To follow the above, wanna know the reason why Islam spread like a plague among Arabs and their neighbors?
Both the Byzantines and Persians levied gigantic taxes on their provinces. People living around the Arab Peninsula were told they could rebel agains those assholes who trade and pillage their land between themselves in their constant wars and join this weird guy Mohammed, who promises everyone less taxes or even none.
That was one of the reasons, yes, but the problem was multi-faceted and both Romans and Persians happened to make a series of big blunders around the same time. For context, pre-Islam the Middle Eastern arab tribes were congregated more or less under two distinct kingdoms: the Ghazanids (Byzantine clients) and the Lakhmids (Persian clients).
A shortlist of reasons for the Rise of Islam (in no particular order):
High taxes.
Religious strife - Eastern Byzantine provinces were largely Monophysite (ie. heretics) and didn't have much love for the Constantinopolitan elite looking to impose Chalcedon upon them.
Political strife - Byzantium went through one of its bloodiest civil wars ever right before Muhammad rose (~600), while being invaded by Persia at the same time. Persia briefly occupied the Middle East and Egypt, the very provinces Islam would easily take less than 20 years later. After Heraclius won the Civil War, he laid the biggest smackdown ever on Persia, recouped all lost territory, sacked the Persian capital and its treasury, recouped most of the holy artifacts (including the True Cross), you get the picture. But that made both Rome and Persia slim pickings for the armies of Islam afterwards.
Big blunders: Emperor Maurice (582 - 602), both as a general and as an Emperor afterwards, had some major beef with the Ghazanid King for whatever reason. During his wars against Persia, he accused the Ghazanid Kind of treachery and briefly had him exiled. That created a power vacuum in the then-Christian arab kingdom which the muslims were easily able to capitalize upon. Meanwhile, the Persians destroyed their own allies (the Lakhmids) for even dumber reasons, basically because the Shah was a proud retard and horny for the Lakhmid King's daughter.
Military blunders: Even as the muslim army was invading, Rome and Persia considered joint military action against them, but miscommunication and mistrust between the two parties led to disasters such as Yarmouk for the Romans and al-Qadisiyyah for the Persians.
The Justinianic/Bubonic Plague re-flaring all throughout the 6th - 8th centuries took a big toll on the population, which led to smaller armies (which were squandered during the aforementioned Civil War and last Byz - Persian war) and to those high taxes. Even if your population takes a nosedive, if your costs are still through the roof, someone's gotta pay for deez warz.
Much of the muslim army was made up of former Roman/Persian mercenaries who knew their way around the provinces they were invading and the armies they were facing. By comparison, the Romans and Persians were taken completely by surprise that the previously divided and pacified arabs would be able to muster such a large and cohesive force so fast.
Even so, the perception that the eastern population welcomed the muslim invaders and threw their gates open for them is largely unsubstantiated. Historical records show constant Christian uprisings in Egypt following the muslim invasion between the mid 7th - early 9th century. The problem was that the Civil War and the Byzantine - Persian war left these provinces rather defenseless, and what little military command was left was largely incompetent and abandoned the populace. Egyptian civilians and the priesthood tried to form ragtag armies to resist the muslims, but they were defeated and massacred.
The most welcoming towards Islam were part of the arabs (who knew how rich Roman and Persian cities were and the largely unguarded plunder awaiting them) and the ever-shifty Jews who, as always, did what they do best. You know, throw open the gates, massacre the Christians, stuff like that. See what they did at Antioch, for instance.
The town from The Truman Show, Seaside, FL, was only 17 years old at the time of production. It was built in 1981, and The Truman Show was filmed there in 1998. Additionally, it was one of the first-ever communities to be designed around the principles of New Urbanism.
New Urbanism also spawned Celebration, FL, a town built and owned by the Disney corporation around the mid-90s, which has been criticized as being Truman-like. Now you know why!
New Urbanism also spawned Celebration, FL, a town built and owned by the Disney corporation around the mid-90s, which has been criticized as being Truman-like. Now you know why!
