SAVsanity

-scientists were looking at some stuff in the inside of a bile duct they were studying in a live patient (this will be important later) using a laser that lets them see the cells in real time. they injected some stuff into the duct and saw the spaces inbetween the cells fill up with fluid in strange, tube-like structures that didn’t correspond with what they expected to be there, so they sectioned and froze them to study them closer; they realized that upon closer inspection, the fluid-filled places were VERY small collagen tubes forming a complex matrix of bundles surrounded by a weird cell covering that seemed to connect them to one another. they called this the Interstitium. 

-they sectioned some more places where squeezy things might happen, like the inner linings of the bladder, lungs, lymph nodes, and the soft tissue enclosing our muscles, filled them with the same indicator, and hyper froze them like they did to the first sample and found the same weird matrix of fluid-filled tubing:

they concluded from what they found from this that: 

1. our previous thought of the space inbetween the cells in these parts of the body, which we thought were just kinda like, there or whatever doing nothing (a series of spaces that were already called the Interstitium that were largely ignored), are actually full of complex tubing running through a ton of very important parts of your body

2. when the structures they’re chilling around (like your bladder and bowel) contract, the fluid moves around all weird

3. the reason this wasn’t discovered before is because when the tubes are squished too hard- like when scientists are cutting into them- they have a tendency to collapse really easily, especially when being treated with chemicals for microscope use, giving the impression of the kind of tissues that we’ve traditionally seen in specimens and thought of being in these sensitive areas (closely compact and dense cell mats). it turns out that in living people, these tubes run between the cells carrying fluid; the scientists were able to see this initially in live patients using the above mentioned laser technology, and then took live biopsies by quickly freezing the cells in place before removal to prevent their collapse.

4. yes, these can move cancer cells around, which is HUGE seeing as they seem to enclose a LOT of important and delicate muscles in our bodies in one giant, complex system. when they looked at it in cancer patients, the tumors they found seemed to kind of be….leaking….into them…..because the tumors were putting pressure on the fluid tubes….which easily collapse…..and move things that fall into the fluid around….

5. the scientists also explored things like hernias and colon damage in relation to these, but unfortunately this is where my translation powers run out as non-plant-related terminology starts being used lmao im so sorry im like this

tl;dr: the membranes that surround some really important parts of squishy things like our stomach, bowels, colon, lungs, muscles, etc are full of very delicate and complex tubing that runs in a weirdly complex system to other important squishy things throughout our bodies and looks like a weird organ that we didn’t know was there before (or like, we knew about it, we just didn’t know it was so…connected and uh…organy). also it seems to have an impact on the spread of cancer throughout these regions

You’ve picked out the main stuff, but here’s some things I think is very interesting:

The discovery of these spaces dramatically expands the lymphatic system. Basically, this is how the lymph nodes are connected to the rest of the body. Before it was kinda like ‘yeah here are the lymph nodes, and the lymph fluid kinda goes to the somehow? idk’. But now we have a whole system. It’s like discovering the entire circulatory system when before you only had the heart to work with.

This is super important for cancers and detecting when a cancer has spread (metastasised, in the lingo). They talk about the spread of cancers into the deeper tissues (such as stomach cancers invading their submucosal tissue and skin cancers pentrating deeper into the dermis layers), but what is most important is that they detected the cancers spreading into the interstitial spaces before there was anything to detect within the lymph nodes. This is super important, as usually lymph node biopsies are done to detect if a cancer is spreading; this is before that very stage. This is literally catching cancers in the act of spreading before they’ve hit another organ this is fucking incredible.

It’s providing an explanation for oedema (or edema, for my US followers), which is the build-up of fluid in certain areas of the body (usually the lower limbs, but it can be anywhere). For so long it’s been like ‘I guess there’s something wrong with your blood vessels??’ but like the lymphatic system, we’ve now got another explanation. ‘Ah, okay, there’s something going down in your interstitial fluid!’ A more effective diagnosis and treatment could be made, Bam! Enrich more people’s lives.

