Pictured: The creature who has promised to protect us from sentient machines not sounding like a carbon-based life form

I’d say we had a good run but we really didn’t.

The heck does agreeing to an understanding for a framework actually mean?

Not really seeing the niche overlap there, as most carnivores are small, shallow rooted, and herbaceous. Gingkos are relicts, conifers tend to be woody, deep-rooted, and can’t grow in pure peat, so there’s probably less pressure to solve nitrogen deficiency. That leaves cycads, which do grow in swampy soils, but they haven’t changed a whole lot in tens of millions of years.

If you go out in a bog and look around, most of the plants there are angiosperms. The non-angiosperms are mainly mosses (capable of surviving on atmospheric deposition, not really producing the sorts of complex structures that can be adapted for carnivory like leaves and roots), ferns, and horsetails. “Why no carnivorous ferns?” seems like an interesting question but it’s also kinda like “Why no flowering ferns?” Because you need structures (leaves, glandular trichomes, or roots) that can be exapted for a new purpose and flowering plants seem to have the most plasticity.

Just a spontaneous exothermic reaction, that’s all.

They’re all QTLs! Phenotype is influenced by the environment! An h squared of 0.2 is actually highly heritable, guys!

The sheer chutzpah of “Not only are we arresting you for trying to clean up our mess, but it’s not like you brought enough mops anyway.”

Zoologists were all “we need the type species of every genus to have the generic epithet” and then someone raised their hand and yelled “what about subspecies?” and they went “screw it, same rule applies for subspecies” and then it turns out the whole thing was a just a prank on Thomas Savage because it’s not like anyone was about to rename humans to Homo homo

Which is ultimately a self-defeating ambition, just a question of how much collateral damage gets done in the process.

“There will be a ChatGPT moment for biotechnology, and if China gets there first, no matter how fast we run, we will never catch up,” the bipartisan Congressional commission said in the report, referring to the transformative chatbot released by U.S.-based OpenAI.

“Our window to act is closing. We need a two-track strategy: make America innovate faster, and slow China down,” the commission said. It recommends that the U.S. government spend at least $15 billion over the next five years to support the domestic biotech sector.

It’s weird how brazen this is - research shouldn’t be a competition, but even if it was this article would read like “we need to do two things to win this race: run faster, and kick all our opponents in the shins.” WE COULD BE COLLABORATING, YOU ASSHATS.

Okay but I want to know where they got that stovetop alembic from. Were they just hanging out on Amazon the entire time while I had to struggle with wok distillation?

Oof, I do not envy anyone trying to identify fungi through the fossil record. Color and fruiting body structure tend to play pretty big roles in ID because the spores themselves tend to be small and fragile, so except for a few genera that are known for highly ornamented spores it can be pretty challenging.

That’s super neat. Is that little triangular bit at the top a germ pore or something else? It’s funny how you get one clade that takes what you’d think would be a really optimizable form like a spore or a pollen grain and takes a left turn with it. In fungi, Entolomas are really identifiable because their spores are pink and cube shaped.

The genus Cornus is a huge middle finger to growth-form-based taxonomy. It contains dogwood trees and also bunchberry, an itty bitty herb that grows on the forest floor.

The first “trees” were also lycopods whose closest extant relatives are the club mosses, a name which gives you an idea of how big they get. All the coal in the world is from a period where plants figured out wood before decomposers learned how to break it down and is mainly the result of a bunch of lycopod trunks sinking into peat bugs and slowly getting compressed.

And so the Western Roman Empire would cease to exist by 476 A.D.

And Byzantium, which survived for another thousand years, always therefore free from issues around currency debasement?

Metabolomics isn’t a real field, it’s a trap invented by sadists.

I’m glad it’s not just me

It’s a cetacean micturation week, huh?