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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Agreed, and I spent like a decade in protein engineering and pre-biotic chemistry.

    And if someone really wants to be a pedant about it, go ahead and prove conscious “intent” is inherently different than, not just a more complex form of, what’s going on here. If someone’s managed to solve all of the philosophy around consciousness, self, and intent, they could really save us all a bunch a time! Until then, pedantically, you’re not wrong to say the plant “knows” to do this as much as I “know” to pay my rent; it’s all just chemical reactions based on environment.

    … Or we could allow people to enjoy the pressures and reasons that give rise to the subtle aspects of organism in this complex ecosystem we call earth without being a dick about it, and trust that the level of language specificity will increase/decrease commiserate to the degree of precision the topic requires.


  • not only native, but the ONLY place. I’ve got carnivores from every continent (accept Antarctica, obviously), and thats STILL my favorite fact.

    It does make sense they’re so rare though. Most carnivory you can picture the evolutionary path: Something had a mutation that kind of made a cup, something had a mutation that kind of made the leaves sticky… etc. You can see it happening one step at a time with minor advantages (and therefore survival) at each step, until they kept compounding into more and more complex and specialized structures.

    For a VFT… multiple things had to happen at once. There’s no advantage to the motion until you can also digest and adsorb the material. There’s also no advantage to a partial motion that can’t trap an organism. It’s really wild they exist!


  • We’re used to getting our energy and building blocks from our food. Plants get their energy from the sun, and their building blocks from the air (CO2). They get water and some minerals, but a plant is made up off solidified air. It’s like if you could be solar powered living off just air, water, and an occasional multi-vitamin.

    Anyway, carnivores don’t really get energy from their prey, just the nutrients. It’s like self fertilizing.




  • batmaniam@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzmycology
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    6 months ago

    So most fungi do have a lifespan, they have teleomere decay, and when you’re cloning mushrooms (from propagating mycelia) you have to let them go to fruit (the part that looks like a mushroom) every now and then. It’s a pain in the ass.

    But like the other poster said, they play it fast and loose with which part you consider the “organism”. My favorite thing is that they do cytosolic streaming. Genetics can be a pain on mushrooms because not only do they share nutrients and metabolic burden through mycelia, they can share nuclei.

    One of the weird convienent realities we used extensively is that cells are big enough you can spread them over a petri dish with a little loop, and if you diluted the initial sample enough, the colonies that developed were, practically speaking, from one parent cell. So you could try to modify a bunch, and then plate them (spreading the cells around) and pick individual colonies that were all clones from a single parent. Fungi mycelia means the nucleus isn’t stuck in one cell. It also means expression levels can be variable (some cells will have multiple nuclei, and then later maybe they don’t).

    Fungi are a godamn pain in the ass to study. They’re not mysterious, they’re not alien, they’re just fucking assholes.


  • Same. I started with Ubuntu like a decade ago. I hated it and didn’t really see the fuss, kind of gave up.

    But then I started putting in tons of time in rasbian, and windows kept getting more and more… Well, windows. I eventually realized how much more I liked working on stuff on the pi, and just needed proper hardware. That’s also when I started to understand the differences between distros. I’m not flaming Ubuntu (I’m not really smart enough to have an opinion), it was just a lot of hastle for something I didn’t understand the upside of yet.

    Been wrestling with my first all Linux (Debian) box. It’s a bit of a learning curve but there’s this weird headspace it frees up. It does what I tell it. There’s no random software that shows up. There’s nothing I can’t nuke. No surveys on my favorite BBQ dish in my Taskbar (true story). It’s so godamn nice. It’s the opposite of a black box.

    Im getting another (3rd) box specifically to slowly replace my current desktop. Ill be fooling around with WINE and whatnot for the software I need for work, probably setting up a small windows partition for when I absolutely need it. But all in all I’ll be 90% penguin by years end.