Located 821 results from search term 'biology'
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Commented in Homophobic, religious and race hate crimes on public transport are soaring
That's what it's become.
Clarifying, do you mean down at the local bingo parlor or something affecting the whole of British transport generally?
If I call you an ass because you are behaving badly, and you are a woman, I hate women.
Your hatred of women may be completely incidental to your behaving badly. You may sense it's as clear as that in your case, and I'll defer to your specific knowledge of your dark-hearted motivations, but you may not even be conscious of your issues either before or after accosting women that way. I'm not sure how clear you are on it now, for instance.
If you're one of the however many genders there now, I'm some flavor of -phobic.
I'll give you one piece of advice for free. You should avoid taking any kind of science, but biology in particular. I don't think you're ready. There are countless genders. Yet somehow, ordinary people do tend to manage to treat one another reasonably well in everyday life. Go figure! Why couldn't it be that easy for us, do you think?
If you're black, I'm a racist.
Watch out, you're coming right up to the very edge of a realization here. It's better to let people think you hate most people about the same than, by speaking up in specific cases this way, remove all doubt you hate some people more equally than others.
Same if you're an illegal immigrant.
Or just generally too brown to fit a given definition for a "Texas teen."
Anything that offends is done on the basis of hate
Really? Because I'd gotten a strong impression you've been saying so this whole post.
because you can't be any of these things AND be an ass, apparently.
False dichotomy. You can easily be all of those things and an ass. I should've thought you would've known.
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Commented in Asexual and Happy
The only reasonable explanation for the word asexual being used this way is that people heard it in biology class and didn't have the vocabulary to express what they mean for a different phenomena among humans. Non-sexual (or perhaps 'insexual')seems like a far more appropriate term, as asexual has a more definitive meaning relating to a creature that reproduces without a mate, rather than one who avoids reproductive processes. It's somewhat (though not entirely) similar to the difference between amoral (something that is without morals) and immoral (something that goes against morals).
I suppose fortunately the language does generally maintain the proper idea when speaking about something other than 'identity'. We would typically say, for instance, that two friends have a non-sexual relationship, rather than an asexual relationship (among other differing examples). Asexual is reproductive. Non-sexual is not reproductive.
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Commented in E.P.A. Officials, Disheartened by Agency’s Direction, Are Leaving in Droves
And that is exactly what the republicans want. These people can be replaced with climate change deniers to advance their agenda, or just not replaced.
I can’t blame them though. I’m considering the same kind of move very seriously. Science has become a hopeless pursuit. At best you’re a hyped-up news soundbite (“a high school student just overturned all of physics, chemistry, and biology by accident and scientists are all jumping off a cliff!”). At worst, and most likely, you’re an out of touch elitist who doesn’t know anything about the real world. It’s nearly impossible to get funding unless you kiss the right asses, and if you have a truly original idea, unless you figure how to keep quiet and fund it yourself, you’re most likely going to get your funding denied and find a big shot getting the same idea funded and published. The system has never been great, but the glorification of ignorance and funding shortages have made it unbearable.
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Commented in Measurements from CERN suggest the possibility of a new physics
You know, I do think we need science news, as in bringing complicated science to the general public in a way that it is understood. No problem there. But turning science into clickbait is not the best way to do this. I'm getting really tired of seeing articles about how our understanding of the universe is going to be changed forever, or how biology's principles are about to be shattered, or how the whole field of chemistry is going down the toilet, etc. This does nothing to help science, in fact, it makes people less likely to think of science as a legitimate way to study the world, since it looks like the whole field is shattered and destroyed every time a potato farts.
I know most people are stupid, and have the attention span of a mosquito with Alzheimer's, but we should at least try to be factual. Of course, that's not going to get us clicks, likes, and retweets.
Maybe I'm just blowing against the sandstorm :/
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Commented in Scientists slam Donald Trump's environment chief over climate denial: 'It's like disputing gravity'
You have to admit it's pretty bold the way that the religious right denies things like evolution, climate change, global warming, and the like. These are all things that are out there for anyone to learn about and check for themselves, and there are very simple ways to properly disprove them if you want to do it. But they just go and scream that these are lies promoted by a conspiracy of evil scientists who want to sabotage our awesome American way of life, and claim that these things can be disproven by 6-th grade biology (without saying how). And that's all they need. Hell, there are people out there who seriously believe that Earth is flat. I can see how it's not too hard to make arguments about tobacco causing cancer, because in epidemiology it is a lot harder to make hard claims. But having a large segment of the population that denies that the planet is getting warmer or that it is round is just proof that humankind deserves to go extinct.