A female’s heart is smaller than a male’s by about 25%. Because of this, the female heart has to beat around six times more than the male heart to pump the correct amount of blood around the body.
Bees can get drunk on fermented tree sap. It affects their ability to fly pretty badly, too, often causing them to crash into things. In the unlikely event that they manage to get back to the hive, for some reason other bees will attack them to prevent them from entering the hive.
If I had to guess it's because they see their disorientated behavior and assume that bee is either sick or infected with some kind of parasite. A fun fact for bees: Stingless bees will make their own kinds of honey too, however to protect their honey they often block up the entrances of their hives with resin they collect. They use that resin too in order to store their honey and make very alien looking structures. They can look unsettling or gross though.
It would, that's the concept behind an induction stove(rapidly alternating magnetic fields to heat up any ferromagnetic material). So to add onto the inefficiencies that it'd experience due to the inverse-square law it'd also bleed out energy into anything like iron or steel around it as heat. The only way I could imagine somehow scrapping this idea is to effectively try and make a kind of cable out of stations and magnetically permeable materials to basically restrict the magnetic field to just those stations. That would still, to my knowledge, be worse than just using a regular old cable though. I wouldn't want to be a loose screw in between those stations either.
Also, Caffeine is a natural poison created by the coffee plant in order to dissuade bugs from infecting the fruits of the plant. There is only one insect inmune to the effects of the caffeine due to its very rare capacity to process the caffeine it consumes in the same way humans do.
There's a kind of bacteria that can digest caffeine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_putida#CBB5_and_caffeine_consumption
Beyond just that, from what I remember, coffee plants will actually excrete caffeine into the soil around them when they germinate to hinder any competition. Caffeine is thusly toxic to plants too.
Honeybees rewarded with caffeine, which occurs naturally in nectar of Coffea and Citrus species, were three times more likely to remember a learned floral scent than those rewarded with sucrose alone. Caffeine potentiated responses of mushroom body neurons involved in olfactory learning and memory by acting as an adenosine receptor antagonist. Caffeine concentrations in nectar never exceeded the bees’ bitter taste threshold, implying that pollinators impose selection for nectar that is pharmacologically active but not repellent. By using a drug to enhance memories of reward, plants secure pollinator fidelity and improve reproductive success.
There is a species of deep-sea snail called the Scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum). This is due to the fact that they can take iron sulfide from the hydrothermal vents they live in, and make scales out of it, as well as use it to coat their shells. In other words, they make iron armor for themselves, and are the only known animal to do so.
I was meaning to post something related to Fall Out Boy in this thread after I read about them randomly some time ago, so here's my chance I guess.
Wentz and fellow Fall Out Boy member, drummer Andy Hurley, were/are (Wentz no longer is) also members of a hardcore punk band that began in the mid-1990s called Racetraitor. Racetraitor even released an album in 2018 called "2042" which is a reference to the year that whites in America are projected to become less than 51% of the population. Probably not something many people would have expected from guys from a pop-punk band that was everywhere in the mainstream in the mid-2000s.
More on Wentz specifically: his grandfather on his mom's side, Arthur Winston Lewis, was the former US ambassador to Sierra Leone. Lewis was also a cousin of Colin Powell.
Outhouses sometimes used to if they built up enough methane gas and someone did something dumb like smoke in them. Most tales of such events were probably bogus though.
Outhouses did and still present a risk for black widow bites. Black widows love to make their webs under the seat in order to catch flies and such. A lot of black widow bites in history were gotten from people using an outhouse that had a spider who was very pissed.
From what I remember as well invasive brown widows from Africa have been destroying black widow populations and the brown widows have become 'cosmopolitan' meaning they have a near global distribution, all from hitchhiking with people it seems.
Arthropods (crabs, lobsters, bugs) are like this alien evolutionary tangent compared to other life on Earth.
