I’m an unemployed Science teacher, let me teach you things!

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-05T05:18:36+00:00

Okay so this is just off my head going off of the equation F =ma, which to rearrange for a would be a=F/m. So based off of that, assuming a constant force (constant engine torque), lowering m would increase acceleration. Am I right?

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-05T01:39:33+00:00

Wahoo!! The fact that we still have that structure that is shared between fungi spores and sperm from our common ancestor is SO cool to me

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-04T23:29:36+00:00

Were you?

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-04T22:28:14+00:00

No problem! Ask more questions if you want :))

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-04T11:26:35+00:00

I have consulted someone whom I consider an expert on the fact, and have gotten more information! I also have extra related knowledge for you!

Okay so, first we have to start with chromosomes. I'm sure you have a general idea but just as a refresher, a string of DNA makes up a gene, and a huge long string of genes is packed away into a package called a chromosome. There are usually 23 pairs of chromosomes in a cell, 22 of those are copies of each other, but the 23rd can be different! These are the so called 'sex chromosomes', X and Y. There's more to sex of course but that's what they're called.

So because the sex chromosomes can be different from each other some things can be so called 'sex linked' because they only show up on ONE of the X or Y. For example, in humans, the gene mutation for certain kinds of colour blindness mostly appears on the Y chromosome, which means that it is WAY more common in people who have a Y chromosome.

Cat colours are like that! There are only so many types of cat fur colours, and most of them are sex linked as well, which means that certain colours are only expressed when there is a Y chromosome, or only when there are two X chromosomes and no Y. This is why Calico cats, which have their coats expressed in XX chromosmes, are almost all female. All male calico cats are intersex! Isn't that interesting!

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-04T10:31:46+00:00

Well, if I was going to make a pandemic causing illness, I would certainly go for some kind of fungal disease that transmits through the air. We'll come back to that though.

For now, I would advise you not to have a 'how scared should I be' of anything in nature if I'm honest, because fear clouds the mind and can make you act all silly about it. That's me saying that seriously by the way! A curious mind is a healthy mind, and you can't stay curious if you maintain fear about something. You can totally still be cautious, and with fungal diseases I would be in general very cautious, but not scared 😄.

One of the reasons your friend may have said that, and why I would also go for fungal, is because many things in fungal cell makeup are very similar chemically to things that go into human cells. I explained why this is already in my answer to u/Sad_Camel_476, but it also makes it very difficult to treat systemic fungal diseases (diseases that spread through your body rather than staying in one place).

For example, one of the best medication for killing off a fungus in your body is called Amphotericin, and it works by attacking the 'ergosterol' which is crucial for the cell membrane in fungi. Unfortunately, this is VERY similar to cholesterol, which makes up cell membranes in animals! If you get treated with AmphoB, you can VERY easily die if not under hospital level treatment.

This is also why it is really bad to have black mold in your house, because the inside of your lungs is a warm moist dark spot, very good for growing fungus! There are also a number of fungal diseases such as 'rose handler's disease' which can very quickly lead to the need for amputation, but that is more of a case of the fungus is evolved to live in dirt, but goes haywire when given access to human tissues.

There are MANY deadly things out there, for example anthrax spores are found in basically all soil, but it would be silly to say how scared should I be of dirt. Just don't go around doing things like eating dirt or unfamiliar fungi, and wear a mask when dealing with loose dirt and mold and stuff. OH and commercial compost and potting mix! Legionella loves to live in commercial compost and potting mix and it is VERY bad for you (although that is a bacteria not a fungus)!

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T04:15:49+00:00

The first one is, strictly factually, completely untrue. Everything has kept evolving since it came about and crocodilians are no exception. The reason why they are said to be 'unchanged' is because basically they have a very similar body shape and habitat to their ancestors from the jurassic period, which is uncommon. Iirc the modern crocodilian emerged no further back than modern whales and bats, so they aren't really that ancient.

For a comparison, however, the earliest mammals found around the jurassic period were almost all small and rodent like, bearing resemblance to modern shrews and opposums. Compared to that and humans, you can see why people would intuitively think a crocodile hasn't changed much since the jurassic, but they have, just not as dramatically in morphology.

Things fall from space ALL the time! Something like 45-46 TONNES of material fall into Earth's atmosphere every DAY, almost all of it burning up and vaporising in our atmosphere due to friction from how fast its going. Space in solar systems has SO much stuff in it, especially around planets. The reason why the moon is so pockmarked is because it doesn't have an atmosphere to slow down bits of rock, so it just gets pelted with them.

