I experience the opposite even when I’m under time pressure (running late for something). When I discover some small, unrelated problem my brain will switch to problem solving mode and focus on this new task instead. This way I totally loose track of time, even though I was totally stressed out about it a second ago. This can happen with stuff like a broken tool but also if I happen to look at a sudoku.

Was it really a bug though?? (i.e. in the order Hemiptera)

So cool!! Thanks :)

Is this an isopod? :O

Nice!!

Haha, made me immediately think of this album

According to the Wikipedia article fascination can be caused by random mutations, bacterial or other infections as well as environmental stresses. So I’d say it totally depends. Only genetic mutations should make the plant give this characteristic to its offspring.

Most plants that I’ve seen with this characteristic are also not uniformly affected by it.

Not necessarily. I don’t consume any social media that algorithmically serve me content, but my sleep schedule is still utterly fucked up. I can easily do an offline puzzle for hours instead of going to sleep for example

I guess most people are definitely negatively affected by manipulative algorithms. But I think what is discussed in the article is contributing even more strongly to our society-wide sleep deprivation. That is, spending the vast majority of our time inside.

The whole series is really fun! (But it’s unfortunately not very long). You can find it on dropout tv and it is called wtf 101.

You’re totally right! I forgot that this is very dependent on where you live. In the area where I usually collect boletes, there are zero poisonous ones and only some that are hard to digest or bad tasting.

This is a play on the two meanings of herb. Of course they are still “herbs” in the culinary sense. But in a botanical sense you would classify plants into categories like herb(aceous plant), sub-shrub, shrub, tree, vine, liana, etc. This doesn’t affect culinary names though.

It isn’t that hard to correctly ID Amanita rubescens and I’ve eaten it quite a few times. But if I’m the only one responsible for identifying it I wouldn’t dare to eat it. With boletes I’m much more lenient and don’t even know the species all of the time :D

Well, one could argue that it is the other way around. We consider most mushrooms as feasibly edible when it is easy enough to distinguish them from non-edible ones. There are thousands of mushroom species out there that are probably edible but that are just not worth anyone’s time. And we also focus more on certain groups of mushrooms that contain a higher percentage of edible ones, like boletes (and also champignons).

This is wrong though. Like obviously it is an animal and no one debates its rough location in the tree of life. There are apparently ongoing discussions if it is a deuterostome or a more basal clade, but that isn’t what the meme is suggesting. Also, there are various described species of Xenoturbella, so you can distinguish them from each other.

And what about the lack of organs?? There is such a great diversity of single celled organisms out there that by definition lack organs (organs are a collection of tissues that serve a common function). So what is the point of even mentioning organs here? The person who wrote this really doesn’t know anything about biology or is trolling.

What species has “a clear reason to exist”? That’s a general question and has no particular connection to this group of animals.

This whole meme is just a desperate attempt to create exciting sounding content for social media without doing enough research.

I feel like this makes everything more confusing. You cannot really follow the hair pins through time because the person takes them out of their hair at one time and the alignment isn’t in the hair. And step 4 confuses what it says (the sister chromatides almost divided) with what it actually shows (the cells almost divided).

Yes exactly. They are both dependent on each other in that way.

And to add on to that, figs are super important food trees in the tropics, because they are the only trees that produce fruits all year around. (Because they have to, otherwise the fig wasp population couldn’t sustain itself.) So many animal species are also dependent on the steady food source of fig trees (btw most look very different from the common fig tree, Ficus carica).

Oof, this whole email exchange reads super misogynistic, but this one here in particular! Poor Faith :(

Especially because most of the corn eaten in the rest of the Americas isn’t sweet at all. It’s more equivalent of rice, pasta, potatoes, etc…

Oooh, nice!!

I feel like something similar has been going on a few years ago as well (or maybe it’s an old post?)