Instead of skin or scales, they have an exoskeleton. Instead of normal eyes, they have freaky compound eyes. Instead of the usual organs, they have weird alien ones like "book lungs" or holes for air.
They belong to a larger group that's also quite alien known as ecdysozoa(ecdysis is their process of molting, so their clade means something like "the molting animals") that includes velvet worms(who are cute and true to their name feel like velvet when you touch them, but be careful they'll sneeze on you when they get scared), tardigrades, nematodes, "penis worms" and some other groups that are a bit more hazy(like the extinct saccorhytus). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecdysozoa
The initial body plan seems to have been a kind of molting worm with backfacing throat teeth(think of the sandworms from Dune) and maybe a ring of more plate-like structures around the mouth. Some insects even still have these teeth, although not all groups have them. Those plate-like structures around the mouth are best shown on the aperture-like mouths of Anomalocaris and its relatives.
Bugs are a very specific kind of insect. They are of the order Hemiptera, and include revolting creatures like bed bugs. They're vermin, they're disgusting, and they're horrible. Do not lump wonderful creatures like spiders in with them.
Bedbugs are so awful they also utilize a reproductive strategy called "traumatic insemination." Due to how arthropods don't have enclosed circulatory systems(essentially blood is separated from tissues only in part of the animal but is made to flow in and out of tissues and organs at other parts) anything that ends up in their blood will travel through their tissues as well. This means that when a bedbug male injects his semen into a female's body the sperm cells can make their way to the eggs eventually. This is something that's thought to have evolved in some arthropods as a kind of countermeasure to "mating plugs" that rival males might use to keep females from reproducing with other males. The idea being that the act of trying to get through the plug harms the female and then you end up selecting for males who just avoid trying to use genital openings altogether.
They belong to a larger group that's also quite alien known as ecdysozoa(ecdysis is their process of molting, so their clade means something like "the molting animals")
Yes. The one I've heard is "terpsichorean ecdysiast" (terpsichorean meaning related to dancing, deriving from Terpsichore, greek muse of dance) for "exotic dancer".
Edit: to clarify, in case you were asking whether the strippers were named for the animals, it is the same word but the animals and strippers were labelled ecdysiasts independently of each other.
Yes. The one I've heard is "terpsichorean ecdysiast" (terpsichorean meaning related to dancing, deriving from Terpsichore, greek muse of dance) for "exotic dancer".
Edit: to clarify, in case you were asking whether the strippers were named for the animals, it is the same word but the animals and strippers were labelled ecdysiasts independently of each other.
To follow the above, wanna know the reason why Islam spread like a plague among Arabs and their neighbors?
Both the Byzantines and Persians levied gigantic taxes on their provinces. People living around the Arab Peninsula were told they could rebel agains those assholes who trade and pillage their land between themselves in their constant wars and join this weird guy Mohammed, who promises everyone less taxes or even none.
Its kinda a weird fact because Islam did not actually spread that fast during the time of Muhammad or even the following Rashidun & Umayyad Caliphates. It took centuries for Islam to actually become a majority in the empire.
If you listen closely to the studio version of REM's "What's the Frequency, Kenneth?" , you'll notice that the song randomly slows down at a certain point.
That's because their bassist experienced acute appendicitis during the recording, causing him to lose the tempo to which the band adjusted instinctively. The bassist powered through without the others noticing and was rushed to the hospital afterwards.
They never bothered to re-record it. As far as I know, all official releases (the single, the album + radio and music video versions) have this subtle but noticeable shift in speed due to their bassist playing through a sudden bout of unspeakably excruciating pain.
There's also a genus of blood-sucking moths. Much to your point on sucking up plant matter they come from a group of fruit piercing moths. One of the reasons why many herbivorous animals(this may apply to vampire bats too, but the pressures that drove them to hematophagy aren't fully clear) is that plants are usually very poor in sodium which is very essential for animal life but not as much so for plant life. For nectarivores this is especially necessary as nectar is very poor in sodium and low in protein, amino acids, other minerals and vitamins(especially B vitamins). Butterflies for example are prone to an act called "puddling" where they'll drink from salty puddles, urine, feces, corpses(drinking blood mainly) and even tears(some species even specialize in this and it's called "lachryphagy" which means "tear eating" from "lachry" for tear and "phagy" to eat).
