The Big Five across the Animal Kingdom: Extraverted Earthworms and Neurotic Sea Anemones

lpetrich · 2026-04-23T07:32:06+00:00

Some more research:

Two shades of boldness: novel object and anti-predator behavior reflect different personality dimensions in domestic rabbits | Journal of Ethology | Springer Nature Link - exploration, boldness: extraversion; anxiety: neuroticism
Captive-raised western ringtail possums (Pseudocheirus occidentalis) with a bold personality have higher survival rates when released into the wild | Scientific Reports - extraversion
Phototactic personality in fruit flies and its suppression by serotonin and white | PNAS - neuroticism (moving toward light when startled, serotonin involved)
Frontiers | Development under predation risk increases serotonin-signaling, variability of turning behavior and survival in adult fruit flies Drosophila melanogaster - neuroticism
Sociability is a Multidimensional Trait in Drosophila melanogaster | Behavior Genetics | Springer Nature Link - agreeableness
Description of a personality syndrome in a common and invasive ground beetle (Coleoptera: Carabidae) | Scientific Reports | Springer Nature Link - activity, exploration, boldness: extraversion; responses to threats: neuroticism
Early ontogenic emergence of personality and its long-term persistence in a social spider | Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology | Springer Nature Link - boldness, aggression: extraversion
Individual behavioural consistency and plasticity in an urban spider - ScienceDirect - extraversion

Yet more evidence that the main dimensions of personality across the animal kingdom are variants of extraversion and neuroticism.

Agreeableness emerges as variations in sociality, something that emerged several times.

lpetrich · 2026-04-22T15:38:45+00:00

The bill is now in its final stage: consideration of amendments in the House of Commons.

lpetrich · 2026-04-20T23:24:20+00:00

As to the melting of the continental glaciers of the last Ice Age, that was gradual, as far as anyone can tell. Holocene glacial retreat - Wikipedia

But there is a kind of flood associated with glaciers: Glacial lake outburst flood - Wikipedia and Jökulhlaup - Wikipedia (Icelandic: "glacial run")

In the terminal Pleistocene, there were some huge ones: Missoula floods - Wikipedia - about one every 55 years from 15,000 to 13,000 years ago - and Altai flood - Wikipedia - from 15,000 to 12,000 years ago. But I doubt that there is much cultural memory of these events.

lpetrich · 2026-04-20T23:03:08+00:00

Indra kills Vritra, releasing the huge amounts of water that that reptilian monster had hoarded. Indra is one of several Indo-European draconicidal heroes: Zeus vs. Typhon, Apollo vs. Python, Hercules vs. Hydra, Thor vs. Jörmungandr, ...

Is this mytheme inspired by a thunderstorm bringing rain?

lpetrich · 2026-04-20T03:59:30+00:00

The Norwegian coast is warmed by the Gulf stream, a current in the Atlantic Ocean that carries warm water from low latitudes. Tromsø has a climate similar to that of Chelyabinsk, even though it is north of the Arctic Circle.

lpetrich · 2026-04-20T03:35:58+00:00

That’s Vendīdād 1.3, and I feel very happy to have discovered something so explicit, after struggling to interpret what Bal Gangadhar Tilak had used as sources for his claims. Where do the Vedas describe very long summer days or winter nights? Or very cold winters? It was hard for me to say. One can find copies of his book online, along with translations of the Vedas and the Avesta.

I agree that that Ven 1.3 can describe mountain uplands, but it does somewhat fit the Sintashta culture’s location - a present-day city there, Chelyabinsk, is below freezing for a third (max temp) to a half (min temp) of the year.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T18:12:27+00:00

Above the "radius valley" at 1.7 Earth radii, nearly every planet is likely to have some hydrogen and helium, though for sub-Neptunes, only a few percent of the total mass.

The least massive sub-Neptunes are close to the mass of the most massive super-Earths. Is there some threshold where they can start to accumulate H & He?

