The Fossil Record Is Biased Against Bats. The Flying Mammals Are Small, Making Their Fossilized Remains

plants that never ever bloom

Seriously, genetics is weird.

I was reading one paper on long noncoding RNAs and there's this one part that just really stood out to me.

So to catch everyone up, genetic data is stored as DNA. Then parts of it go through a process called transcription to build a strand of RNA. Certain RNAs get translated into proteins, but there are noncoding RNAs that don't make proteins but instead do a secret second thing (and I mean secret cause there are tons of ncRNAs that no one knows what they do). long noncoding RNAs are just noticeably longer than average.

Anyway, one lncRNA mentioned in the paper is called WINCR1. When the researchers managed to block it from being used, they noted that cells lost the ability to divide and there was one particular gene GADD45B, which is responsible for triggering apoptosis, was more common in the cells.

So my guess is one of WINCR1's jobs is to just confirm to the self-destruct system that the DNA isn't broken. Like, it being transcribed essentially tells the cell that that part of the DNA is still working and it can then go and turn off the kill switch.

So I guess cells are just designed to kill themselves as their default setting and WINCR1 is the drinking bird pressing the Y key to tell the system to not just blow up.

A quick little note about this bacterium, Nocardia! These are fascinating to me as, although they are a rod-shaped bacteria, they can form beaded, perpendicularly branching filaments that are acid-fast. They can appear morphologically similar to a different bacteria, the anaerobic Actinomyces, however Actinomyces does not exhibit beading like Nocardia does.

This is a Gram-stain of a bacterial embolus within a pulmonary vessel of an Australian marsupial species, and we were lucky enough to know what genus we were dealing with before culture was performed, purely based on the bacteria's morphology!

Microbelr

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you know what? no! *sanger sequences you and aligns you with a sequence of saxifraga rosacea no matter how many gaps i have to add between singular bases*

String identified: t g c g a a g. a t t a . t t t c g c g ' t . t. t c g c . a at c tt a a . t t . c a . t' at t t at t a a a . a ' t g t . at a c .

Closest match: Saxifraga rosaceawait how did you do that. what the fuck

Rosy bonnet mushroom, Mycena rosea Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

Ceratiomyxa fruticulosa var. poroides

by fungispot

[Hotwheels gen. nov., a new ground spider genus (Araneae, Gnaphosidae) from southwest China]

The generic name refers to Hot Wheels, a collectible die-cast toy car made by Mattel, as the long, coiled embolus of this new genus resembles a Hot Wheels track; neuter in gender.

Liu & Zhang, 2024