Oh, and the world’s largest freshwater arthropod is the Tasmanian freshwater lobster, which can grow up to three feet long and weighs up to fifteen pounds.
They recently have been able to breed them in captivity. I look forward to eating freshwater lobster 20 years from now. I've also heard that roasting crayfish will make them taste like lobster but I've never actually done it myself so I can't confirm that. You can remove their poop and digestive tract though -- at least from their tail(their "pleon" for nerds) without breaking them apart. Here's a video on that:
I've also seen people do that BEFORE they boil it, which is how I would prefer it.
Papua New Guinea is one of the least explored places on Earth. We know little about some of the tribes there and it's even thought there are undiscovered plants and animals there.
There are bacteria living miles below the ocean floor in sediments as old as 100 million years with metabolisms so slow they divide as infrequently as every 10,000 years.
I think those are the ones found in the center of the South Pacific gyre, right? Some of the bacteria in that group are theorized to derive their energy from radiolytic processes. The idea being that when some uranium that is naturally present in sea water undergoes alpha decay(an ejection of a helium nucleus) that the water broken down from that destructive event being split into hydronium, hydroxide, hydrogen gas and oxygen is essentially used to power their metabolism(like how hydrogen-oxidizing bacteria derive their energy from hydrogen gas).
I remember that there are even more finds of bacteria trapped in sedimentary rocks that are similarly old and slow developing/living. But even cooler than that are some of the other forms of bacteria found both in deep sea sediments like those you mentioned and also found in aquifers: Electric bacteria. There are a variety of kinds, some just using conductive filaments in order to, in a way, breath into the environment(to be technical they're throwing electrons into the environment instead of having something like oxygen take them). Others still are able to actually fully derive their energy from electricity. They can take in a higher energy electron, sap some of its energy and release that electron back out into the world.
Frogs hydrate by absorbing water though their skin and never directly drink water. Unfortunately this alsa means frogs skin is highly sensitive to touch and frogs often make a loud shrieking noise when held by human hands because the salt, bacteria, and oils on human skin is causing them discomfort.
They can also breath partially through their skin. In fact, you can breath partially through the lining of your mouth, nose and throat. Wet membranes with blood vessels near the surface are all that's needed to allow for gas exchange. Our lungs are so important because they have a massive amount of surface area and pump air in and out whilst also producing a kind of surfactant(something that breaks surface tension so that the little passageways of your lungs don't close and get stuck together). There is a whole group of salamanders however that are known as "lungless salamanders." Some of them do have some partial lungs, but most of them largely breath through their skin and the lining of their mouths and noses whilst performing buccal pumping to move air into and out of their mouths and noses. In effect their mouths have become something like a tiny lung.
Also they're cute and tend to grow very long, likely to better breath through their skin. They also are the biggest group of salamander species that are currently extant(not extinct). Here's a wonderful video of one kind that lives in redwoods:
And now another video that features a lungless salamander's tongue:
I think those are the ones found in the center of the South Pacific gyre, right? Some of the bacteria in that group are theorized to derive their energy from radiolytic processes.
You may like finding out about somatic fusion which can forcibly fuse two separate species' cells into one. To my understanding this is mostly done on plants which don't run into as many complications with tetraploidy(having 4 sets of chromosomes) as animals can have. You should be able to, in theory, take two different egg cells to make a fused cell that is diploid like we are. I've made posts on /an/ before where I talked about how it may be possible to forcibly hybridize cheetahs with domestic cats. For reference domestic cats have made fertile hybrids with the more distantly related Serval which is called a "Savannah" or "Savannah cat".
