i’m really dumbfounded that i never realized skin colour is literally just caused by being closer to or farther from the equator and the resulting sun exposure and skin darkening
actually, its an adaptation. natural selection. people with darker skin are selected for in areas near the equator, where the melanin that causes the darker color protects them from radiation and protects them from skin cancer and other health defects, and because they are healthier they can pass on that trait more. people near the poles have lighter skin because it allows them absorb more of the limited sunlight to convert to vitamin d.
THIS IS THE THING SOME PEOPLE HATE OTHER PEOPLE OVER.
Evolution of melanin levels based on geographical location.
Fun fact: the guys at our college’s geology department prop out the doors with their samples. I totally understand why but as someone whose work with samples is necessarily super delicate and sterile it fucks me up so bad
lol idk if you watch nautilus live at all but watching them process bio & geo samples side by side evokes exactly this Thing (the descriptions are gold too… “here are the 30 steps we use to preserve bio samples, and as for rocks, well, we let them dry, bag them, & put them in the Rock Box)
Good to know there’s enough Biologist Salt™ to go around
Paleontologists occupy a weird and highly uncomfortable slice of this Venn Diagram
in my own experience with geology most precautions with samples are to preserve the life and safety of the geologist, most of the rocks are fine.
i am continually reminded of one of my colleagues, who wanted to collect a sample of gypsum on a field excursion but was too lazy to take off his backpack and get his rock hammer. so he said “eh, it’s soft enough” just fucking punched the rock until a piece fell off like it was fucking minecraft
their arms are similar to our tongues in that their muscle fibers are oriented in three different directions
octopuses are disconcertingly strong (anecdotal evidence says that a 15 inch wide octopus was as strong as the scientist handling it)
on that note that same scientist said that when her octopuses escaped she would have to run behind them, “like cats” (paraphrased from sy montgomery’s the soul of an octopus)
aquariums have “octopus enriching programs” so they don’t get bored and fuck shit up in their tanks
they are crazy smart like. really. really fucking smart
but we can’t compare their intelligence to ours because our evolution branched from the same common ancestor so long ago we cannot comprehend how they think
it’s believed that their intelligence evolved when they lost their shell, and had to adapt to predict how countless of different prey and predators would act, how to avoid them, distract them, lure them or trick them
they visualize how other creatures are going to act, which means they have have awareness that others are individuals which is a type of consciousness but i can’t remember what it’s called right now
like, they use tools
they have distinct personalities
aquarium octopuses are socialized from a very young age and even though in the wild they are solitary creatures they become extremely friendly with enough human exposure
sometimes they dislike people for no apparent reason and will shoot water at them
they have three hearts
each of their arms has a tiny brain that controls movement and sensory input on its own i shit you not
they are color blind and yet they can camouflage their color and nobody knows how
they can change the color and texture of their skin faster than human eyes can keep up with it
great pacific octopuses are white when they are peaceful, and red when they’re excited
aquarium octopus have escaped their tanks and slithered down pipes into the ocean
escaped their tanks to eat the fish in other tanks
escaped their tanks to go fight other octopuses cuz they were bored
octopus fight club
learned how to take photographs
cost thousands of dollars by flooding new floors
they can feel, taste, and smell with their suckers and all of their skin
they enjoy tasting their food by slowly moving it through their suckers instead of shoving it in their beaks
they can rewrite their rna. no, really
the only reason why they haven’t evolved to take over as the next dominant race is because they’re doing pretty well in the ocean so there’s no need for them to adapt further
there’s a ton more but i’m so overwhelmed by love i can’ think of any at the moment i’m going to cry
read the soul of an octopus by sy mongomery no she didn’t pay me i just love octopuses so much
Also:
learned to shoot out the annoying light over the tank
hid in floor drains when caught out of their tanks by researchers
hid the shells of crabs stolen from a tank under a third, unrelated tank
Sy is a wonderful human and a great researcher. NEAq actually named a GPO after her in honor of all her work on octopuses. (Or octopi, or octopodes – they’re all correct). Definitely read that book.
-liked being splashed. Figured out that spitting water would have keepers splash back in response
– learned to spray 45°F water everywhere to demand splashes
-likes taking brushes from divers. Knows the best way to do this was to sneak up from underneath or reach over the shoulder
-will wait until keepers are looking away/distracted to grab stuff and knows exactly how far to sink down to get out of reach
-seriously octos are huge thieves. If you have something in your hand, they want it. As soon as they grab it, it belongs to them. There’s no food and they have no use for it? Doesn’t matter it’s their thing now.
