So the plant you have there is a Maranta leuconeura. I have one that looks just like it!

There's a couple things that could be going wrong. In general, here are the conditions it likes:

1. It likes indirect light. I keep mine by a south facing window that has an awning cutting the harsh light outside. Additionally, I have it behind a sheer curtain.

2. It likes to be kept in moist soil, and in a humid place. I don't let mine fully dry out before rewatering it, and I live in a place where the ambient humidity is often 60-80%. If you live in a dry place, water it often and maybe keep it in the most humid place with enough light (kitchen or bathroom is usually more humid)

3. and this is key, it does NOT like hard water. I honestly think this could be the problem with yours given what you said. Hard water has a lot of minerals, and over time, they build up in the soil. The plant might have been fine with tap for months, but now the soil could effectively be too "salty" for it.

If I had this plant, I'd do one of two things.

Option 1:

• buy fresh potting soil
• gently remove the plant from its pot
• shake off the soil from the roots
• rinse and scrape off any residue on the inside of the pot
• replant in fresh soil
• water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

Option 2:

• buy or obtain real reverse osmosis (RO) water (see note below)
• water the plant so thoroughly with RO that the mineral salts dissolve and are carried away. This means soaking the pot in a large volume (like more than a gallon) of RO water for an hour or so, or watering it so water flushes out the bottom 5+ times in a row. You can tell if you flush the minerals out because there should be no grey dusty residue left on the soil or sides of the pot!
• add a small amount of balanced fertilizer (like follow miracle grow instructions or something)
• water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

As backup, I might also try and root a cutting (again, in RO water) just in case it still dies anyway. Hopefully with these efforts it will revive, though!

Note on soft/RO water:

If you are looking for soft water, don't use water from a water softener (confusing, I know). This is because water softeners for humans replace the minerals with sodium ions. In essence, water softener water is just as "salty" as hard water, it's just different salts.

Instead, try and get deionized (DI) or reverse osmosis (RO) water.

Ideally, this would come from an RO system, which is a common kind of in-house water filter. If you live by a college, you could maybe ask for some from their science departments (especially biology or chemistry). You can also buy it online and have it shipped to you, but this is really expensive, especially considering that the maranta needs so much water.

Instead, I would buy a TDS meter (available on Amazon for like $7). It's a little stick device that you put in the water and it tells you how hard it is. With this, you could test a few brands of bottled water (avoid "spring water", or "remineralized" water-- go for "filtered" or "purified") until you find one with less than ~30 ppm / ~75 µS/cm dissolved solids. My grocery store sells water in big machines out front that reads 15 µS/cm, and it costs $2.50/5 gallons!

Honestly, I cheat and get lazy sometimes with mine and water it with tap. You saw yourself how long it takes for the solids to build up, and watering it with RO dissolves some of those over time. It's not like tap will kill it right away, but these guys sure are picky! :)

GLAAD's Accelerating Acceptance is the most comprehensive survey we have to determine changes in public sentiment about LGBTQ+ acceptance. It's literally what I cite when writing research papers about queer issues. The difference is absolutely believable, and they validated the results with sampling bias in mind. There is no reason for you to cast doubt on the result like this, and it reads as disengenuine for you to do so.

Also, you don't get to decide what queer lives deserve to be in articles about LGBTQ+ people. Thankfully.

I'm trans

I don't support murder

Not of 80 year old Trump supporters, not of anyone

OP: says something revealing they don't understand biology

Response: dude, what? You don't understand biology!

You: "maybe they don't understand biology because of all these new-fangled GeNdErS and iDeNtItIeS!!!"

(please don't get me started on this, I am literally about to get my PhD in the ways people intentionally misconstrue and oversimplify sex, sexuality, and sexual selection in nature to obfuscate the validity of LGBTQ+ people in society and I don't want to be here all day)

The whole point is that we still don't know what Lucy actually looked like, and therefore whenever we depict her we are "filling in the blanks" with our own interpretations. In the past, we didn't know whether she was likely to be covered in hair or not, but almost every depiction showed her covered.

The author of the article, who has a PhD and is the chair of a college's interdisciplinary humanities department, makes the point that when we exclusively depicted her covered in hair when we didn't know whether or not she was covered in hair, we were projecting our standards of modesty onto her. We also idealized her as a mother, as exemplifed by her depiction with protective and warm body language toward fictional children and male partners. These are aspects that various artists, researchers, and journalists projected onto a skeleton, not truths about Lucy as an individual.

When it was revealed that Lucy, in fact, was likely not covered in hair, and instead likely walked around naked and uncovered, we did not immediately revise these depictions. They disrupt the previously held projections and interfere with the narrative of Lucy as a "perfect mother" by modern standards-- not because she can't be both naked and a good mother in an absolute sense, but because these are disparate and conflicting signifiers in our modern society. In essence, it's harder to solidifiy her illustration as "the mother of all humans" to an audience of modern Westerners if she can't be depicted with "chastity and modesty", because we strongly associate those characteristics with good motherhood.

It is, therefore, a media analysis of the depictions of Lucy, it's not about Lucy herself. It's about how we project onto Lucy, and what that says about the people doing the projecting.

