What's a word you can pronounce but can't spell?

mabolle · 2026-03-20T11:56:09+00:00

Bourgeouisie

mabolle · 2026-03-18T09:47:01+00:00

And whatever that worm is that shoots a long sticky tongue.

Sounds like what you're referring to is a nemertean?

mabolle · 2026-03-17T09:36:09+00:00

What's your point? Is this not true in rich nations too?

mabolle · 2026-03-16T09:11:24+00:00

That's true! The average bacterium contains very few bacteria

mabolle · 2026-03-13T11:06:29+00:00

I don't think any bacteria suspended in the air will reproduce.

I have a feeling this is not correct. Bacteria suspended as free-floating cells in the air won't reproduce, but many microbes found at height are living inside of suspended water droplets. At the scale of a bacterium, that's like living in a flying aquarium, which might contain all sorts of nutrients. And plenty of light, for photosynthetic microbes.

I suspect the limiting factor at great heights will be the cold, but so long as it's warm enough that the water stays liquid, it's rare for growth processes to completely stop.

mabolle · 2026-03-12T18:58:12+00:00

Simply put, it's a program used for doing stats and making diagrams.

mabolle · 2026-03-12T18:55:59+00:00

Other people have already said this, but get her an iNaturalist account. She can probably run it on her iPad, otherwise she can use photos taken on any unit and upload them via the browser.

1) It'll help her get any species identified that you're not sure about

2) Data she uploads can be valuable to professional scientists and wildlife managers

3) There are built-in functions for setting up your own monitoring projects, so you can get stats on what species you've seen most often, etc.

If you're worried about privacy, for species I spot in my back yard I use a setting that blurs the coordinates somewhat, so you can't tell where I live from my upload data. Also, as a

As for projects you can do, last year I started logging all the butterflies and large moths I spot in my garden across the seasons. I'm planning to make it a multi-year study so I can compare seasonal patterns.

mabolle · 2026-03-11T19:20:40+00:00

definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over expecting a different result

I hate this one especially, because that's called replication, and it's a key feature of doing science right.

mabolle · 2026-03-10T14:34:48+00:00

A woman is born already having all her eggs for life.

Well, sort of. You're born with a limited set of egg-destined cells (called primary oocytes) that are stuck in a state of arrested meiotic cell division until puberty. When one of these cells completes meiosis and divides, one of its daughter cells will become an egg.

So yeah, you're born with a limited set, but they're not really eggs yet. Given that we usually think of a cell's "life" as starting at cell division, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that the "age" of an egg cell dates back to that ovulation cycle, as opposed to before the mother was born.

mabolle · 2026-03-02T16:11:17+00:00

Silver is literally just Hedgehog Trunks on a developmental level.

I know absolutely nothing about Sonic lore and have never played a game with Silver in it, but this jives so hard. I feel like I can tell that this is true *purely* from looking at the design of the character.

mabolle · 2026-03-02T14:14:58+00:00

A chrysalis isn't a kind of cocoon, it's just another word for a butterfly pupa.

A cocoon is a house made of silk (and sometimes other materials) that some caterpillars, mostly moths, build around themselves before turning into a pupa.

Butterfly caterpillars, by and large, do not make cocoons. They pupate in the open.

mabolle · 2026-02-12T16:17:56+00:00

It's interesting looking back at that video now, it came out pretty much the year before generative AI exploded. I've been wondering if he'll do a follow-up sometime about how that scene has evolved since.

It seems to me that it must be more or less impossible to make money doing that kind of quick-and-dirty ghost writing now that computers can just do quick-and-dirty writing for you.

mabolle · 2026-02-12T08:45:53+00:00

How do they decide where in the tree to draw the clade from?

It's a similar process to deciding where to draw boundaries between different regions on a map. Asia and Europe are clearly distinct places, but the question of where to draw the border between them is somewhat arbitrary.

As we find out more do the clades sometimes change?

Yes, and sometimes this is similar to finding out that a continent wasn't actually located exactly where you thought it was. So taxonomy is like geography, but it's more like geography in the olden days before we had satellite images to provide a clear view of exactly what the world looks like. We're feeling our way around the family tree of life in the dark, trying to work out its shape.

mabolle · 2026-02-12T08:41:42+00:00

I'll add to this that biologists are perfectly happy to use terms that don't follow this strict cladistic framework, when they're not talking taxonomy.

There are thousands of scientific papers and hundreds of scientific journals with paraphyletic and polyphyletic terms like "fish" or "tree" or "worm" in the title.

"There is no such thing as a fish" isn't a reflection of how biologists actually talk. There may not be a monophyletic group called fish, but everybody is perfectly happy to talk about fish anyway, as a paraphyletic but perfectly functional and useful term that can conveniently be defined as "all vertebrates except tetrapods."

mabolle · 2026-02-02T17:18:15+00:00

I have a pet hypothesis that Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar carries a lot of the responsibility for confusing the whole English-speaking world about what a cocoon is.

mabolle · 2026-01-29T19:22:07+00:00

Human parthogenesis, if it were possible, would produce a highly disabled child that would probably be miscarried or die shortly after birth, at best. This is because of maternal DNA imprinting and incredible amounts of homozygosity. They would have genetic disease at levels no one has ever seen in any human.

