• 2 Posts
  • 504 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle

  • flora_explora@beehaw.orgtoScience Memes@mander.xyz>:(
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    10 hours ago

    Looked it up because I hadn’t heard of it. Wikipedia say the following:

    Common names in English include Indian borage, country borage, French thyme, Indian mint, Mexican mint, Cuban oregano, broad leaf thyme, soup mint, Spanish thyme.

    What? So does it taste like a mix of borage, thyme, mint and oregano?? Sure, they are all Lamiaceae (except for borage), but they have wildly different aromas!









  • Thanks for the explanation, but I cannot follow on this line

    Since he knows that Bernard doesn’t know given just the row, each ball in that row is in a column that contains more than one ball.

    Why is that? Why couldn’t it be A2 or A3? In this case neither Albert nor Bertrand could tell what row/column this was either, because it would be in a row/column with another ball. How can you exclude any row with overlap with any single-ball columns?





  • From Wikipedia on dopamine:

    The brain includes several distinct dopamine pathways, one of which plays a major role in the motivational component of reward-motivated behavior.

    So it is a neurotransmitter but has many different functions as such. But also:

    Outside the central nervous system, dopamine functions primarily as a local paracrine messenger. In blood vessels, it inhibits norepinephrine release and acts as a vasodilator; in the kidneys, it increases sodium excretion and urine output; in the pancreas, it reduces insulin production; in the digestive system, it reduces gastrointestinal motility and protects intestinal mucosa; and in the immune system, it reduces the activity of lymphocytes. With the exception of the blood vessels, dopamine in each of these peripheral systems is synthesized locally and exerts its effects near the cells that release it.

    So dopamine is important for all kinds of cells to function correctly. So just chugging a bunch of dopamine would do all kinds of stuff to your body…



  • I guess things can have multiple names, too. In German you would also say Waldfrüchte (forest fruits) to mixed berries, but they are still Beeren (berries) as well. If you search for “postre de bayas” or “pastel de bayas” many recipes pop up. And sure, Spanish is obviously a diverse language with the divide between Spanish from Spain and from Latin America.

    Disclaimer: I’m part of the scientific bubble so that’s why I may here more terms that are botanical in Spanish ;)




  • Hm, I was intrigued and looked at the evolution of plants. This made me realize how paraphyletic gymnosperms and angiosperms really are! We just don’t know how angiosperms exactly started out and if they might be monophyletic. And in case of gymnosperms, they are consisting of many very different plant groups that evolved independently.

    So gymnosperms were probably the first plants to evolve seeds and they “include conifers, cycads, Ginkgo, and gnetophytes, forming the clade Gymnospermae”. That doesn’t really give an answer but that’s the best we can do?

    It was previously widely accepted that the gymnosperms originated in the Late Carboniferous period, replacing the lycopsid rainforests of the tropical region, but more recent phylogenetic evidence indicates that they diverged from the ancestors of angiosperms during the Early Carboniferous.[12][13] The radiation of gymnosperms during the late Carboniferous appears to have resulted from a whole genome duplication event around 319 million years ago.[14] Early characteristics of seed plants are evident in fossil progymnosperms of the late Devonian period around 383 million years ago. It has been suggested that during the mid-Mesozoic era, pollination of some extinct groups of gymnosperms was by extinct species of scorpionflies that had specialized proboscis for feeding on pollination drops. The scorpionflies likely engaged in pollination mutualisms with gymnosperms, long before the similar and independent coevolution of nectar-feeding insects on angiosperms.[15][16] Evidence has also been found that mid-Mesozoic gymnosperms were pollinated by Kalligrammatid lacewings, a now-extinct family with members which (in an example of convergent evolution) resembled the modern butterflies that arose far later.

    Wow, so there was already pollination going on before flowering plants even existed??? By scorpionflies who’s ancestors I frequently see? And there were butterfly-like insects long before real butterflies existed? Look how butterfly-like they were! This is wild!!