understands that models are just useful lies

uses a lie that’s not all that useful

idk some are pretty easy. like MAP kinase kinase kinase kinases phosphorylate MAP kinase kinase kinases, it’s right in the name

Leaves evolved more times if you include blades of algae

Yeah I’ve seen 'em eating dead slugs

Most are yellow but they can be more tannish, white, or brown. Pacific banana slugs also often have black or dark brown spots (they look like overripe bananas) that can cover their entire body to make them black. Pacific banana slugs are usually less bright than California banana slugs too. The yellow is likely warning colouration: their slime has an anesthetic that numbs the tongue.

Marbled crayfish are pretty cool. A new species that evolved in captivity

Ain’t no rule says the bird can’t be pope.

what would you look like without a jaw?

He intentionally dodged ethical review and the law, the consent forms he had the parents’ sign obfuscated the nature of the treatment, the experimental treatment offered no benefit over the currently used treatment to prevent HIV transmission from the father (sperm washing), the parents likely only agreed because the law prevented them from otherwise having biological children (IVF isn’t available to HIV+ patients in China), the high risk of modifying non-target genes was well known, and he knew that the gene he introduced is believed to be linked to neurological differences.

…are we sure he’s not doing any more human germ line gene editing without ethical approval or patient consent?

The upper row is from the EU’s Directive 67/548/EEC which has since been replaced with the international GHS (oddly enough a UN standard instead of ISO). The lower ones are in fact the DOT symbols from the US rather than the very similar GHS transport symbols (including the UN numbers). No idea where this figure showing EU-specific hazards for containers and US-specific hazards for transport together would’ve come from.

Relevant SNL

A dogwhistle for “the Jews”

and now you’re even more hyped, surely?

Inadvertent eDNA research

ICC is still arguably able to set precedent in interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and Customary International Law, both of which the US is subject to

No actually. If you consider the plants to be Archaeplastida (glaucophytes, red algae, and Viridiplantae) or Viridiplantae (the green algae including Embryophyta) then the common plant ancestor is unicellular (greens and reds evolved multicellularity independently). If you consider the plants to just be Embryophyta (the land plants) then they already had highly specialized cells and looked plant-like before they split off from the rest of the green algae.

I’m not sure if the fungal common ancestor is believed to have been unicellular or multicellular but if it was multicellular then it would’ve been filamentous like modern multicellular fungi, rather than a sheet of cells

Fun fact: Animal embryos can be disassociated by depriving them of calcium (E-cadherin, the molecule that holds the cells together, needs to calcium to work) and then can be allowed to reassociate by adding back calcium. If you do this in early enough stages then the embryo will function and develop normally once reaggregated, despite all the cells being jumbled up

Early animals were likely very similar to Trichoplax, but they weren’t Trichoplax. Trichoplax adherins is a modern species with just as many millions of years of evolution between it and the first animal as between us and the first animal. Just bugs me when people end up implying that orthogenisis is real

I think you misread wikipedia when it talks about its endosymbioses. Whole bacteria are found within an organlle (the endoplasmic reticulum) of Trichoplaxs.

That being said what you described does happen in a number of organisms (including ‘complex’ ones like nudibranchs): they steal the chloroplasts from the algae they eat in a process called kleptoplasty. Seeing as mitochondria and chloroplasts originated as bacterial endosymbionts that were then heavily integrated into their hosts, calling kleptoplasty a form of symbiosis isn’t that unusual.