It makes me wonder what the hell else can be naturally consumed by insects. There's probably a wide range of softer plastics that could also remain edible to a bug with strong enough chewers. But was it ever actually found out if styrofoam is entirely digested or if micro parts still survive?
Subsequently, these antibiotic-treated superworms were tested for their PS degrading capability in comparison with the untreated controls. Both of antibiotic treated and control (untreated) superworms were fed with Styrofoam, and the average molecular weights of their frass were analyzed. The average molecular weight of the THF-extract of frass egested by antibiotic-treated superworms (Mn = 101,500, and Mw= 248,100) was significantly larger than that of control superworms (Mn = 66,000, and Mw = 134,000) (Fig. 4d). This result indicates that the suppression of gut microbiota by antibiotics impairs the ability of the mealworms to depolymerize PS, and suggests that the gut microbiota plays a potential role in the PS degradation within superworms.
In short their ability to break down plastic into its monomers(the subunits that combine together to form the polymer or plastic itself) was very much reliant on bacteria in their digestive tracts and also presumably to break those monomers into actual food for the worms(or the bacteria which the worms then digest some of). They've since found a number of bacteria that can break down polystyrene, but more than that there are a whole bunch of bacteria and fungi that can break down plastics. It seems that bacteria will evolve novel ways to digest plastics in a relatively short amount of time, within a human lifespan(I even have a related video for that down below, but not on plastic specifically).
This means that the material doesn't quite matter so long as it can be broken down for energy then all those insects would need is for their guts to be inoculated with bacteria that can break it down(which may very well already exist on the material naturally as that is their food source). The mealworms provide the mechanical work to break the plastics down into tiny bits and the bacteria break it down for food which the mealworms will in part get. As bizarre as this might sound, this is actually how just about all(but not all) animals who eat wood get their energy. I only know of one animal that has its own enzyme for digesting cellulose, all other animals like termites or roly-polies or beetle larvae rely on endosymbiotic bacteria and fungi to digest cellulose down into food for them.
Likewise ruminants make use of bacteria and fungi to break down grass for energy too. Here's a wonderful video too covering how E. coli in an experiment developed an entirely new way to digest citric acid:
Also the one animal group that I know has its own enzyme to digest cellulose, the "Gribble." They're a species of isopod and they're also tiny and cute.
Those little orbs are her babies and she's the larger one.
Camels originally evolved in the Americas too and then migrated into Eurasia before going extinct in the Americas. Their closest living relatives are llamas and alpacas. That adaptation that they have was seemingly specifically to eat cacti, which were notably missing in the old world(until more modern times) but originated in the new world.
Thiomargarita magnifica is a bacteria that can be seen with the naked eye. They average about 10mm in length but some have been found to be up to 20mm. They're also notable for having a membrane which encapsulates their DNA, a feature originally thought to be exclusive to eukaryotic cells.
Eukaryotes and T. magnifica may not be the only groups of organisms that've done this either. A singular microbe, identified as "Parakaryon myojinensis" also had encapsulated DNA and was found on an expedition to a hydrothermal vent. Beyond just that it appeared to converge on the Eukaryote form far more than T. magnifica by having what appeared to be prokaryotic endosymbiotes(like our mitochondria are) and it very weirdly had filamentous chromosomes.
My personal hypothesis is that the Parakaryon is a legitimate specimen and represents a different lineage that converged on the Eukaryote form and that it is specifically adapted for extremely hot and high temperature environments. The ribosomes within the nucleus suggests that much of what needs to be encoded there needs to be sheltered and/or used immediately(like if a major DNA break happens due to the heat). Their filamentous chromosomes would also make DNA repair and heat shock proteins more effective at protecting their genome in the extreme heat and pressure. The lack of a cytoskeleton can also make sense in the intense heat as Brownian motion increases with higher temperatures and thus any kind of transport network could be redundant and just as well the membranes of cells get more stiff at higher pressures and thus a cytoskeleton to resist deformation or to make it stronger is not needed.
Concrete has to be made with 'locking sand'.
Sand particles that are jagged, not smoothed by weather/time.
