#snience

He put wayyyyyy too much indications on every steps : color, potential dangers (risk of irritation, toxicity, etc), developed a mortality /100 scale for each step, indicate the margin of safety (3 more or less drops and you're 3rd degree burned dunderhead) .

By the seventh book, he learned biochemistry and organic chemistry, and added the pH, reaction equations, active ingredient, what protections to use (gloves, glasses) and progress tables.

Then he wrote "Muggle Techniques Applied to Magical Potions", in which he explains how to take off your gloves in safety, how to sterilize the supplies (including dragon leather gloves), when and how to use an autoclave, a centrifuge, and everything you can find in a muggle lab.

Through the years, he wrote many books :

Fresh, Dried, Fermented or Chopped : a proper use of plants in magical potions ;

Raw, Rare, Blue, Well done or Burnt: a proper use of animal parts in magical potions ;

Healing Spells and Potions for Daily Life ;

Why Using Your Wand While Brewing is the WORST IDEA EVER ;

You Blow Your Cauldron : Healing Spells for Dunderheads

Ancient Runes and Alchemy: How to Make the Lab Dunderhead-Proof

Starry Sky and Unicorn Poop : Potions for Toddlers and Children (under a pen name)

Easy Peasy, Potions Easy (under a pen name)

Those Legal Potions That Should Be Worst a Dementor Kiss (very controversial, includes Amortentia)

He also published many papers in potions magazines, all controversial, and that's how the word "Snience" started to spread.

He has been offered many jobs in potion labs, but never accepted it. However, he agreed to teach some summer camps when he's short of money, where he met very skilled wizards in herbology, magical creatures, spells and alchemy, whom he befriended.

They called themselves The Mad Snientists Team, since they all started to use muggle knowledge to improve their research.

Every single scenario where someone gets sick from being out in cold weather is valid and here’s why:

Rhinoviruses (a family of viruses responsible for the majority of colds) prefer to replicate at 32°C (89°F), which is an oddity among infectious agents because most human pathogens are adapted to work best closer to our normal core temperature 37°C (98°F). Hence why they almost exclusively infect the respiratory tract - this is one of the coolest parts of the body due to air exchange.

Studies have demonstrated that at least part of this preference to replicate at nasal cavity temperature is due to a less efficient antiviral defense response of infected cells at cool temperatures.

Yeah, I absolutely agree that this kink is more than just environmental factors. Not too long ago I made a post about how interesting it is that there are so many autistic snzfuckers out there (myself included), and, more broadly, how a disproportionate number of snzfuckers have some kind of auditory processing abnormalities. (I think I forgot to get that post reblogged to this new blog. I’ll fix that in a second.) As far as I’m aware, neuroatypicallities like those are largely genetic.

I can’t claim to have ever studied kink science (which is a goddamn shame, given how many evolution and animal behavior courses I’ve been through), but this all makes me think that there isn’t a single specific snz kink gene. There are probably several genetically coded factors that make it likely for the kink to develop early on.

And if that’s the case, you’re right and we’d rule out hypothesis 1 because it assumes that the same genetics underpin all kinks.

So if we assume that the genetic factors contributing to having a snz kink are unique-ish, it comes down to two possibilities. Either the kink is beneficial for survival and reproduction, or the kink is neutral/slightly negative, but there’s not enough selection pressure to remove it from the gene pool.

The kink being just kinda neutral/not detrimental strikes me as the most likely situation. Evolution is such a chaotic mess of a process, and most mutations are, in fact, neutral or deleterious. There’s also the complication of the genes that underpin the snz kink also being linked to other traits, and selection will act on those traits as well.

But I do have yet another fun explanation for why having a snz kink may be evolutionarily beneficial. So with non-dangerous illnesses (like the common cold), the vast, vast majority of symptoms and just feeling shitty are not due to the virus. They’re due to your immune system’s response. Snotty? Your body’s making mucus to flush out the virus. Sore throat? Your throat’s inflamed, which is something your body does to get white blood cells to the site of infection faster. Exhausted? All your body’s energy is focused on this immune response right now, you don’t have energy to spare.

And here’s the thing. People with stronger immune systems, ones that would adequately protect them from from illnesses that are actually dangerous, also tend to be the same people who are more symptomatic from regular colds.

Scientists have found a surprising explanation for snakes’ effortless slithering: A mind-bogglingly thin coat of fatty lubricant embedded on the snakes’ scales.

The findings not only explain the reptiles' eerie slickness, but they also point the way toward new kinds of industrial lubricants and coatings, not to mention improved designs for snake-inspired robots.

“You know at county fairs, when you have the greased pig contest?” says Joe Mendelson, a herpetologist at Zoo Atlanta who wasn’t involved with the study. “These guys just showed that snakes are self-greased pigs.”

As entertaining as the notion of a slippery snake may be, the finding goes a great deal toward explaining how snakes smoothly weave their limbless bodies over terrain. Snakes can climb trees, scurry across scorching-hot desert, swim, and even “fly," gliding from tree limb to tree limb. (SeeNational Geographic's amazing snake pictures.)