-we lost a magnet scrubber for three days because one stole it from the interns. Every time she let it go and we reached a net to get it, she would snatch it out of the net and drag it back into the den. By the time we got it back she had torn apart the scrub pad
-honestly it’s like keeping an aquatic possessive 8-legged cat
Say, Thanos, I recall you telling your adopted space daughter (who you routinely abused, by the way) that her home planet of Zehoberei was now thriving because you killed half its population – including her birth mother – because ‘balance was restored’.
Do you know what I think about that?
I think it’s nothing more than a
BIG
FAT
LIE!!!
So apparently her planet prospered to the point everyone spontaneously died? Troll-logic yourself out of that one, you insane oversized prune.
Welll… TECHNICALLY he would point out that
No one is starving on that world
The crime rate is reduced to zero
The economy is very stable.
Pollution is no longer a problem.
It’s all in the spin….
In some biological experiments with flour beetles, they studied chaos in populations, by placing the beetles in an environment where all their needs were met in a finite environment, and after a certain point they would remove a percentage of adults (because larvae and pupae were slightly harder to collect) to simulate a mass die off, and from around fifty percent in some cases and up in a few studies caused massive uncontrolled population growth, or massive uncontrolled population decline causing the beetle cultures to collapse.
It’s very likely that Gamora’s people suffered a massive population crash after Thanos “Saved the Planet”, and now that he’s had the infinity gauntlet and won, you can expect the rest of the universe to follow suit in to chaos, either extreme population growth in some places, and massive death and huge power imbalances in others.
Thanos did not save the universe, he made it worse.
Here’s a source, but you can find many more articles like this on Google Scholar if you enter in “Flour Beetle chaos population dynamics” or “bifurcation analysis of beetle dynamics”
there’s something poetic about the idea of surviving the most inhospitable environment in the universe and the several-mile fall from it through the power of technology and then being lain low by a fucking bear
I really feel this sums up Russia
This may be the cover story
they do not fool me
they brought that machete with them to fight Space Monsters O.O
Oh, it was much funkier (and so much more idiosyncratically Russian industrial) than that.
It wasn’t multiple weapons; it was one weapon, the TP-82:
The top two barrels are 40-gauge shotgun barrels, while beneath it is a 5.45x39mm rifle barrel (that’s the AK-74 round, basically the Russian answer to the M4 and other Western rifles designed for 5.56mm NATO).
Take a look at the buttstock; see how it’s got a sort of cloth wrapper unfolded, and there’s clips and other stuff? That’s because the buttstock was the machete. The whole thing was part of the standard issue survival kit for cosmonauts, and it was in service from 1986 to 2006.
But, why, you ask, did they design such a thing?
The Восход-2 (Voskhod-2) mission, in which Alexey Leonov became the first human being to execute a spacewalk, was beset with technical problems (as happened with hair-raising regularity in the Space Race era of the Soviet/Russian space program), most of them hit during reentry. Leonov wrote about it, so I’ll forgo the details; suffice it to say they came down hundreds of miles away from the planned landing zone, in heavily forested Siberian wilderness (taiga), and mission control had lost radio contact.
This happened during the mating season for both bears and wolves. And the survival kit had just one small-caliber handgun (given the year, 1965, I’m assuming a Makarov), which would do only marginally more damage to an enraged, seasonally-horny bear or wolf than the cosmonauts’ most caustic mat (barring a stupendously lucky shot).
Fortunately, Soviet aircraft found the landing module in fairly short order; unfortunately, there was no way for helicopters to put down anywhere even close. So warm clothing and blankets were air-dropped so that Leonov and the other Voskhod-2 cosmonaut, Pavel Belyayev, wouldn’t freeze to death overnight. (And a good thing, too, because the landing module developed an electrical fault such that the heater wasn’t working but the fans were going full-blast.)
A rescue party on skis arrived the next day, and built a fucking log cabin within the day so that Leonov and Belyayev had a much warmer and more comfortable place to recover for a night before setting out on skis to the nearest place a helicopter could pick them up.
Yes, a fucking log cabin. Because Russians.
Anyway, Leonov — at that point a national hero — told his superiors that the piddly little Makarov¹ was, as far as Siberian wildlife was concerned, roughly equivalent to yelling at them very loudly while poking them with sticks, and told them that if there was any chance future cosmonauts might have to contend with such circumstances, they needed to be issued something rather more authoritative an argument winner.
1. Don’t get me wrong! I adore the Makarov as a design; in a post-apocalyptic hellscape with inexplicably abundant ammunition, it’d be on my short list of weapons I’d like to have, along with an AK-47 and a pump-action 12-gauge, because I know it will basically never stop working. Russians have a long history of building absurdly reliable firearms. But 9x18mm Makarov, as a round, is right at the bottom end of useful for general self-defense.
“Animals don’t go to war because they’re cinnamon rolls unlike ebil humans uwu” Check-fucking-mate Linda, cephalopods are having trench warfare in the ocean.
Cheloneuniverse 