They may play a role in how scar formation works. Some scar tissue can get a bit crazy and grow too much, meaning it needs to be cut away as it hinders movement or it just fucking painful. Perhaps the interstitial tubing/fluid plays a role in this, considering collagen is used in scar tissue, and these spaces are full of it.

There’s clearly communication between these spaces and the digestive system, as they found tattoo pigment from the intestines in these spaces. Tattooing in the intestine is done to mark lesions for removal or observation later on, so the fact this pigment is actively moving out of the digestive system and else means it could play a role in disease we don’t know much about, like inflammatory bowel conditions.

Basically, THIS IS FUCKING HUGE AND COULD POTENTIALLY CHANGE THE GAME IN A BIG WAY.

Thank you OP for sharing this, I haven’t nerded out and been so fascinated by a study in a long time.

So, since nobody really had the edited font for Blurryface, I edited Futura (Base font) myself so nobody else has to waste their time and money on it! You can get the font here for free! FYI, you need more than 4 GB of RAM to use FontForge, because otherwise it keeps crashing and crashing and crashing (I spent 2 hours last time).

Loki being shockingly polite.

Bonus (Loki being polite even as Odin):

this is emmett and cullen they are best friends

I remember fifteen.

I was fifteen when I had my first kiss. He was a friend, I’d known him to some degree for three years. That year, though, we flirted in science class. We had study break before mock exams and he asked me to help him study.

Now, I’d always been the smart girl. Guys asked me to check their spelling, they didn’t ask me to the movies. Always the friend, never the girlfriend. And I felt like a freak - the only one of my friends who’d never been kissed. At fifteen I knew guys were starting to find me attractive … but that didn’t seem enough. They flirted with me, sure, but they never pursued me.

Until this guy. Cause it turned out, the only thing he wanted to study was the back of my throat.

He knew I’d never kissed anyone before. That didn’t stop him from trying to stick his hands down my pants.

And I went home feeling guilty. Guilty that I’d refused to have sex with him. Guilty that he’d wanted me and I’d disappointed him. When you’re fifteen and someone finally notices you, you want more than anything to make them happy. Even if it’s at the expense of your own happiness.

See, I didn’t want this guy to be my boyfriend. He was way too into sports and I didn’t like his friends and he flat out wasn’t interesting enough for me to want to date him. But he was funny, he was popular, and he wanted me. I can’t stress how intoxicating it is when you’ve never felt wanted before … you’ll do anything to hold onto that. Anything.

So add to that that this guy is older, he’s known in the youtube community, you have his songs on your iPod, you never thought he’d ever talk to you … let alone want you. You don’t want to seem like some stupid little girl who doesn’t know what she’s doing, do you? You don’t want to let him down. After all, you’re special. He picked you.

If I could go back to fifteen, I’d tell myself that there is no lonelier place than the arms of someone who doesn’t love you. But I doubt fifteen year old me would have listened.

Because being wanted is a drug I wasn’t strong enough to fight.

And these girls should never have had to.

Mike Lombardo is an expert manipulator. When I met him, I had incredibly high self-esteem, and he found a way to whittle it down to nothing. It was subtle at first—he’d challenge or correct me on things I said in group conversations in front of our mutual friends, or he’d explain to me why jokes in movies were funny, as if I were incapable of understanding on my own. Over time, it got bigger. He would immediately shoot down my ideas or suggestions as being immature or unhelpful, and a week later he pretended he had come up with the same idea on his own, insisting that I was making it all up in my head when I called him out for it. He would tell embarrassing or private things about me to groups of people, right in front of me, forcing me to choose between pretending I didn’t care or looking dramatic. He would literally copy and paste different parts of our text message conversations together to make it look like I had said something adorably stupid, and he would post those online, and I would laugh it off because I didn’t want to look crazy by causing a scene. Every time I said something funny to him, he would stare stoically ahead and refuse to laugh… and then tweet my joke as his own a few days later. After enough instances of him self-promoting himself to other people in the YouTube community while completely ignoring the fact that I was standing next to him, and making no effort to introduce me or involve me in any way, I somehow came to the conclusion that I should sacrifice my own internet presence and become “his girlfriend” rather than an individual person.

