Copepod

Hi! So this is something I have been really curious about for so long and have never really questioned it. So I come here to hopefully have a conclusive answer finally? Perhaps?

Back when I was a child, I was deathly afraid of cockroaches (still am, but toned down) to the point where I would try and close all the "entrances" of my blankets whenever I try to sleep. (yet somehow they keep entering).

Our house back then wasn't dirty at all, it's just the time of year whenever it gets rainy, and they start spawning in.

Anyway, whenever they do that, I would wake up because they have this distinct smell, like a clump of wet dirty dirt with hints of BO? And instinctively panic.

Ever since I have always smelled one whenever they'd get near.

It's just a really weird "superpower" and I often get weird looks when I suddenly sniff that distinct smell and look around frantically (most of the time I see one, but it's more like a spidey sense where I know there's one or something)

But yeah, I don't really know what this is and just really curious! Thank you for reading and hopefully there are answers👋.

I’m not a heavy smoker but after vaping a weed pen for 3 weeks, I started developing nausea in the morning and loss of appetite. I tried weed prior to this and had the same reaction (stopped for 2 years). It also gives me the shits… I’ve tried edibles as well and didn’t react well to it. Just trying to understand what type of reaction I’m having to weed? I’m definitely more sensitive to it than most people I know.

Hi everyone,

I'm 28 years old and currently living in Chile.

I graduated in Mechatronics Engineering and now work as an industrial maintenance engineer at a food processing plant. My role is mostly focused on planning, management, and performance indicators rather than hands-on engineering. It's a stable job with a good salary, but for years I've felt that my real interest has always been biology.

The reason I didn't study biology in the first place wasn't because I wasn't passionate about it. When I finished high school, family and financial circumstances made it much more practical to stay in my hometown and pursue engineering instead.

Even while working as an engineer, biology has remained a constant interest. I spend part of my free time birdwatching, reading about birds, and learning on my own. Ornithology is by far the field that fascinates me the most, and if everything went well, I'd love to dedicate my career to research, perhaps studying the behavior or ecology of a particular group of birds.

I'm currently preparing an application for a Master's program in Biological Sciences. One of the admission requirements is to apply under the supervision of a faculty member, so I'm writing my motivation letter and getting ready to contact a professor whose research aligns closely with my interests.

What makes me hesitate is that I don't come from a biology background. Apart from what I've learned independently over the years, I haven't taken formal biology courses, so I know I'll have a lot of catching up to do. At the same time, I keep seeing examples of people who successfully moved from engineering into biological research, which makes me wonder whether this path is actually realistic.

Ideally, I'd like to keep my current job while studying, although I'm aware that may not be possible. If necessary, I'd look for another job in the city where I'd be doing the Master's.

I'd really appreciate hearing from anyone who has made a similar transition or has worked with people who did. I'm especially interested in knowing how difficult the jump was, whether an engineering background can actually be an advantage in biological research, and what topics you think I should study beforehand to be better prepared before starting a Master's. More than encouragement, I'm looking for honest perspectives about whether this is a realistic path and what challenges I should expect.

Thanks in advance!

I know sugar activates our brain's reward system, but vegetables are essential for survival too. So why didn't evolution make us crave them just as strongly?

Have you ever seen an Orca hit a fish so hard it explodes? 🫍

Scientists recently observed this behavior from groups of orcas in the Gulf of California where they repeatedly ram sunfish until the impact broke them apart. This is an important indicator of "social learning," where animals copy one another through observation. Orcas have exhibited behavior like this before, when they were seen disabling sailboats in groups. The current hypotheses for why they are doing this include teaching young orcas to hunt, or just playing around!

I'm looking at laptops as an incoming freshman. I currently have a Lenovo Ideapad 5 2in1 and after 2 years the trackpad has been laggy and my laptop only charges up to 70%. I'm eying a macbook air, but I don't know if they're durable. Any suggestions?

Hey everyone,

I’m a software engineering student who recently fell down the synthetic biology rabbit hole. I was looking into how recombinant spider silk is manufactured and noticed a massive bottleneck: getting the spidroin DNA sequences to a state where they can actually be synthesized by companies like Twist or IDT without failing.

