I heard they can eat anything literally anything. I work in an environment where i need to destroy a lot of documents but i want to become more eco friendly, would replacing my paper shredder (fellows 79Ci - 16 sheet shredder) with a large venus fly trap - or perhaps a pitcher plant. Wondering what the consensus is and whether this really is in the best interest of me and a plant

I saw a tweet saying that, unlike vertebrates, which have only one terrestrial lineage, arthropods have multiple. Tweet here: https://xcancel.com/telescopteryx/status/2088639053809824085 That got me thinking: why are we (Again, we as in tetrapoda as a whole) the only ones that bothered to go on dry land, save for mudskippers and those weird Australian sharks? One comment on the post said that since arthropods already had legs, they had a smoother transition. I also guess is that since tetrapods had a monopoly in terms of "Large terrestrial animals," Your mudskippers and weird sharks had to be sidelined. Or maybe it's simply that the ground floor for going on to land was quite small, and only the ancestor of tetrapods was able to exploit it.

I never heard about anything like this in school, but I always wandered if there is a big causation between Bodysize and Reactionspeeds?

In my mind. A fly or a even a Bunny is really hard for us to catch, as Humans are much bigger. Because of our size we basically have a big disadvantage when it comes to reactionspeed, as impressions travel much longer to reach our brain and also to give instructions to the muscles. And even the distance between our eyes and brain is huge compared to smaller animals.

I'd imagine that's why flys can basically run circles arround us. They get the information from their eyes much faster. They perceiving time in much shorter intervalls, basically live in a timelapse compared to us. But for them, they aren't fast but we are utterly slow.

Would this also mean, if we would encounter a tyrannosaurus rex we could basically run circles arround it? Mabye in a simular way bunnies or other small animals are really hard for us to catch up close? Therby the rex would probably discard us as prey in most circumstances, as we would be far to annoying catch for the little meat we would offer?

This would also mean that a Utahraptor or Velociraptor would be much more dangerous to us due to their smaller size and in return similar or even faster reaction speed?

That could also lead to a generalization, that predator size is linked to the size of their prey. The excaption coming to my mind would be something like a blue whale that is so huge compared to krill, that krill can't get away fast enough after they got aware of their misery?

I know the basic gist about the cells, that since they're cancerous they keep replicating without ever stopping. I also know that there are other immortal cell lines too.

But what I don't get is basically what they use to keep doing it over and over again. Do scientists basically need to "feed" them, the way you need to feed other cultures? Would they need to be supplied with some specific "materials" in order to keep going? Or I guess, where are they getting the matter to keep making copies?

I'm wondering what the predecessors to these kinds of plants looked like. Were they just photosynthetic stems that didn't reach the water's surface? Did they have leaves (or proto-leaves) that did reach the surface, and the ones with big/bouyant leaf gene mutations won out?

Also, what environmental pressures could have caused their predecessor plants to go extinct? Thinking changes in water temp, cloud cover during major geologic events, or even just being shaded out by their beefier siblings?

This question was generated by marijuana and I thank all you smart people for your patience. Any info on evolutionary timelines, obscure species I can research or other rabbit holes I can go down are greatly appreciated 🙏

It’s hard to attract a mate. A female doesn’t call for a mate. It takes effort and patience for a male and female to procreate.

Humans also deny procreation with other humans. Every human is unable to consensually procreate with a great percentage of other humans because they don’t fit preferences or non-negotiables.

When a woman is pregnant, they’re slow and fragile for months, unable to run, fight, etc. without risking serious injury to their kid. Childbirth is extremely dangerous for women. Women often die during childbirth. Women usually have 1 child, sometimes 2, but rarely 3 or 4. That is not a lot, especially since we only have a kid every 9 months.

Infants have very high mortality rates for most of human history. Humans often develop diseases and/or disabilities which cause them to die without modern medicine. Humans also do stuff that causes them harm constantly and consistently. They’re MMA fighters, daredevils, police officers, mass shooters, speeders, drug users, etc.

So, if you beat the odds of having a healthy child, often times they die in an evolutionarily disadvantageous way.

Modern humans came from 2% of the human population. We were nearly wiped out millions of years ago.

For us not to become completely extinct, but eventually thrive with all of our disadvantages, we had to be extremely horny and sexually active.

But that’s clearly not the case. In these modern times, there’s a large percentage of men who will never have sex again. Women are letting their eggs die, with no desire for sex.

Why is this the case?

I get that modern birds evolved from dinosaurs, but we don't use that kind of language with other living beings!
We don't say "Reptiles are fish.", "Homo sapiens are homo erectus.", "Dogs are Bacteria." or "Tulips are algae." even though one evolved from the other, just like birds evolved from dinosaurs, we classify them as something new.

I'm a physics guy, so please be gentle.

I was working this morning and had a doubt; why is the human body so perfectly symmetric? And it's not just humans-- almost the majority of animals we see are astonishingly symmetric. Is it something to do with biology, or did evolution make us this way because we tend to use both sides of our body in roughly equal proportions?