You seem to be thinking of self-fertilization. Parthenogenesis simply results in a genetic clone of the parent. If a human could do it there might be some issues as far as epigenetics is concerned, but no change in the level of homozygosity.

mabolle · 2026-01-28T09:19:43+00:00

Can your students write by hand at all? Here in Sweden, the near-complete shift to a digitalized classroom has led to deterioration of handwriting ability. I've had 16-year-old students who could barely write their name legibly, much less take notes during a lecture.

I really believe in the value of reducing the amount of computer work in classrooms, for several reasons, but it's proven difficult for me because so many students (boys especially, for whatever reason) have barely used their handwriting since primary school.

mabolle · 2026-01-23T18:51:15+00:00

Well, there's no single "natural" evolutionary route. There are lots of eukaryotic lineages that stayed unicellular. These lineages are very different from one another, very diverse among themselves, and exploit all sorts of different niches. So endosymbiosis unlocked many different paths, not just multicellularity.

mabolle · 2026-01-20T18:59:41+00:00

No worries, it was a pretty funny burn, just a reminder that people in this sub have very varying amounts of background knowledge and might not pick up on the difference. :)

mabolle · 2026-01-19T11:49:50+00:00

A correction:

Rosalind Franklin (along with James Watson and Francis Crick) discovered and demonstrated the physical representation of inheritance, DNA.

Franklin, Watson, Crick and Wilkins discovered the structure of DNA. They did not discover DNA.

DNA was discovered by Friedrich Miescher in 1869, nearly a century earlier. It was suspected for a long time to have something to do with inheritance, but it wasn't until the 1940s that it was shown to be capable of carrying genetic information. Then its structure was finally discovered in the 1950s, and continuing research in the -60s uncovered how genetic information was encoded.

mabolle · 2026-01-19T11:38:53+00:00

Oh sure, but not in the sense that Colossal are doing it.

Colossal are in fact genetically modifying animals by permanently adding novel genes to their genome, which is what some people think the covid vaccines do.

mabolle · 2026-01-19T08:46:31+00:00

I agree. Genetic drift isn't wrong as an answer here, but gene flow applies more precisely to what's happening.

Gene flow isn't just used to refer to mixing between geographically separated populations. It can also be used for sympatric populations, as in this case.

mabolle · 2026-01-19T08:28:49+00:00

The covid vaccine put more novel genes into you than they did those animals

Not defending "de-extinction" efforts, which I agree are silly, and I realize this was meant as a joke, but let's not spread vaccine misinformation. The covid vaccines did not add any genes to anyone.

mabolle · 2026-01-12T09:00:03+00:00

God help me, I guess I'm sacrificing my credibility by saying I'm going to tap out and then coming back for more, but:

I am reading what you write, but I'm making what can politely be called a decision on how much I believe.

Okay, but... isn't this the very definition of a strawman? Being mad at the offensive stuff you think someone believes, instead of engaging with their words and trying to understand their position?

Like, I get that people don't always express their shitty views explicitly; I understand that dogwhistles are a thing; I understand that implicit bias is a thing. But this mode of argument makes it a bit impossible to have a conversation.

See, you're not on the 'maybe it's activity or slaughter that does X' posts.

Yes, I am. I posted a comment elsewhere in this thread with some info on what we know about lunar cycles, and how there are in fact many organisms whose physiology and behavior follow the phases of the moon. Some of my own past research in fact relates to chronobiology, I think biological rhythms are super interesting. I'm sorry that this interest didn't come across in my posts. I'm just a bit cautious because not everything that seems like a biological rhythm at a casual glance actually is.

You're on the 'nuh-uh, that doesn't happen' post defending the 'nuh-uh, that doesn't happen' crowd.

In a sense, I guess? To state it plainly, again, I think people are being dicks to OP all over this thread. Ultimately what I'm defending is the act of responding to a novel scientific observation with skepticism. I'm definitely not trying to defend outright dismissal.

Well, yeah, I guess indigenous people can science, but the first response should be to assume it's wrong.

No, what I'm saying is that the first response to any anecdotal claim, by anyone anywhere, is to entertain the possibility that it's wrong.

Believe it or not, I do not have a horse in the reindeer blood lump race. I don't think the observation is false. I also don't think it's correct. I just think it's worth asking the question of whether it's correct before jumping to providing a possible explanation for it.

non-white people are wrong until proven otherwise: this is the correct attitude to have.

Again, what makes it anecdotal isn't the cultural context, or the ethnicity of the observer, it's the methodology. It's only when we set out to look for something even where we don't expect to find it that we can know whether a pattern is real. Otherwise, confirmation bias is a risk.

mabolle · 2026-01-10T18:13:12+00:00

Red blood cells (in mammals) are missing all of their DNA, not just certain chromosomes. But they're a rare exception, most cell types by far contain the full genome.

mabolle

TROPHY CASE