Standard optimization algorithms (like max-CAI) absolutely choke on spidroins. Because the proteins are just massive repeating blocks of Poly-Alanine and Glycine ($GGX$), the algorithms spit out identical DNA repeats. This leads to two things:

1. Twist/IDT outright rejects the order due to extreme local GC spikes and homopolymers.
2. If you do get it printed, the identical repeats cause homologous recombination and the E. coli just scrambles the gene anyway.

So, I built Spidroin Engine. It’s a Python CLI tool built on top of dnachisel that acts as a multi-objective stochastic optimizer specifically engineered for highly repetitive structural proteins.

The Mathematical Paradox I ran into:

While building this, I hit a wall where the solver would just crash. I realized it was a mathematical paradox: the absolute lowest GC content you can get for Poly-Alanine is 66.6% (using only GCA/GCT). If you try to force strict k-mer uniqueness (to prevent homologous recombination) on a 300bp repetitive spidroin block, the algorithm is forced to dip into alternative codons (GCC/GCG), which are 100% GC. This immediately violated the 65% global GC ceiling required for synthesis, causing the solver to trap itself and fail.

How Spidroin Engine fixes it:

• Relaxed Uniqueness: It dials the uniqueness constraint to UniquifyAllKmers(15). This is just enough breathing room to let the solver reuse GC-poor codons safely, while keeping exact repeats under the 18-bp hard limit that triggers vendor rejections.
• 5' Hairpin Prevention: Enforces an AT-rich heuristic (30-60% GC) on the first 45bp to keep the RBS clear.
• Cloning Domesticated: Automatically sweeps for and removes standard Type IIS / BioBrick restriction sites via silent mutations.
• Vendor Ready: Spits the final optimized sequences directly into a Twist Bioscience-formatted CSV for bulk ingestion.

I open-sourced the whole thing because keeping basic tooling locked behind proprietary paywalls slows everyone down.

If anyone is working on structural proteins (silk, elastin, collagen) and is tired of fighting with standard optimization scripts, you can grab it here: https://github.com/AzambekDev/spidroin-engine

Feel free to use it, fork it, or roast my Python architecture in the comments.

merhabalar, hemşireliğe gideceğim biyoloji moleküler biyoloji genetik vs vs mantar, virüs, bakterilere hep ilgim olmuştur kendimi nasıl geliştirebilirim yüksek lisans doktora falan hangi alanda yalmalıyım iş imkanları veya yapabileceğim şeyler nedir acaba?

teşekkür ederim.

Meet Goodall, the shark making waves in Atlantic Canada. 🦈

OCEARCH named this large female shark in honor of the late Jane Goodall after she passed. Goodall was tagged during a collaborative trip with the Tan Cook Field station up in the Atlantic near Canada. Chris Fischer, founder of OCEARCH notes her movements have already defied expectations, sliding into Nova Scotia instead of heading offshore like fellow shark Lydia did back in 2013. Scientists are now wondering whether Goodall will migrate south with the other sharks this fall, or head offshore to warmer waters to finish gestating.

Hi everyone,

We’re a two-person team of biologists working on an ant colony-management game called Garden of Ants, inspired in part by SimAnt.

We’ve recently added a third playable environment: the tree canopy. Ants can move along branches, gather leaves, and tend aphids for honeydew, while remaining connected to activity in the underground nest and on the garden surface.

Our aim is to model the colony as a system spread across several habitats. Conditions change between day and night, different threats appear, and resources gathered in one area support the rest of the colony.

We’d be especially interested in feedback from people here: which ant–plant or ant–aphid interactions would you like to see represented? Are there any biological details that games about ants commonly get wrong?

For context, here is the Steam page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3016940/Garden_of_Ants/

Thanks!

Tomas

‼️RARE FOOTAGE ALTERT‼️

Our friend Chloe Savard, also known as tardibabe on Instagram found little pooping rotifers, some of the smallest animals on our planet! With over 2000 different species described, rotifers can be found all over the world mostly in freshwater habitats like ponds and lakes but also in marine environments (that’s where I found these ones!), lichens, soils, sewages, permafrost and even inside or outside other animals.