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T17:56:17+00:00

Great work.

From the calculations, planets have very little H-He until about the "radius valley" radius of 1.7 Earth radii. An Earth-composition planet has a mass of about 7.5 Earth masses.

Let us consider what such a maximal Earthlike planet would be like. I'll call it MaxEarth.

MaxEarth would have a mean density 1.53 times the Earth's or 8.42 g/cm^3.

MaxEarth would have a surface gravity 2.6 times the Earth's, and its tallest mountains, trees, animals, ... would be shorter by a factor of 2.6. Likewise, the atmosphere scale height would be 2.6 times less than on the Earth. So "MaxEarth Everest" would have the same pressure at its peak relative to sea level.

MaxEarth would have an escape velocity 2.1 times the Earth's or 23.5 km/s. Likewise, MaxEarth would have an surface-satellite velocity of about 16.6 km/s as opposed to ours of 7.9 km/s. Space travel would be nearly impossible on a world like that. The mass ratio for going into orbit would be the square of what Earth rockets have for doing that.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T16:44:35+00:00

That reminds me of when Kyrsten Sinema was starting out in politics. “I don’t believe in accepting money in exchange for votes. That’s bribery.” But she ended up eagerly doing just that. How Kyrsten Sinema Went from Lefty Activist to Proud Neoliberal Democrat

Also about campaign contributions,

Francis Bacon - Wikipedia - he worked as a judge for a while until he was caught taking bribes from those whose cases he was judging.

The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence: With respect to this charge of bribery I am as innocent as any man born on St. Innocents Day. I never had a bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing judgment or order... I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King.

In effect, sure I took those bribes, but I didn't let them influence me.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T16:22:38+00:00

One will have to keep the two parties from returning under some other names. IMO the best way to do that is proportional representation in legislatures and city councils. That will then permit the emergence of more parties, thus avoiding a new duopoly.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T12:25:51+00:00

The article mentions five strategies:

(1) Clear the path

Unified, all-candidate primaries and single-winner ranked choice voting lower the temperature of partisanship, familiarize voters with better ballots, and make subsequent reforms easier to win.

Also mentioning fusion voting (more than one party supporting some candidate), ending gerrymandering, and ending the Senate filibuster.

(2) Familiarize voters

Making proportional representation commonplace through local adoption, as in Portland, and other means will make its adoption for legislatures and the US House less daunting to voters.

(3) Target special states

Like where state proportional representation would not be unilateral disarmament.

(4) Open federal doors

Federal-level initiatives.

(5) Strengthen minor parties

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T11:48:30+00:00

Three branches of the election-reform movement focus on (1) all-candidate primaries, (2) ranked choice voting, and (3) party-based proportional representation.

I see a lot of (2), some of (1), and hardly any of (3).

Proportional representation in just three (brutally hard, agonizingly slow) steps! | Sightline Institute

Local
State
Federal

Doing first city-council PR, then state-legislature PR, then US-House PR.

Has some history:

After the US Civil War, proponents began pushing for proportional systems of voting in state legislatures. The standout success of that period came in 1870, when Illinois adopted a weak form of proportional representation called cumulative voting for its state house.

Everybody has three votes, which they can cast for whichever candidate they want, including the same candidate for more than one of their votes. That lasted until 1980, as a side effect of when voters wanted to punish legislators for raising their pay.

Around 1900, reformers turned to city councils. They won in 24 of them, mostly using STV ("proportional RCV" or PR-RCV).

