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I think that panspermia is the most likely hypothesis to be eventually proven correct.

According to this hypothesis, very simple "living" structures can be found throughout space, scattered around planets, meteorites, and perhaps even in space dust. This dust can be thought of as fungal spores. When they land in a planet with suitable conditions, these systems can evolve into more complex life forms.

The alternatives to panspermia generally imply that Earth is a super special planet in which certain special conditions conspired at a point in time to allow an extremely unlikely event to happen. Panspermia suggests that, instead of a being a statistical anomaly, life is probably rather common throughout the universe.

Woops. Thanks! I have modified it to point at the HTML page instead of the PDF: https://opg.optica.org/oe/fulltext.cfm?uri=oe-33-3-3759

I don't have any recommendations, unfortunately. But this is very interesting! I have gotten into software-defined radio recently and radio astronomy seems like a good direction to continue learning. Hopefully someone has some good advice.

An instance for nature and science related content. It is intended to be an instance to share photos of nature, scientific articles, ask about plants, science-related hobbies, etc. I make some effort to avoid politics and charged topics, although some small amount is tolerated, mostly because it is difficult to always enforce this without being too aggressive with moderation.

Here is the side bar:

An instance dedicated to nature and science.

We follow Lemmy’s code of conduct.

Please be respectful to each other.

The main focus of this instance is the natural sciences, and the scope encompasses all of the STEM fields.

Please keep politics to a minimum. When science is the focus, intersection with politics may be tolerated as long as the discussion is constructive and science remains the focus. As a general rule, political content posted directly to the instance’s local communities is discouraged and may be removed. You can of course engage in political discussions in non-local communities.

As a member of the fediverse, you can create your account here and interact with any other federated community!

To find communities all over the Lemmyverse you can use a community browser such as: https://lemmyverse.net/communities

To fetch a community, simply copy and paste the community’s URL into the search box in Mander.

Hey! Thanks a lot for offering help with this, and I am happy to hear that you like it here :D

Financially: At the moment I am paying approximately ~$60 per month for the instance, which is an amount that I am more than happy to contribute to the fediverse in addition to donations to the dev team. If you have the means and want to contribute, my suggestion is to donate directly to the development: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

As for other kinds of help: Moderating a community (or communities) is a lot of help. Users are free to create their own communities or can reach out to me and I can make them a moderator in any of the communities I moderate 🙂

Nice idea! Hello!

At some point I was looking into whether I could add a simple IRC-like web client and point chat.mander.xyz at it, just as an exercise if anything.

I found an open source web client called "The Lounge" (https://thelounge.chat/). I was looking into how to host it in a way that the same authentication could be shared between mander.xyz and chat.mander.xyz, but it is became one of those unfinished projects. If there is some interest I could give it a try again.

A masive hug back to you! Thank you for being such an amazing contributor and bringing lots of laughs and memes to share.

I was no aware of the magnitude of your chronic pain issues! I am happy to learn you are feeling better, and best of luck finding some very cool insects while touching that grass 😄

Ooooh, fascinating!

If they can send me over the second half of my thesis I would appreciate it enormously! 😀

The analytics tools that I am personally uncomfortable with involve dynamic, changing forms of data. I run GPSLogger on my phone (without a SIM card) and continuously log the GPS data to a text file. This data is then synced to my computer when WiFi is available. I can display this data on a map using gpx-viewer, and show very detailed tracking data of myself.

I have explored this map with some friends/family. They get to see a time-stamped movie of my life - my trips to work, to the shop, when I go out, if I go on a trip, etc. The data displayed in this manner is somewhat intimate, personal information. Anyone I have shown this to has said that they would not be so comfortable with such a map of their lives existing... Well, if they are carrying a active phone with a SIM card, it does.

To think that a company like Google can own such a map for a very large number of people makes me uncomfortable. On top of that, each of those map trajectories can be associated with an individual and their personality... They have the ability to pick out specific trajectories on the basis of the political ideologies or shopping behaviors of the personas behind them. This is extreme. I am of the opinion that the convenience afforded by a these technologies does not justify the allocation of that super-power to the companies that enable the technology.

A few years ago Facebook enabled a "Graph search" feature. This allowed users to create search queries such as"Friends of friends of X who like the page "X" and went to school near Z". That tool seemed super cool on the surface, but it quickly became obvious how something like that could be easily exploited. Later on in Snowden's book I learned about XKeyscore from the NSA, which is like an extra-powerful no-consent-needed graph search that is available to some people. This is not just targeted ads.

I guess that what I am trying to convey is... For me, making the privacy-conscious choice is about not contributing to the ecosystem of very concrete tools that give super-powers to groups of people that may not have my best interest in mind. In my mind it is something very tangible and concrete, and I find many of those convenience tradeoffs to be clearly worth it.

I don't think I would be able to identify them, sorry.

Some specific information could help. The breaking veil of a young specimen showing the web-like cortina of Cortniarius (like in the first image here) would suggest that genus.

I think that the spore print you have shown rules out Tubaria.

A photo of the spores taken with a microscope could help definitely rule out Psilocybe. However, confirming definitely Psilocybe would still be difficult from the spores. If any of the specimens would show some blue bruising that would be a very strong argument for Psilocybe.

Very interesting list! I am especially curious about Matt Brown's videos. Thanks!

Fresh from the Farm Fungi - he is a mushroom farmer from Colorado. He has a ton of valuable information on growing mushrooms and running a business. He also has a few series of videos on very interesting experiments such as growing boletus, morelles, and cordyceps.

Microbehunter - he is a biology teacher that runs a microscope channel. His videos are very useful for learning the basics of microscopy.

Huygen Optics - I'm not sure about this guy's background. He worked in R&D for Phillips in the 90s and he knows a lot about optics and chemistry, but I don't know much more. He has built some equipment in has garage for sputtering metals on surfaces and has some pretty cool videos.

MissOrchidGirl - she is more popular than the others. She has great info about caring for orchids and a fantastic orchid collection.

Ben Felix - he is a portfolio manager with very solid financial advice. He supports his claims with research articles.