The world is quite low on this substance- partly why Chinese shit buildings are collapsing (using desert sand).
You can and people do use some desert sand(smooth sand) for concrete to increase workability. The real problem that can occur is when people use sand from beaches or that has been dredged up from the sea and not properly washed and cleaned. The salts that are carried with the sand will degrade any steel rebar used and I believe I remember that it'll also degrade the concrete too. That kind of sand is also smooth. Luckily as far as that kind of sand being limited, we can artificially make it. Places that crush rocks actually make this kind of jagged sand and it's sometimes used or sold in local construction. Practical engineering has an amazing video on this too:
Beyond just that some kinds of very strong concretes(namely the kinds you might use to resist being bunker busted) will use things like fumed silica and tons of tiny steel bars. For resisting bunker busters the material strengths of the concrete is extremely important, as to my remembering of it all, the penetration capability of those bombs exponentially decreases with the material properties of what it has to penetrate. So a concrete that is nebulously twice is strong is going to stop a bunker buster in less than half the distance it would penetrate the standard concrete.
There's a huge bounty of something around 1 million US dollars(after conversion as the bounty is from a Japanese company so is in Japanese Yen). I have work I need to do with this problem, I found something really interesting and just have a few more steps to overcome (:.
Diogenes plucked a live chicken once and threw it at Plato during his lecture, screaming "Behold! A man!". Then he shat all over the floor doing his best GG Allin impression.
After that Plato changed his definition of a man to a featherless biped with flat nails.
This means that an armless chimp would be considered a man by Plato's newer definition. In fact any armless primate would qualify since flat nails are a primate trait.
And then, ironically, humans decide to cultivate these peppers because of their spiciness, causing them to be a thousand times more prolific than if they lacked spice. Their defence mechanism was such a failure that they underflowed back into absolute success.
Some of those defense mechanisms in other plants we've actually used more properly though. Like a lot of spices that we enjoy the smells and tastes of are actually anti-septic. Pines for example are very toxic and anti-septic and its distilled sap was made into turpentine which was used in medicine for a very long time. We of course love the smell of pine, but most animals do not like the smell of pine sap or scent. Likewise mint plants and other relatives in the mint family are terrible smelling to many animals. This may in part be because mints have antibacterial/antimicrobial properties that would devastate gut microbes that many animals rely on, especially herbivores who need microbes to ferment their food.
However the use of spices in our food may help in keeping them preserved longer. For the other members of that family, they have medically relevant compounds that they produce that could likewise be unappealing. Us enjoying their smell too may also mean that hunters used them to mask their scent from herbivores they hunted in the distant past. I haven't looked into it, but catnip is in the mint family and I imagine that many animals find the smell of catnip to be horrible so I wouldn't be surprised if cats also enjoyed rubbing on catnip and eating it as an evolutionary trick to help them mask their scent.
Dogs have their own kind too. CTVT (The link has a picture of a dog penis, you have been warned.), short for "canine transmissible venereal tumor", is hypothesized to have originated around the time we first domesticated wolves to later become the dogs we all know and love. This is because we seemingly put them through a very rough genetic bottleneck and thus a kind of cancer managed to undergo selection pressures to not only spread but eventually persist all the way to modern times(also the split between CTVT and dogs lines up fairly closely to around when they were newly domesticated). This disease is essentially a speciation, or new species, from dogs/wolves and transmissible cancers in general can be thought of this way.
One final fun fact before I stop flooding the thread: I finally finished reading the whole of the thread.
New Urbanism also spawned Celebration, FL, a town built and owned by the Disney corporation around the mid-90s, which has been criticized as being Truman-like. Now you know why!
I’m pretty sure Celebration also pipes in fake birdsong through speakers in people’s gardens which ironically drives the real ones away. The place is about as uncanny valley as a locale can get. There was also a murder there, too. Don’t get me wrong, I understand it. I like some Disney movies, but living in a fake neighbourhood would make me want to commit genocide.
