1000%!! Over the years I’ve lent it to various people and they all loved it very much. It has been the most influential book for me regarding how I view society, capitalism and anarchism.

Yeah, the right is how science unfortunately works. My professor told me that science progresses one death at a time. We argued in various papers that the terminology in our field was really messy and didn’t hold up to actual findings, but the old generation of scientists didn’t want to allow any changes. In most research fields there are a few scientists that hold a position of power and that don’t like sharing that power.

Reading Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed and her idea of an anarchist world caught me off guard when she starts exploring exactly this problem in science…

Wikipedia says the following:

The use of the common names frog and toad has no taxonomic justification. From a classification perspective, all members of the order Anura are frogs, but only members of the family Bufonidae are considered “true toads”. The use of the term frog in common names usually refers to species that are aquatic or semi-aquatic and have smooth, moist skins; the term toad generally refers to species that are terrestrial with dry, warty skins. There are numerous exceptions to this rule. The European fire-bellied toad (Bombina bombina) has a slightly warty skin and prefers a watery habitat whereas the Panamanian golden frog (Atelopus zeteki) is in the toad family Bufonidae and has a smooth skin.

Reading the introduction of the study (first link), they completely fail to explain why they call this language. Like, first they explain that fungi also have action potentials and that this seems to work like neurons and then they immediately jump to talk about how this could be a language. Am I missing something here? This seems like a legit paper, but why don’t they even attempt to explain or discuss this?

How do you define “wasp” though? All Hymenoptera? All Apocrita? All Apocrita minus Apoidea and/or Formicidae? All Vespoidea (minus Formicidae?)? Only Vespidae?

What about all the parasitic wasps? All fig trees would die and with them whole food webs. And if all the parasitic wasps that hold other organisms in check would die, this would also lead to a total disruption of so many biomes…

Yeah, this quote is sooo wrong on sooo many levels :(

Are you on iNaturalist yet? It’s similar in that you can try to identify all kinds of organisms that get uploaded and you never run out of new ones :)

What? Why would it be? I think humans are scared of anything that surprises them or that they cannot immediately understand what it’ll do. But why centipedes in general? I’ve never had any fear of them, unlike other arthropods that moved more erratically and faster.

Yeah, I was wondering what about a tentacled animal would be so exciting, given that there are so many other tentacled animals out there already…

Oh, this is double hard, isn’t it. My initial thought was that it was a confusion between paedology and pedology (in my head something to do with feet!). But it’s actually soil science… TIL :)

Wikipedia says:

Spielberg told Lucas he was interested in making a James Bond film, but Lucas pitched him of an idea “better than James Bond”, outlining the plot of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Well, growing up in Germany with all my grandarents being more on the nazi side of WWII, I feel like the US idea of getting rid of nazis is that you just have to fight them like in WWII. It didn’t work though. German society and politics was still very much made up of nazis afterwards. Sure, they got taken the power to act upon their ideology in the same way as before. What you need is a systemic change where fascist ideas don’t have any space anymore, where emancipatory ideas can grow and where people are liberated in who they are and what they think. But the issue is, misogyny and racism like portrayed by the Indiana Jones movies are strictly opposed to emancipatory struggles. Giving discriminatory ideas like these too much space will again lead to more fascist tendencies. My point is, it isn’t always black and white, nazi or not nazi. I have no idea if my grandparents were all nazis. They were just kids brainwashed into this ideology. My granddad fought in the Wehrmacht against the allies, but he was just 17. It is easy to say “punch nazis” or “kill nazis”. But unless you have a clear cut enemy like in a political party or an opposing army, this gets messy pretty quickly.

Why do you choose to see Jones in the context of the 1930s? It is a character based on the values of the 80s and onward. On top of being misogynistic, the character of Indiana Jones is also being the white hero playing into many racist tropes. So using Jones as this Nazi fighting hero doesn’t work even on the most basic level. Again, I’m all for punching Nazis, but we should choose better heroes or even better: no heroes at all!

Though the character of Indiana Jones or Harrison Ford as a person aren’t really worth to aspire to. Sure, the nazi punching part is great but being a sexist piece of shit isn’t…

If you like fun but also well-researched stories about people living in pre-modern times, you might also enjoy the weird medieval guys podcast :) They actually did an episode on fossils recently. Another funny story they mention is the one of Johann Beringer’s “Lying Stones”.

While I agree with the first part of what you said, I don’t think the longterm solution is to call out individuals and make their lives horrible. It sure is a good way to maybe deter a few people from doing those misogynistic things. But what we need is actual structural change. It shouldn’t be possible these people to do such things in the first place without being sanctioned. And we should educate people more on feminism and intersectional struggles in general.

You still got it mixed up a bit though. There is no “normal” respiration, cells use both types of respiration all the time.

current estimates [of the yield in aerobic respiration] range around 29 to 30 ATP per glucose. Aerobic metabolism is up to 15 times more efficient than anaerobic metabolism (which yields 2 molecules of ATP per 1 molecule of glucose).

Anoxic regeneration of NAD+ is only an effective means of energy production during short, intense exercise in vertebrates, for a period ranging from 10 seconds to 2 minutes during a maximal effort in humans. (At lower exercise intensities it can sustain muscle activity in diving animals, such as seals, whales and other aquatic vertebrates, for very much longer periods of time.)

Maybe you could link an article or a study where you’ve hear about this cancer connection? Would be curious what’s behind it.

Your first sentence is wrong (the mitochondria’s primary function is to generate ATP, which then gets transported to elsewhere where its stored energy is used). And your second sentence is confusing. With “broken ATP” you mean ADP? Or broken ATP synthesis? The point of this alternative oxidase pathway is producing some ATP, but inefficiently. And it produces also heat, because of its inefficiency (not all the energy stored in the sugars can be turned into chemically stored energy so it also produces heat energy. Think traditional light bulb). This heat is then used in the inflorescences of some aroids.

Isn’t this just the normal functions of mitochondria in organisms irrespective of kingdom? They burn sugars (in aerobic respiration using oxygen) to produce ATP. ATP can then be used elsewhere in the body as an energy reserve. Animals do it and plants do it. The difference here might rather be that they don’t convert the sugars into ATP but rather use the thermic energy of the reaction to produce heat instead of ATP?

ETA: unfortunately, searching for “Alternative Oxidase Metabolic Pathway” only leads to this very short Wikipedia article and a whole bunch of hard to understand scientific papers. But seems to be an alternative pathway found in various different organisms for various reasons.

Well, the child is three years old and certainly has no concept of gender/sex. So how and why is someone apparently assigning gender and sex to this child? Why not just keep it neutral? Especially in context of forced gender and sex assignations as well as intersex child mutilations. Shouldn’t we be much more careful in this context not to force our biases and weird ideas of gender/sex onto children?!

Interesting how they call this child a “boy” if the karyotype and genitalia are so ambiguous. Like, why???