretty much the only guy with any character development.

Behold, the evidence.

Hey guys, Jonathan12345 here at Chapterhouse again with some good-old fashioned biomed.

If you've paid any attention to medicine in the recent years, you may have have heard of 'superbugs'. These bacteria are resistant to many common antibiotics. If you've ever dug a bit deeper, you might've even heard that bacteria have evolved themselves to be resistant to antibiotics.

This is complete bullshit. Let me explain why.

It's true that many strains of bacteria have resistance to common antibiotics now. However, they didn't consciously choose to evolve resistance--that's not how evolution works. As an example, could you suddenly evolve the ability to fly? I thought so.

The truth behind what happens is that bacteria reproduce so quickly, they accumulate many random mutations fast, some of which are bound to cause resistance to antibiotics. When these antibiotics are used, the bacteria that can't survive die, while the ones with resistance survive and grow more common. This process, natural selection, we touched on in my previous article about evolution.

The idea, now discredited, that beings could choose to evolve, was first proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Now, while we know that his ideas are garbage today, we can't completed discredit him as he lived before Darwin, and still managed to propose a (albeit flawed) theory of evolution.

What Lamarck believed was that animals had an innate desire to become perfect. They would try very hard to get the traits they desired (how they did this was never touched upon), and pass these improved traits to their offspring. Needless to say, this idea is stupid. If you lose an arm to a flying knife, does that mean your children will also be missing an arm? No.

The advent of genetics sealed the fate of Lamarckism. There is simply no way to modify your own genes without relying on tools, so there was no pathway left where Lamarckism would still be feasible.

Despite the evidence to the contrary, Lamarckism has survived amid the populace because of its straightforwardness. Just remember that you can never consciously "choose to evolve."

That's all for Chapterhouse today, and as always I'll see you in the next one.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/48500788/chapters/122609341#workskin

I read somebody else's fic, and holy shit it was so much better than mine. I figured the least I could do was make my chapters a bit longer...

Edit: I don't know why you guys hate this so much. I'm not referring to any real world events here, it's part of my danganronpa fanfiction for fucks sake! If I'm gonna get downvoted, at least tell me why!

Duncan tossed Sayori a sword, its blade harmless rubber, while holding one of his own.

"Come on, Sayori. Time for afternoon practice."

"More swordsmanship? I'm not really in the mood for it."

"Not in the mood? If Pavel were here, I'm sure he'd want you to exercise, train, and push yourself to your limits. Isn't that right, Sayori?"

She sighed. "Alright, Duncan. I'll train with you." With some reluctance, she took the sword in her hand and stepped into the training circle they had cleared out. "Nothing too intense, Duncan."

"Since today was so tiring---sure. What say we carry a little conversation, just to make things a bit more interesting?"

She nodded. "Sounds good, Duncan."

They stood in the center of the room for a few moments before Duncan suddenly lunged. Sayori was barely able to deflect his three blows. And he was surely going easy on her.

"Now, what should we talk about?" he asked, as if they were sitting across from each other at a coffee shop instead of being locked in intense combat. "Current events, perhaps?"

Another slash, this time from the left. She could see that he was trying to back her into a corner. She suddenly ducked, knocking his blade preemptively aside, rolling past him quickly. She spun around as fast as she could, just in time to avoid another one of Duncan's carefully placed blows.

"You'll have to be more careful than that, Sayori. If I was trying to kill you, I could easily have!"

She slashed, hoping that he would be distracted. No luck; he deftly sidestepped her attack. She ducked as his sword brushed her hair.

"If it's current events you want, it's current events you'll get. What do you think of the defeatist protests?"

Sayori almost hit the wall to dodge a quick stab to her stomach, her sword nearly jolted out of her hand by the force behind Duncan's attack. Although her arms already felt like lead, Duncan seemed to not even breaking a sweat.

"Defeatism is an idiotic ideology, at least in my opinion. They see the contradictions within capitalism and offer no solutions other than to twiddle their thumbs and wait for their own demise."

After a few more failed attacks from Duncan, she felt confident enough to try her own attack. Mustering her strength, she struck at Duncan several times in different places, hoping to daze him and land a single hit somewhere, although she was aware it was unlikely. Just as she'd expected, Duncan easily moved out of her range, then nearly knocked her over by striking while she was off balance.

"Good. But you'll have to do better than that."

"The defeatists are gaining traction, though. It seems that they've finally seen through the lies, but think that there isn't a world outside of them. You know, they think that all humans are to blame for climate change! That any old factory worker is as much to blame as an oil company executive!"

Duncan was behind her suddenly, in a lightning burst of speed. The blade flickered once, twice, three times. Sayori felt the soft impacts one after the other.

Duncan threw the sword down. "You're getting better. Pavel will be pleased when he finally leaves Hope's Peak."

She sighed and wiped some sweat from her brow. They'd continue this ritual tomorrow.