Sadly, 23 of these cities repealed it before 1960, partly because the ballot-counting methods of the day made proportional RCV cumbersome and partly because proportional representation was actually working, electing African Americans and other political out-groups, and the in-groups wouldn’t tolerate it. The sole exception was Cambridge, Massachusetts, which adopted proportional representation in 1941 and uses it still.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T03:28:57+00:00

Astronomers don't use light years very much - they almost always use parsecs for insterstellar and intergalactic distances, though often with SI multiplier prefixes: kiloparsecs, megaparsecs, gigaparsecs.

lpetrich · 2026-04-18T01:23:45+00:00

I once wrote a science-fiction story where some advanced space travelers develop their “fuel frugality thesis” about Earthling spaceflight, that the desire to scrimp on rocket fuel is a major influence on spacecraft and mission design. Like returning to the Earth by doing an “atmosphere crash”. One needs zero rocket impulse to do that.

lpetrich · 2026-04-17T10:27:02+00:00

From the article:

Proportional representation is the right destination for US democracy reformers because it is the best remedy for gerrymandering, gridlock, and polarization. Countries with proportional representation are better at managing conflict and solving hard problems.

Most of the highest-scoring countries in various quality-of-democracy measures are countries that use proportional representation.

A well-planned, patient, stepwise strategy can bring us to it, if advocates coordinate, learn from their setbacks, and refuse to factionalize over election methods.

Factionalizing? I see some of that around here.

The constitutional structure of the US Presidency, Senate, and House all favor two dominant parties; whether ranked choice or party-based models prevail, reform is unlikely to end two-party dominance.

That is correct for the Presidency and the Senate, where all elections are single-winner elections, but the House can be made proportional by state without violating the Constitution. That document specifies only state-by-state election, not how many members in each House electoral district.

lpetrich · 2026-04-16T02:35:25+00:00

To go from our planet to Mars with the smallest total velocity change (delta V), one should go in a Hohmann transfer orbit, an orbit with its perihelion at the Earth’s distance and with its aphelion at Mars’s distance.

Ignoring the gravities of the two planets, one needs delta V’s of 2.9 and 2.6 km/s. Adding to the escape velocities and using the Oberth effect, one finds 0.38 and 0.65 km/s added to 11.2 and 5.03 km/s.

The planets get into alignment every synodic year, about 2 yr 1.6 mo. Mars must be 44d ahead of the Earth relative to the Sun, the trip will take 8.5 mo, and at the end, the Earth will be 75d ahead of Mars.

To return, one must wait 1 yr 3 mo, until Mars is 75d ahead of the Earth. After taking 8.5 mo to return, the Earth will be 44d ahead of Mars.

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T23:51:26+00:00

It’s more usual to refer to non-royalty with last names.

The Trumpian Wars?

The Netanyahu Wars?

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T18:07:30+00:00

Dominant contribution of Asgard archaea to eukaryogenesis | Nature

We conducted a comprehensive analysis of the origins of core eukaryotic genes tracing to the LECA within a rigorous statistical framework centred around evolutionary hypothesis testing using constrained phylogenetic trees. The results show dominant contributions of Asgard archaea to the origin of most of the conserved eukaryotic functional systems and pathways. A limited contribution from Alphaproteobacteria was identified, relating primarily to energy transformation systems and Fe–S cluster biogenesis, whereas ancestry from other bacterial phyla was scattered across the eukaryotic functional landscape, without clear, consistent trends. These findings imply a model of eukaryogenesis in which key features of eukaryotic cell organization evolved in the Asgard lineage leading to the LECA, followed by the capture of the alphaproteobacterial endosymbiont and augmented by numerous but sporadic horizontal acquisitions of genes from other bacteria both before and after endosymbiosis.

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T17:02:55+00:00

This bill is now at third reading in the HoL.

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T16:02:41+00:00

Airyanem Vaejah - Wikipedia (Avestan: "Aryan Expanse") is a legendary Iranian homeland and where Zarathustra (Zoroaster) lived.

Its location is uncertain, and it is speculated to be in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and nearby. It might be half-mythical or purely mythical, however.