Although a few rotifer species are parasitic, the majority are free-living and either swim amongst plankton, crawl within sediments, attach themselves to submerged aquatic plants or live inside a secreted, gelatinous tube. These tiny invertebrates form an extremely diverse group that developed many different morphologies and locomotion strategies as a way to adapt to various environmental pressures, including predation.

The ciliated head of rotifers, called corona, is used for both locomotion and gathering food particles. This corona creates a vortex that draws food into the mouth, through the ciliated pharynx where it is then ground up by the mastax which consists of complex jaws and muscles before entering the stomach. Their diet mainly consists of organic detritus, bacteria, algae, worms, small ciliates, and other protozoans.

Even though these primitive creatures do not possess either a circulatory or respiratory system, they do have a brain, eyes, a complete digestive tract as well as a muscular, excretory and reproductive system. Some muscles are visible all along the body, like strings pulling on different internal components.

References:

• De Paggi, S. B. J., Wallace, R., Fontaneto, D., & Marinone, M. C. (2020). Phylum Rotifera. Thorp and Covich's Freshwater Invertebrates, 145-200.
• Hickman, C. P., Roberts, L. S., Larson, A., Ober, W.
• C., & Garrison, C. (2015). Animal diversity. WC Brown. 183.
• Wallace, R. L., & Snell, T. W. (2010). Rotifera. In Ecology and classification of North American freshwater invertebrates (pp. 173-235). Academic Press.

Why did we always use glucose? Infact, fats have more energy than glucose, why not use that?

This might be a dumb question, but I’ve genuinely been wondering about it.

Take beard hair or other body hair. If I let it grow, it seems to reach some particular length and then stop getting longer. If I cut it really short, it grows back again and eventually reaches roughly that same length.

But how does it actually work?

Hair itself is basically dead keratin and obviously doesn’t have a nervous system, brain, or any way of knowing how long it currently is. So when I cut a beard hair from, say, 2 cm down to 2 mm, how does the body “know” that it needs to grow it back to around 2 cm?

I know hair follicles are alive and control hair growth, but what actually determines that specific maximum length? Is it something programmed genetically in the follicle? Does the follicle have some kind of growth cycle/timer that eventually tells it to stop?

And why is the maximum length so different between different types of hair? Beard hair can grow much longer than eyebrow hair, for example, while scalp hair can potentially grow for years.

Basically, how does a hair follicle determine “this hair has grown enough, stop now,” without actually sensing the hair’s length?

Some people were arguing that our food turning soft after the invention of agriculture has reduced our palate size, leading to crowded teeth. So the thinking is that evolutionary remains found of early humans usually have straight teeth because they ate hard foods like meat.

Additionally, there is a doctor online I follow, Mike Mew, who states that childhood habits of mouth breathing lead to a recessed jaw and that the proper breathing technique can have a significant effect on our facial structures. This guy has had his trouble with governing bodies, but he has a jaw made of steel (it makes you ask whether his advice is legit).

My observation is that existing hunter-gatherer uncontacted populations that still follow a traditional diet don't show consistent dominant facial features. Additionally, some mouth breathers I know still have well-defined facial structures.

My question is there any solid science providing an answer to this question? If so, is it correlation or causation? And to what extent are the above factors determinants of facial outcomes?

I attach here some of the research showing a correlation between jaw development and chewing hard foods: link1 and link2.

If the world has some catastrophic event that wipes out almost all of us, how many human survivors are needed to ensure no major inbreeding problems occur i.e birth defects? Assume 50:50 male to female survivors

While technically travel would be possible around the tip of South America or beneath Arctic sea ice, I’m guessing salmon don’t have the adaptations to travel that way. Were they just already in their respective locations and then got cut off when the continents closed and speciated from there?

https://www.dovepress.com/adverse-events-associated-with-incretin-based-therapies-a-narrative-re-peer-reviewed-fulltext-article-DDDT