Sal

EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

Hah, sure, let's investigate 🕵️‍♂️

The term 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user 'Mxn'.

The description of the edit is the following:

Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the 'Gulf of Mexico' in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the 'Gulf of Mexico' in September 16, 2018. I don't have access to the citation so I don't know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

If you check the history you will find that the same 'Mxn' fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

I find it highly unlikely that:

• User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

AND

• This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

More likely....

• Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
• Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

And this concludes my little investigation 🧐

Always exciting to learn about new perspectives on consciousness!

I have searched for the "Cellular Basis of Consciousness (CBC)" theory and I do not personally find it very compelling. I appreciate that the hard problem of consciousness is very difficult to address using the scientific method, but I suspect that consciousness arises from a form of processing that requires computations of the kind performed by animal brains. I don't think that the kind of biophysics that allows cells to sense and respond to the environment are enough to create a conscious experience.

About the: "third state". Cells are alive, independently of the multi-cellular organism that they come from. I don't agree that changing the way that the cells are organized constitutes some "third state".

Despite my disagreements, it is still nice to read and think about. Thanks for sharing.

Interesting! I wonder if it is already technically feasible to culture tooth-like pieces from the patient's stem cells. Instead of extracting and carving a tooth, it would be cool to grow the tissue in some kind of structured 3D matrix. Patient gets to keep their canine then.

That said... Do you know if tissue grown from a patient's own stem cells is generally not rejected by the immune system? I am not sure if cells need to differentiate within the body to get labeled by some molecular markers that make them immunocompatible, or if having the same genetic makeup is good enough.

Hello!

Yes, the !biology@mander.xyz community is a community for general biology-related content.

There are also more specific communities that focus in more specialized topics, such as such as !palaeontology@mander.xyz.

If you have an interest in a specific topic, feel free to create a community that reflects that interest. Some instances are very general while others try to limit communities to those that fit a range of topics, so it is best to create a community in an instance for which the topic is in scope.

Ooh, cool! 😁 That detector seems to be working only in "Geiger mode", which means that it can count the number of X-rays/Gamma particles but it does not estimate their energy. So, the dedicated devices are still better in that they allow you to identify the source of the radiation by measuring the counts and the energy distribution simultaneously.

It probably would not be too difficult to build the open gamma detector into something like a pinephone. I don't think that has been done yet.

My experience with phone zoom has been underwhelming so far, but I would like to check out the Samsung S2x's 10x zoom when I have the chance!

Still, I really like using binoculars because they transport me next to what I am looking at and do so in very high definition. I do have >100€ binoculars though, colors look very nice through them. I think it will be difficult to replicate via a screen.

I think it would be an interesting hypothesis to test.

I looked a bit more and extended my search into brines, and was able to find another set of data in the following paper:

Roupas, P., Keogh, J., Noakes, M., Margetts, C., & Taylor, P. (2010). Mushrooms and agaritine: A mini-review. Journal of Functional Foods, 2(2), 91-98.

This one is not freely available, but it is found in SciHub and I can also share the PDF if needed.

This relevant section discusses that mushrooms canned in liquid and in brine were measured to have less agaritine, which makes sense. I think that lactofermentation helps degrade even more due to the acid, additional metabolic activity, and possibly a bit more oxygen.

I agree that it would be nice to research. I am surprised that it hasn't been (or at least it is not easy to find). I did find research on other methods such as heating and drying, but I could not find lacto fermentation....

Agaritine content of mushrooms

The agaritine content in fresh A. bisporus mushrooms in Swit- zerland has been reported to be in the range of 94–629 mg/kg fresh weight. Canned mushrooms contained 1–55 mg/kg drained weight with 3–103 mg/L in the liquid. The highest agaritine values were reported in dried commercial mush- rooms amounting to 2110–6905 mg/kg (Fischer et al., 1984). In Sweden, Andersson et al. (1999) measured agaritine in fresh mushrooms and 35 canned mushroom products (A. bisporus). Two fresh samples contained 212 and 229 mg/kg, respectively. Agaritine levels in brine were generally slightly lower than the levels detected in canned mushrooms. Canned whole mushrooms contained 14.9 ± 6.7 mg agaritine per kg product whereas cut mushrooms contained 18.1 ± 7.8 mg/kg. The wet canning process was shown to reduce the level of agaritine in A. bisporus by 10-fold resulting in lower levels in canned products. On a portion basis, somewhat higher amounts of agaritine may be found in some other food prod- ucts (mushroom soup and pasta sauce) containing A. bisporus (Andersson et al., 1999).

Yes. The camera pixels generate a current in response to light. You can add some filters to block certain wavelengths of light (like UV) from getting to the camera sensor, and tune the pixels so that they respond more to to specific colors. But X-rays and gamma rays can just pass through the filter. Often they will pass through sensor as well, but, in the cases that they do get absorbed by the sensor, they can also produce a current that to the camera's readout electronics looks like other light would.