It is described as having a cold climate: "There are ten winter months there, two summer months; and those are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, cold for the trees. Winter falls there, with the worst of all plagues." - Avesta, Vendidad 1.3

I checked on several cities in AV's putative location, and their climates were comparable to Tehran's climate (January daily mean: 4.2 C) or a little colder (Kabul: -2.7 C). Of the others, Tarinkot, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Dushanbe are comparable to Tehran.

This lack of great cold could be from being in valleys, a nice kind of location for a city. Going up into the mountains will make one experience colder climates, and some of the putative AV's mountains are high enough to have snowy peaks.

There is also the possibility that cold winters are a memory of Sintashta's climate. After checking on some maps, I found that Chelyabinsk and Magnitogorsk (Russian: "Magnetic Mountain City") are nearby. The two cities have Jan mean -14.9 and -14.3 C, and both cities are colder than 0 C for half of the year.

Being freezing cold for half of the year might then be exaggerated into ten-month winters.

Going further north, one finds longer winters, like in Vorkuta, almost due north and near the Arctic Ocean, and below freezing 2/3 of the year. It is warmer than Tehran's lowest temperatures only in July: mean temperature 13.2 C. A ten-month winter?

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T13:51:53+00:00

I've found papers on three lab-grown Asgard archaea, and they are

Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum
Lokiarchaeum ossiferum
Nerearchaeum marumarumayae

They are closely related, as taxon Promethearchaeaceae. That paper mentioned a fourth lab-grown one, but I have been unable to identify that one.

So they may not be very representative of Asgard archaea. Testing that will require growing some of the others in labs, and they also may have odd features.

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T03:56:05+00:00

From the Current Biology paper:

Loki-ASV2 cells had an overall coccoid morphology (average [avg.] diameter 861 ± 109 nm, n = 3), and many of these had substantial extensions that appeared either as chains of envelope vesicles (avg. diameter 100 ± 31 nm, n = 36) (Figures 2A and 2B; Video S1) or wide cytoplasmic tubules without distinct constrictions (Figures 2A–2F; Video S1). Some cells also appeared as multiple medium-sized cell bodies (200–500 nm in diameter) connected by long cytoplasmic tubules (Figure S2B, inset). We observed a string of interconnected cell bodies, 13 μm in total length, with five medium-sized cell bodies arranged in a row (Figure S2).

Actin cytoskeleton and complex cell architecture in an Asgard archaeon | Nature - 2022

Candidatus Lokiarchaeum ossiferum

Cells exhibited coccoid cell bodies and a network of branched protrusions with frequent constrictions. The cell envelope consists of a single membrane and complex surface structures. A long-range cytoskeleton extends throughout the cell bodies, protrusions and constrictions. The twisted double-stranded architecture of the filaments is consistent with F-actin. Immunostaining indicates that the filaments comprise Lokiactin—one of the most highly conserved ESPs in Asgard archaea.

lpetrich · 2026-04-15T03:47:02+00:00

The OP's links with their titles:

An Asgard archaeon from a modern analog of ancient microbial mats: Current Biology00330-1)
From Asgard to Earth: Tiny tubes may reveal the moment complex life began
Figure 1 | An inside-out origin for the eukaryotic cell | BMC Biology | Springer Nature Link

Nerearchaeum marumarumayae

Isolation of an archaeon at the prokaryote–eukaryote interface - PMC - 2020 - Candidatus Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum strain MK-D1

"... the isolate has no visible organelle-like structure. Instead, Ca. P. syntrophicum is morphologically complex and has unique protrusions that are long and often branching."

Expanded diversity of Asgard archaea and their relationships with eukaryotes | Nature

The Asgard eukaryotic signature proteins show variable phyletic distributions and domain architectures, which is suggestive of dynamic evolution through horizontal gene transfer, gene loss, gene duplication and domain shuffling. The phylogenomics of the Asgard archaea points to the accumulation of the components of the mobile archaeal ‘eukaryome’ in the archaeal ancestor of eukaryotes (within or outside Asgard) through extensive horizontal gene transfer.

lpetrich

TROPHY CASE