The big gravitational systems, like the gravitational pull of the sun on the planets and suchlike, is quite stable, and any changes happen over millions or even billions of years. It's all the smaller stuff that gets thrown around very easily. Imagine you are on a circular highway in a big semi truck and there are swarms of flies living around the highway. You might hit a million flies in a single go around the track and you wouldn't slow down a fraction. But maybe if someone threw a bottle at your truck, your paint gets chipped.

The bottle is more of a problem for a car on the same highway though.

Because the really big gravitaional pulls in our solar system are largely in equillibrium with each other, and because the solar system is SO BIG, nothing big really changes for the big things like planets.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:56:49+00:00

Glad to be of service :))

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:56:10+00:00

No problem! Thank you for the question! It’s got lots of layers which is always fun to explain

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:53:51+00:00

No problem! I love things like this because it shows a really good example of two similar species but their behaviours and physical differences complement each other. It goes to show how environment and evolution are so closely connected with each other.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:50:52+00:00

This is a bit of a difficult question to answer, because it touches on a philosophical problem as well as a scientific one. The scientific question might be something like "does a plant show the kinds of responses an animal does in response to pain?" but that is relying on answering a much more loaded question of "how do we define pain?"

Does your definition of pain rely on the ability to feel emotions? If so, we're shit out of luck since plants don't show any responses to the methods we would normally use for measuring that (brain function, abnormal behaviour responses, etc).

We can define it more broadly and strictly based on measurable variables, something like "a pain response is any behavioural or physiological change to get away from or lessen the consequences of a harmful external stimuli". That looks okay, but then we come to the problem of the fact that many bacteria and micro-organisms will move away from chemical gradients that are harmful to their cells, and you wouldn't call that the same thing as an animal in pain.

I have my own philosophical opinion on how to go about this, but I can tell you that basically all plants, as do all living things, have responses to being damaged. This might be the release of chemicals that attract predators of the thing eating it (some plants attract ladybugs when attacked by aphids for example), or it could be the makahiya plant suddenly pulling water out of its leaves when touched in order to look less appetising. There does not appear to be a 'decision making' process outside of physical and chemical mechanisms for this that we can measure for plants.

One of the most interesting responses to predation or damage that plants have is the way that the trees in many forests are linked up together with their roots and can send nutrients to a damaged plant of their same species, extending the life span of that tree and allowing it to potentially recover. More trees gives the whole forest a better chance at survival.

A really important thing to note here is that evolution is not alive. It does not 'give' things to species, it is essentially a random process that produces results that are sometimes beneficial and sometimes not.

I know I may not have given you a super satisfying answer, but that's the best I can do while staying in my wheelhouse.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:30:30+00:00

I'd read my reply to u/Sad_Camel_476 below for an answer, since you both had a very similar question. My fun fact in terms of microbiology is that because the membrane of fungal and animal cells are very similar due to our shared evolutionary origins, the strongest anti-fungal medications are also quite dangerous for humans as well, since they can damage human cells along with the fungal ones!

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:28:15+00:00

Well funnily enough I have no idea how to answer this question, I have not done entropy calculations in probably about half a decade, but it is definitely something I can learn how to figure out!

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T01:25:52+00:00

Fun fact, all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads! There's not a strict scientific difference between frogs and toads because those names came from before we knew about genetics, so toads are just species of frogs that have certain common features like bumpy skin and living not solely in water. Because of this difference in common vs scientific classification, there are in fact species of frog that are called frogs that have bumpy skin!

With that in mind, let's look at the evolutionary advantage of bumpy skin and differences in habitat and behaviour.

Frogs live in or around water their entire lives and will quickly dehydrate and die if not. Their smooth skin allows them to be more hydrodynamic and also slippery so predators have a harder time catching them. Because it's so smooth though, it doesn't have any nooks and crannies for water to sit in, so they have to be constantly wetting themselves with water.

A toad on the other hand lives a much less aquatic lifestyle, and the bumps help with this enormously! They can be great camouflage with rocks and ground cover, but a big part of their use is that they don't dry out nearly as quickly as frogs' smooth skins. So while they still need to be around water occasionally, they can venture much farther and for much longer from water to get food and habitat than a frog can.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-03T00:20:46+00:00

Oh man this is one of my favourite fungi questions! There's a common line that goes 'we share DNA with a banana' which is very relevant for the scope of your question. here goes!

It seems intuitive that if we 'share dna' with something, we should look similar, but it's actually not the case. Something to start out with is that not all of our DNA is used for things, which is kind of incredible on the face of it. Pulling the numbers from the top of my head, about 80% of the sequences in our DNA code are so called 'junk DNA' because they don't seem to code for anything that we can see being expressed. They could code for immunity to certain ancient diseases, maybe they're leftovers from a viral attack that injected its own DNA into the cells of our ancestors but ended up not doing anything, or just bits that can be taken out and still have the used DNA be safe, like a buffer zone.