The gamma detectors I mentioned are very very sensitive. They respond to single X-ray/Gamma ray particles. These detectors can count how many individual particles collide with a small crystal cube every second. These crystals are special in that they produce a very tiny flash of light when an X-ray or gamma particle collides with them. As an added bonus, these sensors can directly measure the energy of the particles by measuring the strength of the flash, and from this information they can construct not only the total counts but also a spectrum. With this extreme sensitivity these detectors can measure small quantities of radiation that come from space, from rocks, and from other materials.

I looked for a video of a phone going through an X-ray machine, and found these:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8iSoPhtY3s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1YaroH6lHA

The white specks that you can see near second 25 (first video) and second 34 (second video) could be a result of the X-rays. I am not sure, but it seems reasonable to me. On contrast, when I put my radiacode through the X-ray machine in the airport the radiacode reacts very strongly and becomes saturated.

Radiation detectors. Such as the Radiacode or the Open Gamma Detector.

Binoculars are quite portable, very useful, and phones don't do a good job at zooming in like that.

Smart watches integrate with phones but the phones by themselves are not so good at measuring the heart rate and other parameters directly.

Mini projectors. UV flashlights. Tools in general... There is so much actually. What type of gadgets are you looking for?

Yes, this is what I mean.

As for (3), this is how I am reasoning about this. The mushroom cells are surrounded by a soft cell membrane made out of lipids, and a hard cell wall made out of a network of sugar filaments (primarily chitin). The cell membrane serves as a chemical barrier that separates the chemistry outside of the cell from the chemistry inside of the cell, and it has many mechanisms to allow specific chemicals to flow from one side to the other. This cell membrane is very dynamic and it needs continuous maintenance to remain functioning as intended. When a cell dies, the cell membrane is no longer kept under maintenance, and it basically dissolves.

After the cell membrane disintegrates, the cell wall remains. This cell wall is much tougher and does not require constant maintenance. The wall also has its own filtering capacity as well the ability to absorb and retain chemicals, but it is a lot more porous and this porosity allows water, nutrients, and other water-soluble chemicals to move more freely.

So, my reasoning is: The mushroom dies. The cell wall disintegrates. The more permeable cell wall remains. Agaritine is soluble in water, and water and small water-soluble molecules can usually move freely through the cell wall. So, within a short period of time the water outside of the mushrooms will mix with the water inside of the mushrooms, and the agaritine will distribute throughout the whole volume. At this point, even if the mushroom's environment had provided some form of protection, the now-mixed agaritine will experience an environment similar to the environments discussed in the papers I from the previous comments.

It is not as simple as I describe here, because the specific properties of the cell wall can be complex, and they can change due to chemical modifications. For example, some molecules can be absorbed into the sugar matrix such that they are protected from degradation - but I could not find any data to suggest that this likely a significant factor for agaritine. There are some recent articles that review the fungal cell wall, I will paste the citations below, in case you want to look at some of this in more detail.

Gow, N. A., & Lenardon, M. D. (2023). Architecture of the dynamic fungal cell wall. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 21(4), 248-259.

Latgé, J. P., & Wang, T. (2022). Modern biophysics redefines our understanding of fungal cell wall structure, complexity, and dynamics. Mbio, 13(3), e01145-22.

My question has to do about the agaritine content in mushrooms that are subjected to fermentation. That agaritine might behave differently when contained in a mushroom. What answer to my question does the articles give you?

It is true. I am not sure, the articles do not address this specific question. It would depend on the process and the amount of time that you let it ferment. Over a period of weeks, it is likely that the mushrooms will have died, the cell membranes will have broken down, and the chemistry of degradation described in those papers will have taken place.

Fresh mushrooms are still alive at the beginning of the process. Until they die, the mushroom's cells may continue to produce agaritine, and the chemistry inside of the cells is not necessarily going to be the same as in tap water. The amount of time that it will take for the cells to die depends on the process. If you are submerging the mushrooms into a brine, I don't think that they will survive for long because of the osmotic pressure.

No problem! I searched "Agaritine degradation" in Google Scholar and selected to those two articles from the results page as they seemed relevant. I also searched for more specific fermentation based papers but did not find any - this is what I mean when I say quick search.

I did not use an LLM chat bot to formulate the answer, but I did copy and paste it to ChatGPT and asked whether it agreed. I often do this in case it catches some obvious mistake. But it did not suggest any corrections, and it did not affect my answer. So an LLM chatbot did assist me in validation.

If you want I can explain some of the reasoning in more detail. Figures 1 and 3 of the first paper have data on what happens when agaritine is dissolved in water in the presence of air ('open vial'), no air ('closed vial'), and at a low pH with a closed vial. I think that these two figures are the most relevant to this particular question, as they give you an estimate to how fast agaritine will break down due to conditions that are easy to control and measure. Other types of microbiological activity can have an effect, but in this case it is not essential to invoke these more complicated processes.