Very early on in our relationship, he asked me to lose weight. I didn’t have considerable extra weight on me, for one thing— but more importantly, I had never had any desire to be thinner. I guess I assumed that, because I was a strong person who didn’t let other people influence my decisions, it wouldn’t hurt to take his advice if I did it on my own terms. He asked me to text him how much weight I had lost each day, to keep me accountable, and I dropped 25 pounds quickly. My best friend had recently moved away, and when I saw her for the first time in a few months, she told me repeatedly that I was “so skinny, so so skinny.” She said it like an observation, not like a compliment. The next time I saw Mike, he was texting (as per usual) as I got into his car. When he finally looked up at me, he said in a flat, disinterested voice, “You look thin.” I said, “Yeah.” Despite the fact that I had done it to appease him, he never mentioned my weight loss again. Oh, except for one time when we were clothes shopping, when he told me to buy a pair of shorts in a size smaller than the ones that fit me. So that they could be aspirational. (I bought them, but don’t worry; I later threw them on a bon fire.)

On the few occasions that I expressed to him that I was mad or upset about something he’d done, he twisted my words over and over until he convinced me that I was being immature, needy, and irrational. He would preach to me in long monologues about how unfair it was that I would put this stress on him when he already had so much else to worry about. He would do this until I apologized to him for having thought I was angry— when really, I was just being silly and childish.

I never felt physically threatened by him, other than maybe one time. I was staying at his parents’ house one week, and I was a ball of energy because he was much more sedentary than I was. I suggested that we wrestle each other, just being dumb, and he said he didn’t feel like it. The next evening, when I was tired and winding down for the day, he came up behind me and scooped me over his shoulder. I told him that I wasn’t in the mood to roughhouse, and he said, “You were the one who wanted to wrestle. Let’s do it.” I laughed for a few seconds and tried to push his grip off me, but when it became apparent that he wasn’t going to put me down, I got a little more stern and told him again that I wasn’t in the mood for it. He continued to carry me around his house, throw me on the couch, and hold me down—all while I protested and asked him to leave me alone. At one point, while he was holding both my arms still with one of his hands, I looked into his eyes and tried as hard as I could to communicate with my face that I seriously wanted him to stop touching me. When he didn’t get that message, I stopped talking, went basically limp, and let him piggyback me around for a few more minutes until he got bored and put me down. I know that this same scenario could happen with someone who wasn’t a sociopath, so I’ve always written off its ability to be used as evidence that he mistreated me, but I did feel really scared in those few seconds when I realized he had absolutely no ability to read my facial cues. And even if he could tell that I wasn’t joking, he didn’t take my No and my Stop seriously, and that freaked me out.

I became such an emotional slave to him that when he decided we should “break up” one day—not after a fight, not after a long time of not seeing each other, just without any warning whatsoever—I agreed. A few days later, our conversations returned to normal, and he told me he loved me constantly. He suggested that our relationship stay the same as it had always been, but that we keep it private (keeping in mind, of course, that the public aspects of our relationship had always been 100% his idea), and my self-esteem was so diminished that I didn’t see the problem with being his secret. He would talk and write about the end of our relationship online, and I was too exhausted to even care.

He devoted a lot of time and effort to making the idea of him cheating on me seem insane and impossible. He would regularly reminded me—verbally— that he was a great boyfriend, and he bought me so many things that I knew he couldn’t afford. If I asked why he was carrying on twenty different text message conversations with strangers from YouTube when he should have been spending time with me, he reminded me of the last present he’d bought. I told him several times that while I trusted that his relationships with teenage girls were platonic and respectful, he should be incredibly careful so that none of them got the wrong idea about his intentions. He laughed that off as being ridiculous. I asked him one time only if he’d ever even considered being unfaithful to me, emotionally or physically, and he spat back that it was ridiculous that I “kept” asking him that. According to him, the fact that I would be so untrusting was a sign that I was too immature for an adult relationship.