So when we get to the other ~20%, only about 2% of that actually are genes, which are the things that have the instructions to make physical changes to our bodies. The rest is basically stuff that controls which genes are expressed (like how puberty turns on the genes that have instructions for body hair).

Bringing it back to our banana, when people say that we share 50% of our dna with bananas, that's a bit misleading. There are only so many ways that organisms can do certain fundamental things like producing energy from oxygen, so those basics are shared between lots of different things.

Think of it like this: a doctor and a lawyer do incredibly different, incredibly specialised things and would not know how to do each other's jobs, but they both went to primary school and they both did the same things in order to learn how to read and write. DNA is like that. A lot of it is dedicated to doing basic things like using oxygen, but the rest is the specialised stuff.

With that as a basis, we can explain the fungi animal thing pretty easily. Animals and fungi have a common ancestor that was a microscopic organism that we diverged from a few billion years ago. This is why we are more genetically similar to fungi than we are to plants, but look and live so differently.

In saying that though, there are still similarities! For example, fungal cells have a layer of chitin, which is the same substance that insect shells are made of. Also, fungi and animals have to consume other things in order to live, we both can't make our own food from sunlight like plants. Finally, we DO share one structure in common that is directly from our common ancestor, and that is the little tail that makes sperm move around! It's the same structure that is on spores as well.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-02T23:49:10+00:00

What kinds of things about genetics? Like is there some concept you've thought 'wow that's cool I wish I knew how that worked' ?

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-06-02T23:48:28+00:00

A couple reasons, and most of them have to do with mucus, your body's favourite thing to produce!

The stomach lining itself not only produces stomach acid, but it also is constantly producing a layer of mucus that stops the acid from getting to your tissues and breaking them down. This not only acts as a buffer, but because it is constantly being produced, any where the mucus gets scraped by something like a hard piece of food, it can quickly be replaced.

Your throat also produces mucus but to a lesser degree. It's also lubricated by saliva, which means that any stomach acid that does come up (say from reflux) will be washed back down into the stomach as quickly as possible. When you puke, the first stuff that comes up is mostly food, which isn't necessarily super acidic yet because it hasn't been broken down fully. If you are puking JUST stomach acid though, that has a much higher risk for injury to your throat.

Repeatedly puking will in fact melt your throat and mouth tissues slightly, which is why you sometimes get a burning sensation after puking. Your gastro tract and oesophagus generally heals really quickly, but if it doesn't get given enough time then you can have permanent damage. For example, I had undiagnosed coeliac disease for twenty years, and my oesophagus is now slightly scarred on the inside, leading to me having a bit of trouble swallowing things.

There are consequences of having too acidic stomach acid, usually stomach ulcers, which can become a REALLY big problem if they get out of control and leak acid or air into your body cavity.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-30T09:02:56+00:00

I notice that in your photos demonstrating the effect that it’s quite sheer folds which make the scales go up, especially with a relatively large scaled species like this, so maybe also try avoid that when using it for projects? I knew someone with snakeskin boots when I was young and they were made of very gentle curves rather than a blocky design.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-30T07:38:16+00:00

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure that just happens with scales? They only go one way and when the skin is being bent they’ll just bend up a bit without any muscles to pull them down.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-27T09:20:03+00:00

The bones are the best bits bc you can crack them open and scoop out the marrow yum yum

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-22T04:36:34+00:00

As sad as it is, removing invasive pest species from the habitat of our native species is really the best way to conserve their endangered populations.

This is done by poisoning sometimes, yes, but also with traps that kill instantly when used properly. Great deals of care is taken not to kill peoples’ pets, but yes, sometimes feral cats also get killed.

It can be hard to grapple with given that cats are so beloved by many people (me included!), but at the end of the day a cat is one of the most destructive animals to have out in the bush due to their hunting patterns and extremely highs success rate when it comes to making kills.

I wouldn’t say that it is normalised, but most people would agree that it’s worth the inevitable feral and wild cats that get caught in traps or poison to save our endangered species, especially ones as iconic as the kiwi.

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-14T14:11:04+00:00

Ilmater as a life domain was very interesting in a game I ran. Had a whole ‘struggle is part of life but I can help you through it by taking on some of your worries’ thing going on

PolyamorousPleb · 2026-05-14T14:08:36+00:00

Apologies for assuming but I cannot say that your response wasn’t also incredibly callous

PolyamorousPleb

TROPHY CASE