I got the impression there is still lots of debate over these critters.
I had read that lateral gene transfer is what gives the slugs the ability to maintain the chloroplasts, but this paper says that might not be the case.
lots of different claims were likewise mentioned and then the authors cautions about potential interpretation.
I really get a kick out of these heterophototrophic kleptoplasty critters. The kleptoplasts can't be inherited and they don't last forever, but they do last for awhile and are not simply consumed.
Ok so WTF?
I’ve read a few different articles on this with varying degrees of boring denseness, and the extra short of why this is important, future theories of quantum electrodynamics potentially have a target to aim for when calculating the Muon’s G-factor, if a new theory doesn’t explain these numbers, then it’s not good enough. Of course it’s not certain yet, it’s only 4.2 sigma, but the experiment has at least one more planned run to go to try and shore that up if it does exist.
A bit more detailed, although to be honest the proper maths of QED gives my head pains, the electron has magnetic moment created by the intrinsic property of spin which causes it to act a bit like a bar magnet with an up and down. The strength of this moment is given by the dirac equation which calculates the multiplying factor ‘g’ of an electron as exactly 2. Throw in some fiddly bits of quantum foam interactions and it’s just a bit higher than 2. Experiments and theory have agreed to amazing precision. Great!
Now we get to the Muon,like an electron but 220 times heavier. That’s no matter though when it comes to it’s magnetic moment, a chunky electron is still the same little bar magnetic and should have the same magnetic moment. The only problem is muons don’t like to stick around and decay quickly, making them quite difficult to study. Hence a giant accelerator ring and it’s massive computer, (the computer systems that log and process the data coming from many of these giant accelerators really deserve credit on their own as engineering marvels.)
An anomaly, or difference between the muon and electron g-factor suggests that the heavier muon is interacting with something that’s giving its spin just a tiny bit more push than it does the electrons. Which sounds unmistakably like potentially related to dark matter to me. Presumably, since an electron isn’t massless, we would see a deviation between theory and experiment with the electron too but it may be so far down to be hidden by noise. There exists another, the Tau lepton, that’s even heavier, but very little study has been done with it and it decays even faster than the muon.
Here is an absurdly large and zoomable image of the experiment, see if you can spot Flash and Reverse-Flash pre transformation.
Photo from said drone, showing the tracks of the rover who fucked off to a good distance just incase the drone became sentient and tried to kill it. Tomorrows expected flight should see a translation of 100m at a height of 5m, so eventually we should see some flying footage and not just up and down.
In short, in a study of 90 people who didnt improve on normal psych meds and have PTSD were given MDMA assisted therapy, or Placebo assisted therapy. At the end of 3 sessions, 67% of MDMA patients were no longer diagnosed with PTSD, compared to 32% of placebo patients.
The worm is very fragile, and breaks apart very easily, making it extraordinarily difficult to dissect and study.
Nevertheless, after painstaking work using a combination of techniques including histology, electronic optical microscopy, immunohistochemistry, confocal laser microscopy, and X-ray computed microtomography, an international team of biologists has managed to study the ins and outs of R. multicaudata's anatomy.
If you could get a parasite that made you live much longer than everyone else, remaining youthful and without any apparent ill effects, and moreover meant you didn't have to work because everyone else would feed you and care for you ... would you go for it?
Deep in the forests of Germany, nestled neatly into the hollowed-out shells of acorns, live a smattering of ants who have stumbled upon a fountain of youth. They are born workers, but do not do much work. Their days are spent lollygagging about the nest, where their siblings shower them with gifts of food. They seem to elude the ravages of old age, retaining a durably adolescent physique, their outer shells soft and their hue distinctively tawny. ... While their sisters perish within months of being born, these death-defying insects live on for years and years and years.
I'm intrigued.
(The long-lived ants are ones that eat tapeworm eggs and get tapeworms growing inside them. The only sacrifice appears to be that they eventually get eaten by birds, because they're too lazy even to run away.)
Quote:
Foitzik told me that her team couldn’t find any overt downsides to life as an infected ant, a finding that appears to shatter the standard paradigm of parasitism. Even the colonies as a whole remained largely intact.
An elixir of youth! Sign me up!
However:
Quote:
The uninfected workers in parasitized colonies, they realized, were laboring harder. Strained by the additional burden of their wormed-up nestmates, they seemed to be shunting care away from their queen. They were dying sooner than they might have if the colonies had remained parasite-free.
So these lazy infected ants are stealing labour from others to the detriment of the colony as a whole.
I wonder if Jeff Bezos is infected with the same tapeworms.
Do we know whether that is a study being carried out by genuine research psychologists or a puff piece for a commercial outfit? I'm going to call "bullshit".
Do we know whether that is a study being carried out by genuine research psychologists or a puff piece for a commercial outfit? I'm going to call "bullshit".
Im posting mostly for my amusement, in the past this might have annoyed me, today this just makes me laugh and a bit concerned. I wanted a spot to record this to come back to for further analysis, as sadly the responder has over 200K followers and thus affects how others think. How and why he gets things wrong is important.
Midnights edge is a youtube channel that spends most of its time mixing truth and rumors to explain why your favorite franchise is being ruined by SJWs. Lots of hate for Discovery and female ghostbusters.
I watched a short few minute interview with Brian Greene, looked at the comments and Midnights edge here was ranting about how bullshit String theory is, and how its wasted resources etc. I decided to poke them and see why, below is their response.
Theres no point in actually correcting everything, especially once theyve thought about it themselves and feel invested in their answer, any correction will be seen as an attack.
This investment in their conclusion, and how psuedoscience tells others to research it for themselves but keeps control of the data so that people invest a part of their identity into their beliefs is not just powerful but something many do on their own, Ive been slowly working on how one might use these tricks to better teach science. (Partly related, I wonder what age is the right age to blatantly lie to students so that they can feel invested in discovering the truth.)
Theres no point in actually correcting everything, especially once theyve thought about it themselves and feel invested in their answer, any correction will be seen as an attack.
I agree, it's rather useless, even if there actually was anything to correct. To such a person I would just offer a couple of simple observations:
1. You are obviously not qualified to have an opinion on any of this. It's a harsh reality, but after reading a pop-sci book or two about the stuff your grasp of a subject like this will be exactly bupkis.
2. You've come up with something better? No? Then STFU.