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???

This got me interested too and apparently aroids as a family are specialized on doing this.

https://www.indefenseofplants.com/blog/2018/6/5/how-aroids-turn-up-the-heat

In lieu of their normal metabolic pathway, which ends in the production of ATP, the mitochondria switch over to a pathway called the “Alternative Oxidase Metabolic Pathway.” When this happens, the mitochondria start burning sugars using oxygen as a fuel source. This form of respiration produces heat.

Nonetheless, some aroids can maintain this costly level of respiration intermittently for weeks on end. Take the charismatic skunk cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus) for example. Its spadix can reach temperatures of upwards of 45 °F (7 °C) on and and off for as long as two weeks. Even more incredible, the plant is able to do this despite freezing ambient temperatures, literally melting its way through layers of snow.

For some aroids, however, carbohydrates just don’t cut it. Species like the Brazilian Philodendron bipinnatifidum produce a staggering amount of floral heat and to do so requires a different fuel source - fat.

For about 20 to 40 minutes, the inflorescence of P. bipinnatifidum reaches temperatures as high as 95 °F (35 °C) with one record breaker maxing out at 115 °F (46 °C)!

Incredible!!

Well, duh, I obviously learned LaTeX only to be less productive and procrastinate more. And when I was getting somewhere with it, I had to switch to RMarkdown instead to be able to procrastinate even more! Imagine actually having to think about the content of your work, ugh :/

If you want to know more about this (because in reality it is a bit more complicated) MinuteFood explains it pretty well in this video.

I misread, thanks for clarifying :)

What? Why does no one in the comments mention that plants don’t decompose dead bodies? This statement is just utterly wrong.

Well, that is pretty much US defaultism. I’m not from the US and was talking about academia on an international level.

Your example again just shows how the structure, i.e. the universities working under capitalist logic, are the problem. This doesn’t mean that academics necessarily agree with this change in politics.

I get why you have such a fatalistic view and I agree with your statements about the fascist takeover :(

Not sure if this would impact academia all that much since those “pompous” scholars are just a tiny minority. I don’t think academia’s problem lies in individuals being problematic anyways but rather on a structural level. Egoistic, shortsighted and competitive behavior is strongly incentivized. And people that don’t fit that mold get burned out pretty quickly. I think opposite to your argument it is rather an indication of how good human nature can be that academia is still working on such a collaborative and communicative basis despite capitalist and neoliberal pressures.

Interesting topic, but unfortunately this article reads like it’s written by AI. Poor editing and an assortment of short statements one after the other…

I’ll go listen to the Bisonology episode of the Ologies podcast and see if I can find more infos on the topic :)

Amazing!!! I love all epiphytes (accidental or not). Thanks for sharing :)

I’m in love with both, too ❤️

Haha, my favorite crochet youtuber Complicated Knots made a series of videos on “Bugsmas” (for Christmas) last year. She included in her bugs such things as bees or beetles, but also a snail and a velvet worm. No hemipterans were included though. But following your definition, all those above could be bugs because they are terrestrial.

While women make up 70 percent of cases of Alzheimer’s disease and 65 percent of cases of depression, only about half of one percent of brain-imaging research is related to women. This disparity continues even in drug approvals, such as lecanemabirmb, which U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved for the treatment of early Alzheimer’s disease, but it may not slow the disease in women.

Big oof!!!

“It’s high time to make the brain a major focus of women’s health,” says Sacher.

Or even better make women’s health the focus of medical research as it has been ignored for decades. Just like research has been on mostly white people.

Thanks for the recommendations! Haven’t read any of these books and after reading some reviews, I’m intrigued.

If you liked the details in Moby Dick about whaling, you may also be interested in this great BBC series I’ve discovered a few weeks ago: Inside nature’s giants where they dissect large animals and explain their anatomy and evolution. There are also two episodes of stranded whales being dissected ;)