Let's say that you're tasked with creating a defensive line capable of defending Moscow from attack from the west. Your enemy has access to a million poorly trained soldiers, as well as laser artillery pieces that are powerful enough to turn rocks into plasma in seconds. You have access to around 0.7 million, and you can only use weapons that don't contain advanced electronics (i.e missiles and jammers). How would you go about doing this?

This is for my fanfiction. Somebody needs to design the Kirigiri Line, and I know I'm not doing it.

Hello! I'm the leader of Chapterhouse Command, but you can think of me as Jonathan12345's assistant of sorts. He's all over the place with his works and info posts right now, so we've decided to convert this community into Chapterhouse, dedicated to letting him post--- basically whatever he wants to. And if you enjoy his stuff, then you get to see all of it, too!

The posting schedule will be just a bit erratic, so you might want to get used to that, as well as the wide variety of topics covered. Other than that, welcome to Chapterhouse, and enjoy your stay!

Hey guys, what's up, Jonathan12345 here again with today's topic: Evolution.

Just a heads up, sometimes I want to post stuff related to my own projects, (insert shameless fanfic promotion here), but can't find a good place to do it, or I'm afraid to flood other communities with my shitty content. So I might convert this community into a sort of Chapterhouse, for me to just post random things I'm thinking about or working on.

Anyways, time for the actual content. I know you're all looking forward to it.

I'm sure we've all heard evolution and natural selection thrown around a lot. From its earliest days, it was first denied by right wingers, then appropriated by right wingers to justify killing people they didn't like. So it's probably justified if you feel a bit inclined to dislike the notion of "survival of the fittest". But just because reactionaries use it as a tool doesn't mean it's false! Reactionaries also breathe air, after all.

Evolution and natural selection are not the same thing. Natural selection is a component of evolution, and an important one at that.

To understand natural selection, let's look at an example first. Now, I'm not going to steal any old example off a textbook. No, I'm going to use my own. What say a trip to Arrakis?

As everybody knows, sandworms live deep in the desert, are attracted by vibrations, and can grow to great lengths---up to over 100 meters. Since there's little food in the desert, aside from autotrophy, producing their own food, most of the sandworm diet consists of other sandworms. And what determines who is eaten and who eats? Size, of course.

So in an ideal sandworm population where they mature evenly, the main deciding factor of survival would be pure chance. If you're older, you win. If you're younger, you lose.

But what if some mature faster than others?

These new sandworms, let's call them Shaq Hulud, grow much faster than normal ones. So at a younger age they can compete with normal Shai Hulud easier, and soon phase them out to dominate themselves.

That's natural selection for you.

The "natural" in natural selection refers to the fact that humans are not intervening: nature is doing all of this, making the sandworms as fit for their environment as possible. However, there's not always a happy ending. If a sudden or too catastrophic change occurs, say the surface of Arrakis is transformed in a few hundred years into a green paradise, then it's very likely that the sandworms would all go extinct. ~~unless some were preserved as part of the God-Emperor's body~~

Aside from being big and living in deserts, sandworms are also known to produce the precious spice melange, making them a very attractive target for domestication. Now, as far as I know, nobody has been able to do this, so please don't try this at home, but let's just say it was possible. What would happen?

First of all, the breeders would want increased melange production. So they would, hypothetically, select for worms that produce the most spice. Over generations, these domesticated worms would eventually produce much more spice than their natural counterparts. Although this trait wouldn't necessarily increase their chances of survival in nature, it's desirable for humans, so specimens with this trait are continuously bred. And that's artificial selection, folks.

You may have noticed something by this point: where are these desirable traits coming from?

That's right. All these exotic favorable traits must've come from somewhere. When they weren't advantageous, wouldn't the individuals harboring them die out? And if they were always favorable, why didn't they appear and spread before? They couldn't have come out of thin air, right?

Right?

First of all, less favorable traits don't guarantee extinction, just reduced chances of success. And second, these new traits do indeed come out of thin air. Let me elaborate.

You all know that DNA decides stuff, right? How specifically it does that is a topic for another day. But the main point is that DNA can be damaged. Most of the time this does nothing, very rarely it does horrible things (as anyone who knows someone with or has a genetic disease themself can attest), and very, very rarely it produces a good change. And even then, the change is only spread if it takes place in a reproductive cell, and just the reproductive cell that is used to create offspring. if you look at it this way, it's a miracle that evolution progresses at all!

That's evolution, folks. Natural selection coupled with mutation. And as always, see you in the next one!

Hey guys, what's up, it's Jonathan12345 again, here on BioMed with today's topic: the immune system.

Experts in every field like to overestimate how knowledgeable ordinary people are in their field. And I'm definitely NOT an expert (you should not take anything I say as serious medical advice. TALK TO A DOCTOR IF YOU ARE SICK), but it's still pretty easy for me to overestimate how much people know. So we're just going to assume that you know absolutely nothing about the immune system other than "white blood cells eat bacteria".

The first thing you have to know is that "white blood cells" aren't a thing. There are many types of "white blood cells", but the ones we'll be talking about today are the Innate Immune System.