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Commented in How, After This Crazy Year, Is ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ Still Being Used As An Insult?
It's a quick way to dismiss someone you disagree with without actually having to think about what they're saying. You should know that, it can all be explained using 6-th grade biology!
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Commented in Scientists record biggest ever coral die-off on Australia's Great Barrier Reef
These are, of course, all lies fabricated by the climate change conspirators so they can damage our energy businesses! All scientists are obviously part of a global secret society created to undermine our great country's economy. The death of hundreds of thousands of square miles of coral reef is a perfectly normal thing that is part of Earth's natural cycles, just like temperatures rising exponentially within decades is just another small fluctuation of the Earth's climate. This is, of course, all explainable using 6-th grade biology. If you understand that, you obviously know better than all those evil scientists with their silly PhD's and peer-reviewed publications!
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Commented in Bogus ‘sex offender’ labels are ruining lives
This is yet another consequence of religious people trying to impose their medieval morality on others, by depicting sex and teenage sexual experimentation as a dirty and criminal act rather than normal biology. Sure, there are people who commit terrible sexual crimes, but utterly destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands of people for minor childish offenses or for natural, innocent exploration of their sexuality looks like a much worse crime to me.
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Commented in My life as a ‘sex object’
I don't think biology has anything to say about whether the either party has to enjoy the process at all, just that it has to be done. After all there are many species where the male knows he's likely to be killed and eaten during sex and he still takes part.
I did find one thing about her story disturbing. After being ejaculated on she went home and had a bath. Surely a shower would have been a much better option.
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Commented in Everything You Need to Trim, Pluck, Shave or Wax Before Hitting the Beach
Reduce cute cat factor by 75% ..... beep bloop... Computer image of what I would most likely look like: ???????sfw
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Commented in Sunburns indicate Alien Origin of Human Life
Not teaching biology properly leads to stupid ideas like this.
The reason we get sunburn is because we evolved in a sun poor environment and we now live inside most of the time and rarely go outside. Our cells share DNA and cell mechanisms with all living things on earth as far as we know. Occam's razor.
/rant
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Commented in Where Are All The Aliens? What Is Fermi’s Paradox?
Not to nitpick, but the zoo hypothesis assumes that there's something unique about earth that makes it worth protecting. We really only made parks of places with something unique, either geology or biology. It's not like we save random things for no reason. Thus the ZH seems anthropomorphic and so to me that's not a good theory.
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Commented in This is where body fat ends up when you lose weight
Something about this article seems a bit off to me. I mean, sure, fat obviously (to anyone with a background in biology) is broken down and ultimately its carbon is exhaled as CO2. But to say that it's used as energy isn't wrong – what do these people think energy is? It's not just some mysterious molecule that turns your fat invisible; rather, energy is stored in molecular bonds, and released when large molecules (such as glucose, or fat molecules when not enough glucose is available) are broken down into smaller molecules, CO2 (carbon dioxide) and H2O (oxygen). Furthermore, fat can't be converted to CO2 and H2O without a release of energy (heat being one form of this). Doctors aren't stupid; this article is just misleading.
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Commented in Why Being ‘Born Gay’ is a Dangerous Idea
More thoughts on the article:
Other liberation movements have rejected the idea that biology is destiny. So why should gay rights depend on it?
Maybe I'm not looking at it correctly, but the opening hook doesn't even make sense to me. I think there's a big difference between, for example, claiming race will determine your success in life, or that hair color determines personality, and saying (essentially) that if you're gay... you're gay. Sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. are very fluid for some people and very rigid for others. Technically neither determine your destiny because people have lived and still do live in repression, self-inflicted or otherwise. Just because we can sometimes pass for being straight/cis and live our entire lives masquerading as such doesn't mean our biology doesn't compel us differently, and it also doesn't mean that we should have to live in repression just because we can. What's the point of the opening statement, then? (Damn, it makes so little sense to me that I can't even figure out my argument to it because I'm not even sure what the author is trying to say.)
African-American activists aggressively called out arguments about genetic and biological differences as legacies of racist, Nazi science. By contrast, the marriage-equality movement has embraced biological determinism. Gay and lesbian activists have led the way popularising the idea that identity is biologically determined.
