‘aBiogenesis’ Reimagines The Primordial Soup Theory In A Mesmerizing Animation By Markos Kay

Fun fact: my dad, after being a surgeon for 25 years, no longer has fingerprints. The sponge he uses to wash his hands several times a day is so harsh that it’s rubbed off his fingerprints throughout the years. Sometimes he can’t get into our building because the biometric uses a fingerprint scanner 😭

Reminder that the "fittest" in "survival of the fittest" does not mean "strongest/most violent".

It refers to an animal that is best fitted to thriving in a given ecological niche. A fit animal is one that is successful at the tasks of finding food food and water, avoiding predators, and reproducing, by whatever means work best for their situation.

Virophages are such a wild concept. It’s a teeny virus that infects a bigger virus. What a genuine flex of natural selection.

i found another specimen of a super rare organism yesterday!

this is a rare and remarkable ciliate, a single-celled organism called Metopus verrucosus.

a few neat facts about it:

it’s an anaerobic organism! this means it prefers to live without oxygen

it lives deep in the mud of sulfur- & methane-rich bodies of saltwater. this one was found in the salt marsh estuary on the side of the garden state pkwy in south New Jersey!

it couldn’t survive in these noxious conditions by itself, though! the fuzzyness covering it’s cell is actually a type of bacteria that symbiotically lives on M. verrucosus.

this bacteria has the ability to metabolize sulfur and/or methane, processing these volatile stinky chemicals and turning it into energy, that it then shares with M. verrucosus!

i’m the only known person with this kind of footage of M. verrucosus! the paper The Santa Barbara Basin is an Oasis of Symbiosis has the only other photo i’ve seen of this organism, and it’s actually an HVEM (electron microscope) photo of a cross-section of the cell showing it’s endosymbiotic bacteria.

here are some more photos i took of other specimens:

Stop the ban on blood donation of gay men

is there a name for this

Reasons to love tardigrades!

They have little eyes.

Women in STEM are just witches in white lab coats instead of black robes

art source: abigaillarson-Poisonous Plants irenhorrors-Drawlloween Laboratory

To students taking exams right now:

You are smarter than you know

It is almost over, just keep holding on

You are not your grades, and your grades don’t define your intelligence

Trust and believe in yourself

Stop comparing yourself to others

Remember to drink water (not just coffee)