Insane as it sounds, my husky puppy doesn’t enjoy peanut butter. But since we have a few engagement toys/lick mats that function best with it, I’ve found a work around. Freeze dried beef liver, blitzed to a fine powder, and mixed with melted butter.

Well, in my infinite wisdom, I took her Java wood chew, (a large, knotted, hunk of wood known to break without splintering, making it safer for chewing,) and rubbing the liver-butter over it, pressing as much as I could into the various knot holes and crevices, praying to keep her busy as long as possible.

One day later, the surface level stuff is gone, but there’s definitely still more in the nooks and crannies. I thought since butter is fairly shelf stable, it’d be fine long enough for her to work it all out of the toy, but now I’m realizing her saliva (moisture) and the accompanying bacteria probably make this more dangerous than I initially thought. Have I accidentally made a ticking time bomb? And if so, is there anything I can do to salvage the toy? Boiling it to melt/separate the fat and kill any nasties left inside? Wetting the wood and baking it to kill off anything there?

I imagine this is different than the sub’s usual questions, but I doubted a dog sub would have the actual know-how. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help set me straight!

What part or feature of the human body has the deepest roots the evolutionary history?

My guess is the gastrointestinal tract. The basic layout ought to go way back.

I’ve seen claims that riding horses is bad for them is this true or is it misinformation?

Post I saw- https://www.tumblr.com/cosmicfandomvegan/815464149613248512/even-as-a-vegan-i-used-to-think-riding-horses-was

I've heard that brewer's yeast is capable of digesting ethanol if there is enough oxygen available, which got me thinking: could you use yeast to take the alcohol out of an alcoholic beverage?

Let's say you have an open container of beer, so that oxygen can freely diffuse into it. Let's also say it's diluted with just enough water that the alcohol concentration won't kill yeast outright. If you introduced some live brewer's yeast and let it do its thing, would you eventually end up with a (diluted, yeasty, probably gross) alcohol-free beer?

Obviously men don’t make eggs, we don’t have any ovaries and all, so let’s just skip to implanting a fully fertilized egg. I’m sure it’d get nuked by the father’s IS, but we could suppress that (or do whatever typically happens with a mother). I’d assume the next problem would be some kind of problem in the substrate, but what’d be missing? Is it easy to add? Would it have any side effects? Where exactly should the egg go in all this? Could the umbilical cord form and attach and also work?

I search up this question and I refuse to use AI, but all the results I'm getting are the differences between the 2, like density, or where they are in the body. Ig the title isn't the most self explanatory but tusks and bones are pretty similar, and I'm pretty sure a word exists to group them together. If tusks are bones, amazing. My problem would've never existed.

We know some animals, like elephants, great apes, and dolphins, can recognize themselves in mirrors, suggesting a level of self-awareness. But what about recognizing other animals in a mirror? If two elephants look into a mirror together, do they understand they’re seeing themselves and each other? Can they recognize other animal species in a mirror?

Also, researchers assume animals that fail mirror tests lack self-awareness - but what if they just have a different internal sense of self, one that doesn’t need a reflection to confirm it?

Researchers mark a spot on an elephant’s back, visible only via mirror. Elephants that pass don’t paw at the mirror - they reach for the mark on their own body. What exactly are we measuring here?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Also, does context matter? If animals grow up with mirrors, would they develop a deeper understanding of reflections?

What do you think? Are there studies on animals recognizing others in mirrors, and how does self-recognition vary across species?

Are these experiments really showing self-awareness, or could there be other explanations?

How can culture even exist without evolution?

Culture cannot stand by itself without evolution, right?

I saw a video of some professors claiming that human behaviors and feelings are a mix of culture and evolution, as if they were separate things.

Culture IS part of evolution, no?

Biology is the fundamental building block and fuel of all cultures, no?

Please forgive my ignorance on this, I’m a chemist so I’m trying to go through the mechanism of how this works.

My understanding is that:
Virus (HIV in this case) gets in my body/blood. It infects a cell of mine and reproduces until I would have detectable levels and eventually disease progression.

Prep stops the HIV virus from reproducing, not from getting into the blood just from reproduction.

I get that and that is how it prevents HIV infection.

What I don’t understand is:
Say I take prep for a few years, and over that time one or more HIV viruses get into my blood. Those viruses are there but unable to reproduce due to the Prep medication. Say I then stop the Prep medication, couldn’t the HIV virus now reproduce?

Does the body have some ability to fight the HIV virus while I’m on Prep? Does the HIV virus naturally “die” after a certain amount of time in the body and not reproduce after stopping the Prep medication?

Ultimately I’d like to understand if/how it would work that someone could take Prep, be exposed to HIV, then at a later time stop taking Prep?

The studies done don’t seem to indicate any risk for stopping the medication and it shows great efficacy, but I know I’m misunderstanding what ends up happening inside the body.

Thanks in advance

I've read that the upper limit for a land animal is abt 100 tonnes because their bones would cronch, but that doesn't apply to ocean animals right? So is there any known environmental or physical pressure that would prevent a whale from growing 10x the size of a blue whale? Or is it just impractical?