These two things aren't related in the way the author implies. People fought against the opinion that biological differences (race) made some people more or less valuable than others because it was ridiculous. This is true for the LGBT(QIA) movement as well, as we fight against the opinion that biological differences (sexual orientation and gender identity) make some people more or less valuable than others. The author claims we "embrace biological determinism" as if it is the equivalent of, for example, a black person "embracing" the Nazi view that whites were superior to blacks, when it's nothing like that at all. We're not claiming biological determinism as a statement of inferiority, we're claiming biological determinism as a statement of lack of conscious control over these traits, just as people who are straight lack conscious control over their heterosexuality. We're not embracing a divide, we're fighting for equality.
I think this is where I'm going to stop, because rereading the article just makes me think the author has no more clue as to what his point is than I do. The comparisons and arguments don't make sense, the writing is all over the place and confusing, and if I analyzed everything in the article I'd end up writing a book. It's an interesting read, but it looks like utter bollox to me. (I'm not even Irish but that's the word that has been coming to mind while rereading this, so that's what I'm going with.)
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Commented in Scientists have developed an eye drop that can dissolve cataracts
I guess what I was trying to state, was fully knowing the mechanism isn't required for starting human trials. Knowing potential side effects, dosage, and treatment timelines are required. We often come out with drugs that we don't exactly know why/how they work, but we know they do and have a decent understanding of the risks. I watched many possible treatments die at this stage of research. Funding gets pulled, the researcher simply doesn't want to take it to the next stage, or many other reasons that is never gets moved towards phase 1 trials. Universities and the NIH have set up methods to try and combat this and help things move forward, but I doubt that the particular research on focusing in on the mechanism for treatment will really advance any of the key questions for moving to phase 1 (dosage, safety, and treatment plan). In my experience the basic biology research is critical for understanding what is going on but is not targeted to really move treatments forward.
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Commented in Headless gutted fish still moving
I'm pretty sure that's indeed the reason why the body still twitches. I experienced the same while disecting frogs (during my biology education, not for fun like a maniac :P). Some of us experimented with a little salt and the legs kept twitching up to 15min after the frogs were killed. The legs were completely severed from the body as well, so there wasn't any residual brain or spinal cord activity responsible for it.
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Commented in When Plants Attack: A Time-Lapse
I'm glad you enjoyed it! As a high school biology teacher, I hope your second statement was an exaggeration! :)
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Commented in When Plants Attack: A Time-Lapse
That was pretty awesome to watch. Learned more biology in a few minutes than I did in a semester in HS.
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Commented in Images I had commissioned for my worldbuilding project, "Panthology".
Ah okay. I'm creating the project for personal pleasure, funded entirely by me, and will be distributed for free once finished. My end goal of the project is a sort of anthology (get it? Panthology, an anthology of everything, oh I'm not that clever) of thicker volumes on the history, geography, geology, biology, etc. of the world complimented by short stories, literary novels, and more set on the world.
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Commented in Rare African plant signals diamonds beneath the soil
Having a background in both geology and biology, I wonder what nutrient dependency this species has to make its' growth conditions so specific to kimberlite soils.
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Commented in Deadly Truth of General AI - Computerphile
I found it interesting that he thinks that an artificial general intelligence will necessarily not be anthropomorphic. I would think that we would model such intelligences after our own biology and that would cause them to at least be related to, if not an instance of, human intelligence. We would make them in our image, so to speak.
My problem with the stamp collector example is that there is no cost associated with the acquisition of the stamps, such that a solution breaking laws (such as converting humans into stamps) would instantly disqualify the solution. It does raise questions about making AI's without such safeguards. However, again the example is a bit infeasible, as such models as the stamp AI used to test every possible combination of signals is quite a bit out of our reach, and if it were in our reach there would be no need for the AI in the first place.
Really interesting post. Lots of food for thought in this one!
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Commented in Police Called Over Ice-Cream Cone With Not Enough Sprinkles
I don't think biology is responsible but rather the surrounding environment making them into sissies :D
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Commented in Depression Can Physically Alter Your DNA
Interested to know how deep the depression must be in order for it to have such adverse effects on ones biology. Really hoping in the future depression can be battled with a sort of DNA therapy.
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Commented in Scientists Claim That Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death
Nothing says its unified now. If anything it appears completely dynamic. It's only the concept of individualism that suggests otherwise. Nearly every other aspect of biology, ecosystem and physics would suggest underlying interconnectedness.
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Commented in No Good News for Oceans As Climate Changes
The above quote was taken directly from the article cited in this tale from PLoS Biology, written by Jonathon Chase.