Of course, humans societies that are alive today are also valuable examples in the process of self reflection. But ignoring the observations made by the author and other researchers is like saying we don't need to analyze media (books, movies, TV shows) that depict society, because real society is right there!

"if you can't afford to leave, or you or your family have medical needs and can't relocate, or if all your friends and family and social spheres are here, or if your job is context dependent, or if you're undocumented, or if your spouse or family disagrees with your desire to move, or if you're enrolled in in-state college, or if you're elderly and have lived here your whole life, or if you have a farm, or if your ancestral home is nearby, or if you're homeless, or if you have a strong sense of duty to your community, or if you're a military service member, or if you're a kid...

...that's on you!"

edit: also, many marginalized people know and will tell you-- there isn't a place on this earth for people like us with 100% safety from violence

So I think I can make the claim that I am an expert in this, at least compared to 95%+ of biological researchers. My research foci include epigenetic and emergent interactions like the ones discussed in the article, and although I am not going to back this up by identifying myself, please believe me when I say I've written some papers on the topic.

The concept of junk DNA is perhaps the problem here. Obviously there are large swaths of our genome that do not encode anything or have instructions for proteins. However, dismissing all non-coding DNA as "junk" is a critical error.

Your telomeres are a great example. They don't contain vital information so much as they serve a specific function-- providing a buffer region to be consumed during replication in place of DNA that does contain vital information. Your cells would work less well without telomeres, so calling them junk is inaccurate.

Other examples of important non-coding regions are enhancer and promoter regions. Papers describing the philosophical developments of stochasticity in cellular function note how enhancers are vital for increasing the likelihood of transcription by making it more likely that specific proteins floating in the cellular matrix interact with each other. Promoter regions are something most biologists understand already, so I won't describe them here (apologies for anyone who needs to go read about them elsewhere!). Some regions also inform the 3D structure of the genome, creating topological associated domains (TADs) that bring regions of interest closer together.

Even the sequences with less obvious non-coding functions often have some emergent effect on cellular function. Transcription occurs in nonsense regions despite no mRNA being created; instead, tiny, transient non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) are produced. Because RNA can have functional and catalytic properties like proteins, these small RNAs "do jobs" while they exist. The kinds of things they do before being degraded are less defined than the mechanistic models of proteins, but as we understand more stochastic models, we are beginning to understand how they work.

One last type of DNA that we used to consider junk: binding sites for transcription factors, nucleosome remodelers, and other DNA binding proteins. Proteins are getting stuck to DNA all the time, and then doing things while they're stuck there. Sometimes even just being a place where a nucleosome with a epigenetic flag can camp out and direct other cellular processes is enough to invalidate calling that region "junk".

Anyway I'm done giving my spiel but the take home message here is that all DNA causes stochastic effects and almost all of it (likely all and we haven't figured it out yet) serves some function in-context. Calling all DNA that doesn't encode for a protein "junk" is outdated-- if anything, the protein encoding regions are the boring parts.

Girl, this community is full of trans folks, and not all of us are trans women. I'd wager the majority of people annoyed with this post are not cis, and it seems like some of them are trans women, too

It's not even something I would post in a community just for trans women, like what about trans women that don't end up with these characteristics? Are people only trans women if they identify with these changes? Why is the assumption that men (and I guess pre-transition trans women) have anger issues and porn addictions? Why are those qualities tied to their hormones and physical bodies, so trans women who can't or won't medically transition are excluded from benefitting?

What organization are you researching with? Why is the submission via Gmail?

How are you handling participant data (mostly email addresses, it seems)? Can participants opt out and revoke access to the data after submission?

Do you have a conflict of interest? Do you or any of your colleagues have an affiliation with Dolby or other companies involved in the research?

Did this proposal pass IRB? I'm guessing it's exempt, so probably yes, but do you have the approval number?

What do you plan on doing with the model? Are these data for training the model or for testing it?

I know those questions sound a lil aggro, and to be clear, I don't think there are necessarily right answers. Maybe you're an undergraduate or hobbiest, like... I don't think IRB is super important for a cute cat study. But I do think this kind of info should be included in recruitment calls as a standard!

Cheers, seems cute and fun

I'm confused; the link says it was updated in 2023 but none of the data is from later than 2022. Am I missing something?

You said it yourself-- the reason those people need to make weird choices like trying to find any way to qualify for more government assistance is because historically their income came from industries that don't and can't exist anymore. They don't have any other choice. The solution is actually more availability of assistance resources so people from those places can have enough stability to be able to make choices like learning new skills or moving to a new place. Why can't people like him-- who see this happening to the people around him, his neighbors, his family-- empathize?

I have an honest question for all the commenters saying "I'd rather not use reddit": where do you get niche information from other than reddit?

I don't want to give reddit traffic, but I find myself constantly looking for information that would necessarily only be available on a platform like reddit. Examples:

• Product info and reviews
• Niche troubleshooting for odd hobbies (fermentation, video games, diy)
• Travel advice from locals/regulars (do I need wetsuit to swim here? Where are restaurants that won't harass my partner and I for being queer?)
• Advice, when the "official" recommendations on SEO websites were clearly written for a litigation-happy American society (some healthcare, some law, etc.)

I consider myself pretty information-access savvy but a lot of these things require a "crowdsource" aspect that blogs and other websites can't provide.

What do y'all do?