also… if it dies anyway and you’re heartbroken, dm me and maybe I can send you a cutting from mine :-) cheers!

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! :)

Whack. The only thing I can think of is if your base activity level has never been low enough in that several year period, you might not know what it feels like to be completely sedentary by comparison?

As an education professional: what the hell, dude? It’s not unfortunate that we aren’t just dropping struggling students without first carefully examining why they’re not succeeding.

You might be right that you can’t let some students detract from the class for other students, but the solution there is advocating for better funding and more staff to be able to give every student what they need, whether they’re above or below the expectation for their age.

Saying it’s “unfortunate” that students don’t fail (read: ruin their whole god damn lives) as often anymore is blaming our most vulnerable YOUTH for the systemic problems of our society. It’s not their job to be what the school environment wants them to be, they don’t even have a choice about whether or not they are there. It’s our (as educators, and as tax paying and voting community members) responsibility to make sure they get the education they need to be functional members of our society.

We even have huge bodies of research to reinforce this. It’s not a secret that the school environment excels at making nice workers, not critical-thinking and well-adjusted adult humans.

Take it up with the school board! Take it up with the local, state, and federal government! Take it up with the voters!

That’s a good (and reassuring) observation!

Still, even if it’s a bot/troll/etc. post, if we don’t call it out when we see it, the culture of the community slowly shifts towards “bigotry is acceptable here”…

I’m gonna keep pointing this stuff out when I see it whether the user is acting in good faith or not :)

Aight you got me there

I, too, am down to clown tbh

Sure, notice that I included this possibility in the last paragraph.

Also notice that that possibility doesn’t reinforce the perspective that “women are sluts for clown daddies”

The fact this has 40 up votes right now makes me feel like lemmy is losing a diverse user base. Like, where are the women to down vote this obviously shitty take?

Let’s list some reasons why these women could have done this that aren’t “women are sluts for clown daddies”:

• he’s their boss, and leveraging his insane power over them to make it hard to say no and keep their job
• he’s just an extremely powerful man and they’re afraid of pissing him off
• they have insecurities, (like the “loser cuck” fallacy!) that they aren’t valuable or desirable as partners, and attention from someone as powerful as him feels like affirmation of their value even if they don’t like him or he treats them badly
• they understand that, by not resisting his advances, they might be able to provide themselves a link to a financial source that could support them and a child
• he literally sexually harasses, assaults, or rapes them and they don’t feel like they can criminally pursue one of the richest men in the world

Like, yeah, some of them might be individuals who have bad taste in men or are shitty people themselves. I’m even certain that some of them are! But damn, can we take the perspective of the woman for one second? It’s not a good look to find yourself agreeing with incels on the internet

You say you don’t like poetry, yet you write a lovely free-form poem. Suspicious…

That is so funny… tbh I know I’d get shit for this professionally, but it definitely frustrates me that we don’t allow people with few other choices to have access to crazy, left field treatment stuff.

My best friend died of a specific and rare cancer this year. We know exactly how that cancer works on a molecular level, and we’ve found a few chemicals that interfere with the function of those cells in vitro while not seeming to harm average cells.

Sure, it’s a huge risk to take that drug that’s only been tested in a dish, and it wouldn’t be worth it for most people. But he was going to (and did) die within a year of diagnosis. It’s not like he had other options.

Maybe he should have invested in a rat costume ;)

This article is garbage but I’m a molecular biologist and the publication they’re talking about is really neat.

The “ELI5 to the point of maybe reducing out the truth” way to explain it is that the researchers can add “flags” to proteins associated with immune responses that make cells pick them up and examine them. This is shown to work for allergins (so say, add a flag to peanut protein and the cells can look at it more closely, go “oh nvm this is fine” and stop freaking out about peanuts) as well as autoimmune diseases (where cells mistake other cells from the same body as potential threats).

It’s not nearly to a treatment stage, but tbh this is one of the more exciting approaches I’ve seen, and I do similar research and thus read a lot of papers like this.

There’s a lot of evidence that we are entering a biological “golden age” and we will discover a ton of amazing things very soon. It’s worrysome that we still have to deal with instability in other parts of life (climate change, wealth inequality, political polarization) that might slow down the process of turning these discoveries into actual treatments we can use to make lives better…

Still, don’t doubt everything you read! A lot of cool stuff is coming, the trick is getting it past the red tape