The innate immune system mainly consists of macrophages and neutrophils, both of which are made in the bone marrow. I'll explain them in more detail now.

Macrophages are very big cells that either flow around in your blood or patrol areas in your body. Their job is to detect and consume any bacteria that are found in their regions. If there are too many bacteria to handle, they'll release signals to call for reinforcements, generally in the form of neutrophils.

Neutrophils are a lot more short lived, since they can cause a lot of damage to tissues once they're activated. Generally, they die off naturally shortly after being born (we're talking about shortly in a human scale here), but while they're alive they are kind of on standby, just waiting to reinforce potential battles.

Now, both of these types of cells resemble large white blobs under microscopes, the main difference being that macrophages are larger. They both resemble amoeba and eat similarly---by engulfing their prey with pseudopods and then digesting them alive. Since they don't have eyes, they instead sense chemicals from bacteria to know which direction to attack.

Here's a video of macrophages in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BlPlgGbb2IU

Sometimes, however, infections can get out of hand. In that case, the body needs a bit more than these cells to defeat invaders...

Here's a bonus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28FVxYQuLOQ

Hey guys, what's up, it's me again with another episode of Biomed. Today's topic: GMOs.

Now, you've probably heard a lot about GMOs, both good and bad. They've both been flaunted as the key to future human survival, and also denounced as evil "artificial" foods that are somehow lacking in that magical nature spirit energy that organics fans lust after. My personal favorites were a few posts on the Chinese internet about how GMOs were a Japanese plot to destroy the entire population. As for the sources cited, there were none. How utterly surprising.

I'm sure you at least have some knowledge of what GMOs are. At their very heart, they're simply ordinary organisms that have been genetically modified to be better at what humans need them to be good at, like fruits with more berries, for instance.

So, why do people think they're bad? Let's break down the reasons and debunk them one by one, ranging from most sensible to least.

#1: GMOs could give genes to weeds and give them superpowers.

This is definitely a valid concern for traits like pesticide resistance and hardiness, but there's not much we can do about it for the moment. There are potential solutions, however, like making GMO crops only male/female (I know what you're going to say, Jurrasic Park fans. DON'T SAY IT.)

#2: GMOs aren't 100% safe.

Complaints of these types are mainly over concerns about new allergens that may be created. And while that's a valid concern, the idea that we shouldn't use GMOs because there's some danger is complete bullshit. Trains are dangerous. Agriculture is dangerous. Hell, surgery and medicine is dangerous. Did our ancestors stop using any of those things just because of the danger? If anything, GMOs are safer that conventional methods of producing new types of crops because we can easily contain them and control them. And even if there are allergens, they can still be identified through rigorous testing, which all GMOs are subject to. If you're going to make the case that corporations could ignore regulations and produce harmul GMOs... well, they basically do that for everything else now, does that make technology inherently bad?

#3: GMOs aren't natural so therefore they are bad.

Fat is natural, poison is often natural, sugar is natural. Does it make any of these things bad? Quite the contrary, GMOs can make us healthier by controlling what goes into our diet. Not like corporations would care, but...

#4: GMOs will somehow poison us and make the population die.

Stop watching so many scifi horror movies.

And there you have it. I hope I've dispelled some myths, and I also hope you all learned something today. Do make sure to read more, since I'm going off memory here.

Hey everyone, Jonathan12345 here, and today I'd like to discuss a topic that might have been on your minds a year or two ago: what's an mRNA vaccine, and how does it work?

Now before I get into it, I'd just like to say that I created this community because many people to increase public awareness about how these biomedical things all work to prevent the spread of ecofascist "all-naturalism" sentiments. Now, back to the article.

There were a lot of people talking about how these were "experimental," "untested", and "unsafe", which is of course anti-science fearmongering. In fact, mRNA vaccination has been around as a concept since the 1970s. So, without further ado, let's get into it.

To understand how an mRNA vaccine works, we first need to know how a normal vaccine works. As many of you may know, it takes a deactivated virus and injects it into the body, stimulating a reaction and causing immune cells to produce antibodies targeting parts of the virus called antigens. That way, when the real virus attacks, the body comes prepared with antibodies targeting it ready for production.

Some vaccines don't use a dead virus and instead use parts of the virus, directly injecting antigens into the bloodstream. It's important to know that these two methods are not necessarily better or worse, they are simply different strategies with their own drawbacks and strengths.

An mRNA vaccine takes the second concept a bit further by having the body manufacture the antigens, the virus bits, itself using mRNA, which is a long molecule used as basically a photocopy of DNA to direct the construction of proteins. Now, while a foreign substance entering your body and hacking your cellular mechanisms might sound scary, it actually isn't that big of a deal. mRNA is unstable and so naturally decays(hence the storage issues), and only a small fraction of your ribosomes (protein factories) will be making antigens anyways.

Finally, it's important to know that antigens themselves are not harmful. They're simply bits of viruses that are used by the body as markers for targeting, like a missile searching for a specific insignia on enemy vehicles.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this, and see you in the next post.